An article by Kent Law School Professor Rosemary Hunter and a book by Senior Lecturer Dr Rose Parfitt have been shortlisted for a Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) prize.
Professor Hunter’s article, ‘Feminist judging in the “real world“’ (Oñati Socio-Legal Series, vol 8, n9, 2018) is shortlisted for the SLSA Article Prize. The article presents Professor Hunter’s empirical research on real world feminist judging. Drawing on case study and interview data it explores the how, when and where of feminist judging, that is, the feminist resources, tools and techniques judges have drawn upon, the stages in the hearing and decision-making process at which these resources, tools and techniques have been deployed, and the areas of law in which they have been applied. The article goes on to consider observed and potential limits on feminist judicial practice, before drawing conclusions about the comparison between ‘real world’ feminist judging and the practices of feminist judgment projects.
Together with Dr Erika Rackley and Professor Clare McGlynn (Durham University), Professor Hunter was one of the co-organisers of the Feminist Judgments Project, in which a group of academics and practitioners wrote alternative judgments in a series of key cases in English law, imagining how a feminist judge sitting on the court might have decided the case. The project resulted in the publication of Feminist Judgments: From Theory to Practice (Hart Publishing, 2010).
Professor Hunter has subsequently co-organised feminist judgment projects in Australia and New Zealand, and has supported and advised similar projects in the USA, Northern/Ireland, India and Scotland. She was a founding editor in 2011 of feminists@law, an online open access journal of feminist legal scholarship, and continues to edit the journal with a group of Kent Law School colleagues.
Dr Parfitt’s book, The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is shortlisted for the SLSA Socio-Legal Theory and History Prize. The book explores the legal historiography of the state and features new archival research. It draws upon both anti-colonial and Marxist theory for a critical examination of the role of international law in establishing and perpetuating inequalities of wealth, power and pleasure. The book has also been nominated, in the US, for the Law and Society Association’s J Willard Hurst Book Prize for socio-legal history.
On Friday 31 January Dr Parfitt will deliver a lecture at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL) in Cambridge on ‘The States We’re in: Law, Inequality, Historiography, Resistance‘. On the preceding evening, she will discuss the book’s contribution to the history and theory of international law at Cambridge’s ‘Legal Histories Beyond the State’ Seminar. Dr Parfitt has also been invited to speak at other universities including Warwick, Sciences Po (Paris) and SOAS University of London. The first launch event for the book was held at New York University’s Institute for International Law and Justice in the US earlier this month with Professor Nathaniel Berman (Brown University), Professor Vasuki Nesiah (New York University) and Martti Koskenniemi (University of Helsinki).
Research for Dr Parfitt’s book was funded in part by a Discovery Early Career Research Award from the Australian Research Council. The grant, awarded in 2015, was for a three-year project on ‘International Law and the Legacies of Fascist Internationalism’ that Dr Parfitt led at Melbourne Law School while on secondment from Kent Law School.
Professor Hunter teaches Family Law and a Critical Introduction to Law to undergraduate students. She also supervises PhD scholars in feminist legal studies and socio-legal studies.
Dr Parfitt teaches undergraduate law in the areas of International Law, Public Law and International Humanitarian Law at Kent Law School.
The SLSA will announce winners of all the prizes at their Annual Conference which, this year, will be held in Portsmouth from Wednesday 1 – Friday 3 April.