By Sarah Weld

When feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon addressed the Worldwide #MeToo Movement conference crowd ... the almost entirely female crowd was riveted.

Catherine MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan at the Worldwide #MeToo Movement Conference, University of California, Berkeley

One of three keynote speakers during the daylong event at Berkeley Law, MacKinnon — who pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment and whose life’s work has focused on women’s rights — assessed the current status of the #MeToo movement, which exploded in the fall of 2017.

“This here is real change, so don’t ask me what is next. This is it. … We haven’t won yet but we are winning,” said MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan. “Imagine a revolution without violence, against domination and aggression. Envision a moment of truth, a moment of transformation for the sexually violated toward a more equal, therefore more peaceful and just world. It’s happening all over the world. All around us. Right now.”

The second annual conference, which focused on global resistance to sexual harassment and violence, is an outgrowth of the international 400-member Comparative Equality & Anti-Discrimination Law Study Group led by Berkeley Law Professor David Oppenheimer.

It also included smaller study sessions, on separate days, that brought together women’s rights leaders and lawyers from around the world to compare post-#MeToo legal strategies to combat sexual harassment and support what MacKinnon called “a whole tsunami of enraged women.”

Oppenheimer said participants reached several conclusions from those sessions, including the need to: find better ways to prevent harassment and to support women who report it; combat how defamation law is being used to silence women, particularly outside the United States; seek more effective legal remedies; and connect harassment to pay equity and economic equality.

“This is exactly the kind of conference I want to see us doing at Berkeley Law because it brings together activists, lawyers, people from the community, all of those who are trying to come up with solutions,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said in his introduction. “By bringing people together we are much more likely to come up with something that’s effective.”