This ground-breaking collection reflects the growing momentum of interest in the international legal community in meshing the insights of queer legal theory with those critical theories that have a much longer genealogy - notably postcolonial and feminist analyses. Beyond the push in the human rights field to ensure respect for the rights of people with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, queer legal theory provides a means to examine the structural assumptions and conceptual architecture that underpin the normative framework and operation of international law, highlighting bias and blind spots and offering fresh perspectives and practical innovations. The contributors to the book use queer legal theory to critically analyse the basic tenets and operations of international law, with many surprising, thought-provoking and instructive results. The volume will be of interest to many scholars, students and researchers in international law, international relations, cultural studies, gender studies, queer studies and postcolonial studies.

This book explores the largely neglected relationship between men, masculinities and honour-based abuse (HBA). There is a common misconception that HBA - whether physical violence, emotional abuse or so-called 'honour' killings - occurs only against women. This book addresses the gap in the current literature concerning the relationship between men, masculinities and HBA. With contributions from an international and interdisciplinary range of both academics and professionals, the book examines HBA and forced marriages specifically from male-victim perspectives, both in the UK and internationally. Providing a clear understanding of the main theoretical and sociological explanations of HBA against male victims, the book demonstrates that, although men are indeed the main perpetrators of HBA, state agencies must address the fact that many men are also victims. This book is essential reading for students, academics, and practitioners alike.

Despite some significant advances in the creation and protection of rights affecting women's health, these do not always translate into actual health benefits for women. This collection asks: 'What is an effective law and what influences law's effectiveness or ineffectiveness? What dynamics, elements, and conditions come together to limit law's capacity to achieve instrumental goals for women's health and the advancement of women's health rights?' The book presents an integrated, co-referential and sustained critical discussion of the normative and constitutive reasons for law's limited effectiveness in the field of women's health. It offers comprehensive and cohesive explanatory accounts of law's limits and for the first time in the field, introduces a distinction between formal and substantive effectiveness of laws. Its approach is trans-systemic, multi-jurisdictional and comparative, with a focus on six countries in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa and international human rights case law based on matters arising from Hungary, Portugal, Spain, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Peru and Bolivia. The book will be a valuable resource for educators, students, lawyers, rights advocates and policymakers working in women's health, socio-legal studies, human rights, feminist legal studies, and legal philosophy more broadly.

Chief Justice John Marshall argued that a constitution "requires that only its great outlines should be marked and] its important objects designated." Ours is "intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs." In recent years, Marshall's great truths have been challenged by proponents of originalism and strict construction. Such legal thinkers as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argue that the Constitution must be construed and applied as it was when the Framers wrote it.
In Keeping Faith with the Constitution, three legal authorities make the case for Marshall's vision. They describe their approach as "constitutional fidelity"--not to how the Framers would have applied the Constitution, but to the text and principles of the Constitution itself. The original understanding of the text is one source of interpretation, but not the only one; to preserve the meaning and authority of the document, to keep it vital, applications of the Constitution must be shaped by precedent, historical experience, practical consequence, and societal change. The authors range across the history of constitutional interpretation to show how this approach has been the source of our greatest advances, from Brown v. Board of Education to the New Deal, from the Miranda decision to the expansion of women's rights. They delve into the complexities of voting rights, the malapportionment of legislative districts, speech freedoms, civil liberties and the War on Terror, and the evolution of checks and balances.
The Constitution's framers could never have imagined DNA, global warming, or even women's equality. Yet these and many more realities shape our lives and outlook. Our Constitution will remain vital into our changing future, the authors write, if judges remain true to this rich tradition of adaptation and fidelity.

Gender Justice and the Law presents a collection of essays that examines how gender, as a category of identity, must continually be understood in relation to how structures of inequality define and shape its meaning. It asks how notions of "justice" shape gender identity and whether the legal justice system itself privileges notions of gender or is itself gendered. Shaped by politics and policy, Gender Justice essays contribute to understanding how theoretical practices of intersectionality relate to structures of inequality and relations formed as a result of their interaction. Given its theme, the collection's essays examine theoretical practices of intersectional identity at the nexus of "gender and justice" that might also relate to issues of sexuality, race, class, age, and ability.

