Part I. The Problem: Patriarchal Law IS Violence
The Logic of Domination
Patriarchal law operates on a simple premise: the world is divided into those who rule and those who are ruled.
This logic permeates every level of the American legal system, from the Constitution itself down to the most mundane municipal ordinance. It determines who counts as a person, what counts as property, whose pain matters, and whose suffering is legally invisible.
This is not a bug. It is the design.
The American legal system was explicitly constructed to protect the interests of propertied white men. It defines "property" expansively enough to include land stolen from Indigenous peoples, human beings kidnapped from Africa, the labor of women and children, and the "natural resources" extracted from a living planet. The law's primary function has always been to enforce these hierarchies while maintaining the fiction of neutrality, fairness, and blind justice.
Carol Gilligan's groundbreaking work on moral development revealed how this bias operates. She challenged Lawrence Kohlberg's model of moral development, which consistently found boys to be more morally mature than girls, arguing that this reflected a masculine bias toward abstract principles of justice over empathy, care, and relationships. The "mature" moral reasoner, in Kohlberg's framework, was someone who could ignore context, ignore relationships, ignore suffering — and apply universal rules without regard for human impact. This, Gilligan showed, wasn't moral maturity. It was patriarchal conditioning dressed up as objectivity. Wikipedia
American jurisprudence operates on the same logic.
Where ethics of care asks "how to respond?" to individual circumstances, justice-based frameworks ask "what is just?" prioritizing generalized standards and impartiality over responsiveness to the particular. The law is supposed to be blind. Not in the sense of being fair, but in the sense of being deliberately unable to see the human beings it impacts. Wikipedia
This is patriarchal law. A system that valorizes rules over relationships, order over care, property over people, and punishment over accountability.
What Patriarchal Law Prioritizes
1. Order Over Justice
The American legal system is designed to maintain social order, not to achieve justice. "Law and order" rhetoric makes this explicit: the goal is stability, compliance, control. When order and justice conflict, the system chooses order every time.
This is why peaceful protesters are met with militarized police violence while white-collar criminals who steal billions face minimal consequences. This is why civil asset forfeiture — a legal mechanism allowing police to seize property without charging anyone with a crime — remains constitutional. This is why qualified immunity shields police officers who kill unarmed civilians from legal accountability.
The law protects order, and order means protecting the people and institutions currently in power.
2. Property Over People
Corporate personhood — the legal fiction that a corporation has the same rights as a human being — is patriarchal law's purest expression.
Corporations cannot suffer. They cannot be tortured, starved, brutalized, or killed. Yet they are granted constitutional rights to free speech (allowing unlimited political spending), religious freedom (allowing them to deny healthcare to employees), and due process (allowing them to sue governments that regulate them).
Meanwhile, actual human beings — especially poor people, Black and Indigenous people, immigrants, disabled people, and incarcerated people — are routinely denied the legal protections that corporations enjoy.
Rivers poisoned by industrial waste have no legal standing to sue for their own protection, but the corporations poisoning them can sue to block environmental regulations.
The hierarchy is clear: corporations > propertied individuals > unpropertied individuals > those deemed "criminals" > non-citizens > ecosystems. Patriarchal law builds and enforces this ladder, then insists it is neutral.
3. Punishment Over Accountability
The American carceral system is the largest in human history.
The United States, with less than 5% of the world's population, holds nearly 25% of the world's incarcerated people. This is not because Americans are uniquely criminal. It is because the American legal system is designed to criminalize poverty, Blackness, addiction, mental illness, and survival strategies. Then they just punish people rather than address root causes.
Patriarchal law asks: "Who can we punish?" Ethics of care asks: "What harm occurred, what caused it, and how do we repair it?"
These are incompatible frameworks. One perpetuates cycles of violence. The other interrupts them.
The punishment paradigm extends beyond prisons. Debt becomes a tool of control (student debt, medical debt, criminal justice debt) with the law treating inability to pay as a moral failing deserving of garnished wages, ruined credit, and compounding penalties. The law protects creditors' right to collect while offering no protection for debtors' right to survival.
