Law and the Quest for Gender Equality

Front matter

LAW AND THE QUEST FOR GENDER EQUALITY

MARGARET THORNTON

LAW AND THE QUEST FOR GENDER EQUALITY

Part I: Women as Nonpersons 1. | Edith Haynes Challenges the Legal Profession

Part Il: The Limits of Law 2. Feminist Jurisprudence: Illusion or Reality?

Part Ill: Legislating for Equality 4. Feminism and the Changing State 5. Sexual Harassment Losing Sight of Sex Discrimination

Part IV: Engendering Legal Practice

Part V: Gender and Judging

9. Sex Discrimination, Courts and Corporate Power 10. The High Court and Judicial Activism

Part VI: Diversifying Legal Education 12. Wondering What to Do about Legal Education 13. Why the Gender and Colour of Law Remain the Same xi XV

145 175 199

227 257 283

311 331

Part VII: The Corporatised Academy 14. Universities Upside-Down 359 15. The Mirage of Merit 379

WGEA

Abbreviations affirmative action

Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women) Act 1986

Australian Human Rights Commission The Australian National University

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women equal employment opportunity

equal opportunity

Equal Opportunity Act 1984 (Vic.)

Equal Opportunity Tribunal

Global Financial Crisis

Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission International Labour Organization

Legal Practitioners Act 1893 (WA)

New South Wales

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

South Australia

Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth)

United Kingdom

United States

Western Australia

Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 (Cth)

work-life balance

Acknowledgements

The author and the publisher thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:

Elsevier for Thornton, ‘Feminism and the Contradictions of Law Reform (1991) 19 International Journal of the Sociology of Law 453-74. Taylor & Francis for Thornton, ‘Feminism and the Changing State: The Case of Sex Discrimination’ (2006) 21(50) Australian Feminist Studies 151-72; Thornton, “The Mirage of Merit: Reconstituting the “Ideal Academic” (2013) 28(76) Australian Feminist Studies 127-43; Thornton, ‘Hypercompetitiveness or a Balanced Life? Gendered Discourses in the Globalisation of Australian Law Firms’ (2014) 17(2) Legal Ethics 153-76. The Federal Law Review for Thornton, ‘Sex Discrimination, Courts and Corporate Power’ (2008) 36(1) Federal Law Review 31-56. Melbourne University Law Review for Thornton, ‘Sexual Harassment Losing Sight of Sex Discrimination’ (2002) 26 Melbourne University Law Review 422-44. The Sydney Law Review for Thornton, “The Flexible Cyborg: Work-Life Balance in Legal Practice’ (2016) 38(1) Sydney Law Review 1-21; and Thornton, ““Otherness” on the Bench: How Merit is Gendered’ (2007) 29(3) Sydney Law Review 391-413. The University of New South Wales Law Journal for Thornton, “Who Cares? The Conundrum for Gender Equality in Legal Practice’ (2020) 43(4) UNSW Law Journal 1473-93. And the University of Western Australia Law Review for Thornton, ‘Challenging the Legal Profession a Century On: The Case of Edith Haynes’ (2018) 44(1) UWA Law Review 1-20.

The following publications are in the public domain: Thornton, Portia Lost in the Groves of Academe Wondering What to Do about Legal Education (Inaugural Lecture, La Trobe University Press, 1991); Thornton, ‘Technocentrism in the Law School: Why the Gender and Colour of xi

Law Remain the Same’ (1998) 36(2) Osgoode Hall Law Journal 369-98; Thornton, ‘Universities Upside Down: The Impact of the New Knowledge Economy’ (2009) 21(2) Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 375-93.

The essays are based on presentations made in various parts of the world in pre-Covid times, when travel was possible. The author thanks the following institutions for providing a platform on which to present draft papers and receive valuable comments from colleagues: American Law & Society; ANU College of Law; ANU Gender Institute; The Australian National University; Australian Law and Society Conference; Columbia University Law School; Equal Opportunity Commission, Melbourne; Griffith University; ILS Law College, Pune, India; La Trobe University; Macquarie University; Open Embodiments Conference, Tucson, Arizona; Research Committee on the Sociology of Law Conference, Bonn; University of Melbourne; University of Vienna; Women’s Studies Centre, University of Sydney; Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto.

