SHARON COWAN, CHLOË KENNEDY and VANESSA MUNRO (eds), Scottish Feminist Judgments: (Re)Creating Law From the Outside In.
| Date | 01 October 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663921992106 |
| Published date | 01 October 2021 |
| Author | Mairead Enright |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
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SHARON COWAN, CHLOË KENNEDYand VANESSA MUNRO (eds), Scottish Feminist
Judgments: (Re)Creating Law From the Outside In. London: Hart, 2019, pp. 472, ISBN
9781509923267, £95 (hbk).
In a feminist judgments project, feminist scholars rewrite selected legal judgments, adapt-
ing established legal forms and demonstrating that important cases could have been
decided otherwise. They show that there is always ‘room to maneuver’, even within
the limitations of judicial practice (Hunter, 2019). In the process, they expose both the
gendered underpinnings of liberal legal reasoning, and the coherence and radical potential
of feminist alternatives. The ingenuity and creativity with which judgment authors
rewrite past judgments means that the edited collections produced by past projects
have attracted wide readerships.
Scottish Feminist Judgments demonstrates the maturity of feminist judging as a critical
legal method. It is over 10 years since Hunter et al. (2010) published Feminist Judgments:
From Theory to Practice and 14 since the Women’s Court of Canada began (Koshan,
2018). Feminist judgments projects, by now, have a core toolkit in common (Hunter,
2013). This book applies and adapts that familiar toolkit to a Scottish context, across a
broad range of subjects. It includes judgments re-telling the stories underlying case
‘facts’
1
; undoing gender blindness
2
; foregrounding the women to whom the law
applies
3
; mounting relational challenges to fundamental legal boundaries
4
; contesting
judicial statements of ‘custom’,
5
common sense,
6
and ‘objectivity’
7
; and making creative
use of obiter dicta.
8
Notably, Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra and Emily Postan rewrite one
judgment of Lady Hale’s(Greater Glasgow Health Board v Doogan & Another
ive) strategy of taking the formalist path of least resistance, where a more substantive crit-
ical approach was available. Taken together, this collection of judgments is effective in
identifying what is unspoken in law, and making it speak.
In this short review, my interest is less in the ways in which this book uses and adapts
an established template to challenge mainstream judicial thinking, than in how it
818 Social & Legal Studies 30(5)
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