4. Dominance Over Relationship
Patriarchal law understands power as dominance: the right of the strong to control the weak.
This logic shapes everything from labor law (employers' rights over workers' rights) to family law (parental rights over children's autonomy) to environmental law (humans' right to "use" nature however we see fit).
Indigenous legal traditions, by contrast, understand power as responsibility.
The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace grounds governance not merely for people, but with and for the natural world. Leadership is measured not by the ability to command, but by the ability to maintain right relationships — with other nations, with future generations, with the land itself. Substack
American law inverts this completely.
It grants nearly unlimited power to those at the top of hierarchies while stripping accountability. CEOs can destroy communities through plant closures, but workers have no legal right to challenge those decisions. Landlords can evict tenants in winter, but tenants have no right to housing. Parents can subject children to conversion therapy, but children have limited legal recourse.
The pattern is consistent: patriarchal law protects the powerful's right to dominate while denying the vulnerable any enforceable right to care.
How We Relate to Other Nations: Imperial Law as Patriarchal Violence
The patriarchal logic of American law does not stop at the border. It extends outward, shaping how the United States relates to every other nation on earth. If patriarchal law treats people as subjects to be controlled and resources as property to be extracted, then foreign policy becomes the international expression of that same violence.
This is why our foreign policy section is so extensive.
The legal frameworks that enable mass incarceration at home are the same frameworks that enable military occupation abroad. The logic that treats poor Americans as disposable is the same logic that treats Yemeni children, Iraqi civilians, and Palestinian families as acceptable collateral damage. The corporate personhood that allows Chevron to destroy the Amazon is the same legal structure that allows American corporations to loot the Global South with impunity.
American exceptionalism — the doctrine that the United States is uniquely virtuous and therefore exempt from the rules that govern other nations — is patriarchal law's geopolitical expression.
It establishes a hierarchy: the United States at the top, "allies" (meaning compliant client states) in the middle, and everyone else subject to invasion, sanctions, coups, or economic domination.
The legal architecture of imperialism includes:
The Doctrine of Discovery
The legal principle, originating in 15th-century papal bulls, that Christian European nations had the right to claim lands inhabited by non-Christians. This doctrine was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court as recently as 2005 to deny Indigenous land claims. It remains embedded in federal Indian law, treating Indigenous sovereignty as something granted by the U.S. government rather than inherent.
This is patriarchal law: the assumption that the powerful have the legal right to define who counts as fully human, who has claim to the land, and whose legal systems are legitimate.
Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS)
A system allowing corporations to sue governments in private tribunals for regulations that reduce corporate profits. This mechanism enables corporations to override democratic sovereignty, demanding compensation when countries pass environmental protections, labor laws, or public health measures.
Chevron used this system to try to nullify Ecuador's court judgment, seeking $220 million from a country whose Indigenous communities the company poisoned. ISDS is patriarchal law at the global scale: property rights (corporate "investments") trump human rights, democratic accountability, and ecological survival. Substack
Unequal Treaties and Debt Peonage
The United States and international financial institutions (IMF, World Bank) impose "structural adjustment" conditions on loans to Global South nations. They require privatization of public services, elimination of food subsidies, deregulation of labor protections, and opening of markets to foreign (primarily American) corporations. These policies create conditions where nations cannot feed their own people, cannot control their own resources, and remain permanently indebted. The debt itself becomes a tool of control. Nations are pressured to prioritize debt repayment over healthcare, education, or infrastructure.
This is the international expression of the same logic that creates student debt, medical debt, and criminal justice debt domestically. The law treats the creditor's right to collect as sacred while treating the debtor's right to survival as irrelevant.
Military Bases and Extraterritorial Jurisdiction
The United States maintains approximately 750 military bases in over 80 countries. American soldiers who commit crimes on foreign soil are often shielded from local prosecution through Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs), which grant the U.S. military legal immunity.
This is qualified immunity at the international level. American state actors can commit violence abroad with minimal legal accountability.
Meanwhile, the United States claims the right to prosecute foreign nationals for crimes committed outside U.S. borders (extraterritorial jurisdiction) while refusing to submit to the International Criminal Court.
