This article offers a feminist socio-legal analysis of the Mazan case—the 2024 trial of 51 men for the rape of Gisèle Pelicot in France—and the 2025 consent law reform it inspired. Combining feminist legal theory, critical legal analysis, and situated reflection, it examines how patriarchal societies and legal systems convert gendered violence into narratives of protection and progress. Drawing on Iris Marion Young’s analysis of the logic of masculinist protection, the article shows how law, politics, and public discourse surrounding the case reproduced the patriarchal bargain that casts men and the state as protectors while shielding them from accountability. Through analysis of the myth of the “good man”, judicial responses to sexual violence, hierarchies of victims, and the structural affinities between patriarchal and security logics, the article argues that the Mazan case offered only the illusion of remedy, confirming the patriarchal system it appeared to challenge.
This paper offers a feminist critique of Switzerland’s regulatory response to alcopops, a sweetened alcoholic beverage popular in the early 2000s. Framed as a public health crisis, the rise in alcopop consumption led to exceptional measures, including a steep excise tax. The analysis highlights the exceptionalism of these measures in a regulatory context focused on individual responsibility and apprehensive of taxation. The paper explores how gendered discourse shaped commercial, public, and legal narratives, framing alcopops as a ‘young women’s drink’. By examining governmental, legislative, and judicial arguments, the paper interrogates how legal discourse perpetuates gender stereotypes, portraying young women as vulnerable and in need of protection while sidelining structural drivers of alcohol consumption. Switzerland’s approach underscores how public health crises are framed, how exceptional legislative measures are justified, and how gender norms about appropriate behaviour influence regulation. The paper argues that these measures reinforce patriarchal power structures, raising critical questions about non-discrimination and demographic vulnerabilities in public health law.
Since the removal of infanticide as a mitigated form of homicide from the Argentine Penal Code in 1994, women who experience miscarriages, stillbirths, and perinatal accidents have faced prosecution for ‘aggravated murder’ and ‘child abandonment’. Drawing on judgments from courts at various levels across Argentina, this qualitative study examines the life histories of twenty-four women prosecuted for what I characterise as involuntary obstetric incidents between 2018 and 2024. The analysis reveals common themes in the women’s backgrounds, including lower socio-economic status, gender-based violence, young age, and other adverse circumstances, such as difficult socio-cultural contexts and family environments, disability and health issues, previous conflict with the law, and migration. Despite the treatment of these women as offenders by the criminal legal system, through a critical and feminist legal re-interpretation, I challenge this framing and argue that vulnerable backgrounds constitute the first step leading to their encounters with the state’s punitive power.
The plight of women who kill their abuser was a key driver in abolishing provocation and introducing loss of control. However, it is increasingly documented that the partial defence to murder continues to aid violent men, while failing to assist abused women. Applying Nedelsky’s concept of relational autonomy, analysis of 117 appeal cases provides valuable insight into why reform aims have not been realised. Drawing upon intimate partner and familial abuse cases we explore how, in contrast to Nedelsky’s mobilisation, judicial interpretation allows relationality to be ‘weaponised’ in ways which undermine statutory reform, perpetuating gendered injustice. To conclude, we argue that Nedelsky’s relational approach necessitates the implementation of an ethical interpretative framework which acknowledges the gendered harms of the past. We introduce the notion of ‘recuperated relationality’ to highlight the need to reclaim relationality so that it can be ethically mobilised to foster a more progressive interpretation to gendered violence.
Emerging research suggests digital communications can be useful for investigating and prosecuting sex crimes and helping reduce barriers to institutional responses to rape and sexual assault. Such evidence, however, may also be used against survivors in court, although little is known about the frequency of this practice in sexual assault proceedings, or its implications for trial outcomes and legal responses to sexual violence. This article analyses publicly available appellate court judgments from sexual assault cases in the U.S. to examine how defence attorneys operationalise digital evidence against survivors in the courtroom, and how judges evaluate social media content in such cases. Findings show that appeals to include digital evidence continue to center on victim credibility and blameworthiness. Although judicial opinions reveal caution in how the courts are interpreting digital communications, my analysis demonstrates that digital evidence and judicial discretion risk entrenching rape myths and problematic stereotypes about ‘ideal’ victims in sexual assault proceedings. I conclude by arguing for the need to amend U.S. rape shield statutes to account for digital communications and the increased scrutiny of survivors they enable, and the ongoing salience of long-standing feminist critiques of criminal legal responses to sexual violence for the digital age.
