1st Edition

Feminist Perspectives on Law and Theory

Edited By Janice Richardson, Ralph Sandland Copyright 2000
    268 Pages
    by Routledge-Cavendish

    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.

     

    Series Editors’ Preface, Contributors, Acknowledgments, Table of Cases, Table of Statutes, Table of Abbreviations, PART I THEORY AND PRACTICE: UTOPIA, IMPOSSIBILITY AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL IMAGINATION, PART II LEGAL SUBJECTIVITY: THE PERSON, SELF AND OTHER, PART III ‘MINORITARIAN POLITICS’, Bibliography, Index

    Biography

    Janice Richardson, Ralph Sandland