The law, in this framework, binds everyone but the empire.
Sanctions as Collective Punishment
U.S. sanctions regimes target entire populations, restricting access to food, medicine, and basic goods.
A 1996 UN study estimated that sanctions on Iraq led to the deaths of 500,000 children under age five. When asked if this death toll was worth it, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright replied, "We think the price is worth it."
This is patriarchal law rendered as foreign policy: abstract geopolitical goals matter more than half a million dead children. The rules matter more than the human cost of enforcing them.
The through-line is clear.
The same legal logic that allows civil asset forfeiture domestically allows the seizure of Venezuelan assets internationally. The same framework that treats Black Americans as threats to be controlled treats entire nations as threats to be subdued. The same property-over-people calculus that defends corporate personhood at home defends corporate extraction abroad.
You cannot have a Legal Code of Care domestically while maintaining an imperial foreign policy.
The two are incompatible. Any constitutional framework rooted in care must also reconstitute how the United States relates to other nations. Not as subjects to dominate, but as equals with whom to build mutually accountable relationships.
Who This System Harms and How
Patriarchal law does not harm everyone equally. It was designed to protect some and subjugate others, and it has succeeded wildly.
Indigenous Peoples
The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace is credited as a contributing influence on the American Constitution, yet the Founding Fathers left out the Seven Generations Principle. It's the mandate to consider decisions' impact on the seventh generation to come. They took the structure and discarded the ethics. ICTincMolly Larkin
Then they built a legal system explicitly designed to dispossess, displace, and exterminate Indigenous peoples. The Doctrine of Discovery (still cited in U.S. law) legally classified Indigenous peoples as less-than-human occupants of land that "belonged" to whoever "discovered" it.
Treaties were signed and broken with impunity, because the law treated them as temporary concessions rather than binding agreements between sovereign nations.
Federal Indian law, to this day, treats tribal sovereignty as something granted by the U.S. government rather than inherent. Indigenous peoples are subject to federal criminal jurisdiction on their own lands, yet lack the same jurisdiction over non-Indigenous people who commit crimes in Indian Country.
This is patriarchal law: power flows one direction, accountability flows the other.
The Indian Child Welfare Act, which protects Indigenous children from being removed from their families and communities, has been under constant legal attack by those who argue it constitutes "racial discrimination". As if preventing cultural genocide is somehow unfair to white adoptive parents.
The law, in patriarchal hands, becomes a weapon against the very people it was meant to protect.
Black Americans
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery "except as punishment for crime." That exception clause became the blueprint for mass incarceration.
After Reconstruction, Black Codes criminalized behaviors like "vagrancy" and "loitering" — effectively criminalizing Blackness itself — to funnel freed Black people back into forced labor through convict leasing.
The legal architecture of slavery adapted, but did not end.
Today, Black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans. Black children are routinely tried as adults. Black mothers face higher rates of separation from their children by child protective services. Black families are disproportionately targeted for civil asset forfeiture. Black communities are subjected to over-policing and under-protection simultaneously; heavily surveilled yet abandoned when they report crimes.
The law treats Blackness as inherently suspect.
"Reasonable suspicion," "probable cause," and "officer safety" become legal justifications for stops, searches, and killings that would be unthinkable if the victims were white. And when the violence is challenged, qualified immunity shields the perpetrators while the legal system blames the victims for "resisting" or "not complying" or simply existing in ways that made officers "fear for their lives."
This is not aberrant. This is patriarchal law functioning as designed: maintaining a racial hierarchy through violence, then using the law to call that violence legitimate.
Women and Gender-Nonconforming People
Women were excluded from constitutional personhood for most of American history.
Coverture laws treated married women as legal property of their husbands, unable to own property, sign contracts, or control their own wages. While formal coverture has ended, its logic persists.
Women still lack an Equal Rights Amendment.
Pregnancy discrimination remains legal in many contexts. Domestic violence was treated as a "private family matter" outside legal jurisdiction until shockingly recently. Even now, enforcement is inconsistent. Rape kit backlogs number in the hundreds of thousands. Rapists routinely receive lighter sentences than drug offenders.