For organising visits and visitorships, as well as for their generous hospitality, I would like to thank Martha Fineman of Columbia Law School, New York, and Emory University School of Law, Atlanta, GA; Alix Frank-Thomasser and Franz Heidinger of the University of Vienna; Nicola Lacey of New College, Oxford, and the London School of Economics; Mary Jane Mossman of Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto; and Hilary Sommerlad of Leeds Law School.

I acknowledge the institutional support of Macquarie University Law School, the former School of Law and Legal Studies at La Trobe University and the ANU College of Law at The Australian National University. I also acknowledge and thank the Australian Research Council for financial support.

For their helpful comments on chapters, I thank Tony Blackshield, Judy Fudge, Narrelle Morris, Susan Priest and Judith Resnik, as well as a host of anonymous referees. For research assistance and valuable discussion, I thank Chris Atmore, Renee Burns, Trish Luker, Harry McLaurin, William Mudford, Lucinda Shannon and Margot Stubbs. A special debt is owed to Richard Collier for his support and challenging questions. Above all, I thank Ann Genovese for her unremitting faith in the feminist jurisprudential project and for writing the Foreword.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Not to be forgotten are my former (mostly male) colleagues at Macquarie Law School who challenged me with their scepticism about feminist legal scholarship (Drew Fraser suggested that if women wished to engage in critique from a feminist perspective, they should establish their own university!). I thank my former colleagues at La Trobe Law School, particularly Sandy Cook, Sue Davies, Judy Grbich, Adrian Howe and Andrea Rhodes-Little, who, in contrast, had already accepted new ways of seeing. I also acknowledge the support of present and past colleagues at the ANU College of Law, including Dorota Gozdecka, Anne Macduff, Heather Roberts and Kim Rubenstein, and I would particularly like to thank the former dean, the late Michael Coper, for encouraging me to come to The Australian National University and for his ongoing support. I also acknowledge many former students—undergraduate and postgraduate—for their engaging and stimulating exchanges.

I am most grateful to the Boyd estate, particularly Lucinda Boyd, for permission to reproduce the cover image of David Boyd’s painting Cockatoos Watching Europas Attempt to Fly (1995).

Finally, I thank ANU Press for inviting me to contribute to its Global Thinkers series. I am particularly grateful to Andrew Kennedy, chair of the Public Policy editorial board, for his support and encouragement and to Jan Borrie for her eagle eye and superior copyediting skills.

Margaret Thornton

ANU College of Law

The Australian National University Canberra

March 2023 xiii

Foreword

I have been a close reader of Margaret Thornton's scholarship since the early 1990s, when I began my own life as a scholar. The institutional conditions in which feminist postgraduate students could do our work back then were still relatively new and precarious. But as students we were encouraged to think it was possible to do feminist, critical and interdisciplinary research because of the intellectual example and advocacy of scholars like Margaret Thornton. We learned that taking up a role as a feminist in legal institutions took courage and had many forms: as advisor to government, as empirical researcher, as advocate. But being ‘a feminist at law’ was also capacious enough to enable the invention of the role of the feminist scholar who was responsible for the care of legal knowledge as an intellectual task. Margaret’s work exemplified all these possibilities with an unflinching attitude. She captured a moment of institutional self-determination in her writing that was deeply important then, and her body of work has continued to be influential ever since.

Margaret’s single-authored books, for example, are rightly understood as classics and forerunners in their fields and genre: The Liberal Promise: Anti- Discrimination Legislation in Australia (1990); Dissonance and Distrust: Women in the Legal Profession (1996); Privatising the Public University: The Case of Law (2011). Her numerous edited collections, which include Public and Private: Feminist Legal Debates (1996), Romancing the Tomes: Popular Culture, Law and Feminism (2002), Sex Discrimination in Uncertain Times (2010) and Gender and Careers in the Legal Academy (2021, with Ulrike Schultz, Gisela Shaw and Rosemary Auchmuty), have brought together the work of other feminists at law, creating community and renewing projects for change. However, there are other works by Margaret—essays and journal articles written over the course of her career that are dispersed and have been much harder to access. For many years, I have sought them out, putting together a cumbersome set of PDFs for students, which I call ‘the Thornton essential’ reading list. Or, I have

XV

Xvi referred to them in my own writing, item by item, to cite effectively both the breadth and the overarching argument of Margaret’s contributions. It is a selection of these essays that fortunately, finally, is presented in Law and the Quest for Gender Equality; and for me (and I think for many others) to have the body of work joined together in one volume is timely and valued.

