At a moment when women’s equality is increasingly contested—politically, socially, and legally—Hanging in the Balance: The Function of Justification in Achieving Women’s Equality by renowned scholar Meghan Campbell, arrives as both an intellectual intervention and a practical guide for courts. The book makes a compelling case that the promise of women’s equality cannot be realised without confronting a neglected but decisive site of adjudication: the justification of limits on equality. In doing so, it reaffirms substantive gender equality as grounded in human dignity while challenging courts to transform how they reason about women’s rights—and about the limits imposed upon them.
Substantive Equality as a Matter of Human Dignity
A central contribution of the book lies in its insistence that gender equality is about dismantling entrenched hierarchies that deny women’s full humanity. Substantive equality, as Campbell elaborates, is rooted in the recognition of women as rights-holders whose dignity has historically been undermined by law itself. Formal equality—treating likes alike—cannot capture the ways in which social, economic, and cultural structures systematically disadvantage women. Substantive equality, by contrast, demands attention to context, power, and lived experience; as she puts it, “the deeply embedded reasons for women’ s inequality and the varied experiences of patriarchy” (p. 22).
This conception resonates deeply with international human rights law. Instruments like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the jurisprudence and positions by international and regional human rights bodies -e.g., the UN Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls– frame substantive gender equality as transformative: States are not only required to refrain from discrimination, but to take positive steps to dismantle structural inequality. Campbell’s analysis situates domestic constitutional adjudication firmly within this normative tradition. Equality is not a negotiable policy preference; it is an expression of human dignity that carries special weight in any legal order committed to human rights.
Why Justification Is the Missing Half of Equality Adjudication
The book’s most distinctive—and consequential—insight is that equality analysis alone tells only half the story. In many constitutional systems, equality rights are not absolute. Courts may acknowledge that a law or policy disadvantages women, only to conclude that the disadvantage is justified in pursuit of other objectives, such as fiscal restraint, administrative efficiency, tradition, or social policy goals. These justification stages—often framed through proportionality or reasonableness tests—frequently determine the outcome of women’s equality claims.
Yet, as Campbell shows, justification has been largely under-theorised in feminist legal scholarship and under-scrutinised in judicial practice. Courts often treat justification as a neutral, technical exercise, detached from the equality analysis that precedes it. This separation obscures how deeply gendered assumptions and biases can shape what counts as a “legitimate aim,” a “necessary” measure, or a “reasonable balance.” The result is that profound violations of women’s equality are upheld as constitutionally permissible, sometimes based on thin evidence or stereotyped reasoning.
By foregrounding justification, the book exposes how limitations analysis can become a vehicle for reproducing inequality. It also explains why victories at the equality stage often turn into losses at the final judgment.
An Asymmetric Relationship: Protecting Equality, Enriching Justification
One of the book’s most innovative contributions is its normative proposal for an asymmetric relationship between equality and justification. Campbell argues that equality analysis must be insulated from justificatory reasoning. When courts allow considerations about State objectives or resource constraints to seep into determining whether there is an equality breach, they risk minimising or even erasing women’s disadvantage. Equality, understood substantively, should be assessed on its own terms.
At the same time, equality should actively inform and enrich the justification stage. Courts should not approach justifications for limiting women’s equality as abstract exercises in balancing. Instead, they must evaluate such claims through a relational and contextual lens that takes seriously the equality harm at stake. This means interrogating whether asserted objectives genuinely require limiting women’s equality, whether less harmful alternatives have been considered, and whether the purported benefits outweigh the cumulative harms to women’s dignity and status. By embedding substantive equality into justification, courts can ensure that limitations on women’s rights are exceptional rather than routine.
The Transformative Role of Courts
The implications of this analysis for judicial practice are profound. Campbell does not argue that courts should never permit limits on women’s equality. Rather -and drawing from UK, US, India, Canada and South Africa case-law on immigration, marriage, social benefits, and criminal offenses, to name some -she insists that when they do so, they must provide rigorous, evidence-based, and transparent reasoning that reflects the constitutional and human rights significance of equality.
Courts, in this account, are not passive arbiters but active participants in shaping social meaning. When they accept weak justifications for gendered disadvantage, they legitimise the notion that women’s equality is expendable. When they subject limitation claims to searching scrutiny, they affirm women’s dignity and reinforce the transformative aspirations of equality guarantees.
This has particular importance in a context of global gender backlash. As legislatures and executives increasingly invoke culture, religion, or austerity to justify regressive measures, courts may be the last institutional forum capable of resisting the erosion of women’s rights. The book equips judges with both the conceptual tools and the normative confidence to do so.
Conclusion: Rebalancing the Scales of Equality
Hanging in the Balance ultimately calls for a rebalancing—of doctrine, methodology, and judicial imagination. By revealing how justification operates as the hinge on which women’s equality claims turn, Campbell reframes a long-standing debate and opens new pathways for legal reform. Her insistence on substantive equality challenges courts to move beyond formalism and deference.
For scholars, advocates, and judges alike, the book is a timely reminder that equality is not secured merely by recognising discrimination. It is secured—or lost—in the reasoning that follows. Reshaping justification through the lens of substantive gender equality, is not a technical refinement. It is a constitutional imperative.
Dorothy Estrada-Tanck is Assistant Professor of International Law and International Relations at the University of Murcia
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