The island of Ireland weighs heavily under the weight of patriarchal worldbuilding, and yet still has an abundance of feminist activism and practice. But the necessary story of defiance against domination often, and for very obvious reasons, overshadows another tale that situates this and other feminist practices as forming part of the island’s legal worldbuilding. … Read more
If you didn’t notice the announcement of the three Clerical Child Abuse reports by the Northern Ireland Executive yesterday, that’s okay, because you weren’t meant to. There was no press conference. There was a terse text statement from the First and Deputy First Ministers which appeared online without notice at a few minutes after 2pm … Read more
Gisèle Pelicot, in September 2024, waived her right to anonymity during the trial of her husband (Dominique Pelicot), who was found guilty of all charges related to the sustained sexual abuse of Gisèle spanning almost a decade between 2011 and 2020. She waived her right to anonymity so that the trial could be held in … Read more
The long-awaited release of the Final Report of the Truth Recovery Independent Panel (into forced adoptions within Mother and Baby Homes, Magdalene Laundries, and Workhouses in Northern Ireland) has reiterated the upsetting findings of earlier exercises (McCormick and O’Connell, 2021) and Mahon et al, 2021. Its 1276 pages will join an increasingly substantial collection of … Read more
On July 9th it was announced that planning permission was granted by Cork City Council for the building of 106 apartments at the site of Bessborough Mother and Baby institution. A site of (continuing) harm and trauma, many questions remain unanswered about the many human rights and other abuses that took place there. This includes … Read more
feminists@law invites submissions for a themed issue on Feminism, Debt and Assets. Feminist scholarship has long examined the gendered dynamics of income inequality and the ways in which debt shapes and reproduces unequal social relations. More recently, assets and asset-holding have also become central to understanding how economic security, autonomy, and power are structured. In … Read more
In Hanging in the Balance, Meghan Campbell tells “the other half of the story” of constitutional equality: not the definition of women’s substantive equality, but the function of justification in adjudicating its limits. This shift in focus is both original and urgently needed. For decades, feminist constitutional scholarship has concentrated on the equality stage—on the … Read more
The relationship between women’s right to equality and justifications for restricting that right has been, as Meghan Campbell observes, ‘overlooked, understudied and undertheorised’ (p.2). Hanging in the Balance: The Function of Justification in Achieving Women’s Equality serves as a corrective by meticulously analysing how apex courts adjudicate this relationship in Canada, India, South Africa, the … Read more
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 … Read more
In a pair of cases, the Canadian Supreme Court found that provisions of the equal pay regime, a statutory limit on back pay and delayed implementation of methodology for correcting equal in female dominated industries, were a violation of section 15 of The Charter. Yet only one of these provisions was ultimately held to be … Read more