Sharon Cowan, Chloë Kennedy, and Vanessa Munro, edsScottish Feminist Judgments: (Re)Creating Law from the Outside In. Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2019. 440 pp.

Abstract

The Feminist Judgments Project (FJP) was conceived by the Women’s Court of Canada (WCC), formed in 2004 as a shadow court to rewrite Supreme Court of Canada decisions from feminist perspectives. Replicating judicial form and voice, and following applicable rules of evidence and precedent, the WCC aimed to show that Supreme Court decisions could legitimately have been reasoned or decided differently.1 Since the first six judgments were published by the WCC in 2008, rewritten feminist judgments have now been published in other jurisdictions, including England, Wales, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Every feminist judgments project is unique, each aiming to impact its own national legal terrain. Recently published Scottish Feminist Judgments: (Re)Creating Law from the Outside In presents sixteen rewritten Scottish judgments, each accompanied by commentary from an expert and a reflective statement from the judgment writer. Five men are included among the nineteen judgment writers and sixteen commentators. Judges selected their own cases, spanning a diverse range of topics, applying substantive and methodological feminist interventions. The judgments are grouped under four headings: crime, victimisation, and violence; family, home, and belonging; relational duties, equality, and discrimination; and citizenship, culture, and protection. This contribution to the FJP also adds seven works from Scottish artists, included to transcend the textual format familiar to lawyers and legal academics and make the project more accessible outside the legal community. The artistic works can be accessed via a virtual exhibition hosted on the Scottish Feminist Judgments Project website.2 A central focus of this book is a feminist concern as pressing now as it was when the WCC was formed almost two decades ago: how to fully represent women’s experiences within standard legal methods. No rewritten judgement more clearly demonstrates how the application of common law rules and reasoning obscure women’s lived experiences than Drury v HM Advocate, a case dealing with the sexual infidelity exception to the partial defence of provocation. In this case, an accused male violently assaulted and killed his former female partner after finding her with another man. In her rewritten judgment, Claire McDiarmid points to the unprincipled expansion of the defence of provocation in Scots Law, which, in the case of sexual infidelity, required only that an accused had learned of infidelity and killed under impulse or passion. The policy question this feminist judge raises in her rewritten judgment is whether the law should continue to place “such a high