Explains why lawyers seeking gender progress from primary legal materials should start with the common law.

The book demonstrates how the 'common law mind' was able to meet the various challenges posed by Enlightenment rationalism and civic and commercial discourse, revealing that the common law played a much wider role beyond the legal world in shaping Enlightenment concepts.

"Merle Hoffman has always known that in a democracy, we each have decision-making power over the fate of our own bodies. She is a national hero for us all.” ​—Gloria Steinem In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe V. Wade and a country divided, a pioneer in the pro-choice movement and women’s healthcare offers an unapologetic and authoritative take on abortion and women's right to choose. Merle Hoffman has been at the forefront of the reproductive freedom movement since the 1970s. Three years before the Supreme Court legalized abortion through Roe v. Wade, she helped to establish one of the United States’ first abortion centers in Flushing, Queens, and later went on to found Choices, one of the nation’s largest and most comprehensive women’s medical facilities. For the last five decades, Hoffman has been a steadfast warrior and fierce advocate for every woman’s right to choose when and whether or not to be a mother. Now, amidst the aftermath of the Dobbs Decision, Hoffman has carefully compiled her decades of analysis, research, and experience into a tour de force manifesto that sheds light on the catastrophic repercussions of overturning Roe, and what we must do moving forward to ensure the safety and legality of abortion nationally. In Choices, Hoffman expresses her views on where we are and what lies ahead. She covers topics ranging from: revamping the healthcare system to support women’s rights; combatting rising authoritarianism; the weaponization of religion; fighting the antis; practicing courage; sabotage from within the movement; and activating the next generation in the fight for reproductive justice.

At the intersection of law, feminism and philosophy, this book analyses the ways in which certain bodies and ‘selves’ continue to be treated as monstrous aberrations from the ‘ideal’ figure or norm. Employing contemporary feminist philosophy to rethink accepted legal ideas, the book is divided into three sections. The first focuses on the different relational ontologies of philosophers Adriana Cavarero and Christine Battersby – also considering their work via a third term: Spinoza. The second turns to diverse feminist engagements with the social contract theorists. The third section employs insights from throughout the book to focus more explicitly on law – and, in particular privacy law and the so-called ‘wrongful birth’ cases. Bringing together more than twenty years of sustained reflection, this book offers an insightful account of how contemporary feminist philosophy can contribute to a richer understanding of law. It will be of enormous interest to scholars and students working in the areas of legal theory, feminist thought and philosophy.

Featuring the most frequently taught female writers and texts of the early modern period, this Companion introduces the reader to the range, complexity, historical importance, and aesthetic merit of women's writing in Britain from 1500–1700. Presenting key textual, historical, and methodological information, the volume exemplifies new and diverse approaches to the study of women's writing. The book is clearly divided into three sections, covering: how women learnt to write and how their work was circulated or published; how and what women wrote in the places and spaces in which they lived, worked, and worshipped; and the different kinds of writing women produced, from poetry and fiction to letters, diaries, and political prose. This structure makes the volume readily adaptable to course usage. The Companion is enhanced by an introduction that lays out crucial framework and critical issues, and by chronologies that situate women's writings alongside political and cultural events.

Through interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period, this book uncovers how the cultural narrative affected the development of the law itself in the 18th and 19th centuries in three case studies: adultery, child criminality and rape testimony.

Revisionary Narratives examines the historical and formal evolutions of Moroccan women’s auto/biography in the last four decades, particularly its conflation with testimony and its expansion beyond literary texts. The book analyzes life narratives in Arabic, colloquial Moroccan Darija, French, and English in the fields of prison narratives, visual arts, theater, and digital media. The various case studies highlight narrative strategies women use to relate their experiences of political violence, migration, displacement, and globalization, while engaging patriarchal and (neo)imperial norms and practices. Using a transdisciplinary interpretative lens, the analyses focus on how women authors, artists, and activists collapse the boundaries between autobiography, biography, testimony, and sociopolitical commentary to revise dominant conventions of authorship, transgress oppressive definitions of gender roles and relations, and envision change. Revisionary Narratives marks auto/biography and testimony as a specific field of inquiry within the study of women’s postcolonial cultural productions in the Moroccan and, more broadly, the Maghrebi and Middle Eastern contexts.

Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Proving Pregnancy documents how women—Black and white, enslaved and free—gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and legal professionals. In the first half of the nineteenth century, community-based female knowledge played a crucial role in prosecutions for infanticide: midwives, neighbors, healers, and relatives were better acquainted with an accused woman's intimate life, the circumstances of her pregnancy, and possible motives for infanticide than any man. As the century progressed, women accused of the crime were increasingly subject to the scrutiny of white male legal and medical experts educated in institutions that reinforced prevailing ideas about the inferior mental and physical capacities of women and Black people. As Reconstruction ended, the reach of the carceral state expanded, while law and medicine simultaneously privileged federal and state regulatory power over that of local institutions. These transformations placed all women's bodies at the mercy of male doctors, judges, and juries in ways they had not been before. Reframing knowledge of the body as property, Felicity M. Turner shows how, at the very moment when the federal government expanded formal civil and political rights to formerly enslaved people, the medical profession instituted new legal regulations across the nation that restricted access to knowledge of the female body to white men.

This handbook sets out an innovative approach to the theory of law, reconceptualising it in a material, embodied, socially contextualised and politically radical way. The book consists of original contributions authored by prominent academics, all of whom provide a valuable overview of legal theory as a discipline. The book contains five sections: • Spatiotemporal • Sense • Body • Text • Matter Through this structure, the handbook brings the law into active discussion with other disciplines, as well as supra-disciplinary debates on the areas of spatiality, temporality, materiality, corporeality and sensorial studies, capturing the most exciting developments in current legal theory, and anticipating future research in the area. The handbook is essential reading for scholars and students of jurisprudence, sociology of law, critical legal studies, socio-legal theory and interdisciplinary legal studies, as well as those people from other disciplines interested in the way the law converses with interdisciplinarity. Chapter 12 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.