Gender and Judging

Does gender make a difference to the way the judiciary works and should work? Or is gender-blindness a built-in prerequisite of judicial objectivity? If gender does make a difference, how might this be defined? These are the key questions posed in this collection of essays, by some 30 authors from the following countries; Argentina, Cambodia, Canada, England, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, South Africa, Switzerland, Syria and the United States. The contributions draw on various theoretical approaches, including gender, feminist and sociological theories.

The book’s pressing topicality is underlined by the fact that well into the modern era male opposition to women’s admission to, and progress within, the judicial profession has been largely based on the argument that their very gender programmes women to show empathy, partiality and gendered prejudice – in short essential qualities running directly counter to the need for judicial objectivity. It took until the last century for women to begin to break down such seemingly insurmountable barriers. And even now, there are a number of countries where even this first step is still waiting to happen. In all of them, there remains a more or less pronounced glass ceiling to women’s judicial careers.

Author Biography

Ulrike Schultz is a senior academic in law at the FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. She heads the International Working Group on the Comparative Study of Legal Professions and has been a member of the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law Governing Board since 2006.

Gisela Shaw, Emeritus Professor of German Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK, has worked and published in philosophy, literature and legal sociology.