[10] In Split Decisions she described herself as: A sex-positive postmodernist, only rarely and intermittently feminist, a skeptic about identity politics, with a strong attraction to "queer" revelations of the strangeness and unknowability of social and sexual life, and a deep distrust of slave-moralistic pretensions to identity-political "powerlessness".
[12][13] Examples of such power according to her are the numerous sexual harassment programs in educational institutions and corporations in the United States and the development of feminist expertise that is used by special offices on gender equality and Non-governmental organizations.
The name of the term was derived from the similarities Halley and colleagues identified between the powerful network-like non governmental organization establishments that feminists adopted, and the law produced by the school of new governance.
[13]The term is to be further developed in the forthcoming book Governance Feminism: an Introduction, to be published by Minnesota University press, co-authored by Halley, Hila Shamir, Prabha Kotiswaran and Rachel Rebouche.
[16] Halley has voiced criticism on the shift of policies at several higher education institutions enforcing the anti-sex discrimination law, Title IX, and was one of the leaders of the opposition to a new sexual conduct code at Harvard in 2014.
She claims that at some campuses the requirements for conviction of sexual assault were loosened, and that this was influenced by dominance feminist ideas coming from the department of education office for civil rights and student movements.
[8] She also argues that the new requirements of affirmative consent in policies and procedures in some institutions, including Harvard, will foster a repressive and sex-negative moral order, and wrote that: They will enable people who enthusiastically participated in sex to deny it later and punish their partners.
[8]Halley was one of 28 Harvard law school faculty members to sign a statement objecting to changes to the sexual harassment policy and procedures of the university in 2014.
The statement claimed that the new policy and procedures "lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process" and "expanded the scope of forbidden conduct", so that it includes rules that are bluntly one-sided in favor of complainants.
[8] In a memo sent to her colleagues in Harvard, following the reform, Halley acknowledged a need to change the former "slipshod, dismissive and actively malign handling of sexual harassment claims", but warned that the new code threatens stigmatized minorities, lacks support for accused students and harms equal procedural treatment.
[19] Michele Dauber from the Stanford law school objects to Halley's claim that legal procedure is a potentially harmful tool which is used too frequently by feminists to regulate sexuality.
West argues that unlike the traditional critical legal studies, which suggested utopian possibilities of less alienated forms of existence, neo-critics such as Halley write against attempts to advance such possibilities, targeting the "expanded civil rights world, with its focus on the injuries sustained by various minorities, cultures, sexually harassed working women, disabled adults, and badly educated and learning-disabled children".
[20] She claims that Halley and her colleagues refuse to acknowledge human suffering and its causes as a subject for left-legal theoretical scholarship, and that this brings the new critical movement closer to libertarian goals that it might want to admit.