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33 Loy. L. A. L. Rev. 947 (1999-2000)
The Truth behind Legal Dominance Feminism's Two Percent False Rape Claim Figure

handle is hein.journals/lla33 and id is 973 raw text is: THE TRUTH BEHIND LEGAL DOMINANCE FEMINISM'S TWO PERCENT FALSE RAPE CLAIM FIGURE Edward Greer* I. INTRODUCTION For at least the last decade, Legal Dominance Feminism (LDF)l has been the predominant voice on sexual abuse within legal acade- mia.2 However, many of its empirical claims regarding the sexual abuse of women are erroneous. Unlike the exemplary scholarship * Brookline, Massachusetts; J.D. Yale, 1966. 1. There is no universally agreed-upon nomenclature for referring to the various strands of feminist legal thought, but the school discussed here is often called dominance theory. See Kathryn Abrams, Songs of Innocence and Ex- perience: Dominance Feminism in the University, 103 YALE L.J. 1533, 1549 n.66 (1994) (referring to the entire range of feminists who have worked theo- retically, and often through political practice, to raise consciousness about male sexualization of and aggression against women). 2. See Kathryn Abrams, Sex Wars Redux: Agency and Coercion in Femi- nist Legal Theory, 95 COLUM. L. REV. 304, 304 (1995) (Over the past decade, dominance feminism has become the ascendant feminist legal theory . .. .) (footnote omitted); see also Deborah J. Merritt & Melanie Putnam, Judges and Scholars: Do Courts and Scholarly Journals Cite the Same Law Review Arti- cles?, 71 CHI.-KENT L. REv. 871, 905 tbl.7 (1996) (illustrating that, of articles cited from 1991-the last year canvassed-two of the top six are authored by legal dominance scholars, Professor Catherine A. MacKinnon and Professor Kathryn Abrams). 3. See MARTHA S. NUSSBAUM, SEX AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 136 (1999) (stating that it is difficult to elicit accurate figures on sexual force by survey or interview techniques and acknowledging Sommers's critique, infra, of ex- isting sex abuse data); DAPHNE PATAI, HETEROPHOBIA: SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND THE FUTURE OF FEMINISM 61-62 (1998) (discussing the absence of seri- ous research on the incidence of false or baseless accusations against men, as another result of the gender bias in the [sexual harassment] field); CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS, WHO STOLE FEMINISM?: How WOMEN HAvE BETRAYED WOMEN 225-26 (1994) (stating that gender feminists are pushing forth their agenda by alarm[ing] the public with inflated statistics); Neil Gilbert, The

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