WUNRN
IRELAND - FEMINIST JUDICIAL
JUDGMENTS PROJECT
Northern/Irish
Courts and the Gendered Politics of Identity
The Irish Feminist Judgments Project is led by Aoife O'Donoghue (Durham Law School) Máiréad Enright (Kent Law School) and Julie McCandless (London School of Economics). The Irish project will build upon the work of the feminist judgment project already completed by Durham and Kent which worked to integrate feminist theory and judicial method, re-writing influential judgments from feminist perspectives.
The Irish project is entitled ‘Judges’ Troubles: Northern/Irish Courts and the Gendered Politics of Identity’ and inaugurates a fresh dialogue on gender, judicial power, and national identity within Ireland. In September 2012, supported by both GLAD and Durham’s University Seedcorn Fund, the first workshop of the Irish project was held here in Durham. This first workshop was well attended by academics from across the UK and Ireland; it exposed some of the questions arising out of judging in Ireland, and further supported the view of the organisers that the project is innovative, necessary and significant. This highly successful event laid the foundations for this project’s other events, such as workshops, roundtables and conferences which will take place from 2012 until 2016.
The project has three key research questions; first, whether feminist theory illuminates relationships between judging, national identities, and the (political) lives of Northern/Irish women. Second, to what extent do Northern/Irish experiences resonate with those in jurisdictions which have also inherited an English legal tradition? Finally, what methodological resources can feminist legal theory provide for critically re-imagining the judicial role in contexts of transition from conflict, colonialism and religious patriarchy? The project will produce a new anthology of judgments as well as an innovative web resource containing materials of use to both academics and civil society.
The project is led by Aoife O’Donoghue of Durham in collaboration with academic partners at institutions across the UK and Ireland, including Siobhán Mullaly at University College Cork, Sally Wheeler at Queens, Belfast, Catherine O'Rourke at the Transitional Justice Institute at the University of Ulster and Judy Walsh at the University College Dublin.
A library of documents collected in connection with the project are available here.