LL245      Half Unit
Feminist Legal Theory

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

The purpose of this course would be to examine the ways in which law acts on and shapes the lives and experiences of women and to reflect on how feminist legal thinking – and in particular its exposure of law’s role in the production and perpetuation of gender-related inequalities – has shaped and acted on law. Students would be challenged to identify and think critically about the assumptions that structure legal frameworks and to consider the effects of these assumptions in practice. 

The course would be structured in two parts: 

Part I of the course would involve an analysis of the structuring effects of law and of the development of feminist legal thinking about this. Is law itself gendered, and if so, how? Conversely, how is law involved in gendering its subjects? We would study foundational texts of feminist legal theory and address the perspectives of different schools of thought on questions of power, subjectivity, agency, autonomy, equality, and intersectionality.

Part II of the course would be more applied, and would involve consideration of topics including, for example (and subject to teaching availability): work, surrogacy, prostitution, pornography, sexual harassment, and domestic abuse. These topics would be addressed and debated in the light of the ideas and theoretical perspectives raised in the first part of the course, but through them we would also consider wider questions about legal constructions of – and assumptions about – care, agency, consent, freedom, and economic security.

20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

2,000 word essay.

Readings would include extracts from: 

Joanne Conaghan, Law and Gender (2013, Oxford University Press)

Joanne Conaghan and Yvette Russell, Sexual History Evidence and The Rape Trial (2023, Bristol University Press)

Drucilla Cornell, At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex, and Equality (1999, Princeton University Press)

Kimberlé Crenshaw, On Intersectionality: Essential Writings (2017, The New Press) 

Martha Albertson Fineman, Jack E. Jackson, and Adam P. Romero (eds.), Feminist and Queer Legal Theory: Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations (2010, Routledge) 

bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center – Second Edition (2000, Pluto Press)

Rosemary Hunter, Clare McGlynn, and Erika Rackley (eds.), Feminist Judgments: From Theory to Practice (2010, Hart Publishing) 

Nicola Lacey, Unspeakable Subjects: Feminist Essays in Legal and Social Theory (1998, Hart Publishing) 

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (1991, Harvard University Press)

Vanessa Munro, Law and Politics at the Perimeter: Re-Evaluating Key Debates in Feminist Theory (2007, Hart Publishing) 

Ngaire Naffine, Criminal Law and the Man Problem (2020, Hart Publishing)

Ngaire Naffine, Law and the Sexes: Explorations in Feminist Jurisprudence (1990, Allen & Unwin)

Jennifer Nedelsky, Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law (2011, Oxford University Press) 

Martha C. Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (1999, Oxford University Press) 

Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (1988, Polity Press)

Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law (1989, Routledge)

Exam (100%), duration: 150 Minutes in the Spring exam period