The Yale Law Journal recently participated in the “Honoring Women’s Advancement in Law” conference, hosted by Duke Law School on February 3, 2020, in Washington, D.C. The conference marked the fact that, at the centennial of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, women hold the editor-in-chief position of flagship law journals at sixteen of the country’s top-ranked law schools. Among those women is the Editor-in-Chief of Volume 129, Ela Leshem.

The sixteen law journals also collaborated on a joint publication, Women & Law, available here. Women & Law features fourteen essays written by women leaders in the legal community. The Yale Law Journal contributed Reconstituting the Future: An Equality Amendment, by Catharine A. MacKinnon and Kimberlé W. Crenshaw. Their piece, originally published as an Essay in the Yale Law Journal Forum, offers a draft of a new constitutional amendment embodying a substantive intersectional equality analysis. It also addresses why the historical treatment of race and sex and existing doctrine make such an amendment urgently necessary. Professor MacKinnon presented the Essay as a keynote speech at the conference, where Ela Leshem also sat on a panel of women editors-in-chief reflecting on their experiences.

The Yale Law Journal is excited to have participated in an event celebrating women’s advancement in the law. The Journal began in 1891 with seven members at an all-male law school. Apart from Alice Rufie Blake Jordan, who was accidentally admitted in 1885, women could not attend Yale Law School until 1919. Today, women and nonbinary students participate in roles across the Journal. The Journal is proud of the progress that has been made and is committed to continuing to promote diversity and inclusion throughout our masthead and our scholarship.