Gender is an increasingly prominent aspect of the contemporary debate and discourse around law. It is curious that gender, while figuring so centrally in the construction and organization of social life, is nevertheless barely visible in the conceptual armoury of law. In the jurisprudential imagination law is gender-less; as a result legal scholarship for the most part continues to hold on to the view that gender plays little or no role in the conceptual make-up, normative grounding, or categorical ordering of law. The official position is that the idea of law and legal fundamentals are, or at least ought to be, gender-independent.This book challenges these long-held assumptions. Exploring the relationship between law and gender it takes gender as a core concept and analytical tool and examines how law is conceptualized, organized, articulated, and legitimated. How can gender be given meaning in legal texts, doctrine, and practices, and how can gender operate within the law while simultaneously appearing to be outside it?The relationship between gender and the law is relevant to virtually all areas of law including in particular criminal law, tort law, family law, employment law, and human rights. Increasingly issues of gender are perceived as the concern of all, reflecting broader debates in the law, including those of equality and sexuality. Covering the key theoretical and substantive areas of jurisprudence, this volume by Joanne Conaghan will be essential reading for all interested in gender studies and legal theory more widely. It offers a clear, concise introduction to gender studies and central feminist concerns for a legal readership.

A close engagement with law has long been a core dimension of feminist activism. However, it is only since the late twentieth century that a distinct and vital body of academic literature addressing the nature, effects, and limits of that engagement has emerged. In particular, from the 1980s onwards, a critical mass of scholarship has accumulated, establishing feminist legal studies not just as a recognizable subdiscipline, both of law and of feminist or women’s studies, but also as a terrain of substance and complexity, the exploration and understanding of which requires increasingly sophisticated navigation skills. As research in and around the area flourishes as never before, this new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Law, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature, and to provide a map of feminist legal studies as it has emerged, developed, and diverged over the last thirty years. There are many ways of classifying feminist thinking within and beyond law. A typical method is to divide work into competing political or theoretical camps (such as liberal feminism, socialist feminism, and radical feminism). Another way, more common in law, is to organize feminist perspectives around issues such as abortion, equal pay, and pornography. A third treatment would be to focus on epistemologies (for example, feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, and postmodernism). However, the editor of this reference work, an internationally renowned scholar, eschews these increasingly sterile approaches and instead offers a view of feminist legal studies as a dynamic process of engagement with law which takes different forms and emphases at different points and contexts. Feminist legal studies does not, she argues, comprise a static set of ideas; it is rather an ongoing conversation. For this reason, the material gathered here in this four-volume collection is, to a considerable extent, organized chronologically, starting with the key feminist issues and interventions of the early 1980s. The collection then progresses thematically to reflect the shifts and turns of feminist legal thought. The content of the material is explicitly inter-jurisdictional, and reflects the global nature of feminist legal scholarship and, in particular, current thematic preoccupations. With a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the material in its historical and intellectual context, Feminist Legal Studies is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students of feminist law―as well as those working in allied areas―as a vital one-stop research resource.

Product Description: The book focuses on the relationship between work and family in the context of debate about labour law and regulation. It considers not just the position of women workers (paid and unpaid) or the current preoccupation of states with developing more family-friendly workplaces but it looks at these issues within the broader context of changes taking place in the world of work as a consequence of globalization...read more

Product Description: Throughout the industrial world, the discipline of labor law has fallen into deep philosophical and policy crisis, at the same time as new theoretical approaches make it a field of considerable intellectual ferment. Modern labor law evolved in a symbiotic relationship with a postwar institutional and policy agenda, the social, economic and political underpinnings of which have gradually eroded in the context of accelerating international economic integration and wage-competition...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: 'Coherently brings together many of the arguments that the left has pressed against tort law' Cambridge Law Journal 'Its great strength lies in its uncompromising critique of the traditional textbook analyses of tort doctrine as a logical, neutral and inevitable development of peculiarly legal categories' Modern Law Review This new edition of The Wrongs of Tort has been thoroughly updated to take account of the many new developments since its original publication in 1993 - without losing any of the spirit or vigour of the original text...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book provides a selection of essays from a variety of feminist writers exploring how feminist legal theory informs and is informed by practice. The primary focus is on questions of strategy: how should feminists working in law devise strategies which are effective in securing their goals? How do they assess the success or failure of strategies already pursued? How can theoretical insights inform and be informed by such an exercise? In this context the book focuses on a selection of contemporary issues including pregnancy and the workplace, sexual harassment, pornography, family and property law, reproductive rights, immigration and sex discrimination law...read more