Feminist Perspectives On The Foundational Subjects Of Law

The essays in this volume fall within a chapter on one of the foundational law subjects on the degree syllabus, and aim to provide an account of feminist approaches to each of the following areas: contracts, torts, land law, equity and trusts, criminal law, public law, and European law.

The essays in this volume fall within a chapter on one of the foundational law subjects on the degree syllabus, and aim to provide an account of feminist approaches to each of the following areas: contracts, torts, land law, equity and trusts, criminal law, public law, and European law. The text uses historical and comparative analysis, political philosophy, legal theory and different literary styles to explore both law and feminist theory.

What is the link between the way in which women are viewed as an aberration within law - such that pregnant women initially had to be compared with sick men to claim unfair dismissal - and the view of women as monstrous within philosophy? This book uses the failure of women to fit within male models of both law and theory as a way to rethink legal questions,including the meaning of equality, freedom, justice and citizenship. This includes concern about the way in which queer theory and critical race theory - as well as issues of class - intersect with feminist theory today. It also raises issues about the relationship between political theory and practice and the productive intersection between debates within law, philosophy and feminism. This collection of essays on feminist legal theory therefore provides an interdisciplinary approach, drawn not only from law and philosophy, but also from cultural and womens studies. Feminism may still be on the margins of both law and philosophy, yet it has the ability to disrupt both. This book moves beyond a feminist critique of existing frameworks to the constructive project of reworking theory from within. It goes beyond debates of traditional jurisprudence to draw its tools from the growing body of work on feminist philosophy - including the writings of Luce Irigaray, Drucilla Cornell and Christine Battersby - which intersect both contemporary continental philosophy and critical legal theory.

Feminist scholarship can provide public lawyers with the critical tools and insights to respond to these new challenges. This collection begins a dialogue between public law and feminism by offering a range of perspectives on contemporary public law themes and topics.

Criminal law has traditionally been taught and analysed as if the gender of criminals and their victims is irrelevant. It has also been taught and analysed as if criminal law doctrine has no connection with questions of criminalisation,crime detection, decisions to charge and prosecute, lawyers trial tactics, decisions as to guilt and sentencing policy and practice, all of which are significantly affected by gender.This book seeks to fill these gaps by looking at the major areas in which gender affects the way that suspected criminals and their victims are treated by the criminal justice system. However, this book is not just a supplement to traditional criminal law discourse. It is a dangerous supplement, in that the focus on gender challenges laws claim to neutrality and even-handed justice.The essays in this book establish that, not only does the law frequently fail to offer women the sort of protection from male violence and sexual invasion that they need, but it continues to discriminate on grounds of gender. Even when discriminating in favour of women, it does so in ways that reinforce dangerous gender stereotypes. More specifically, both criminal law doctrine and criminal justice personnel apply and reinforce ideas, on the one hand, of female passivity, irrationality and proneness to illness, and, on the other, of natural male aggression - both physical and sexual.

Examining specific areas of family law from a feminist perspective, this book assesses the impact that feminism has had upon family law. It is deliberately broad in scope, as it takes the view that family law cannot be defined in a traditional way. In addition to issues of long-standing concern for feminists, it explores issues of current legal and political preoccupation such as civil partnerships, home-sharing, reproductive technologies and new initiatives in regulating family practices through criminal law, including domestic violence and youth justice.

Questions of evidence and proof are fundamental to the operation of substantive law and to our understanding of law as a social practice. The study of evidence involves issues of central concern to feminist scholars,including matters of epistemology, psychology, allocation of risk and responsibility. Debates about evidence, like debates about feminism, involve questioning ideas of rationality and truth, as well as claims to knowledge both by and about men and women. Social constructions of gender are reflected both explicitly and implicitly in evidential rules and in the way in which evidence is received and understood by judges, jurors and magistrates. Feminist evidence scholarship is a relatively new but rapidly developing field. This collection brings together previously unpublished work by feminist legal scholars from different jurisdictions. In these essays, they explore the contributions of feminist theory and methodology to the understanding of the law of evidence.

"First Published in 1998, Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company."