How did unrecognised gender biases impact the codification of international humanitarian law (IHL)? While recent studies on IHL have highlighted historical lawmaking processes, little research has examined gender biases behind the codification of the “Protection of Women” in the Geneva Conventions and additional protocols. This study examines gender biases and state interests reflected in the codification process by focusing on Article 76§3 of the 1977 Protocol Additional I, which incompletely protects civilian women internees who are pregnant or have dependent children by prohibiting execution but leaving room for pronouncement of the death penalty. Referring to the theory of benevolent sexism, I argue that the codification of preferential protection for interned mothers reflects ideas essentialising women as weak protectees by default. Such benevolent protection of mothers likely ceases when conflicts arise with state interests in maintaining discretion over women whose behaviour exceeds the traditional boundaries of gender roles.
This article examines the global inadequacy of maternity leave frameworks through the lens of feminist legal theory, care ethics, and reproductive justice. It argues that even where international human rights instruments such as CEDAW and ILO Convention C183 mandate maternity protections, prevailing legal standards remain biologically unrealistic, socially exclusionary, and structurally limited. Drawing on biomedical research and feminist scholarship, the paper critiques the temporal and epistemic misalignment between law and postpartum realities. Nigeria is analysed as a case study that exemplifies these failures: while recent reforms extend leave in the public sector, rigid timelines, informal sector exclusion, and compulsory prenatal leave policies reflect a deeper disregard for maternal autonomy and recovery. The article calls for a reparative approach to maternity justice, grounded in constitutional care and enforceable rights, that repositions caregiving not as a private burden but as a public good, advancing a broader vision of gender justice and inclusive governance.
This article advances the socio-legal debates on invisible work and on migrant domestic care work by exploring how legal mechanisms contribute to the invisibilisation of so called 24-hour care work in Austria. Building on feminist legal scholarship and the concept of ‘invisible work,’ it identifies two distinctly legal mechanisms – exclusion and differentiation – that devalue and obscure domestic care work. The article examines how exclusion from protective labour laws and differentiation within legal frameworks perpetuate invisibility. It traces Austria’s legal treatment of domestic care work from its marginalisation in early labour law to the formalisation of live-in care under the Home Care Act 2007. Highlighting the role of migration regimes in shaping workers’ rights, the article argues that even formalised legal structures sustain invisibility by relegating care workers – predominantly migrant women – to lesser protection. By taking the ambivalences of both the law and visibility seriously, it sharpens the concept of ‘invisible work’.
This article examines China’s legal prohibition on single women’s nontraditional reproductive choices, including the use of egg freezing for fertility preservation and the pursuit of single motherhood through assisted reproductive technologies for social, rather than medical, reasons. It reveals both theoretical and practical dilemmas posed by such prohibitions. In theory, although China’s regulations are framed as protective, they fail to meet the criteria for justifiable hard paternalism. In practice, contradictions within China’s fertility policies have spurred reproductive tourism, enabling women with greater socioeconomic resources to circumvent domestic prohibitions and exacerbating inequality among single women—an outcome current regulations are insufficiently prepared to address. Drawing on comparative experiences from Japan and South Korea, this article proposes a more adaptive regulatory framework for governing single women’s reproductive demands. It argues that restructuring China’s current paternalistic approach would improve policy coherence and better fulfil the obligations to protect women’s reproductive rights under both domestic and international legal norms.
