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Irving on Gender & Constitutional Design

By Lawrence Solum

Helen Irving (University of Sydney - Faculty of Law) has posted Where Have All the Women Gone? Gender and the Literature on Constitutional Design on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The literature on constitution-making is substantial but, until recently, gender as an imperative of design has received little attention, and most analyses have been narrowly-framed. Even the conceptualisation of what is at stake is often missing. There are many monographs, symposia or collections on constitutional design where gender as a referent is entirely missing, and where women, if acknowledged at all, are listed only as a sub-set in a taxonomy of design challenges. In the large body of theoretical writings on constitutional identity, legitimacy, and constituent power ? all normatively implicated in constitutional design ? gender appears entirely overlooked. Yet, a significant proportion of the literature on constitutional design concerns principles for redressing other power asymmetries or accommodating social cleavages. This paper ? which (under a different title) will constitute a chapter in a forthcoming collection on Comparative Constitutional Law (ed Rosalind Dixon and Tom Ginsburg) examines constitutional design scholarship from the perspective of gender, identifies reasons for the under-recognition of gender, explores the history of gender interventions in constitution making, and considers a framework though which feminist theory can approach this issue.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on May 13, 2010 (boomark / email).