Northern/Irish Feminist Judgments: Judges' Troubles and the Gendered Politics of Identity in Northern/Irish Courts

Abstract:     

The Northern/Irish Feminist Judgments Project is a collective of legal academics and practitioners who have written the ‘missing’ feminist judgments in a series of significant Irish and Northern Irish legal cases. By requiring participants to adhere to the rules of precedent and custom that bind practising judges, the Project has demonstrated that it is possible to reason and decide difficult legal cases in ways which take proper account of feminist concerns. Through this process of judicial re-imagining, the Project has focussed on Northern/Irish concerns in investigating how gender is shaped through judicial practices and how the Northern/Irish judiciary has contributed to the construction of gendered national identities across the island since the founding of the two jurisdictions almost a century ago. This Briefing Paper explains what we mean by feminist judging methodology before detailing the scope of the Northern/Irish Feminist Judgments Project. It then elaborates on the role of the judiciary in governmental national identity projects.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 4

Keywords: Judging, Feminist Methodologies, Socio-Legal Methods

JEL Classification: K19, K41