Feminist Judging

Abstract

Since the 1980s, feminists have been theorizing about what feminism means and should mean in the context of judging. Different philosophies have informed scholarly and advocacy efforts to address institutional gender bias in the courts, with priorities and strategies shifting over time. Initiatives have expanded to include calls for greater diversity on the bench and improving the process of dispensing justice. This chapter begins by canvassing multiple reasons why more “outsider” judges, marked by gender, race, ethnicity, and other marginalized identities, are desirable. It then examines the ideal of “feminist judging,” concluding with two recent scholarly projects that integrate feminist judging into real-world practices of the judiciary. One project involves training judges using methods of legal participatory action research, a community-based research paradigm that takes a bottom-up approach; the other Feminist Judgments project reimagines landmark legal cases through the rewriting of judicial opinions from feminist perspectives.