The Feminist Judgments Project: Legal Fiction as Critique and Praxis

Abstract

This note introduces the United Kingdom's Feminist Judgments Project and explains its method of (re)writing imagined legal judgments from a feminist perspective. It identifies the ways in which project participants put feminist concerns, feminist theory and feminist methods into legal practice, and considers the value as well as the limitations of this new form of feminist critique and praxis. It concludes by outlining some of the wider impacts and implications of the project.

Keywords:

• legal judgments
• feminist legal scholarship
• feminist judging
• United Kingdom judiciary
• legal method

Acknowledgements

The Feminist Judgments Project was funded by an ESRC Small Grant awarded from October 2008–January 2010. Professors Clare McGlynn (Durham University) and Erika Rackley (University of Birmingham) were co-investigators on the project. An earlier version of this paper was given at the Umea Forum for Studies on Law and Society, Umea University, Sweden, in October 2012. I would like to thank my feminist colleagues there for their conversations around the project.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Rosemary Hunter is Professor of Law and Socio-Legal Studies at Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom. Her research interests lie in the broad area of feminist socio-legal scholarship, with a particular focus on family law procedures and dispute resolution, access to justice, and judging and the judiciary. She was a co-organiser of both the United Kingdom and Australian Feminist Judgments Project and co-editor of Feminist Judgments: From Theory to Practice (2010) and Australian Feminist Judgments: Righting and Rewriting Law (2014).

Notes

¹ See the websites: www.thecourt.ca/decisions-of-the-womens-court-of-canada/, http://section15.ca/blog/2008/03/14/womens_court/.

² The Supreme Court was established in 2009. Prior to that, the final court of appeal was the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords. Most of the rewritten cases for the Feminist Judgments Project were House of Lords cases.

³ YL v. Birmingham City Council, [2007] UKHL 27.

⁴ R v. D, [2006] EWCA Crim 1139.

⁵ James v. Eastleigh Borough Council, [1990] 2 AC 751.

⁶ Re A (Children) (Conjoined Twins: Surgical Separation), [2000] EWCA Civ 254.

⁷ Re N (A Child), [2007] EWCA Civ 1053.

⁸ Re G (Children) (Residence: Same-Sex Partner), [2006] UKHL 43.

⁹ Roberts v. Hopwood, [1925] AC 578.

¹⁰ R v. Zoora (Ghulam) Shah, [1998] EWCA Crim 1441.

¹¹ Evans v. Amicus Healthcare Ltd and Others, [2004] EWCA Civ 727.

¹² Baird Textile Holdings v. Marks & Spencer Plc, [2001] EWCA Civ 274.

¹³ R v. A (No. 2), [2001] UKHL 25.

¹⁴ See the website: www.law.uq.edu.au/the-australian-feminist-judgments-project.

¹⁵ See the website: www.feministjudging.ie/.

¹⁶ See the website: http://ilg2.org/2014/01/16/invitation-to-participate-in-the-feminist-international-judgments-project/.

¹⁷ See the website: http://sites.temple.edu/usfeministjudgments/.

¹⁸ See the website: www.liv.ac.uk/law/research/european-childrens-rights-unit/childrens-rights-judgments/, www.earthlaws.org.au/events/wild-law-judgment-project/.