Subject Bibliography in Law: Feminist Legal Studies

This book explores justice 'on the ground' in Southern African communities, and in particular the roles that women play in these processes. Justice on the ground is often critiqued for being male-dominated and patriarchal. This volume seeks to unpack and problematize this assumption through the case studies of Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa. Contributions focus on the lived experiences of women and the intersections of race, class, culture and the colonial experience that shape their lives. In the rural and peri-urban contexts discussed in this book, justice on the ground is found to be relational. The network of relationships between people and the well-being and health of a community as an integral whole continue to be of central importance as the survival of the community depends on the entire community functioning interdependently.  An engagement with African feminisms is helpful in providing a number of lenses, or simply questions, through which to read the case studies. These case studies reveal the complex and organic ways in which women have power and influence in relation to justice on the ground which may not be immediately obvious.

By rewriting both canonical and lesser-known tort cases from a feminist perspective, this volume exposes gender and racial bias in how courts have categorized and evaluated harm stemming from pre-natal malpractice, pregnancy loss, domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment, invasion of privacy, and the award of economic and non-economic damages. The rewritten opinions demonstrate that when confronted with gendered harm to women, courts have often distorted or misapplied conventional legal doctrine to diminish the harm or deny recovery. Bringing this implicit bias to the surface can make law students, and lawyers and judges who craft arguments and apply tort doctrines, more aware of inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation or identity. This volume shows the way forward to make the basic doctrines of tort law more responsive to the needs and perspectives of traditionally marginalized people, in ways that give greater value to harms that they disproportionately experience.

In Frontiers of Gender Equality, editor Rebecca Cook enlarges the chorus of voices to introduce new and different discourses about the wrongs of gender discrimination and to explain the multiple dimensions of gender equality. This volume demonstrates that the wrongs of discrimination can best be understood from the perspective of the discriminated, and that gender discrimination persists and grows in new and different contexts, widening the gap between the principle of gender equality and its realization, particularly for subgroups of women and LGBTQ+ peoples. Frontiers of Gender Equality provides retrospective views of the struggles to eliminate gender discrimination in national courts and international human rights treaties. Focusing on gender equality enables comparisons and contrasts among these regimes to better understand how they reinforce gender equality norms. Different regional and international treaties are examined, those in the forefront of advancing gender equality, those that are promising but little known, and those whose focus includes economic, social, and cultural rights, to explore why some struggles were successful and others less so. The book illustrates how gender discrimination continues to be normalized and camouflaged, and how it intersects with other axes of subordination, such as indigeneity, religion, and poverty, to create new forms of intersectional discrimination. With the benefit of hindsight, the book's contributors reconstruct gender equalities in concrete situations. Given the increasingly porous exchanges between domestic and international law, various national, regional, and international decisions and texts are examined to determine how better to breathe life into equality from the perspectives, for instance, of Indigenous and Muslim women, those who were violated sexually and physically, and those needing access to necessary health care, including abortion. The conclusion suggests areas of future research, including how to translate the concept of intersectionality into normative and institutional settings, which will assist in promoting the goals of gender equality.

Shaped by politics and policy, Gender Justice and the Law presents a collection of essays that contribute to understanding how theoretical practices of intersectionality relate to structures of inequality and relations formed as a result of their interaction.

This book examines women's access to justice in both traditional and statutory courts through an intersectional lens. It analyzes the lived experiences of women and their access to justice by situating the courtroom as both a spatial and a temporal arena for seeking justice (as litigants) and for seeking access to the bench (as judges).

Opposing Patriarchy explores women's increasing political activism in nineteenth-century Italy.  In Italy and beyond, the nineteenth century was a time of great political change. Shifts in state boundaries and socio-economic structures deeply affected the Italian political landscape, including the nation's legal system. Many Italian women, who had lived within a strict patriarchal and hierarchical society, began to redefine their identities beyond the traditional domestic roles of daughter, wife, and mother. This volume charts that process by focusing on women's attitudes towards the law and their interaction with the legal system. Sara Delmedico seeks to recover the forgotten voices and lives of those ordinary women who, in their everyday lives, reacted against the limitations and constraints imposed upon them by society and who refused to accept their status passively. As this volume shows, the women of the period understood the law, questioned obedience, challenged authority, and stood up for themselves. Even though they did not always achieve their goals, their actions contributed to shaping our present.

Slaves, mistresses, concubines - the English courts have used these terms to describe polygamous wives in the past, but are they still seen this way today? Using a critical postcolonial feminist lens, this book provides a contextualized exploration of English legal responses to polygamy. Through the legacies of British imperialism, the book shows how attitudes to polygamy are shaped by indifference and hostility towards its participants. This goes beyond the law, as shown by the stories of women shared throughout the book negotiating their identities and relationships in the UK today. Through its analysis, the book demonstrates how polygamy and polygamous wives are subjected to imperialist and orientalist discourses which dehumanise them for practising a relationship that has existed for millennia.

This Open Access book aims to find out how and why states in various regions and of diverse cultural backgrounds fail in their gender equality laws and policies. In doing this, the book maps out states' failures in their legal systems and unpacks the clashes between different levels and forms of law--namely domestic laws, local regulations, or the implementation of international law, individually or in combination. By taking off from the confirmation that the concept of law that is to be used in achieving gender equality is a multidimensional, multi-layered, and to an extent, contradictory phenomenon, this book aims to find out how different layers of laws interact and how they impact gender equality. Further to that, by including different states and jurisdictions into its analysis, this book unravels whether there are any similarities/patterns in how these states define and utilise policies and laws that harm gender equality. In this way, the book contributes to the efforts to devise holistic and universal policies to address various forms of gender inequalities across the world. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students in Gender Studies, Sociology, Law, and Criminology.

First published in 1985, Women-in-Law is a collection of essays examining the complex interactions of law, sexuality, and the family. It explores the ways in which legal ideology and practice affect women and looks at issues such as child custody, domestic violence and prostitution in the light of new research. The contributors review the history of feminist involvement with the law and analyse the law's fundamental failure to improve the status of women. They also assess strategies for change in view of the current backlash against women's rights and the traditional role of law in the subjugation of women. This book will be of interest to students of law, political science, sociology, gender studies, and sexuality studies.

This book examines the view of women held by medieval common lawyers and legislators, and considers medieval women's treatment by and participation in the processes of the common law. Surveying a wide range of points of contact between women and the common law, from their appearance (or not) in statutes, through their participation (or not) as witnesses, to their treatment as complainants or defendants, it argues for closer consideration of women within the standard narratives of classical legal history, and for re-examination of some previous conclusions on the relationship between women and the common law. It will appeal to scholars and students of medieval history, as well as those interested in legal history, gender studies and the history of women.