Brooklyn Law School BrooklynWorks Faculty Scholarship 12-1997 Treating Sexual Harassment with Respect Anita Bernstein Brooklyn Law School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/faculty Part of the Law and Gender Commons, Law and Society Commons, Legislation Commons, Litigation Commons, Other Law Commons, Sexuality and the Law Commons, and the Supreme Court of the United States Commons Recommended Citation 111 Harv. L. Rev. 445 (1997-1998) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by BrooklynWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of BrooklynWorks. VOLUME 111 DECEMBER 1997 NUMBER 2 HARVARD LAW REVIEWj ARTICLES TREATING SEXUAL HARASSMENT WITH RESPECT Anita Bernstein TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................ 446 1. ON REASON AND REASONABLENESS AS THEY PERTAIN TO SEXUAL HARASSM ENT ....................................................................................................................... 455 A. The Trouble with Reason ............................................................................................ 456 i. The Tadition of Exclusion ............................................................................... 456 2. E m otion ...............................................................................................................460 3. Sex and Reason .................................................................................................. 462 B. The Trouble with a Reasonable Person Standard................................................... 464 I. Does the Reasonable Man Lurk Below? The Cipher of Reasonableness.. 465 2. Ideologies Embedded in Reasonableness ....................................................... 467 U1. DOCTRINAL REvISION: THE REASONABLENESS QUANDARY ...................................... 471 A. Innovation: The Reasonable Woman ........................................................................ 471 I. Different Strokes, or The Charge of False Essentialism ............................... 472 2. Holding Men to a Female Standard ................................................................ 474 3. Condescension, Stereotyping, and the Pedestal .............................................. 475 4. The Subjectivity Slope ...................................................................................... 477 B. Tinkering: The Reasonable [Insert Noun]................................................................ 477 C. Despair: The Subjective Alternative ......................................................................... 480 Ill. THE RESPECTFUL PERSON ................................................................................................ 482 A. Entitlement to Respect. Toward a Conservative Standard..................................... 483 i. Recognition Respect ........................................................................................... 483 2. A D uty to Refrain .............................................................................................. 486 B. Respect as a Legal Standardfor Sexual HarassmentCases - The Employment Context ......................................................................................................................... 492 I. Agency and Responsibility ................................................................................ 492 2. Justifications for Apparent Disrespect ............................................................ 497 3. The Law/Fact Divide ........................................................................................ 504 IV. SOME VIRTUES OF THE RESPECTFUL PERSON ............................................................... 5o6 A. Descriptive Accuracy: Offensive Behavior and Harm to Dignity.......................... 5o6 B. Doctrinal Harmony:Respect Elsewhere in the Law .............................................. 512 i. Visual Artists' Rights ......................................................................................... 513 2. Environm ental Law ........................................................................................... 5 4 3. The First Am endm ent ....................................................................................... 517 V. COMMON SENSE AND RESPECT ........................................................................................ 521 C ON CLUSION .............................................................................................................................. 524 TREATING SEXUAL HARASSMENT WITH RESPECT Anita Bernstein* What is sexual harassment? Individuals in the workforce need to know. Judicial opinions do not fully inform them, and academic commentary has not linked doctrine to everyday work experience or to an intelligible ethical philosophy that is widely understood and shared. In this Article, ProfessorBernstein undertakes to explain sexual harassment using the concept of respect. She argues that a defendant charged with hostile environment sexual harassment ought to be held to the standard of a respectful person. This doctrinal device improves on approaches that now prevail, particularly those emphasizing "reasonableness." After detailing the shortcomings of current law, Professor Bernstein describes the virtues of a legal rule that affirms respect. These virtues - which extend beyond sexual harassment - include the resonance of respect as a value among ordinary people, the history of inclusion based on human dignity that informs respect, the orientation of respect around the conduct of an agent (rather than the reaction of a complainant, the focus of current rules), and congruence with a tradition,found in many other areas of American law, of calling on citizens to render respect. INTRODUCTION YTears of feminist effort created the term sexual harassment, now a legal wrong and a cultural colossus. But as doctrine the phrase remains elusive, connoting no specific type of harm. Once thought of as a problem that has no name,1 sexual harassment is now a term that brings no -clear image to mind - a name, as it were, that has no problem. Decades of litigation in the federal circuits and the Supreme Court have resulted in the promulgation of workable guidelines 2 but prompted little vivid judicial writing and no courtroom-scene edifica- tion; neither the Hill-Thomas pageant of i99i nor the spectacles that followed shed much light on sexual harassment law.3 * Professor of Law and Norman & Edna Freehling Scholar, Chicago-Kent College of Law, B.A. r98r, Queens College; J.D. 1985, Yale. I acknowledge with deep thanks the inspiration, and challenges, of Carolyn Raffensperger, Chicago-Kent Class of 1994, who first proposed that we write together on this subject. Carolyn's commitments later precluded her from being co-author - or indeed sole author - of this Article. In my role of adoptive parent, I hope I have not be- trayed the promise of her early ideas. Another former student from the same class, John Franc- zyk, Jr., made several helpful remarks as I got started. Thanks also to Patricia O'Brien and Beth Miller for research assistance; Ian Ayres, Jacob Corr6, Paul Fanning, Steven Heyman, Richard Gonzalez, Herma Hill Kay, Peggie Ren~e Smith, and Alison Steele for sharing their ideas about respect and sexual harassment; and the Marshall Ewell fund for financial support. I See CATHARINE A. MACKINNON, FEMINISM UNMODIFIED io6 (1987). 2 See Guidelines on Discrimination Because of Sex, 29 C.ER. § 1604 (1996). 3 Numerous writings on sexual harassment spectacles include DAVID BROCK, THE REAL ANITA HILL (1992); JANE MAYER & JILL ABRAMSON, STRANGE JUSTICE: THE SELLING OF CLARENCE THOMAS (1994); Douglas R. Kay, Note, Running a Gauntlet of Sexual Abuse: Sexual Harassment of Female Naval Personnel in the United States Navy, 29 CAL. W. L. REV. 307 (1992); 446 1997] TREATING SEXUAL HARASSMENT WITH RESPECT Attempting to fill this void, legal scholars have struggled to observe the rigors of doctrine and at the same time to understand sexual ha- rassment as it is experienced. Appropriately focusing on hostile envi- ronment sexual harassment in the workplace, 4 these commentators ex- plain this phenomenon as expressions of gender hierarchy, economic inefficiency,6 free speech, 7 and misplaced pluralism., But few of these descriptions have achieved widespread acceptance in the judicial or academic communities. 9 Among those who undertake to describe the nature of sexual harassment, 10 a division has emerged. One group of writers, expressing a sunny view of human relationships, offers a paradigm of workplace hostile environment sexual harassment as mis- communication. These observers envision a man who provokes fear or anger, perhaps unintentionally, when he approaches a colleague or and Susan B. Jordan, A Profession of Packwoods?, L.A. DAILY J., Sept. 21, 1995, at 6. On the vagueness of the term "harassment," see Eugene Volokh, Freedom of Speech and Appellate Re- view in Workplace Harassment Cases, 90 Nw. U. L. REv. 1009, 1012-18 (1996). 4 Sexual harassment occurs in a variety of settings; within case law the workplace is the most important of these settings. Workplace sexual harassment, according to an early manifesto by Catharine MacKinnon, divides into two categories: quid pro quo harassment and hostile or abu- sive environment harassment. See CATHARINE A. MACKINNON, SEXUAL HARASSMENT