This course examines law and legal institutions from a feminist lens. Students will review case law in substantive areas of law including family, criminal, tort, and constitutional law. We will examine how legal norms are situated within economic, political and social contexts and how the law may be structurally rigged against certain groups. Using feminist legal methods such as standpoint epistemology, positionality, and practical reasoning, we will critically examine caselaw and statutes. To ground the debate, we will rely on various texts in feminist legal theory. Feminist legal academics argue that the law’s subject is inherently masculine, and that when this is the case, lawyers and academics use the sameness/difference or the dominance theory to explain gendered discriminations. We will address distinctions between liberal, post-modern, cultural, eco, Marxist or materialist, decolonial feminism, and critical race theory. Students will have an opportunity to critique various areas of law. These include racial and gendered discrimination at the workplace, evolving law around reproductive health rights specifically abortion, the emergence of Muslim Personal Law in South Asia, feminist interpretations of Shariah law on marriage, divorce, and custody, Indian Muslim women’s double bind and landmark cases on Khula and triple Talaq, US and Pakistan’s anti-harassment laws and workplace discrimination, labor law in Pakistan, housing justice, and laws protecting women and trans people from violence including trafficking. In studying current laws criminalizing gendered violence, we will use tools of decolonial feminism to examine the origins of systems of criminal administration and the prison abolition movement.