For those not previously familiar with Margaret Thornton’s work, the essays you are about to read are a great introduction to an important Australian legal scholar. This book spans work produced between 1986 and 2020, but Margaret has also written a new introductory essay to orient Law and the Quest for Gender Equality as a collection. The Introduction begins: “While sometimes reformist and occasionally transformative, engagement with law poses a challenge for those pursuing the path of social change.’ From this opening sentence, Margaret is inviting any reader, new or old, to understand the relationship between the selected essays, how they fit into a career project as whole, as well as what work they do jurisprudentially and politically in each instance. Margaret Thornton’s authorial voice is resolute and constant in this Introduction, as it is in all her work. She does not write with hubris or accept the promise of law reform as easy or a tool for change if it is unfounded, untested and unsupported by a realist’s appraisal of social, historical and doctrinal evidence. Her project is to provide readers with a community, to show them they are not alone and to equip them with techniques they can use to foster clear analysis, demonstrated as a prerequisite for adaptive and targeted change for gender recognition in law and justice before it. That attitude and tone are important compass points, as is the clarity with which Margaret explains and exemplifies in the pages that follow her own unique methodological framing and her long-term political commitments.

To give an example: a hallmark of Margaret’s work is her ability to lead in the articulation of a feminist jurisprudential praxis in Australia. The cross-disciplinarity of her work, in which she joined often distinct modes of engagement and spoke between them, offered something new in 1986, when she wrote ‘Feminist jurisprudence: Illusion or reality?—the first article in Australia to join the words ‘feminist’ and ‘jurisprudence’ in title or subject matter. This positioning is now taken for granted in the international feminist and critical legal landscape, so it is timely that Margaret’s leadership is reprinted and centralised in this collection. The innovation of Margaret’s approach was, and is, to begin with philosophically informed attention to liberalism and its project,

FOREWORD and its inviolability in law. This activity, if undertaken from a feminist perspective, exposes and problematises how law works in real-life situations that effect diverse constituencies of marginalised subjects of law. Margaret repeatedly uses that investigation to then propose action, to build resistant sites for engagement. This produces a unique foundation for a sociolegal scholarship, a basis for public engagement and a careersustained argument for committed political change. These are essential tools for feminists working as lawyers today, be it as students, researchers, advocates or institutional officials. The Introduction makes these achievements plain, and the book as it is then described and arranged opens space for discussion by all these different participants.

The other current in Margaret’s work that is clearly articulated across Law and the Quest for Gender Equality is her historical framing of practice and reformist projects. Margaret trained as an ancient historian before coming to law and this gives all her work a clear eye and a viewpoint that contextualises the conditions and situation of the here and now, and what mightbe required to attend to the entrenched everyday injustice experienced by subjects of law excluded from the liberal promise. Margaret’s historical approach is not directed to a transcendent overcoming by law reform and a false sense that the present is teleologically an improvement on the past (a liberal promise in itself). She instead uses history to show how that project is never over and changes over time. Material and political events at the time of writing each essay are signposted, to show markers of ebb and flow, how perennial problems of discrimination re-create themselves in courts, parliaments, workplaces, homes and streets. Importantly, Margaret’s essays demonstrate that these are systemic problems, not individualised causes (as orthodox legal form and philosophy would like us to accept).

The value and power of these collected essays are that they show how and why people’s difficult, exclusionary and problematic experiences with law can be reframed by feminists, using the tools we have at our collective disposal to fight problems for our own time. Law and the Quest for Gender Equality reminds all of us as readers to watch what is unfolding before us in everyday life with acute attention and to marshal our resources to renew the quest for gender justice in law and as lawyers.

Ann Genovese Professor of Law Melbourne Law School June 2022 xvii

While sometimes reformist and occasionally transformative, engagement with law poses a challenge for those pursuing the path of social change. It is easy to cling to the liberal progressivist myth that things are always getting better and to overlook the past, even when the seeds of invidiousness linger. This is apparent when we turn to feminist engagement with law, particularly as law was long a means of entrenching the subordination of women. To expect law to change instantaneously and become the primary means of effecting gender equality must inevitably produce uncertainty and ambivalence.

The common law—that is, law made by judges, all of whom were men until very recently—is replete with misogyny. A startling illustration was the doctrine of coverture by which a woman entered what amounted to a state of civil death on marriage. While she had few rights when single, she had none when she married, as her persona merged with that of her husband. To paraphrase the noted eighteenth-century English jurist Sir William Blackstone, ‘the husband and wife are one person in law and that one is the husband’.!

