4.2 Feminist Jurisprudence

Core claim: law is not gender-neutral; it has been built from male experience, presupposing a public/private divide that privatises women's subordination — and jurisprudence must be rebuilt from women's lives.The schools within (learn the map — each named by its answer to "what went wrongand what to fix"):1. Liberal feminism (Wollstonecraft; modern equality-strategists): the problem is exclusion; the fix is equal rights, equal access, equal treatment — same rules, same chances. Legal fruit: anti- discrimination statutes, equal pay, entry to professions. Strength: wins concrete rights. Weakness: identical treatment of differently-situated people can entrench inequality (formal vs substantive equality).2. Cultural / difference feminism (Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice): the problem is the devaluation of the feminine — law prizes autonomy, abstraction, adversariality; the fix is to value care, relationship, context (the ethics of care; the restorative-justice affinity). Critique: risks re-essentialising "woman."3. Radical / dominance feminism (Catharine MacKinnon): the problem is not difference but dominance — gender is a hierarchy, and law has been its instrument (rape law written from the rapist's standpoint; sexual harassment invisible because the law of work was written by men). The fix: unmask objectification; reframe crimes around the victimised; law's neutrality is the problem. Legal fruit: sexual harassment doctrine (MacKinnon practically authored it), rape- law reform.4. Intersectional and postmodern feminism (Crenshaw — also Sociology Unit 7.2;…