This article examines the legal device known as the margin of appreciation at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). To critically evaluate its modus operandi, we first explore scholarly literature on its functioning to then analyse the margin’s application in abortion-related jurisprudence. By relying on the framework of reproductive justice, we present three objections to the doctrine. First, spurious incrementalism addresses individualised burdens of standardised human rights procedures, which place disproportionate procedural and evidentiary constraints onto applicants and reinforce prevailing injustices. Second, politicised presentism explores the normative prioritisation of state representatives, which entrenches static abortion attitudes, even in the face of evolving societal views or the rights of minority groups. Third, the watershed of injustices interrogates the possibility of justifying restrictive jurisdictions through market logics, which displaces access to human rights across borders, compelling citizens to engage in a form of absurd forum-shopping for reproductive health care.
This article is an overview of a Legislative Theatre (LT) workshop that was organised by the authors at Newcastle University in June of 2024. The workshop was aimed at both rethinking and reimagining the university’s broadly defined approach to and policies around complaint handling with a specific focus on instances and reports of gender-based violence (GBV). All of the authors are committed to enacting anti-carceral feminist futures aimed at challenging structures that cause harm and perpetuate racial and colonial violence. This is expressed throughout our conversation as we shift between the political to the personal reflecting a feminist praxis. These normative commitments are also reflected in our methodological decision to draw attention to our redactions of the comments we felt uneasy about including. Despite having consent from all workshop participants, this choice reflects tensions between privacy, harm, frustration, and care that persisted far past the day itself, and which speak to the ongoing pressures feminist researchers face when talking about sexual violence in the neoliberal academy (Godden-Rasul and Serisier 2024).
Current legal responses are not able to effectively address obstetric violence and mistreatment in childbirth. This inadequacy stems from their failure to recognise that this phenomenon has a structural dimension related to the broader oppression women experience regarding childbirth, which manifests both during and beyond events of obstetric violence and mistreatment in childbirth. This structural oppression typically takes three forms: masculine domination, seen in the application of gender stereotypes regarding childbirth; professional domination of health professionals, evident in the performance of non-consensual medical procedures; and structural violence, apparent in the lack of access to appropriate healthcare services. Structural oppression of women in childbirth must be addressed because it is fundamentally unjust and violates women’s human rights. The identification of State obligations regarding childbirth constitutes a promising framework for addressing this structural oppression as well as obstetric violence and mistreatment in childbirth more generally.
Reproductive rights and justice paradigms have long been viewed as incompatible, largely because of their divergent orientations to the notion of choice. I argue that the dissenting opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which overturned Roe v. Wade and returned to states the authority to regulate abortion, goes partway toward bridging the gap between abortion rights and a health-oriented reproductive justice. After examining the potentialities and limitations of Dobbs, I turn to the 2022 Constitutional Court of Colombia decision, which decriminalised abortion up to 24 weeks, for an example of further integrated choice and reproductive justice paradigms. I then reenvision the concept of ordered liberty, at the centre of Dobbs, such that it invites consideration of the collective health and well-being of pregnant persons and their potential or future children. I contend that these collective interests should also be part of the balancing tests used in First Amendment challenges to abortion restrictions, which are increasingly considered alternatives to Fourteenth Amendment privacy rights claims. This reformulated balancing test would strengthen the co-articulation of reproductive rights and justice, as assertions of individual choice would be inseparable from those of gender, class, and racial equality.
This article investigates the impact of the widespread characterisation of sodomy laws as “unenforced” or “unenforceable,” arguing that this presumed inactivity is a political fiction that obscures the broader governance functions these laws perform. Focussing on Uganda, the research draws on over a decade of data, including parliamentary debates, Police Annual Crime Reports, civil-society documentation, and ethnographic fieldwork. With these data, the article traces how the category of the “unnatural offence” became a capacious site for moral panic, political mobilisation, and everyday enforcement. Analysis of crime-reporting patterns reveals that peaks in heterosexual sexual harms routinely catalyse intensified political focus on homosexuality, illustrating how sodomy law functions as a technology for displacing and re-narrating sexual crises. The article theorises social panopticism to describe the dispersed legal, institutional, and extralegal practices that collectively produce carceral conditions for queer and trans Ugandans. It concludes that decriminalisation requires dismantling the broader normative and institutional infrastructures that sustain queer criminalisation.
