Ever since Lawprof Danielle Citron tried to reinvent online nastiness as cyber civil rights, meaning that it’s all about discrimination against women even if it’s not, and sought to use that as a justification to curtail free speech, I’ve been on the lookout for other attempts to hijack phenomenon.  At PrawfsBlawg, another woman-hater has reared its ugly head:  Natural disasters.

Susan Kuo, a law professor at the University of South Carolina following her stint as a special Assistant United States Attorney, has turned her focus from criminal justice to social justice in disaster law.  Until now, I wasn’t even aware of there being a specialty called disaster law, as disasters had always seemed beyond jurisdiction, not to mention difficult to serve.  Kuo began a series of posts that caught my eye, beginning with this:

My overarching goal is to identify a normative legal framework that can guide efforts to fortify communities before and to rebuild after disaster.

I have no clue what this means, but it was intriguing that a normative legal framework is important to disasters.  I had always assumed that levies held back the floods.  Who knew?

Whether the disaster is a flood, hurricane, fire, tornado, or riot, preexisting social inequality and vulnerability predicts how severe and how lasting the damage will be. Accordingly, how a society grapples with disaster tells us a lot about its commitment to social justice.

Aha!  It’s rich against poor, the wealthier areas receiving the largesse of better preparation and greater resources to rebuild.  And then there’s the racial overtones, since the wealthy areas are likely white while the poorer are darker shades of pale.  Now there’s some social justice worth discussing.  You go, girl!

Kuo’s next post, however, burst my bubble.

As I mentioned in a previous post, disaster harm depends upon the vulnerability of particular groups of people and therefore implicates questions of social justice. Part of the difficulty in developing a comprehensive response to disaster, however, is that social vulnerability is a complex phenomenon. For example, women face increased gender-based violence during and after disasters. Yet, in the wake of disaster, women care for children and aging relatives, stand in line at relief offices, and otherwise hold together their communities. As I’ll discuss in a future post, the participation of women is critical to effective disaster recovery.

Huh?  No rich and poor?  No black and white?  Women face increased gender-based violence during and after disasters?  What the heck are you talking about?  There are plenty of bad things that happen during and after a natural disaster, but I’ve never seen anything to suggest that hurricanes cause men to go around beating women. 

Since lawprof Kuo is proffering a position that facially makes no sense at all, one would assume that at some point she would establish the existence of a problem, whether through proof, citation or at minimum some logical explanation of how we get from Point A to wherever the heck she is.  But since there are future posts a’coming, let’s not jump the gun and give a scholar a chance to show us the implausible is in fact the case.

In her third post, Kuo explains:

This post continues my discussion of social justice issues concerning women and disaster. Again, an adequate legal framework for development and recovery planning must recognize that women are vulnerable to disaster harm, including gender-based violence, and that they should be encouraged to participate fully in disaster recovery efforts.

Before we get to the “must recognize” part, it seems that some basis, even the tiniest, as to the existence of this phenomenon might be in order?  Sure, women are vulnerable to natural disasters, but the same wind blows everybody, not just women.  As for gender-based violence, I still have no clue who’s running around the flood waters of Katrina beating up women.  That’s got to be one warped dude.

Although there is relatively little legal scholarship in this vein, I am learning from a wealth of front-line policy work. This literature describes the differential impact of disasters on women and suggests practical approaches for mainstreaming women into the recovery process.

Is it possible that the absence of legal scholarship on the relationship between natural disasters and gender-based justice is because it’s, well, absurd?  If there is a “wealth” of front-line policy literature, this might have been a good place to, perhaps, name one.  Maybe a hyperlink.  Something?

While private groups and NGOs have successfully integrated women’s voices into disaster planning and recovery, governments have lagged behind. Even worse, the designation of government relief monies for the “head of household,” coupled with the assumption that the head is male, further disenfranchises women. This gendered notion of family affected resource distribution in post-Katrina New Orleans and after the Berkeley-Oakland wildfires in California and Hurricane Andrew in Miami. Until our policymakers recognize the importance of socially inclusive, participatory disaster management, we risk exposing susceptible groups to additional harms and perpetuate their vulnerability to future events.

So the issue is that the government fails to recognize that women can be “head of household” for disaster relief?  Well, I’m happy to hear that Brownie isn’t the guy beating up women, even if he’s denying them funds, though some proof would still be appreciated since I’ve never seen anything to suggest that the government was any worse toward women as they are toward everyone. 

No doubt women suffer from the impact of natural disasters.  As do men.  As do children.  As do dogs and cats.  This attempt to turn natural disasters, or disaster law as it’s now called, into a gender issue is preposterous.  Hurricanes don’t discriminate.  Tornadoes don’t target women.  Rich and poor, black and white, male and female, it rains on all of us.

It’s certainly difficult these days for associate professors to find new areas of scholarship, virgin territory, to plow on the way to tenure, but if you’re going to try to manufacture a gender-based issue out of whole cloth, you can’t just leap over why it’s gender-based in the first place. 

As Jeffrey Harrison notes at MoneyLaw with regard to tenure, academic freedom (and some other stuff),

You do not hear much about academic freedom from law professors because they rarely say anything controversial that anyone hears about. In fact, wouldn’t it be far more interesting if someone were listening to us? It may seem odd that there is so little controversy given the iron clad protection we have. The reasons for the quiet, I think, can be traced to the fact that straying ideologically or culturally from the mainstream (of law professors that is) means you may be labeled “difficult” or “uncollegial” and these are career killers as much a being labeled a racist, whether true or not.

One of the sacred cows of the academic orthodoxy is gender discrimination.  How else could one explain anyone putting up with Ann Bartow?   Accordingly, once some lawprof announces that she’s taken ownership of a problem and turned it into a sex discrimination issue, no one in the Academy is allowed to disagree, dispute or even question the claim without being branded a misogynist.  Kiss that tenure good-bye.  Heck, kiss that cushy job good-bye.  Since I’m not subject to Academy approval, I’m under no such constraint.

Does Susan Kuo have anything here?  I don’t see it, but then, I may not be sufficiently sensitive to the cause, so I’m prepared to consider any rational argument, substantive basis, even dubiously grounded theory, she has to offer.  Up to now, she’s got nothing.  It is because she says it is.  Clearly she hasn’t forgotten her prosecutor training.

Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of shooting blanks, Lawprof Kuo would be confident in obtaining tenure, not by going on wild, gender-based goose hunts, but by teaching law students how to be lawyers?  And if I am dead wrong about hurricanes’ hating women, then maybe Kuo might want to do a little more heavy lifting in the next post in her series and, oh, provide some basis for her claims?  It would be the scholarly thing to do.