Whilst there many publications dealing with children from both legal and theoretical perspectives, the child is persistently represented and discussed as a gender neutral or pre-gender and pre-sexual object. This text uses feminist perspectives to explore more rarely addressed aspects of childhood.

Publisher Description

Feminist perambulations : taking the law for a walk in land / by Anne Bottomley and Hilary Lim -- National nature reserves : nature as other confined / by Sue Elworthy -- Ancient monuments of national importance : symbols of whose past? / by Penny English -- A trip to the mall : revisiting the public/private divide / by Anne Bottomley -- Scapegoating and the legal landscape : homeless women and the law / by Rosy Thornton -- Women's work : locating gender in the discourse of anti-social behaviour / by Helen Carr -- Women travellers and the paradox of the settled nomad / by Margaret Greenfields and Robert Home -- 'Land doesn't come from your mother, she didn't make it with her hands?' : challenging matriliny in Papua New Guinea / by Melissa Demian -- Unfair shares for women : the rhetoric of equality and the reality of inequality / by Rosemary Auchmuty -- The shared home : a rational solution through statutory reform? / by Simone Wong -- Networking resources : a gendered perspective on Kwena women's property rights / by Anne Griffiths -- Accidental Islamic feminism : dialogical approaches to muslim women's inheritance rights / by Hilary Lim and Siraj Sait.

Reimagined court opinions that address iconic issues in family law from a feminist perspective with timely commentaries on those issues.

Combining feminist legal theory with international human rights concepts, this book examines the presence, participation and treatment of children in a variety of contexts. Specifically, through comparing legal developments in the US with legal developments in countries where the views that children are separate from their families and potentially in need of state protection are more widely accepted. The authors address the role of religion in shaping attitudes about parental rights in the US, with particular emphasis upon the fundamentalist belief in natural lines of familial authority. Such beliefs have provoked powerful resistance in the US to human rights approaches that view the child as an independent rights holder and the state as obligated to proved services and protections that are distinctly child-centred. Calling for a rebalancing of relationships within the US family, to become more consistent with emerging human rights norms, this collection contains both theoretical debates about and practical approaches to granting positive rights to children.

"In the completely updated second edition of this outstanding primer, Nancy Levit and Robert R.M. Verchick introduce the diverse strands of feminist legal theory and discuss an array of substantive legal topics, pulling in recent court decisions, new laws, and important shifts in culture and technology. The book centers on feminist legal theories, including equal treatment theory, cultural feminism, dominance theory, critical race feminism, lesbian feminism, postmodern feminism, and ecofeminism. Readers will find new material on women in politics, gender and globalization, and the promise and danger of expanding social media. Updated statistics and empirical analysis appear throughout. At its core, Feminist Legal Theory shows the importance of the roles of law and feminist legal theory in shaping contemporary gender issues"--Unedited summary from book cover.