The use of a rape victim’s sexual history as evidence attracted intense public attention after the acquittal of footballer Ched Evans in 2017. Set within the context of a criminal justice system widely perceived to be failing rape victims, the use of sexual history evidence remains a flashpoint of contention around rape law reform. This accessible book mounts an important interrogation into the use of a victim’s sexual history as evidence in rape trials. Adopting a critical multidisciplinary perspective underpinned by feminist theory, the authors explore the role and significance of sexual history evidence in criminal justice responses to rape.

The use of a rape victim’s sexual history as evidence attracted intense public attention after the acquittal of footballer Ched Evans in 2017. Set within the context of a criminal justice system widely perceived to be failing rape victims, the use of sexual history evidence remains a flashpoint of contention around rape law reform. This accessible book mounts an important interrogation into the use of a victim’s sexual history as evidence in rape trials. Adopting a critical multidisciplinary perspective underpinned by feminist theory, the authors explore the role and significance of sexual history evidence in criminal justice responses to rape.

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.

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.

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.

For any reader needing a concise yet expert explanation of a subject in law, the New Oxford Companion to Law is the ideal reference work. Providing greater depth than can be found in legal dictionaries but always accessible to the non-specialist, entries in the Companion cover all areas of law and legal systems and are extensively cross-referenced for ease of navigation.
The Companion draws upon the expertise of over 700 scholars and practitioners, offering the widest possible range of perspectives on legal topics. Consisting in over 1700 alphabetically-arranged entries, the Companion features:
The fundamentals of all the major areas of law such as criminal law, tax and social security law, human rights law, family and employment law, education law, sports law, international and EU law
The role and workings of legal institutions such as parliaments, courts, law schools, and international bodies such as the EU and the UN
Leading cases, famous trials and distinguished lawyers, past and present
Major events in legal history and major debates in legal theory
Twenty pages of rich illustrations, bringing the content to life
The Companion will appeal to the interested citizen, students applying for law courses at university, law students, and also to advanced readers who are already familiar with the law who will enjoy reading the engagingly written accounts of areas that they know as well as many that they don't.

Throughout the industrial world, the discipline of labour 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 labour 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, a decline in the capacity of the nation-state to steer economic progress, the ascendancy of fiscal austerity and monetarism over Keynesian/welfare state politics, the appearance of post-industrial production models, the proliferation of contingent employment relationships, the fragmentation of class-based identities and emergence of new social movements, and the significantly increased participation of women in paid work. These developments offer many appealing possibilities - the opportunity, for example, to contest the gender division of labour and re-think the boundaries between immigration and labour policy. But they also hold out quite threatening prospects - including increased unemployment and inequality and the decline of workers' organizations and social participation - in the context of proliferating constraints imposed by international financial pressures on enacting redistributive social and economic policies. New strategies must be developed to meet these challenges. These essays - which are the product of a transnational comparative dialogue among academics and practitioners in labour law and related legal fields, including social security, immigration, trade, and development - identify, analyse, and respond to some of the conceptual and policy challenges posed by globalization.

In recent years, gender has emerged as an important focus of attention in discourse in and around labour law. Gender is gradually moving from the margin to the mainstream of labour law debate, particularly with the development of a 'family-friendly' policy agenda. This book consists of a series of essays from an international selection of leading legal scholars exploring the shifting boundary between work and family from a labour law perspective. The object is to assess the global implications for labour law and policy of women's changing role in paid and unpaid work. The approaches adopted by the contributors' are diverse, both conceptually and geographically, encompassing analyses from Australia, North America, Canada, the UK, Europe and Japan, and including national and supra-national perspectives. Key themes informing the collection as a whole are the re-positioning of unpaid care work as integral to the performance and structure of productive activity; and consideration of the implications of recognizing the interdependence of work and family activities. In this way, the book seeks to develop a central theme from the previously published 'Labour Law in an Era of Globalization' (Conaghan, Fischl and Klare, eds. OUP), as part of an ongoing exploration into the distributive implications of economic and political globalization.

Throughout the industrial world, the discipline of labour 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 labour 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.

These essays - which are the product of a transnational comparative dialogue among academics and practitioners in labour law and related legal fields, including social security, immigration, trade, and development - identify, analyze, and respond to some of the conceptual and policy challenges posed by globalization.