For almost 30 years, scholars and advocates have been exploring the interaction and potential between the rights and well-being of women and the promise of international law. This collection posits that the next frontier for international law is increasing its relevance, beneficence and impact for women in the developing world, and to deal with a much wider range of issues through a feminist lens.

This work introduces and further develops the feminist strategy of 'norm transfer': the proposal that feminist informed standards created at the level of international criminal law make their way into domestic contexts. Situating this strategy within the complementarity regime of the International Criminal Court (ICC), it is argued that there is an opportunity for dialogue and debate around the contested aspects of international norms as opposed to uncritical acceptance. The book uses the crime of rape as a case study and offers a new perspective on one of the most contentious debates within international and domestic criminal legal feminism: the relationship between consent and coercion in the definition of rape. In analysing the ICC definition of rape, it is argued that the omission of consent as an explicit element is flawed. Arguing that the definition is in need of revision to explicitly include a context-sensitive notion of consent, the book goes further, setting out draft legislative amendments to the ICC 'Elements of Crimes' definition of rape and its Rules of Procedure and Evidence. Turning its attention to the domestic landscape, the book drafts amendments to the United Kingdom (UK) Sexual Offences Act 2003 and to the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999: thereby showing how the revised version of the ICC definition can be applied in context of the UK.

Focusing on femicide, this book provides a contemporary re-evaluation of Carol Smart’s innovative approach to the law question as first outlined in her ground-breaking book, Feminism and the Power of Law (Routledge 1989). Smart advocated turning to the legal domain not so much for demanding law reforms as construing it as a site on which to contest gender and more particularly, gendered constructions of women’s experiences. Over the last 30 to 40 years, feminist law scholars and activists have launched scathing trans-jurisdictional critiques of the operation of provocation defences in hundreds of femicide cases. The evidence unearthed by feminist scholars that these defences operate in profoundly sexed ways is unequivocal. Accordingly, femicide cases have become critically important sites for feminist engagement and intervention across numerous jurisdictions. Exploring an area of criminal law that was not one of Smart’s own focal concerns, this book both honours and extends Smart’s work by approaching femicide as a site of engagement and counter-discourse that calls into question hegemonic representations of gendered relationships. Femicide cases thus provide a way to continue the endlessly valuable discursive work Smart advocated and practised in other fields of law: both in articulating alternative accounts of gendered relationships and in challenging law’s power to disqualify women’s experiences of violence while privileging men’s feelings and rights.

This book brings together feminist scholars to explore the directions and tensions in feminist engagement with various areas of international law.

"Feminist Perspectives on Law" is a socio-legal text which examines the interaction between law and women's lives, particularly in relation to legal regulation of the female body. It comprises extracts from feminist legal texts and interdisciplinary writings, case law and legislation, which the authors explore through an ongoing commentary. It seeks to identify the points of connection between the law and women's lives, the role of the law in perpetuating the disadvantageous position of women, and the limitations as well as possibilities for the creative use of law in bringing about change in teh lives of women in the areas under construction.

Contemporary feminist advocacy in human rights, international criminal law, and peace and security is gripped by the issue of sexual violence in conflict. But it hasn't always been this way. Analyzing feminist international legal and political work over the past three decades, Karen Engle argues that it was not inevitable that sexual violence in conflict would become such a prominent issue. Engle reveals that as feminists from around the world began to pay an enormous amount of attention to sexual violence in conflict, they often did so at the cost of attention to other issues, including the anti-militarism of the women's peace movement; critiques of economic maldistribution, imperialism, and cultural essentialism by feminists from the global South; and the sex-positive positions of many feminists involved in debates about sex work and pornography. The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict offers a detailed examination of how these feminist commitments were not merely deprioritized, but undermined, by efforts to address the issue of sexual violence in conflict. Engle's analysis reinvigorates vital debates about feminist goals and priorities, and spurs readers to question much of today's common sense about the causes, effects, and proper responses to sexual violence in conflict.

Transcending the Boundaries of Law is a ground-breaking collection that will be central to future developments in feminist and related critical theories about law. In its pages three generations of feminist legal theorists engage with what have become key feminist themes, including equality, embodiment, identity, intimacy, and law and politics. Almost two decades ago Routledge published the very first anthology in feminist legal theory, At the Boundaries of Law (M.A. Fineman and N. Thomadsen, eds. 1991), which marked an important conceptual move away from the study of "women in law" prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s. The scholars in At the Boundaries applied feminist methods and theories in examining law and legal institutions, thus expanding upon work in the Law and Society tradition. This new anthology brings together some of the original contributors to that volume with scholars from subsequent generations of critical gender theorists. It provides a "retrospective" on the past twenty-five years of scholarly engagement with issues relating to gender and law, as well as suggesting directions for future inquiry, including the tantalizing suggestion that feminist legal theory should move beyond gender as its primary focus to consider the theoretical, political, and social implications of the universally shared and constant vulnerability inherent in the human condition.