Why a Feminist Law Journal? Introduction to the issue.

  1. OUR PROJECT

    The Columbia Journal of Gender and Law (JGL) editorial board formed in 1989, and we produced our first issue in 1991. But fourteen years after our conception, we found ourselves wondering, "Why a Feminist Law Journal?"--questioning both whether we are a feminist journal, and whether there should be feminist journals. We invited members of the legal academy to help us scrutinize the role of journals like ours by asking the following questions: Is our purpose still relevant? Considering how theory and practice look today, is a journal focused on the intersection between law and gender, w omen, or feminism still a useful forum? Do we have clear goals? Are journals devoted to gender or women even feminist? What does "feminist" mean, and is that a worthy mission?

    The answers came pouting in from legal scholars across the nation. The participants at our April 4, 2003, symposium and the contributors to this special issue (1) offer a dizzying array of opinions about whether we and our sister journals at schools around the country continue to provide a valuable academic space. They question the relationship between feminism and journals focusing on women or gender. They examine the interplay between students who produce law journals and authors who publish in them, highlighting how our power to select and edit articles may dramatically affect professors' quests for tenured positions, while also contributing to our own education as feminists and lawyers. They contemplate the varied needs not only of our diverse audience of students, scholars, and practitioners, but also of the diverse women and men who can benefit concretely from feminist legal analysis.

    Our contributors do not simply evaluate; they submit constructive criticism and highlight recurring themes to guide us and feminism generally. Many contributors elaborate on how format and logistics impact the effectiveness of a journal. For example, as Taunya Lovell Banks remarked at the symposium, many journals conform to an "assimilationist" or "male model" by using traditional measures of prestige to choose their staffs and select their articles. (2) Other contributors, including Carlin Meyer and Suzanne Goldberg, call for an expansion of feminist journals' willingness to print articles using non-traditional formats such as case briefs, narrative or informal writing styles, or unified pieces presenting dialogue among multiple authors. Several papers in this issue are examples of these last two unconventional styles. Many authors, including Twila Perry, suggest that journals would serve their mission better by presenting more issues that focus on single topics, allowing deeper and more diverse analysis.

    Several contributors focus on concerns about deep rifts in the feminist community. A few authors grapple with the definition of feminism itself, including Linda Fisher and the four authors of Gender, Sexuality, and Power: Is Feminist Theory Enough? The contradictions between feminist generations, often divided into Second and Third Waves, were one inspiration for the panel we entitled "Why Do We Eat Our Young?" and come to the fore most explicitly in Regina Austin and Elizabeth Schneider's joint paper. The symposium participants explore clashes on the level of theory, such as in Amy Wax's condemnation of legal feminists' parochial unwillingness to engage the tools of approaches like law and economics, and in Janet Halley's plea...

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