A paper of Steven Svoboda’s has just been published on June 10, 2025 by the Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice.
This paper, one of the longest and most comprehensive Steven has ever written, partly relates to a case in which he was a litigator in 2003. The case was a class action against a Queens (New York City) hospital for systematically tricking Latina women into agreeing to circumcisions (male genital cutting or MGC) of their newborn sons. The plaintiffs’ case was torpedoed by a visiting Michigan judge, Bernard Friedman. Many years later, when several Detroit physicians and midwives were prosecuted in 2018 for practicing female genital cutting, the judge denied the case but laid out for Congress the steps it should take to pass a new, stronger law against FGC. The judge’s name seemed familiar. Then Steven realized: it was the judge from 15 years earlier in New York City! So the article is based on these two cases decided a decade and a half apart by the same judge, discussing the judge’s great sympathy for FGC victims and complete lack of empathy for MGC victims, perhaps influenced by his Jewish faith. Steven uses Judge Friedman’s difference of opinion on the two practices as a springboard to discuss their differential treatment in the US and in the world and to outline paths to correcting this injustice.
The paper is available on our website at https://www.arclaw.org/wp-