The Equality Pit or the Rehabilitation of Justice

The Implementation of Feminist Law Reforms

“…The value of feminist law reform strategies, however, has been the subject of two, related debates. First, feminist critical theorists have argued that law invariably does more harm than good to women; consequently, feminist law reforms are doomed to failure, and feminists ought to resist law's claims to be a force for good and focus their efforts on challenging legal and wider discursive constructions of gender (Brown, 1995;Frug, 1992;Jhappan, 1998;Smart, 1989Smart, , 1990Smart, , 1995Thornton, 1991). While this has been a powerful and influential argument, it has also been contested as being overly pessimistic and essentialist and as failing to account for potential ambivalence in the meaning of particular reforms (Hunter, 2012;Sandland, 1995).…”