The law's relationship to reproductive autonomy reveals patriarchal logic most starkly. The overturning of Roe v. Wade made explicit what was always true: the legal system prioritizes state control over women's bodies over women's right to bodily autonomy. Abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest treat pregnancy as a punishment for sex, and women as vessels whose personhood is secondary to the fetuses they carry.
Trans and gender-nonconforming people face legal erasure.
Many states refuse to allow gender marker changes on identification documents. Trans people are routinely incarcerated according to assigned sex at birth, subjecting them to sexual violence and denial of medical care. "Religious freedom" laws allow discrimination in employment, housing, and healthcare.
The law, in these contexts, doesn't just fail to protect. It actively enables harm.
Disabled People
The Americans with Disabilities Act was a hard-won victory, but enforcement remains minimal and loopholes abound.
Disabled people can legally be paid below minimum wage under Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Forced institutionalization continues, often justified through guardianship laws that strip disabled people of legal personhood. "Ugly laws" that criminalized visible disability in public were only repealed in the 1970s, and their logic persists in anti-homeless ordinances that criminalize the visibility of poverty and disability.
The legal standard for accommodation is "reasonable," which in practice means "whatever doesn't inconvenience the able-bodied too much." Courts routinely rule that accessibility requirements are "undue burdens" on businesses and institutions, prioritizing property rights over disabled people's right to exist in public space.
Police killings of disabled people, especially those experiencing mental health crises, are shockingly common. Yet, qualified immunity shields officers from accountability.
The law treats disabled people as problems to manage rather than people deserving of care.
Poor and Working-Class People (Including White People)
Patriarchal law harms white people too, though not as severely or systematically as it harms BIPOC. The class hierarchy baked into American law means that poor and working-class white people, while granted racial privileges, are still subjected to economic domination.
Wage theft — employers stealing workers' pay through unpaid overtime, misclassification, and off-the-clock work — exceeds all other property crime combined in dollar value. Yet it is rarely prosecuted as a crime.
The law treats workers' rights as negotiable and employers' property rights as sacred.
Bankruptcy laws were rewritten to favor creditors, making it nearly impossible to discharge student loan or medical debt. Meanwhile, corporations routinely use bankruptcy to shed pension obligations and worker contracts while executives walk away with golden parachutes.
Right-to-work laws gut union power, making collective bargaining nearly impossible. At-will employment allows bosses to fire workers for any reason or no reason, while workers who quit without notice can face legal retaliation.
The asymmetry is deliberate. The law grants power to employers and strips it from workers.
Poor white people also face criminalization through debtor's prisons (jail time for unpaid fines and fees), civil asset forfeiture, and "quality of life" ordinances that criminalize homelessness.
The opioid epidemic ravaging white working-class communities was enabled by corporate actors (Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family) who faced minimal criminal accountability because the law treats corporate malfeasance as a regulatory matter, not a crime.
The point is not that white poverty is equivalent to racialized poverty. It isn't.
The point is that patriarchal law's hierarchy harms everyone who isn't at the top, just to different degrees and through different mechanisms.
The Earth Itself
Rivers, forests, mountains, wetlands, and entire ecosystems have no legal standing. They cannot sue for their own protection.
They exist, in law, solely as resources for human use.
This is patriarchal logic in its purest form. The living world is dead property, and the only question is who owns it and how it can be exploited for profit. When a river is poisoned, the law asks whether human property rights were violated, not whether the river itself has been harmed. When a forest is clearcut, the law asks whether proper permits were obtained, not whether the forest has a right to exist.
The climate crisis is the inevitable result of this legal framework.
A system that treats ecological destruction as an externality rather than a crime. It grants corporations personhood while denying it to ecosystems. It prioritizes quarterly profits over generational survival, such a system cannot prevent collapse. It can only accelerate it.
A System Working As Designed: The Case of Steven Donziger
Abstract critiques of legal systems can feel distant. So let's talk about a specific case that reveals exactly how patriarchal law operates when challenged: the persecution of environmental lawyer Steven Donziger.
