Splitting from Halley: Doing Justice to Race, Unwantedness, and Testimony in Campus Sexual Assault

Abstract

This article takes the documentary film The Hunting Ground, and the controversy it provoked, as a starting point for interrogating approaches to the representation and regulation of sexual assault on campus. We focus on the work of critical legal theorist Janet Halley, who has been a leading and contentious figure in advocating against the film and for a reconsideration of how Title IX is implemented on university campuses. In 2015, nineteen Harvard law professors, for whom Halley was the spokesperson, issued a press release objecting to the Hunting Ground for misrepresenting the case of one of their students.