This book explores the intersecting issues relating the phenomenon of ageing to gender and family law. The latter has tended to focus mainly on family life in young and middle age; and, indeed, the issues of childhood and parenting are key in many family law texts. Family life for older members has, then, been largely neglected; addressing this neglect, the current volume explores how the issues which might be important for younger people are not necessarily the same as those for older people. The significance of family, the nature of family life, and the understanding of self in terms of one's relationships, tend to change over the life course. For example, the state may play an increasing role in the lives of older people - as access to services, involvement in work and the community, the ability to live independently, and to form or maintain caring relationships, are all impacted by law and policy. This collection therefore challenges the standard models of family life and family law that have been developed within a child/parent-centred paradigm, and which may require rethinking in the turn to family life in old age. Interdisciplinary in its scope and orientation, this book will appeal not just to academic family lawyers and students interested in issues around family law, ageing, gender, and care; but also to sociologists and ethicists working in these areas.

Despite a popular view that trials are the focal point of the criminal justice process, in reality, the most frequent way a criminal matter resolves is not through a fiercely fought battle between state and defendant, but instead through a process of negotiation between the prosecution and defence, resulting in a defendant pleading guilty in exchange for agreed concessions from the prosecution. This book presents an original empirical case-study of plea negotiations drawing upon interviews with legal actors and an analysis of defence practitioner case files, to shine light on the processes and ways in which an agreed outcome is reached in criminal prosecutions, within the setting of a jurisdiction, like many others world-wide, which is suffering major shifts in state resources. Plea negotiations, also referred to as "plea bargaining", "negotiated guilty pleas" and "negotiated resolutions" are neither an alloyed benefit nor a detriment for defendants, victims or the criminal justice system generally, and like all compromises, this book shows how the perfect "justice" outcome gives way to the good, or just the reasonably acceptable justice outcome.

This book offers a multifaceted look at Northeast India and the customs and traditions that underpin its legal framework. The book: charts the transition of traditions from colonial rule to present day, through constitutionalism and the consolidation of autonomous identities, as well as outlines contemporary debates in an increasingly modernising region; explores the theoretical context of legal pluralism and its implications, compares the personal legal systems with that of the mainland, and discusses customary law's continuing popularity (both pragmatic and ideological) and common law; brings together case studies from across the eight states and focuses on the way individual systems and procedures manifest among various tribes and communities in the voices of tribal and non-tribal scholars; and highlights the resilience and relevance of alternative systems of redressal, including conflict resolution and women's rights. Part of the prestigious 'Transition in Northeastern India' series, this book presents an interesting blend of theory and practice, key case studies and examples to study legal pluralism in multicultural contexts. It will be of great interest to students of law and social sciences, anthropology, political science, peace and conflict studies, besides administrators, judicial officers and lawyers in Northeast India, legal scholars and students of tribal law, and members of customary law courts of various tribal communities in Northeast India.

This book is a legal and political intervention into a contemporary debate concerning the appropriateness of sexual offence prosecutions brought against young gender non-conforming people for so-called 'gender identity fraud'. It comes down squarely against prosecution. To that end, it offers a series of principled objections based both on liberal principles, and arguments derived from queer and feminist theories. Thus prosecution will be challenged as criminal law overreach and as a spectacular example of legal inconsistency, but also as indicative of a failure to grasp the complexity of sexual desire and its disavowal. In particular, the book will think through the concepts of consent, harm and deception and their legal application to these specific forms of intimacy. In doing so, it will reveal how cisnormativity frames the legal interpretation of each and how this serves to preclude more marginal perspectives. Beyond law, the book takes up the ethical challenge of the non-disclosure of gender history. Rather than dwelling on this omission, it argues that we ought to focus on a cisgender demand to know as the proper object of ethical inquiry. Finally, and as an act of legal and ethical re-imagination, the book offers a queer counter-judgment to R v McNally, the only case involving a gender non-conforming defendant, so far, to have come before the Court of Appeal.

This book integrates women's history and legal studies within the broader context of modern European history in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sixteen contributions from fourteen countries explore the ways in which the law contributes to the social construction of gender. They analyze questions of family law and international law and highlight the politics of gender in the legal professions in a variety of historical, social and national settings, including Eastern, Southern, Western, Northern and Central Europe. Focusing on different legal cultures, they show us the similarities and differences in the ways the law has shaped the contours of women and men's lives in powerful ways. They also show how women have used legal knowledge to struggle for their equal rights on the national and transnational level. The chapters address the interconnectedness of the history of feminism, legislative reforms, and women's citizenship, and build a foundation for a comparative vision of women's legal history in modern Europe.

