Kcasey McLoughlin - Böcker

This book seeks to understand how women judges are situated as legal knowers on the High Court of Australia by asking whether a near-equal gender balance on the High Court has disrupted the Court’s historically masculinist gender regime.This book examines how the High Court’s gender regime operates once there is more than one woman on the bench. It explores the following questions: How have the Court’s gender relations accommodated the presence women on the bench? How have the women themselves accommodated those pre-existing gender relations? How might legal judgments and reasoning change as a result of changing gender dynamics on the bench? To develop answers to these (and other) questions the book pursues a methodology that conceptualises the High Court as an institution with a particular gender regime shaped historically by the dominant gender order of the wider society. The intersection between the (gendered) individuals and the (gendered) institution in which they operate produces and reproduces that institution’s gender regime. Hence, the enquiry is not so much asking ‘have women judges made a difference?’ but rather is asking how should we understand women judges’ relationship with the law, a relationship that is shaped as much by the individual judge as by the institutional context in which they operate.Scholars, legal practitioners and researchers interested in judicial reasoning, gender diversity and the legal profession, gender and politics will be interested in this book because it breaks new ground as a case study of a Court’s gender regime at a particular time.

In the past decade, feminist scholars and women's rights activists have used the feminist judgment method to reimagine the relationship between law and gender justice, resulting in rewritten 'feminist' judgments from courts around the world. This groundbreaking book extends this approach and applies it to a wide range of decisions of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Hague-based court with power to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression in over 120 countries. With over 60 contributors from the Global North and Global South, including countries where the ICC has been active, this book reflects an international and intersectional feminism. Diverse contributions reveal the gendered implications of crimes (both sexual and non-sexual), command responsibility, defences, complementarity, head of state immunity, sentencing, reparations and more. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.