About
The UCLA Journal of Gender & Law (formerly the UCLA Women's Law Journal), established in 1989, is dedicated to the critical analysis of gender as it is structured and reinforced by the law and legal institutions. Integral to this mission is the promotion of scholarship that attends to the ways that race, class, ability, sexuality, nationality, religion, and other forms of marginalization constitute and intersect with gender as a lived and legal reality. We strive to incorporate critiques of the law as a tool of oppression, as well as solutions for collective liberation that operate within and beyond the law.
Volume 25, Issue 1, 2018
UCLA Women's Law Journal
Front Matter
Table of Contents
Articles
Is Justice Best Served Cold?: A Transformative Approach to Revenge Porn
People often use retributive and utilitarian concepts to argue that we should throw people in jail for sharing nudes without the permission of the person depicted. But it turns out that imprisoning people is not the best approach. Revenge porn, the nonconsensual sharing of intimate images, is not an individual problem. It is a sign that something is wrong with our society. There are revenge porn criminal statutes in about thirty-four states and the District of Columbia, but many of them are ineffective due to limitations imposed by the First Amendment. Thus, many scholars advocate for this to be a federal crime. Criminalization within our current criminal justice system, while convenient, is not the best approach partly because prison makes most people worse off than they were when they came. Furthermore, the United States is over-incarcerated and should find better ways to deal with crimes like revenge porn. A transformative justice approach, which attempts to work outside of the criminal justice system to achieve meaningful remedies for survivors and meaningful punishments for offenders, is our best bet.