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Description:

The editor has assembled 25 chapters "in response to students' requests for a course on feminist legal theory" (p. vii).  The contributors include 19 women identified as professors of law, one attorney and author, one consultant to a state department of health, and two professors of philosophy, including the editor.  The book has 628 pages and includes lists of suggested readings for ten topics in jurisprudence.  The 25 chapters are organized in six sections on equality, justice and harm, adjudication, freedom, human dignity and law and jurisprudence.
 

Discussion:

The editor claims that the feminist legal thought she has assembled for this volume "represents the first steps of conceptual change necessary to a cultural revolution that will bring about the end of patriarchy" (p. viii).  It clearly represents a political and ideological agenda.  The ideology is radical or gender feminism that sees male patriarchy as the root of all evil, oppression, and tyranny over women.  The conceptual change advanced is "the feminist intellectual movement ... regards the truth of all propositions relating to society and certainly to law as depending on context, perspective, and situation.  Every perspective is just that, a perspective" (p. 212).  The revolution envisioned is based on "the focus on gender equality and the conviction that it cannot be obtained under existing ideological and institutional structures" (p. 595).  The claims advanced are grounded and based on the claims of experience of women: "Critical feminism's most common response to questions about its own authority has been reliance on experiential analysis.  This approach draws primarily on techniques of consciousness raising in contemporary feminist organizations ..." (p. 596).  The experience claimed is "the experience of 'being dominated' not just in thinking about domination ..." (p. 596).  At the same time, it is acknowledged that "contemporary survey research suggests that the vast majority of women do not experience the world in terms that most critical feminists describe" (p. 597).  Critical feminist jurisprudence is also based on the claim that women are more moral, more natural, more loving, and less likely to choose abstract rights over concrete relationships and empathetic nurturance (pp. 597-598).

The validity of feminist claims is also based on "the first step is to deconstruct the dualistic framework of truth and falsehood in which these issues are often discussed.  As postmodern theorists remind us, all perspectives are partial, but some are more incomplete than others.  To disclaim objective standards of truth is not to disclaim all value judgments.  We need not become positivists to believe that some accounts of experience are more consistent, coherent, inclusive, self-critical, and so forth" (p.599).
 Of course, as already noted, the feminist experience is more complete and more moral than that of men.  There is no truth or falsehood but only the superior subjective insight of the female.  Yes, as Orwell wrote, all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

This book is important primarily because it is so clear and explicit in setting forth the ideology of radical or gender feminism in relationship to the law.  If feminist jurisprudence succeeds in its goals, it means the end of the rule of law.  There is no universal truth, no fundamental principles of right and wrong, no established and inalienable individual rights, and no stable security.  Our nation becomes not a nation of law but a nation of a select group of women and their peculiar, subjective, and changeable perspectives.

Reviewed by Ralph Underwager, Institute for Psychological Therapies.