Is Feminist Law Reform Flawed? Abstentionists & Sceptics

Feminists have generally been ambivalent about whether law could or should be used as a tool for feminist action and strategy. Early feminist legal scholarship implicated law as central to a patriarchal political structure which reinforced women’s subordination. Politically committed to changing this, feminists sought to use law to address the unequal conditions under which many women live, but lamented the failure of feminist law reforms to achieve lasting or meaningful change.1 Some questioned whether law or legal method could ever respond to gendered claims and concluded that law was largely impervious to feminist perspectives.2 Others doubted that a feminist jurisprudence was possible.3 Still others became disillusioned by the law reform project altogether. Frustrated by what they considered to be the naïve assumptions that informed feminist law reform and the paucity of its results, they cautioned feminists to abstain from reform and sought to engage differently with law.4 However, feminists are still challenged by the urgency and magnitude of the inequalities many women continue to experience. Chastened by law reform failures and informed by developments within feminist legal theory, many feminists feel compelled to engage in legal reformist projects. This paper revisits debates within legal feminism about the merits of engaging with law reform. I survey a spectrum of feminist approaches to reformism to argue that feminist law reform is not flawed. There is still scope, indeed necessity, for reform in a transformative feminist project. British sociologists and feminists working in the field of domestic violence have described those supportive of legal interventions as ‘sceptical reformers’ and those who reject engagement with law and law reform as ‘abstentionists’.5 Whilst this categorisation was not solely directed at