Undressing the judge : feminism, adjudication and the legal imagination

This thesis explores the legal imagination. In particular, it focuses on the role of imagination in shaping and informing understandings of law, justice and adjudication. It seeks to provoke and generate new insights about the processes and substance of legal decision-making through the invocation of the idea of difference in the context of debates about the role and composition of the judiciary. Harnessing the power of literature - its images and stories - the thesis highlights the extent to which imagination is involved in our perceptions and evaluations of judging and the judge. To this end it deploys literary examples and techniques, alongside the destabilising potential of feminist method and insights, to identify and disrupt the imaginative hold of particular images and narratives about law and adjudication. Debate about difference brings into sharp relief the extent to which prevailing understandings of the judge are enmeshed in notions of sameness and uniformity. This thesis invites us to take seriously images of the judge, so familiar and two-dimensional as to belie their unacknowledged grip on our imaginative and cognitive processes. It encourages us to disturb such images and the assumptions underlying them with a view to imagining new conceptions of the judge and unearthing a broader understanding of legal decision-making. Put another way, difference becomes not an end in itself but rather a means - a route - to engendering diverse perspectives on adjudication, justice and law, to ‘undressing the judge’.