Feminism and the Idea of Law

Abstract

In recent years feminist legal scholars in Canada and the United Kingdom have set themselves an intriguing task – to expose the politics embedded in major appeal court decisions by rewriting certain judgments from a feminist point of view. The Women’s Court of Canada, devised over dinner at an Italian restaurant in Toronto in 2004 (Majury 2006: 1) was born of frustration at the narrowing focus of the Canadian Supreme Court in its equality jurisprudence. With the assistance of organisations such as the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund and under the influence of the Canadian Charter for Rights and Freedoms, the Supreme Court had once been willing to innovate, but feminists had noticed it becoming increasingly less progressive. The Women’s Court, established as a loose coalition of feminist lawyers, scholars and activists, was established with the intention of illustrating that any judicial opinion is always just one possibility among many. Alternative opinions and decisions can always be made which are based on more imaginative approaches to the equality (and other) jurisprudence. The UK-based Feminist Judgments Project (Hunter, McGlynn and Rackley 2010a) took some inspiration from this approach, but applied the feminist judgment concept to a broader range of cases, including medical, property, criminal, family, and public law matters.