The heritage of coverture, or what Thomas Hobbes referred to as ‘domesticated command’? long shaped marital relations. Even in terms of entry into the marriage contract, the bride was merely an object of exchange; the arrangement was a fraternal contract effected between the father or guardian of the bride and the prospective husband.’ The metaphysical ramifications of this were profound, for it meant the wife had no right to refuse sexual relations with her husband. Her consent was implied as her will had been vitiated on marriage. The fiction that

1 William Blackstone, Commentaries (University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1765-69]) 442.

2 Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: Or The Citizen, edited & introduced by Sterling Lamprecht (Appleton- Century-Crofts, 1949 [1642]) IX, 6.

3 Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Polity Press, 1988).

the wife was incapable of withholding consent prevented a husband from being prosecuted for the rape of his wife and was only formally abandoned by superior courts in 1991 in both the United Kingdom and Australia,‘ thereby pointing to the deeply patriarchal nature of the common law.’ The recent abandonment of the rape immunity also underscores just how novel is reform in the history of gender relations.

Marriage generally has been slow to shed elements of its premodern status and to transition ‘from status to contract’ in accordance with Maine’s famous aphorism that marked the shift from feudalism to contractualism in areas such as employment and commerce. Nevertheless, marriage was regarded as a perfect form of contract in nineteenth-century law textbooks because of the assumed indivisibility of the wills of the husband and wife, as well as being a religious sacrament.’ The premodern status element in the marriage contract meant the parties were not free to negotiate its terms like other contracting parties, which included being able to choose the sex of one’s partner.* Thus, marriage could occur only between a man and a woman; the right to marry a partner of the same sex is a very recent development,’ although some relationships, such as polygamy, are still prohibited.

The philosophical separation between public and private life that disproportionately impacted women and long contributed to their status as nonpersons remains a structural impedimentat the heart of the equality/ inequality conundrum, and the private sphere continues to be largely immunised against legal regulation. The private sphere was historically regarded as a sphere of inequality because of the ‘domesticated command’ exercised by the male head of the household over subordinates—that is, the wife, children and servants. The ‘law of the father’ prevailed in the home rather than the law of the state, which was largely confined to the public sphere.

5 Fora detailed study of this issue, see Ngaire Naffine, Criminal Law and the Man Problem (Hart, 2019).

6 Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas (J. Murray, 1917 [1861]), n2t.net/ark:/13960/t7cr67j5¢.

7 For example, Theophilus Parsons, Law of Contracts (Little, Brown, 1980 [1853]) 556-57.

8 Margaret Thornton, ‘Intention to Contract: Public Act or Private Sentiment’ in Ngaire Naffine, Rosemary Owens & John Williams (eds), /ntention in Law and Philosophy (Ashgate, 2001), doi.org/ 10.4324/9781315187136-10.

9 For example, Marriage Amendment Act 2017 (Cth).

In the public sphere, male citizens alone were able to participate in the governance of the democratic polity and promulgate whatever laws they thought fit. Furthermore, formal equality was attainable only in public life where it was the prerogative of free men. Women were permanently confined to the private sphere and the status of inequality. First- Wave Feminism—associated with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—entailed the struggle by women to enter the public sphere and the ‘community of equals’, which included attending universities and gaining admission to the professions, as well as securing the right to vote.

Inroads have undoubtedly been made into the idea that there is a strict line of demarcation between the public and the private spheres, particularly through the endeavours of Second-Wave Feminism since the late twentieth century. The insistence that the polity pay attention to the injustices of private life—symbolised by the catchphrase ‘the personal is political’—changed the notion that what occurs in the home is largely beyond the jurisdiction of the state. Nevertheless, contemporary liberalism remains resistant to the regulation of the private sphere and lukewarm about radically reforming seemingly intractable gendered harms, such as domestic violence, which continue to be treated differently from assaults in the public realm. The echoes of ‘domesticated command’ may still be discerned in the policing of domestic violence, which remains a highly gendered phenomenon in which men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators.

While sexual assault is no longer formally gender-specific, it has also been unable to slough off its misogynistic history of male sex right, which has been sustained through the law of rape. Hence, the antifeminist myths surrounding the act of sexual penetration and the notion of consent linger. Furthermore, the criminal law remains fixated on the accused, who is deemed to be ‘innocent until proven guilty—a factor that deflects attention from the harm to the victim, who becomes merely a witness for the prosecution if a trial takes place. The individualised perspective that is central to legal form causes law to lose sight of the systemic nature of gendered violence that inhibits substantive reform. Historically, liberal legalism has preferred to treat each instance of criminality as the aberrant act of an individual perpetrator and to slough off the harm to victims generally, although this paradigm is very much a contemporary site of context.

