Deborah Dinner

Professor Deborah Dinner says the LaFleur pregnancy discrimination case decided by the Supreme Court in 1974 "deserves a far more prominent place in our constitutional history and canon." It led to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 which added pregnancy bias to federal employee laws. "The context of these pregnancy-dismissal policies is that they were routine and widespread across the country," Dinner told Education Week. "My default intuition about any teacher who says she was fired for this at the time is that she was correct."

30 years after Ann Hopkins won a Title VII workplace discrimination case at the Supreme Court, the court is again considering whether discrimination laws protect LGBTQ freedom of gender expression, in two cases brought by gay and transgender employees. Associate Professor Deborah Dinner is quoted by the Washington Post: "... discriminating on the basis of somebody's gender identity or on the basis of their sexual orientation, what an employer in fact is doing is discriminating on the basis of a gender stereotype."

Emory Law Associate Professor Deborah Dinner gave a detailed legal analysis to 11 Alive on the "heartbeat" abortion law Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law this week. "The Georgia legislation is flagrantly unconstitutional, violates women's fundamental rights to reproductive liberty and privacy, and represents a major threat to the ongoing struggle for gender equality," Dinner said, when asked for her final assessment. Dinner also broke down specific aspects of the law and its enforcement.

The ERA only needs one more state for ratification. Will Georgia be it? A bipartisan group of women in the state senate are mobilizing around a resolution calling on the state to ratify the ERA, which would amend the U.S. Constitution to guarantee equal rights regardless of sex, Rewire News reports. "We need the ERA to protect women's rights because it would provide explicit basis in the text of the Constitution for the recognition of women's equality," said Emory Law Associate Professor Deborah Dinner, clarifying that these rights currently only exist in state and federal laws, and under a broad interpretation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

In 1978, The Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed to protect against discrimination based on pregnancy, childbirth or other related medical conditions. It was hailed as a victory, but 40 years later, many women don't feel protected. "The Takeaway" interviewed Emory Law Professor Deborah Dinner. "Is the Pregnancy Discrimination Act Doing Enough? The answer is no," Dinner said. "We need affirmative protections to accommodations for pregnant workers and for other temporarily disabled workers, too."

Despite heightened attention across the nation on sexual harassment, Georgia has no consistent system for investigating complaints. The state also can't say how many of its nearly 70,000 employees have filed complaints recently, because it has no centralized system for tracking them, according to a recent investigation by the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Emory Law Professor Deborah Dinner was asked to examine documentation of a Georgia Patrol secretary's case, and found "plenty to suggest that the officers' behavior ... was harassing," the story says. "It does seem like men were routinely sexualizing her," Dinner said.

Decades after Roe v. Wade, both the political left and right are concerned about workplace pregnancy, but for vastly different reasons, Professor Deborah Dinner tells The Atlantic. She discusses the lesser-known 1974 case, Geduldig v. Aiello. "Businesses used the notion of reproductive autonomy to characterize pregnancy as a private choice with private costs, Dinner writes, so feminist, labor, and civil rights groups chose to emphasize that childbearing was in fact a public need and a social good."

The Supreme Court dealt a significant blow to public-sector unions in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, ruling 5 to 4 that states could not require government employees to pay union fees.

In Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, the Supreme Court buttressed constitutional protection for women's reproductive freedom. A five-justice majority struck down a Texas statute that required abortion providers to have local hospital admitting privileges and clinics to meet costly standards for ambulatory surgical centers. Justice Anthony Kennedy's move to join the liberal wing of the court, in 2007, he had written the majority opinion in a 5-4 decision restricting abortion procedures, came as a welcome surprise for abortion rights advocates.

Deborah Dinner and Martha A. Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, recently participated in talks exploring Fineman's pioneering scholarship on vulnerability theory held across the pond at the University of Birmingham and Leeds University.

In a two-day workshop, Deborah Dinner, associate professor of law, will be joined by authorities in family and labor law, corporate law, welfare history, economics and policy who use the concepts of vulnerability and resilience to argue for a more responsive state.