Loving Gender Balance: Reframing Identity-Based Inequality Remedies

Authors

Darren Rosenblum

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Fordham Law Review

Publication Date

2008

Volume

76

First Page

2873

Abstract

(Excerpt)

The egalitarian voice of the U.S. Supreme Court resonates forty years after it abolished antimiscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia. While Loving's vigor influences contemporary debates on sex-related marriage restrictions, its impact extends to the hopes and tensions that undergird and unite equality movements. Half a world away, Norway's Corporate Board Quota (CBQ), recently began enforcing a forty percent floor for both sexes on publicly traded companies' boards of directors.

At first glance, Loving's affirmation of an interracial marriage in the face of the state's opprobrium seems impossibly divergent from the CBQ. Loving concerned de jure racial discrimination while the CBQ remedies de facto corporate gender inequality. Loving also struck down state-sanctioned criminal penalties for interracial marriage, while the CBQ aims at the private sector. Loving is the prototypical test-case litigation, complete with the perfectly named plaintiff and a compelling story. In contrast, the CBQ coldly regulates publicly listed corporations. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, race and gender inequality remedies differ sharply from one another.

Even so, parallels exist between Loving and the CBQ. Both attempt to subvert inequalities—marriage's restriction on same-race couples and corporate leadership's maleness. Each also involves government attempts to insert equality into inherently "private," yet state-defined, institutions. Given these consistencies, present-day attempts to remedy inequality, such as the CBQ, reflect the purchase Loving still carries.

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Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol76/iss6/9/