About

In recent years, a number of jurisdictionally-specific ‘feminist judgment’ projects have been produced. These have created a space for re-imagining the processes and outcomes of judging in key cases from feminist perspectives. Projects have been undertaken in Canada, England and Wales, Northern/Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, where ‘missing’ feminist judgments have been written, using the precedents and principles available at the time of the original case. These projects have produced edited collections of the ‘missing’ feminist judgments, alongside commentaries by subject experts, providing a powerful teaching resource, and also sparking dialogue between academics and legal practitioners.

The Scottish Feminist Judgments Project is an exciting new addition to this growing body work. With contributions from academics and legal practitioners, judges, artists, and representatives from the third sector, the Project engages critically with a number of key Scots law decisions to show how, through applying feminist perspectives, the outcome or reasoning of the case could have been different. Our ambition is to make a contribution to worldwide discussions about the power and potential of feminism(s) to critique and potentially shape the law and its application. At the same time, we aim to attend to the particularities of the Scottish social, political, and historical contexts, producing resources that will speak to Scottish and international audiences alike.

The co-ordinators of the Project are Sharon Cowan (University of Edinburgh), Chloë Kennedy (University of Edinburgh) and Vanessa Munro (University of Warwick).

Various aspects of the project benefited from funding from the University of Edinburgh (Innovation Initiative Grant; College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Knowledge Exchange & Impact Award; School of Law Research Fund; and Official Development Assistance Grant) and the University of Warwick (Legal Research Institute; Faculty of Social Sciences Impact Support Funding; ESRC IAA (ES/T502054/1)), which we would like to gratefully acknowledge. This support, together with additional funds that we were able to secure from the Clark Foundation for Legal Education and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (to whom we are also grateful) have been critical to ensuring the success of the project, and in particular to enabling us to extend its reach beyond legal and academic audiences.