Gendering the Legal Complex: Women in Sri Lanka's Legal Profession

Date01 November 2020
Published date01 November 2020
AuthorDINESHA SAMARARATNE
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12259
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 47, NUMBER 4, NOVEMBER 2020
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 666–93
Gendering the Legal Complex: Women in Sri Lanka’s
Legal Profession
DINESHA SAMARARATNE,∗∗
Drawing upon feminist standpoint theory and interviews with
pioneering women lawyers in Sri Lanka, I argue for a focus on
women as a distinct category in ‘legal complex theory’. I consider
the following questions in making this claim. What were the internal
structures of the legal profession that the older generations of women
lawyers encountered as they entered the profession and as they took
up positions of leadership? In what ways, if at all, was the ‘culture(s)’
within the profession patriarchal? In what ways, if any, did the entry
and advancement of women impact these internal structures of the
profession and its culture(s)? And what can we learn from these
experiences in predicting the future trajectory of the legal profession?
The analytical expansion that I propose reveals gender-based dynamics
within the legal complex, such as gender-stereotyped perceptions
about women lawyers within the profession, the ‘feminization’ of the
profession, and ‘gender segmentation’ within its different spheres.
Although about a century ago the law was not an area into which Sri Lankan
women ventured,in later times the picture altered dramatically, and today about
half the students at the law faculties and the LawCollege and about half of those
Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, 185 Pelham Street,
Carlton, Melbourne, VIC, 3053, Australia
d.samararatne@unimelb.edu.au
∗∗ University of Colombo, PO Box 1490, Colombo 03, Sri Lanka
I thank Kim Rubenstein and Terry Halliday for their guidance and Raaya Gomez
for her assistance. A draft of this paper was presented and discussed at the Cardiff
Law and Global Justice Socio-Legal Writing Workshop held at Aziz Premji University,
Bangalore on 29–30 October 2018. I am grateful to Gita Gill, Philip Thomas, and the
other participants for their advice and support. Research for this paper was partly funded
by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate
Program ‘Balancing Diversity and Social Cohesion in Democratic Constitutions’.
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© 2020 The Author. Journal of Law and Society © 2020 Cardiff UniversityLaw School
who enter the legal profession each year are women.And usually many of those
at the top of the pass lists are women.1
Why few women get to the top of the legal profession and why few women
find places on the Bench, especially in the Superior Courts, is a very complex
question.2
I. INTRODUCTION
In what ways can a focus on women’s inclusion in legal institutions clarify
the prospects for progressive social change? In this article, I ask this question
of the legal profession in the context of ‘ legal complex theory’. In doing
so, I combine critical feminist insights on the legal profession with that of
theory on the ‘legal complex’. I interpret evidence gathered from interviews
conducted with pioneering women in Sri Lanka’s legal profession through
feminist standpoint theory in demonstrating the clarifying power of a focus
on seven women’s inclusion in legal institutions. Using the life experiences of
these women, I make two arguments in calling for a gendered understanding
of the legal profession in legal complex theory. First, I argue that the
achievements of these women in reaching the highest levelsof their profession
did not necessarily change stereotypical norms about gender within the
profession. Second, and consequently, I argue that the ‘feminization’ of the
legal profession has a tendency to result in ‘gender segmentation’ rather than
in the advancement of substantive equality for women. Therefore, I suggest
that institutions within the legal complex require reform to improve their
capacity to guarantee substantive equality (for women in those institutions).
Legal institutions that are able to make this guarantee will arguably be more
effective in guaranteeing substantive equality in the work undertaken by those
institutions.
I was inspired to write this article by the numerous conversations that I
have had with colleagues in the Sri Lankan legal community. In courtrooms
and classrooms and around dinner tables, we have dwelt on questions of
women’s inclusion, participation, and representation in legal institutions.
These conversations have been closely aligned with discussions on women’s
access to justice in Sri Lanka.3I am completing the writing process of this
article at what seems to me to be a unique moment in time for women in Sri
Lanka. Some significant milestones have been reached, such as the mandatory
1 A. R. B. Amerasinghe, Gender and the Law (2003) 40–41. These observations were
made in 2003 but remain relevant to the Sri Lankan context, as evidentin the statistics
provided in this article.
2Id.
3 For an article on access to justice and gender that emerged out of similar
conversations, see N. de Mel and D.Samararatne, ‘The Law’sGender: Entanglements
and Recursions – Three Stories from Sri Lanka’ (2017) 3 On_Culture: The Open J.
for the Study of Culture,athttp://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2017/12996/>.
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© 2020 The Author. Journal of Law and Society © 2020 Cardiff UniversityLaw School

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