The public/private dichotomy constitutes an ongoing impediment not just to the operation of the criminal law, but also to the efficacy of the civil law. Thus, the promise of antidiscrimination legislation, which was an important initiative of Second-Wave Feminism in the late twentieth century, is undermined by the fact that its operation is restricted to the public sphere, paying scant regard to what occurs in the home. This is even though the private sphere continues to be a primary source of inequality for women, whose disadvantage may be compounded by having a disability or being Indigenous, aged or LGBTIQ+. Women are generally still expected to assume the major responsibility for caring for children, the sick and the elderly, as well as performing the preponderance of unpaid domestic labour, which disproportionately impacts on their ability to participate as equals in the public sphere. As a result, the commitment to the non-discrimination principle fails to live up to its legislative promise of promoting the ‘principle of the equality of men and women’.

Rather than engaging in thoroughgoing social change, this is a matter that liberal legalism prefers to leave to chance. Unlike medicine, law is resistant to taking preventative or prophylactic action and chooses to provide a course of action for affected individuals to assume the burden of pursuing a remedy themselves. Any ripples that flow from individual action to civil society more broadly are merely a matter of chance. Accordingly, social change is likely to be slow and uneven. There is resistance to imposing ongoing obligations on employers or other institutions as a means of foreclosing legal action by individuals, even though preventative action is a far more effective mechanism for securing substantive equality. Indeed, proactive measures are wont to be trenchantly attacked by conservatives as a misguided form of reverse discrimination. This was the fate of affirmative action (AA) initiatives designed to promote sexual and racial equality in the United States in the more progressive context of the 1970s." In Australia, the life of very weak AA legislation on the ground of sex” was haunted by specious claims that AA would entail the appointment of unqualified women and the legislation reduced men to ‘victims’.'? Liberal legalism favours a formal understanding of equality, or equality before the law, where everyone is

10 For example, Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth), s. 3(d).

11 For example, Regents of University of California v Bakke 438 US 165 (1978).

12 Affirmative Action (Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace) Act 1986 (Cth).

13 Gabriël Moens, Affirmative Action: The New Discrimination (Centre for Independent Studies, 1985).

treated the same regardless of how historically disadvantaged they are or how different their personal circumstances might be. Liberal legalism is generally opposed to mechanisms for achieving substantive equality.

While the rhetoric that justice is blind has been a familiar trope associated with law since antiquity, recourse to the courts as a means of achieving a modicum of equality is all too often available only to those who can afford to pay. The myth of equality before the law nevertheless assumes that the impoverished individual and the multinational corporation will be treated the same when confronting each other in the courtroom. Our legal system tends to be silent when it comes to economic disparities, although class represents a profound source of injustice and is compounded by the fact that it is all too often invisible and ineffable in our society. Most notably, class is not included as a proscribed ground in antidiscrimination legislation, although it may intersect with and exacerbate the impact of the proscribed grounds of sex, race, sexuality, disability and/or age.

Despite the rhetoric, the swing from social liberalism to neoliberalism in the late twentieth century caused support even for formal equality to recede. The centrality of the market to governance of the state resulted in Keynesianism, with its modest support for public goods and progressive taxation, being abandoned in the interests of economic elites and the generation of wealth. Entrepreneurialism, competition, promotion of the self and regressive taxation became the central tenets of neoliberal governmentality. Antidiscrimination legislation was not repealed, but it became more difficult to use. Not only did human rights bodies receive reduced funding to enable them to undertake their basic legislative functions, but also the erosion of workers’ rights through the gig economy and new forms of contractualism precluded operation of the typical individualised model of antidiscrimination legislation—for example, a single employer could not be held responsible for a systemic harm that arose from government policy. The emphasis on profit maximisation and competition policy meant inequality had become a social norm that was extolled by the state, which exacerbated the tension with the elusive equality ideal.

Women struggled to be admitted to the practice of law from the late nineteenth century in the belief that this would equip them with the means to rectify some of the injustices in women’s lives. Despite the inauspicious beginnings, as discussed in the case of Edith Haynes, women are now most of both law students and legal practitioners. Numerosity, however, cannot be equated with substantive equality, the quest for which is ongoing, as discussed in Parts IV and V, regarding the contradictions arising from authority, affectivity and care.

