Calculating claims: Jewish and Muslim women navigating religion, economics and law in Canada

Abstract

This article presents an empirical study of Jewish and Muslim women who go through divorce in Canada, drawing on a ‘left law and economics’ methodology. Religious law and family law have long been considered outside the market and, as a result, are more rarely accounted for in the law and economics literature. According to dominant narratives, religious family law is experienced by women either as an exceptional form of oppression or as a form of spiritual religious identity. In this article, I apply a ‘left law and economics’ approach to deconstruct these notions. On the basis of my socio-legal fieldwork with Jewish and Muslim women in three Canadian cities, I identify the background formal and informal legal rules, social norms and distributional practices that help produce asymmetric bargaining locations for women. I employ the economic language of costs/ benefits to illustrate the ways in which religious parties bargain strategically upon divorce, although these market claims are surprisingly underrecognised by the legal system. Such empirical knowledge helps disenchant the idea that religious law is systematically used as punishing forces that make women worse off economically or morally inferior. It also allows for a distributive analysis which reveals how husbands and wives negotiate economic resources, desires and day-to-day decisions in all kinds of fair and unfair ways, flying in the face of conventional narratives surrounding women and religion.