The first book to examine the critical area of land law from a feminist perspective, it provides an original and critical analysis of the gendered intersection between law and land; ranging land use and ownership in England and Wales to Botswana, Papua New Guinea and the Muslim world. The authors draw upon the diverse disciplinary fields of law, anthropology and geography to open up perspectives that go beyond the usually narrow topography and cartography of land law. Addressing an unorthodox variety of sites where questions of women's access and rights to land are raised, this book includes chapters on: shopping malls ancient monuments nature reserves housing estates the family home. An interdisciplinary and enlivening account of feminist perspectives on land law, it is an excellent addition to the bookshelves of students and researchers in legal studies, gender studies, social anthropology and social geography.

Reimagines fundamental property law cases to demonstrate how a feminist lens could impact the law's development.

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.

The book raises and examines critical issues from a feminist perspective in an area of land law which remains, for too many of us, an area of boredom and unreflexive, undigested rule regurgitation. It should, in fact, be no surprise that feminists have very specific concerns in this area, most obviously in relation to the family home. Whilst the topic of the family home and domestic property is addressed, this volume also displays the wide range of feminist work in relation to property, especially land, and draws from other disciplines (especially anthropology and social geography) as well as legal scholarship to provide a set of topics (including access to shopping malls, the needs of travellers and the impact of registration of title to land, etc) and a range of feminist insights which will provide a valuable resource for all scholars and students interested in property in land and/or feminist work.

This edited collection questions the assumptions about feminist perspectives on contract law made in mainstream textbooks and the ideologies that underpin them, drawing attention to the ways in which the law of contract has facilitated the virtual exclusion of women, the feminine and the private sphere from legal discourse.

The essays in this volume fall within a chapter on one of the foundational law subjects on the degree syllabus, and aim to provide an account of feminist approaches to each of the following areas: contracts, torts, land law, equity and trusts, criminal law, public law, and European law.

Owning Land, Being Women enquires into the processes that establish inheritance as a unique form of property relation in law and society. It focuses on India, examining the legislative processes that led to the 2005 amendment of the Hindu Succession Act 1956, along with several interconnected welfare policies. Scholars have understood these Acts as a response to growing concerns about women’s property rights in developing countries. In re-reading these Acts and exploring the wider nexus of Indian society in which the legislation was drafted, this study considers how questions of family structure and property rights contribute to the creation of legal subjects and demonstrates the significance of the politico-economic context of rights formulation. On the basis of an ethnography of a village in West Bengal, this book brings the moral axis of inheritance into sharp focus, elucidating the interwoven dynamics of bequest, distribution of family wealth and reciprocity of care work that are integral to the logic of inheritance. It explains why inheritance rights based on the notion of individual property rights are inadequate to account for practices of inheritance. Mondal shows that inheritance includes normative structures of affective attachment and expectations, i.e., evaluatively-charged imaginaries of the future that coordinate present practices. These insights pose questions of the dominant resource-based conceptualisation of inherited property in the debate on women’s empowerment. In doing so, this work opens up a line of investigation that brings feminist rights discourse into conversation with ethics, enriching the liberal theory of gender justice.