Law schools have been overcome with a sense of cognitive dissonance ever since the teaching of law for practice moved into universities in the nineteenth century. They were uncertain as to whether they were merely another branch of the legal profession where their role was to teach law as it is or whether they were free to critique the presuppositions of legal doctrine in the same way as a faculty of humanities or social sciences. The impact of the modernisation of law schools in conjunction with the increasing proportion of women over the past 50 years has been dramatic. The move away from a focus on the żs of law to what it ought to be in the 1970s and 1980s provided a green light for feminist legal scholars not only to agitate for the repeal of the misogynistic laws of the past, but also to articulate their concern about the persistence of the masculine bias in the law curriculum. A noted example arose when Justice Derek Bollen, during the course of a rape in marriage case in the early 1990s, stated that a little ‘rougher than usual handling’ was acceptable on the part of a husband towards his wife who was less than willing to engage in sexual intercourse.'> This resulted in a public outcry, which showed how society was changing from the masculinist ‘domesticated command’ that had prevailed only a short time before. As a result of the adverse publicity, feminist legal scholars, with the support of the Commonwealth attorney-general, prepared gender-sensitive materials for inclusion in the 11 compulsory core subjects of the law curriculum specified throughout Australia. Materials were sent to all law schools, as well as being made available on the internet.'° Law students, legal practitioners and judges were no longer expected to blindly pay obeisance to law as it és, but to approach it as a dynamic entity appropriate for contemporary society.

14 Loss of consortium is one such anachronistic example. This enabled a husband to bring an action for the loss of household and sexual services against a third party when the man’s wife was injured; no comparable action was available to the wife. See Ann C. Riseley, ‘Sex, Housework and the Law (1981) 7 Adelaide Law Review 421; Margaret Thornton, ‘Loss of Consortium: Inequality before the Law’ (1984) 10 Sydney Law Review 259.

15 Rv Johns, Supreme Court of South Australia, Bollen J, 26 August 1992 (unreported).

16 Regina Graycar & Jenny Morgan, ‘Legal Categories, Women’s Lives and the Law Curriculum— Or, Making Gender Examinable’ (1996) 18 Sydney Law Review 431.

However, one of the themes I have sought to highlight in this collection is the uneven and often contradictory nature of social change. Thus, immediately after completion of the Gender Issues in the Law Curriculum Project, the Howard government was elected to office and cut the budgets for public goods, including universities. While the commodification of higher education has undoubtedly been one of the downsides of neoliberalism, the encouragement of research as a dimension of competition policy nevertheless proved to be beneficial for feminist legal research. The production of a rich body of legal scholarship has enabled the concept of gender equality to be interrogated and imagined in novel ways. Indeed, law reform, whether it takes place through legislation or through adjudication, has often been instigated and supported by creative feminist scholars. This is even though the admitting authorities, dominated by members of the judiciary, continue to specify familiarity with traditional areas of legal practice as a prerequisite for admission to legal practice.!”

The essays in this collection explore the struggle for gender justice in a sociolegal context that adopts both theoretical and applied perspectives. The issues are considered against a dynamic backdrop of social change, which underscores the fact that change does not occur in a linear fashion. The essays put paid to the liberal progressivist assumption that things are always getting better, although many things have undoubtedly improved since Edith Haynes sought to sit for her intermediate examination as a prerequisite to qualifying for admission to legal practice at the beginning of the twentieth century. Subsequent chapters address ongoing questions pertaining to public and private life, taking into consideration aspects of the criminal law, antidiscrimination legislation, sexual harassment, the practice of law and what it means to be a judge, together with legal education and the nature of scholarly life in the corporatised academy. The essays were selected because they were believed to capture a sense of the struggle for gender equality in the history of Second-Wave Feminism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The essays have been minimally edited, such as adapting a consistent form of citation and including updated references.

17 Law Admissions Consultative Committee, Prescribed Areas of Knowledge (Law Council of Australia, 18 October 2019), available from: www.lawcouncil.asn.au/files/web-pdf/LACC%20docs/Redrafting %20the%20Academic%20Requirements%20for%20Admission%20-%20Subs/657475579_ 1_657475579.01%20Prescribed%20Areas%200f%20Knowledge.pdf.