Trevor Buck, Richard Kirkham and Brian Thompson, The Ombudsman Enterprise and Administrative Justice, Farnham: Ashgate, 2011, 294 pp, hb £70.00.
| Published date | 01 March 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2012.00901_4.x |
| Date | 01 March 2012 |
| Author | Sabine Carl |
REVIEWS
Rosemary Hunter, Claire McGlynn and Erica Rackley (eds), Feminist Judgments:
From Theory to Practice, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2010, 504 pp, pb £22.95.
There are few areas of legal research and legal education more in need of
development than judicial studies.This statement may be deeply confusing to
some and a surprise to others. It is certainly a deeply ironic state of affairs. Since
the founding of the domestic ‘black letter’ tradition in the mid 19th century,legal
scholars have fetishised the published judgments of senior members of the
judiciary.Many mountains of paper have been devoted to the task of unearthing
and recording their hidden and not so hidden meanings, remodelling their
idiosyncratic and contradictory expressions as incontestable manifestations of
deep enduring principles and commenting upon their content. More recently,
scholarly practice has extended to criticising their substantive content. But at the
same time there is little domestic scholarship on how judges work in or out of the
courtroom. Likewise, almost no empirical scholarship exists on how individual
judges or panels of judges arrive at their published decisions. At the same time,
the senior judiciary have maintained their distance, air of mystery and cloak of
secrecy.Public judicial reflections on the art of judgment writing are exceptional.
Domestic judicial biography and autobiography is poorly developed. Essential
archives of senior members of the judiciary are more likely to be destroyed than
preserved and opened for inspection and analysis. Last, but by no means least,
the divide that separates legal scholars from the judiciary is rarely crossed and
when crossed tends to be circumscribed by elaborate performances of respectable
fascination and polite deference respectively.There are signs that this general state
of affairs is changing. Feminist Judgments: From Theory to Practice is an inspired and
provocative edited collection and an exciting ongoing project that puts a cat in
the midst of all of the established pigeons of judicial studies in particular and legal
scholarship more generally.
The collection begins with an extended introduction and reflection on the
feminist judgments project. This is contained in three essays. The first, jointly
authored by all three editors, introduces the feminist judgments initiative. The
project’s objective is to write the ‘missing’ feminist judgments from a series of
what participants in the project identified as ‘key cases’.The opening essay situates
the initiative in the midst of a range of debates – on the nature of adjudication,
substantive and formal equality, policies and practices of judicial appointments
and judicial diversity – and reflects on the contribution the project and resulting
judgments make to these important debates. It also offers an overview of the
substantive ‘changes’ that the various judgments in the collection offer across a
wide range of legal topics, from property law, implied contracts and employment
law to rules on the admission of sexual history evidence, child contact, surrogacy
and offences against the person to name but a few.The second essay,by Rosemary
Hunter, provides some of the feminist theoretical background to the project’s
practical aims and goals. Particularly useful is her characterisation of feminism in
© 2012The Authors.The Modern Law Review © 2012 The Modern Law Review Limited. (2012) 75(2) MLR 287–300
Published by BlackwellPublishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX42DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,MA 02148, USA
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