Originally published in 1989. This is the first history of modern France to explore the long-term origins of the libertarian revolt. It traces the moral history from the eighteenth century to the 1960s, examining the questions of marriage and divorce, homosexuality, and sexual morality. It includes detailed chapters on the Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, Andre Gide, and Daniel Guerin in order to illustrate the changing legislation, popular thought and public opinion. The result is an enlightening and provocative account which will be of interest to students of modern French history, moral thought and the history of sexual attitudes.

Transgender and Gender Diverse Persons offers mental health professionals and other caregivers information and best practices for working with transgender and gender diverse persons and their families. In each chapter, experts from a variety of fields provide an accessible introduction to medical, legal, educational, and spiritual care for transgender and gender diverse adults and youth within a range of contexts, including communities and schools in urban and non-urban settings. Appendices include helpful suggestions for online resources, as well as additional reading for practitioners, clients, and their families. With rich examples and personal narratives woven throughout, this is an essential reference for mental health professionals, as well as other service providers, educators, and family members seeking to address the needs of transgender and gender diverse persons in an up-to-date, inclusive manner.

Originally published in 1998, Sexual Harassment in Higher Education addresses the problem of sexual harassment on college campuses. This work reflects on a variety of aspects of sexual harassment, its litigation and law, as well as how the issues they demonstrate often have as much to do with linguistics or jurisprudence as with negative action, though there is a great deal of evidence of the latter. The book provides a clear-eyed and detailed assessment of the 'harassment' controversies now plaguing America's universities and colleges.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER and a Times, Spectator and Observer Book of the Year 2021 'In the first decade of this century, it was unthinkable that a gender-critical book could even be published by a prominent publishing house, let alone become a bestseller.' Louise Perry, New Statesman 'Thank goodness for Helen Joyce.' Christina Patterson, Sunday Times 'Reasonable, methodical, sane, and utterly unintimidated by extremist orthodoxy, Trans is a riveting read.' Lionel Shriver 'A tour de force.' Evening Standard Biological sex is no longer accepted as a basic fact of life. It is forbidden to admit that female people sometimes need protection and privacy from male ones. In an analysis that is at once expert, sympathetic and urgent, Helen Joyce offers an antidote to the chaos and cancelling.

Between 2000 and 2015, women ascended to the top of judiciaries across Africa, most notably as chief justices of supreme courts in common law countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Zambia, but also as presidents of constitutional courts in civil law countries such as Benin, Burundi, Gabon, Niger and Senegal. Most of these appointments was a "first" in terms of the gender of the chief justice. At the same time, women are being appointed in record numbers as magistrates, judges and justices across the continent. While women's increasing numbers and roles in African executives and legislatures have been addressed in a burgeoning scholarly literature, very little work has focused on women in judiciaries. This book addresses the important issue of the increasing numbers and varied roles of women judges and justices, as judiciaries evolve across the continent. Scholars of law, gender politics and African politics provide overviews of recent developments in gender and the judiciary in nine African countries that represent north, east, southern and west Africa as well as a range of colonial experiences, postcolonial trajectories and legal systems, including mixes of common, civil, customary, or sharia law. In the process, each chapter seeks to address the following questions: What has been the historical experience of the judicial system in a given country, from before colonialism until the present? What is the current court structure and where are the women judges, justices, magistrates and other women located? What are the selection or appointment processes for joining the bench and in what ways may these help or hinder women to gain access to the courts as judges and justices? Once they become judges, do women on the bench promote the rights of women through their judicial powers? What are the challenges and obstacles facing women judges and justices in Africa? Timely and relevant in this era in which governmental accountability and transparency are essential to the consolidation of democracy in Africa and when women are accessing significant leadership positions across the continent, this book considers the substantive and symbolic representation of women's interests by women judges and the wider implications of their presence for changing institutional norms and advancing the rule of law and human rights.

