Catharine MacKinnon

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...But as Halley read the new rules, she felt alarmed — stunned, in fact. The university’s definition of harassment seemed far too broad...Halley’s critique has reverberated — as the latest salvo in a long-running war, with deep intellectual roots, over how to grapple with rape and sex as a feminist. In the late 1970s, when Janet Halley was writing a dissertation on 17th-century poets like Donne and Milton, a young lawyer and political scholar named Catharine MacKinnon opened new possibilities for the women’s movement by conceiving the legal claim for sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination.

Catharine MacKinnon was a law student at Yale University in the mid-1970s when she had a radical idea: Sexual harassment on campus was discrimination, and it interfered with a woman's ability to attend college. MacKinnon would put that theory to the test in a court case that her side would eventually lose, but that would have far-reaching effects. In recent months the issue of sexual assault and harassment at college has attracted the scrutiny of the White House and Congress. But some four decades ago, the gender equity law on which many federal inquiries into college sexual assault are based, Title IX, pertained primarily to sports. So in 1977, when MacKinnon advised a group of Yale students alleging harassment on campus to file their lawsuit, Alexander v. Yale, the legal argument was an untested theory.