Between 2000 and 2015, women ascended to the top of judiciaries across Africa, most notably as chief justices of supreme courts in common law countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Zambia, but also as presidents of constitutional courts in civil law countries such as Benin, Burundi, Gabon, Niger and Senegal. Most of these appointments was a "first" in terms of the gender of the chief justice. At the same time, women are being appointed in record numbers as magistrates, judges and justices across the continent. While women’s increasing numbers and roles in African executives and legislatures have been addressed in a burgeoning scholarly literature, very little work has focused on women in judiciaries. This book addresses the important issue of the increasing numbers and varied roles of women judges and justices, as judiciaries evolve across the continent. Scholars of law, gender politics and African politics provide overviews of recent developments in gender and the judiciary in nine African countries that represent north, east, southern and west Africa as well as a range of colonial experiences, postcolonial trajectories and legal systems, including mixes of common, civil, customary, or sharia law. In the process, each chapter seeks to address the following questions: What has been the historical experience of the judicial system in a given country, from before colonialism until the present? What is the current court structure and where are the women judges, justices, magistrates and other women located? What are the selection or appointment processes for joining the bench and in what ways may these help or hinder women to gain access to the courts as judges and justices? Once they become judges, do women on the bench promote the rights of women through their judicial powers? What are the challenges and obstacles facing women judges and justices in Africa? Timely and relevant in this era in which governmental accountability and transparency are essential to the consolidation of democracy in Africa and when women are accessing significant leadership positions across the continent, this book considers the substantive and symbolic representation of women’s interests by women judges and the wider implications of their presence for changing institutional norms and advancing the rule of law and human rights.

Intersectionality and Women's Access to Justice, edited by J. Jarpa Dawuni, propounds layered intersectionality as a paradigm for examining how gendered factors affect women's access to justice, whether as judges or litigants. Through intersectional and decolonial frameworks, the contributors analyze the lived experiences of women and their access to justice by situating the courtroom as both a spatial and a temporal arena for seeking justice (as litigants) and for seeking access to the bench (as judges). This book examines patterns of mutually reinforcing discriminatory practices that women share based on common gender identities and depending on which identities are at play at a given point in time in both traditional and statutory courts. The book provides recommendations for various justice sector providers.

Women judges are playing increasingly prominent roles in many African judiciaries, yet there remains very little comparative research on the subject. Drawing on extensive cross-national data and theoretical and empirical analysis, this book provides a timely and broad-ranging assessment of gender and judging in African judiciaries. Employing different theoretical approaches, the book investigates how women have fared within domestic African judiciaries as both actors and litigants. It explores how women negotiate multiple hierarchies to access the judiciary, and how gender-related issues are handled in courts. The chapters in the book provide policy, theoretical and practical prescriptions to the challenges identified, and offer recommendations for the future directions of gender and judging in the post-COVID-19 era, including the role of technology, artificial intelligence, social media, and institutional transformations that can help promote women’s rights. Bringing together specific cases from Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania, and South Africa and regional bodies such as ECOWAS and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and covering a broad range of thematic reflections, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of African law, judicial politics, judicial training, and gender studies. It will also be useful to bilateral and multilateral donor institutions financing gender-sensitive judicial reform programs, particularly in Africa.

A sequel to Bauer and Dawuni's pioneering study on gender and the judiciary in Africa (Routledge, 2016), International Courts and the African Woman Judge examines questions on gender diversity, representative benches, and international courts by focusing on women judges from the continent of Africa. Drawing from postcolonial feminism, feminist institutionalism, feminist legal theory, and legal narratives, this book provides fresh and detailed narratives of seven women judges that challenge existing discourse on gender diversity in international courts. It answers important questions about how the politics of judicial appointments, gender, geographic location, class, and professional capital combine to shape the lives of women judges who sit on international courts and argues the need to disaggregate gender diversity with a view to understanding intra-group differences. International Courts and the African Woman Judge will be of interest to a variety of audiences including governments, policy makers, civil society organizations, students of gender studies, and feminist activists interested in all questions of gender and judging.

Does gender make a difference to the way the judiciary works and should work? Or is gender-blindness a built-in prerequisite of judicial objectivity? If gender does make a difference, how might this be defined? These are the key questions posed in this collection of essays, by some 30 authors from the following countries; Argentina, Cambodia, Canada, England, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, South Africa, Switzerland, Syria and the United States. The contributions draw on various theoretical approaches, including gender, feminist and sociological theories. The book's pressing topicality is underlined by the fact that well into the modern era male opposition to women's admission to, and progress within, the judicial profession has been largely based on the argument that their very gender programmes women to show empathy, partiality and gendered prejudice - in short essential qualities running directly counter to the need for judicial objectivity. It took until the last century for women to begin to break down such seemingly insurmountable barriers. And even now, there are a number of countries where even this first step is still waiting to happen. In all of them, there remains a more or less pronounced glass ceiling to women's judicial careers.

Feminist lawyers have long been engaged in critiquing the gendered nature of South African law. This project has increased in importance and scope as a result of the centrality of gender equality, as a value and a substantive right, in the South African Constitution. Gender, Law and Justice provides both theoretical and practical tools to enable academic and practising lawyers to apply concepts of gender equality to the law. It introduces readers to basic feminist concepts and arguments, and to a wealth of local, comparative and international material on gender and the law. It also illustrates how the law may be shaped to transform the social, cultural and economic conditions of women's lives in South Africa, at the same time as it acknowledges the limits of legal strategies for change. This book has three main objectives. The first is to identify the different positions of women in South Africa and to examine the disparate impact of the legal system on their lives. Secondly, it aims to expose the gender bias in legal concepts and in the content and application of legal rules. Thirdly, it suggests changes to the law, and evaluates those changes that have already occurred, with a view to developing the law so that it is better able to ensure justice and meet the diverse needs of women in South Africa.

This edited volume centers the voices of African women judges as agents of justice and equality. The legal and personal narratives approach in the book privileges the contributors’ lived experiences, professional trajectories, contributions and challenges. The legal narrative storytelling approach also contributes to oral histories of African indigenous knowledge production and transfer. By highlighting the substantive representation of women in African judicial leadership, the chapters examine their impact on the development of jurisprudence, judicial administration, and contributions to the rule of law, access to justice, and women's rights in contemporary Africa. This book significantly contributes to the diversity of knowledge and representation in the global discourse on gender and judging, offering a novel contribution to the growing literature on African women judges.