Suchergebnisse

This is the text of the keynote lecture delivered at the launch of Black, Lynsey and Dunne, Peter (eds). Law and Gender in Modern Ireland. Oxford: Hart, delivered 13th September 2019, Department of Law, Maynooth University, Ireland. The lecture locates the book within the context of rapid, radical transformation in gender law and politics in Ireland, highlighting some of the issues which have been the focus of activism and/or reform. The lecture goes on to outline some of the challenges which arise in the legislative pursuit of gender equality including the tension between respecting agency and choice and curbing exploitative and/or gender disadvantaging practices. Comparisons are also made with legislative initiatives in neighbouring Britain. The lecture concludes with some reflections on the interplay of sex and gender in law and public debate and their embedding in the constitutional creation of the modern Irish State.

This article explores the idea that rape has an essence. It considers the meaning of essence in ordinary language and constructs a fourfold typology through which ideas of essence are interrogated. This process reveals that different notions of essence are implicated in key debates around rape, its nature, content, function(s), and scope. Mounting a comprehensive critique of the role of essence in rape discourse, it is argued that such discursive reliance on essence pro-motes an understanding of rape as static and universal, insensitive to historical and cultural spatialities, and projecting a continuity of meaning and commonality of understanding which is more misleading than enlightening. The article concludes by encouraging an apprehension of rape as politically contested and contextually bound, shifting the focus away from abstract enquiries into what rape is, towards situated engagement with law's role in the regulation of sexual misconduct.

This paper troubles the notion of 'labour' in 'labour law' by excavating the material and philosophical roots of the distinction between paid and unpaid labour. Feminists have long argued that labour law is based on a paid work paradigm and that in the context of radical economic and social restructuring in the postindustrial era, labour law scholars must extend the focus of enquiry to encompass unpaid domestic work. This paper looks at how the separate of paid and unpaid labour arose in the context of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and how it became explained and justified in liberal political thought. The primary focus of the paper is historical although the concluding section does consider the implications for the future of labour law of moving beyond the paid work paradigm.

In recent years and as a consequence of radical changes in the world of work the idea of labour law has come under sustained interrogation. Of particular concern has been the extent to which the traditional boundaries of labour law organised around the regulation of employer-employee relations are in need of revision, as the ambit of labour regulation expands outwards to encompass a much broader range of socio-economic and political objectives. Such developments, inter alia, present feminists with an opportunity to challenge the extent to which labour law is predicated upon a paid work paradigm and to emphasise the interconnectedness of paid and unpaid labour and the significance of gender as a category of analysis in this context. Taking as a particular focus a recent collection of essays entitled The Idea of Labour Law, edited by Guy Davidov and Brian Langille (OUP 2011), this paper endeavours to gauge how far mainstream labour law debate has taken up the feminist challenge to confront the implications - for labour regulation - of acknowledging the interdependence of work and family life and the constituting significance of gender in relation to the social (and legal) organisation of work.