The New York Times Magazine quotes SLS Professors Michele Dauber and Deborah Rhode on recent changes to sexual assault policy and education at universities across the country.

Last summer, the Harvard law professor Janet Halley sat down at her dining-room table to look through a set of policies that her university created for handling complaints of sexual assault and harassment. Halley had taught this area for years, and she was interested to see what the university came up with. The new rules were released amid pressure from student-led groups of rape survivors and their advocates, who demanded that schools across the country do more on behalf of victims. Harvard was also responding to years of calls for change by the Obama administration. Just eight months earlier, Valerie Jarrett, a senior presidential adviser, called for a ‘‘more victim-centered’’ campus approach to dealing with the problem of sexual assault.

But as Halley read the new rules, she felt alarmed — stunned, in fact. The university’s definition of harassment seemed far too broad. She worried that Harvard’s new rules would not be fair to the accused. She thought of a case she wrote about years earlier, in which a military serviceman was discharged because another serviceman complained that the man had looked into his eyes for too long in the mailroom.

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Halley’s skepticism about using law to fight female inequality is out of sync with many feminists in the legal academy, who argue that she is also out of sync with many women. ‘‘The actual lived experience of real women is that they often are the victims of sexual violence,’’ said Michele Dauber, a Stanford law professor who helped rewrite the university’s policies on sexual harassment and assault and teaches a course on the issues. ‘‘It’s absurd to say that it undermines women’s agency to give them a tool to stop that bad thing from happening. People are suffering from harm, you provide them with a remedy, and somehow that’s infantilizing? No, it’s empowering.’’

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On this point, she has support among liberal feminists. ‘‘Schools have been reluctant to incorporate issues of alcohol abuse in rape-prevention programs out of concern that victims will be blamed, and blame themselves, for assault,’’ writes the Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode, who has advocated women’s advancement in the legal profession throughout her career, in a forthcoming article in The U.C.L.A. Women’s Law Journal. ‘‘That needs to change. Warning women that intoxication increases their risk of sexual assault does not imply that they are responsible for it.’’ …

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