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Feminist Judgments on the UK Supreme Court

Hunter, Rosemary, Rackley, Erika (2020) Feminist Judgments on the UK Supreme Court. Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, 32 (1). pp. 85-113. ISSN 0832-8781. (doi:10.3138 / cjwl.32.1.04) (KAR id:78832)

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Abstract

Prompted by two of the premises of feminist judgment-writing projects – that feminist judgments are relatively rare in the ‘real world’, and that they make a valuable contribution to jurisprudence and to the quality of justice – this article explores feminist judgment writing on the UK Supreme Court. Drawing on a database of over 570 cases, the article investigates who writes feminist judgments on the UK Supreme Court, what kind of feminist judgments they write, and what the feminist judgments add to the Court’s jurisprudence and the quality of justice it dispenses. It finds that among judges employing feminist reasoning, Lady Hale was by far the most active, but she was not alone, with Lords Kerr and Wilson also writing several feminist judgments. A range of different type of feminist reasoning was deployed and feminist judgments generally did constitute better judging, although their impact tended to be more discursive than substantive. The article concludes by considering the implications of these findings for both feminist debates and for the UK Supreme Court and the litigants appearing before it.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.3138 / cjwl.32.1.04
Uncontrolled keywords: feminist judgments; UK Supreme Court; Brenda Hale
Subjects: K Law
Divisions: Divisions > Division for the Study of Law, Society and Social Justice > Kent Law School
Depositing User: Rosemary Hunter
Date Deposited: 18 Nov 2019 22:55 UTC
Last Modified: 23 Mar 2021 00:00 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/78832 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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