This book explores the prosecution of wartime sexual violence in international criminal law and asks what the juridicalisation of gender-based violence signifies for women. The book explores the portrayal of the various gendered identities that surface in armed conflict and it asks whether the law is capable of reflecting these in subsequent judgements. Focusing on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda as well as subsequent developments in the International Criminal Court, the book shows how the tribunals have delivered landmark jurisprudence in the area of sexual violence against women and provided a legacy for how gender justice is incorporated into international law. However, Daniela Nadj argues that in the relevant cases there is a tendency to depict women in monolithic fashion with little agency or sense of identity beyond their ethnicity. By bringing to the surface the complexity and multi-faceted gendered identities in wartime, the book calls for a reconceptualisation of notions of femininity in armed conflict.

This book examines the history and evolution of Title IX, a landmark 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination at educational institutions receiving federal funding. Elizabeth Kaufer Busch and William Thro illuminate the ways in which the interpretation and implementation of Title IX have been transformed over time to extend far beyond the law's relatively narrow statutory text. The analysis considers the impact of Title IX on athletics, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and, for a time, transgender discrimination. Combining legal and cultural perspectives and supported by primary documents, Title IX: The Transformation of Sex Discrimination in Education offers a balanced and insightful narrative of interest to anyone studying the history of sex discrimination, educational policy, and the law in the contemporary United States.

While gender-based violence occurs in all societies irrespective of the level of development or cultural setting, whether in conflict or peacetime, the challenges for legal responses to gender-based violence are particularly acute in Asia. This book addresses the lack of academic discourse on gender-based violence in Asia beyond domestic violence, by demonstrating that gendered violence exists within many different contexts and is perpetuated by multiple actors. Bringing together scholars, legal practitioners and human rights advocates, the book examines the intersections between gender, violence and the state in Asian contexts. It considers the role of state institutions in perpetuating and preventing violence based on gender and identity, and thus contributes to growing scholarship around due diligence standards under international law. Analyzing both physical and structural gender-based violence, it scrutinizes how such violence exists within a landscape shaped by distinct cultural norms, laws and policies, and grapples with how to practically translate international human rights standards about state responsibility into these complex domestic environments. Contributors from diverse backgrounds draw on case studies and empirical research to ground this academic scholarship in lived experiences of individuals and their communities in Asia. By bridging the divide between policy, laws and practice to offer a unique insight into both theoretical and practical responses to how gender-based violence is understood within communities and state institutions in Asian countries, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Asian studies, Gender Studies and Law.

This book is a legal and political intervention into a contemporary debate concerning the appropriateness of sexual offence prosecutions brought against young gender non-conforming people for so-called 'gender identity fraud'. It comes down squarely against prosecution. To that end, it offers a series of principled objections based both on liberal principles, and arguments derived from queer and feminist theories. Thus prosecution will be challenged as criminal law overreach and as a spectacular example of legal inconsistency, but also as indicative of a failure to grasp the complexity of sexual desire and its disavowal. In particular, the book will think through the concepts of consent, harm and deception and their legal application to these specific forms of intimacy. In doing so, it will reveal how cisnormativity frames the legal interpretation of each and how this serves to preclude more marginal perspectives. Beyond law, the book takes up the ethical challenge of the non-disclosure of gender history. Rather than dwelling on this omission, it argues that we ought to focus on a cisgender demand to know as the proper object of ethical inquiry. Finally, and as an act of legal and ethical re-imagination, the book offers a queer counter-judgment to R v McNally, the only case involving a gender non-conforming defendant, so far, to have come before the Court of Appeal.

A sequel to Bauer and Dawuni's pioneering study on gender and the judiciary in Africa (Routledge, 2016), International Courts and the African Woman Judge examines questions on gender diversity, representative benches, and international courts by focusing on women judges from the continent of Africa. Drawing from postcolonial feminism, feminist institutionalism, feminist legal theory, and legal narratives, this book provides fresh and detailed narratives of seven women judges that challenge existing discourse on gender diversity in international courts. It answers important questions about how the politics of judicial appointments, gender, geographic location, class, and professional capital combine to shape the lives of women judges who sit on international courts and argues the need to disaggregate gender diversity with a view to understanding intra-group differences. International Courts and the African Woman Judge will be of interest to a variety of audiences including governments, policy makers, civil society organizations, students of gender studies, and feminist activists interested in all questions of gender and judging.

