Legal Capacity Gender

This book explores the role of gender in the recognition of an individual's legal capacity. It discusses the meaning of the right to legal capacity and its two core elements - legal personhood and legal agency. It then analyses historical and modern denials of personhood and agency experienced by women, disabled women, and gender minorities - for example, prohibitions from voting, limitations on contracting, loss of personhood upon marriage, and gender binary requirements leading to an inability to exercise legal capacity, amoung others. Using critical feminist, disability, and queer theory, this book also offers insights into the construction of legal personhood and its role as a predictor of power and privilege. The book identifies patterns of oppression through legal capacity denial in various jurisdictions and discusses situations in which modern law continues to enforce these denials. In addition, the book presents solutions: it identifies practices to learn from in various jurisdictions around the world - including both civil law and common law jurisdictions. It also uses case studies to illustrate the ways in which existing laws, policies and practices could be reformed. As such, the book offers both a novel contribution to the field of legal capacity law and a tool for creating change and helping to realise the right to legal capacity for all.

This book explores the role of gender in the recognition of an individual’s legal capacity. It discusses the meaning of the right to legal capacity and its two core elements – legal personhood and legal agency. It then analyses historical and modern denials of personhood and agency experienced by women, disabled women, and gender minorities – for example, prohibitions from voting, limitations on contracting, loss of personhood upon marriage, and gender binary requirements leading to an inability to exercise legal capacity, among others. Using critical feminist, disability, and queer theory, this book also offers insights into the construction of legal personhood and its role as a predictor of power and privilege. The book identifies patterns of oppression through legal capacity denial in various jurisdictions and discusses situations in which modern law continues to enforce these denials. In addition, the book presents solutions: it identifies practices to learn from in various jurisdictions around the world – including both civil law and common law jurisdictions. It also uses case studies to illustrate the ways in which existing laws, policies and practices could be reformed. As such, the book offers both a novel contribution to the field of legal capacity law and a tool for creating change and helping to realise the right to legal capacity for all.

Questions of gender have strongly influenced the development of international refugee law over the last few decades. This volume assesses the progress toward appropriate recognition of gender-related persecution in refugee law. It documents the advances made following intense advocacy around the world in the 1990s, and evaluates the extent to which gender has been successfully integrated into refugee law. Evaluating the research and advocacy agendas for gender in refugee law ten years beyond the 2002 UNHCR Gender Guidelines, the book investigates the current status of gender in refugee law. It examines gender-related persecution claims of both women and men, including those based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and explores how the development of an anti-refugee agenda in many Western states exponentially increases vulnerability for refugees making gendered claims. The volume includes contributions from scholars and members of the advocacy community that allow the book to examine conceptual and doctrinal themes arising at the intersection of gender and refugee law, and specific case studies across major Western refugee-receiving nations. The book will be of great interest and value to researchers and students of asylum and immigration law, international politics, and gender studies.

Until very recently, the legal gender of a person-both at birth and later in life-in virtually all jurisdictions had to be recorded as either male or female; most laws simply did not allow any other option. However, there are many cases where this gender binary is unable to capture the reality of a person's gender identity. In 2013, Germany became the first Western jurisdiction in modern times to introduce legislation allowing a person's gender to be recorded as 'indeterminate' at birth and thus give them a legal gender status other than male or female. However, despite good intentions, this legislation has proved problematic in many ways and is subject to pertinent criticism. Several other jurisdictions are now beginning to react to challenges to the gender binary. The Legal Status of Intersex Persons provides a basis for discussions surrounding law reform in this area. It contains contributions from medical, psychological, and theological perspectives, as well as national legal perspectives from Germany, Malta, Australia, India, the Netherlands, Columbia, Sweden, France, and the USA. It explores international human rights aspects of intersex legal recognition, and it features chapters on private international law and legal history. [Subject: Human Rights Law, Gender & the Law, Private International Law, Legal History]

Mona Samadi examines the sources of gender differences within the Islamic tradition, with particular focus on guardianship, and describes the opportunities and challenges for advancing the legal status of women.

An unprecedented window into the most private thinking about success of four male and four female middle-aged lawyers, each of whom is widely recognised to be at the apex of the legal profession in Canada.

First published in 1998, this volume is the first full-length discussion of women’s experiences in the solicitors’ profession in the UK. It provides an account which is grounded in historical research and a contemporary research study. The authors explore this material to analyze both women’s own experiences and the mainstream culture and structure of the profession. Following a treatment of the struggle against the formal exclusionary barriers to women’s entry to the profession, this book then seeks to identify the informal obstacles which were subsequently erected to women’s participation and career progression, and examine their persistence, in a modified form, into the contemporary era. The analysis draws on perspectives from feminist jurisprudence to the sociology of the professions to shed light on the processes which support women’s continued subordination in employment as lawyers.

The importance of property rights in providing the incentive to invest, work hard, and innovate has been recognized for centuries. Yet, many women in Africa do not have the same property rights or formal legal capacity enjoyed by men. Empowering Women: Legal Rights and Economic Opportunities in Africa documents the extent to which the legal capacity and property rights vary for women and men, and analyzes the impact this has on women’s economic opportunities. The book introduces the “Women’s Legal Economic Empowerment Database – Africa (Women LEED Africa).” This database covers all 47 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, providing indicators and links to constitutions, ratified international conventions, and domestic statutes where there are gender gaps in legal capacity and property rights. It shows how and where, despite universal constitutional recognition of non-discrimination, many countries have exceptions in areas of marriage, ownership, and control over property and inheritance. With less secure property rights, women in these countries do not have the same ability – or incentive – to accumulate and control assets and thus to access finance or to grow their businesses. After laying out the various gender gaps in legal capacity and property rights, the book addresses the additional challenges stemming from legal systems with a multiplicity of sources of law. Overlapping legal systems themselves add uncertainty to defining women’s economic rights. The authors use case law to trace out the implications for women’s rights and to provide examples of effective reforms. The book recognizes that beyond de jure differences, women may face greater practical constraints in having their rights protected. This book spells out specific steps that can be taken to address gender gaps both in formal property rights and in practical constraints in accessing justice.