Feminist Judgments Projects (FJPs) consist in «rewriting» the judgments in significant cases by applying feminist theory to practice. In this paper, the authors give an account of some of the conversations that took place during a two-day workshop at Edinburgh Law School in Scotland between ten members of the African, Indian and Scottish Feminist Judgments Projects (FJPs), comprised of legal academics and legal practitioners, They discuss questions of how best to celebrate and use, but also constructively build upon and perhaps even push beyond, the legacies of earlier FJPs; the difficulties of re-affirming common law traditions imposed from the outside in the process of writing feminist judgments, and the particular challenges that this poses in a post-colonial context; the use within FJPs of ‘gender’ as a category through which to interrogate and redress historical inequalities; the ability of FJPs in general, and these projects in particular, to cast new light on long-standing methods within feminist legal theory; the concept of feminist lawyering; and the potential for critical engagement with the legal profession. In the final section, they also explore some tentative ideas for future collaboration to promote further dialogue between FJPs across the world and reflect on the absence to date of FJPs from Civilian jurisdictions. This can be understood as an invitation to start such projects in Switzerland and other continental European contexts. The recent decision by the European Court of Human Rights in the case of J.L. v. Italy, in which the Court found that the language and arguments used by the court of appeal of Florence conveyed prejudices existing in Italian society regarding the role of women and were likely to be an obstacle to providing effective protection for the rights of victims of gender-based violence, illustrates the urgent need for such a European feminist rewriting endeavor.

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FRI - Gender Law Newsletter 2021#3 - III.1