This book offers a multifaceted look at Northeast India and the customs and traditions that underpin its legal framework. The book: charts the transition of traditions from colonial rule to present day, through constitutionalism and the consolidation of autonomous identities, as well as outlines contemporary debates in an increasingly modernising region; explores the theoretical context of legal pluralism and its implications, compares the personal legal systems with that of the mainland, and discusses customary law's continuing popularity (both pragmatic and ideological) and common law; brings together case studies from across the eight states and focuses on the way individual systems and procedures manifest among various tribes and communities in the voices of tribal and non-tribal scholars; and highlights the resilience and relevance of alternative systems of redressal, including conflict resolution and women's rights. Part of the prestigious 'Transition in Northeastern India' series, this book presents an interesting blend of theory and practice, key case studies and examples to study legal pluralism in multicultural contexts. It will be of great interest to students of law and social sciences, anthropology, political science, peace and conflict studies, besides administrators, judicial officers and lawyers in Northeast India, legal scholars and students of tribal law, and members of customary law courts of various tribal communities in Northeast India.

First published in 1997, this book marks a culmination of a three year research programme focused upon the incidence of domestic violence in Leicester. The study examined the levels of violence, the details of applicants and respondents and the nature of complaints, as well as the policies applied and the problems faced by those enforcing the law. The books sets the findings in the context of the policies on protection of victims of domestic violence, the problems they face and protection after 1997. This book will be of interest to those studying law, social work, sociology and women's studies.

Constitutions around the world have overwhelmingly been the creation of men, but this book asks how far constitutions have affirmed the equal citizenship status of women or failed to do so. Using a wealth of examples from around the world, Ruth Rubio-Marin considers constitutionalism from its inception to the present day and places current debates in their vital historical context. Rubio-Marin adopts an inclusive concept of gender and sexuality, and discusses the constitutional gender order as it has been shaped by debates such those around same-sex marriage and the rights of trans persons. Covering a wide range of themes, from reproductive rights to political gender quotas and violence against women, this book offers a comprehensive feminist account of constitutional law. Truly international in scope and ambitious in subject matter, this is an invaluable resource for students and scholars working on gender within multiple disciplines.

Although over the last two decades there has been a proliferation of gender studies, transgender has largely remained institutionalised as an 'umbrella term' that encapsulates all forms of gender understandings differing from what are thought to be gender norms. In both theoretical and medical literature, trans identity has been framed within a paradigm of awkwardness or discomfort, self-dislike or dysfunctional mental health. Marginal Bodies, Trans Utopias is a multidisciplinary book that draws primarily from Deleuze and post-structuralism in order to reformulate the concept of utopia and ground it in the materiality of the present. Through a radically new conceptualisation of the time and space of utopia, it analyses empirical findings from trans video diaries on the Internet belonging to transgender individuals. In doing so, this volume offers new insights into the everyday challenges faced by these subjectivities, with case studies focusing on: the legal/social impact of the UK's Gender Recognition Act 2004, boundaries of public and private as evidenced within public toilets, and the narrative of the 'wrong body'. Contextualising and applying Deleuzian concepts such as 'difference' and 'marginal' to the context of the research, Nirta helps the reader to understand trans as 'unity' rather than as a 'mind-body mismatch'. Contributing to the reading and understanding of trans lived experience, this book shall be of interest to postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Transgender Studies, Critical Studies, Sociology of Gender and Philosophy of Time.

This book addresses a growing area of concern for scholars and development practitioners: discriminatory gender norms in legally plural settings. Focusing specifically on indigenous women, this book analyses how they, often in alliance with supporters and allies, have sought to improve their access to justice. Development practitioners working in the field of access to justice have tended to conceive indigenous legal systems as either inherently incompatible with women's rights or, alternatively, they have emphasised customary law's advantageous features, such as its greater accessibility, familiarity and effectiveness. Against this background - and based on a comparison of six thus far underexplored initiatives of legal and institutional change in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia - Anna Barrera Vivero provides a more nuanced, ethnographic, understanding of how women navigate through context-specific constellations of interlegality in their search for justice. In so doing, moreover, her account of ongoing political debates and local struggles for gender justice grounds the elaboration of a comprehensive conceptual framework for understanding the legally plural dynamics involved in the contestation of discriminatory gender norms.