In the 1990s, Donziger represented 30,000 Indigenous people and farmers in Ecuador against Texaco (later purchased by Chevron) for massive oil contamination in the Lago Agrio region of the Amazon. Chevron admitted that Texaco dumped 16 billion gallons of toxic waste into waterways, but refused to take legal responsibility.
After decades of litigation, Donziger's team won a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron, upheld by Ecuador's Supreme Court. The InterceptPeople's World
Chevron's response reveals how patriarchal law functions when corporate property rights are threatened.
Chevron assembled a legal team of hundreds of lawyers from 60 firms, hired private investigators to surveil Donziger, froze his bank accounts, placed liens on his property, and successfully had him disbarred rather than pay the fines. Judge Lewis Kaplan took the extraordinary step of appointing a private law firm with likely ties to Chevron to prosecute him, then bypassed the standard random assignment process to handpick Judge Loretta Preska to oversee the case when the US Attorney's Office declined to prosecute. The Intercept + 2
The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Donziger's detention was arbitrary, identifying the situation as legal harassment in the form of a SLAPP suit, Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. Donziger spent nearly 1,000 days under house arrest followed by imprisonment, longer than any person in U.S. history for a misdemeanor contempt charge. Amnesty International + 2
Let's be clear about what happened here. A lawyer won a judgment protecting Indigenous peoples and ecosystems from corporate poisoning. The corporation responded by weaponizing the legal system to destroy him personally. Judges with financial conflicts of interest were allowed to preside.
A private prosecution was permitted. This is virtually unprecedented. The man who fought for accountability was imprisoned while the corporation that admitted to dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste faced no criminal consequences.
This is patriarchal law working exactly as designed.
Corporate property rights (Chevron's "right" not to pay the judgment) trumped human rights (Indigenous peoples' right to clean water) and environmental rights (the Amazon's right not to be poisoned). The legal system punished the lawyer who challenged corporate power while protecting the corporation that committed mass ecological destruction.
When the law itself is the weapon of the powerful against the powerless, reform is insufficient. The system must be reconstituted from its foundation.
Why We Must Abolish and Rebuild
Some will argue for reform. Amend the Constitution, they'll say. Pass better laws. Elect better judges. Expand who counts as a person under existing frameworks.
We've been trying this for nearly 250 years.
And while those struggles have won real victories — the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and same sex marriage — the foundation remains intact. We're still operating under a legal framework that treats people as property, ecosystems as resources, and corporate profits as more sacred than human life.
You cannot build a house of care on a foundation designed for domination. The logic is incompatible.
The climate is collapsing. Mass incarceration continues. Corporate power is near-absolute. Indigenous sovereignty remains precarious. Women's bodily autonomy is being stripped away state by state. Disabled people still fight for basic access. Workers still have no meaningful power against employers. The Global South is still being looted and bombed with legal impunity.
Reform has not stopped these harms because the legal system enables them. It was designed to.
The Haudenosaunee understood something the American Founders did not: governance must be for and with the natural world, not merely for humans who claim dominion over it.
Ethics of Care directs attention to the need for responsiveness in relationships, to paying attention, listening, and responding — and to the costs of losing connection with oneself or with others. SubstackEthics of care
A Legal Code of Care begins from a fundamentally different premise: The purpose of law is to sustain right relationships. Relationships between people. Relationships between humans and ecosystems. Relationships between present and future generations. Relationships between nations.
This is not a minor tweak. This is a different operating system entirely.
And it is not unprecedented. Ecuador's 2008 Constitution recognized the legal personhood of nature, granting Pachamama the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, with any person, people, community or nationality empowered to defend those rights. New Zealand granted the Whanganui River legal personhood, recognizing it as an indivisible and living whole with its own rights, based on the Māori understanding of the river as ancestor. South Africa's post-apartheid Constitution embraced transformative constitutionalism — a long-term project of constitutional enactment designed to transform political, social institutions and power relations in a democratic, participatory, and egalitarian direction. Columbia Undergraduate Law Review + 5
These frameworks prove that reconstituting law around care is not utopian fantasy. It is happening, right now, in multiple places around the world.
The question is not whether it's possible. The question is whether we have the courage to do it here.