Legal Categories, Women's Lives and the Law Curriculum OR: Making Gender Examinable?

Abstract:     
This article discusses the ways in which the core law school curriculum is informed by assumptions about gender. It discusses a project, funded by Australia's federal department of education in the mid 1990s that involved creating teaching materials that raised and introduced gender issues into the core law curriculum. The authors prepared a set of teaching materials, made available via the internet, which focused on the themes of 'work' and 'violence'. The article also discusses legal categories and the roles that they play in obscuring legal problems that affect women's lives. However, there is a tension between trying to reconstruct those categories (eg, by focusing on themes such as 'work' and 'violence') and creating teaching materials that can readily be used in courses with names like 'contract', 'property' etc. In this article, the authors canvass their approach to this dilemma and illustrate this with some of the examples from their project.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 21

Keywords: legal education, law school curriculum, core curriculum, feminist legal scholarship, legal categories, gender, legal pedagogy

JEL Classification: K10, K30

Accepted Paper Series