Feminist Judgments: Family Law Opinions Rewritten

Rachel Rebouche, Feminist Judgments: Family Law Opinions Rewritten (Cambridge University Press, 2020). 

This book provides new, feminist perspectives on famous family law cases that span generations. The chapters take court decisions and rewrite them with feminist ideas in mind. Each author of a rewritten opinion relied only on materials available at the time of the original decision. The decision address topics such as the criminalization of polygamy, intimate partner violence as a ground for asylum, the enforcement of gestational surrogacy, contracts, the rights of cohabitants, discrimination against transgender parents, immigration rules governing noncitizen parents, and child welfare and child support systems, among others. Each opinion is accompanied by a commentary that explains the original opinion as well as the case's contemporary relevance. The combination of rewritten opinion and its commentary provides an in-depth examination of the most important topics in family law. 

-Publisher's Description

Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tort Opinions

Martha Chamallas & Lucinda M. Finley, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tort Opinions (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

By rewriting both canonical and lesser-known tort cases from a feminist perspective, this volume exposes gender and racial bias in how courts have categorized and evaluated harm stemming from prenatal malpractice, pregnancy loss, domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment, invasion of privacy, and the award of economic and noneconomic damages. The rewritten opinions demonstrate that when confronted with gendered harm to women, courts have often distorted or misapplied conventional legal doctrine to diminish the harm or deny recovery. Bringing this implicit bias to the surface can make law students, lawyers and judges who craft arguments and apply tort doctrines, more aware of inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation or gender identity. This volume shows the way forward to make the basic doctrines of tort law more responsive to the needs and perspectives of traditionally marginalized people, in ways that give greater value to harms that they disproportionately experience. 

-Publisher's Description

Feminist War on Crime

Aya Gruber, The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration (University of California Press, 2020).

Former public defender Aya Gruber documents how zero-tolerance laws and policies aimed at combating sexual and domestic violence -- advocated for by feminists -- can actually make women less safe and more vulnerable. Deploying vivid cases and unflinching analysis, The Feminist War on Crime shows how mandatory arrests, no-drop prosecutions, forced separation, and incarceration exacerbate social inequalities by expanding a fundamentally flawed criminal justice system, often without offering women safety or justice. 

-Publisher's Description

Feminist Judgments in International Law

Loved Hodson & Troy Lavers, Feminist Judgments in International Law (Hart Publishing, 2019). 

This collection asks whether feminist perspectives can offer meaningful and viable alternatives to international law norms; and if so, whether that application results in distinguishable differences in outcomes. It answers these questions with particular reference to sources of international law, the public and private divide, State responsibility, State immunities, treaty law, State sovereignty, human rights protection, global governance, and the concept of violence in international law. This landmark publication offers a truly innovative reassessment of international law. 

-Publisher's Description

Stories from Trailblazing Women Lawyers

Jill Norgren (John Jay College of Criminal Justice), Stories from Trailblazing Women Lawyers: Lives in the Law (NYU Press 2018).

“This remarkable volume collects the life and career stories of a hundred female lawyers, all part of the so-called ‘second wave’ of the movement, this is the period after women gained suffrage and other full citizenship rights…. a vast collaborative effort of oral history taking and writing, now organized with an historian’s fine hand. It will be useful for years to all scholars of legal profession as a model and an inspiration.” 

– Barbara Babcock, Crown Professor Emerita, Stanford Law School

Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism (Pantheon 2017).

"Paglia considers herself, depending upon her mood, a libertarian feminist, a pro-sex feminist or an 'Amazon' one. What she is really committed to, she writes in one essay here, is this: 'My mission is to be absolutely as painful as possible in every situation.'

Paglia’s arguments are incisive and worth tangling with . . . .When she bears down and worries about sentences more than poses . . . she’s a fearless public intellectual and more necessary than ever."


—Dwight Garner, New York Times (full review here)

A Question of Sex: Feminism, Rhetoric, and Differences that Matter

Kristan Poirot (Texas A&M University). A Question of Sex: Feminism, Rhetoric, and Differences that Matter (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).

"By the mid-1990s feminist theorists and critics began to challenge conventional thinking about sex difference and its relationship to gender and sexuality. Scholars such as Anne Fausto-Sterling and Judith Butler troubled the sex-gender/nature-nurture divide. Some have asserted that these questions about sex are much too abstract to contribute to a valuable understanding of the material politics faced by feminist movements. In A Question of Sex, Kristan Poirot challenges this assumption and demonstrates that contemporary theories about sex, gender, identity, and difference compel a rethinking of the history of feminist movements and their rhetorical practices."

—Publisher's Website