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
The blogs in this series by emerging and leading equality scholars examine the questions and ideas in Meghan Campbell’s new monograph Hanging in the Balance: Why Justification Matters to Feminist Legal Practice through the prism of their own research on equality. Vandita Khanna examines how justification operates in the context of race inequality in the … Read more
To my friend, the editor, I’d love to write you a detached academic essay, but oh my heart, I am so angry at the minute that I could spontaneously combust. Can you feel it, through the text? Can you feel the pulse of my rage? Anger is an energy. Stay angry, little Meg. Tropes and … Read more
Picture Jane Austen’s unpersuaded Anne Elliot or even Charles Dickens’ Miss Havisham. The spinster is often understood as an unpleasant term for a woman of a certain age who has not married and does not have children. In contrast, the bachelors unmarried status gave him a carefree vibe, leaving him available for the roles of … Read more