This book brings together feminist academics and lawyers to present an impressive collection of alternative judgments in a series of Australian legal cases. By re-imagining original legal decisions through a feminist lens, the collection explores the possibilities, limits and implications of feminist approaches to legal decision-making. Each case is accompanied by a brief commentary that places it in legal and historical context and explains what the feminist rewriting does differently to the original case. The cases not only cover topics of long-standing interest to feminist scholars – such as family law, sexual offences and discrimination law – but also areas which have had less attention, including Indigenous sovereignty, constitutional law, immigration, taxation and environmental law. The collection contributes a distinctly Australian perspective to the growing international literature investigating the role of feminist legal theory in judicial decision-making.

Violence against women is a major problem in all countries, affecting women in every socio-economic group and at every life stage. Yet, when women enjoy good social and economic status they are less vulnerable to violence across all societies. This book develops a political economy approach to understanding violence against women - from the household to the transnational level - accounting for its globally increasing scale and brutality.

Aboriginal peoples in Australia have the oldest living cultures in the world. From 1788 the British colonisation of Australia marginalised Aboriginal communities from land and water resources and their traditional rights and interests. More recently, the national water reforms further disenfranchised Aboriginal communities from their property rights in water, continuing to embed severe disadvantage. Overturning aqua nullius aims to cultivate a new understanding of Aboriginal water rights and interests in the context of Aboriginal water concepts and water policy development in Australia. In this award-winning work, Dr Marshall argues that Aboriginal water rights require legal recognition as property rights, and that water access and water infrastructure are integral to successful economic enterprise in Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal peoples social, cultural and economic certainty rests on their right to control and manage customary water. Drawing on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Marshall argues that the reservation of Aboriginal water rights needs to be prioritised above the water rights and interests of other groups. It is only then that we can sweep away the injustice of aqua nullius and provide the first Australians with full recognition and status of their water rights and interests.

The Mythology of Modern Law is a radical reappraisal of the role of myth in modern society. Peter Fitzpatrick uses the example of law, as an integral category of modern social thought, to challenge the claims of modernity which deny the relevance of myth to modern society.

New Critical Legal Thinking articulates the emergence of a stream of critical legal theory which is directly concerned with the relation between law and the political. The early critical legal studies claim that all law is politics is displaced with a different and more nuanced theoretical arsenal. Combining grand theory with a concern for grounded political interventions, the various contributors to this book draw on political theorists and continental philosophers in order to engage with current legal problematics, such as the recent global economic crisis, the Arab spring and the emergence of biopolitics. The contributions instantiate the claim that a new and radical political legal scholarship has come into being: one which critically interrogates and intervenes in the contemporary relationship between law and power.

Child abuse - Affirmative action - Divorce - Domestic violence - Discrimination - Equal opportunity - Family law - Sexual harassment - Surrogacy.