Time and technique: the legal lives of the 26-week qualifying period

This paper aims to bring an appreciation of legal form, technicalities, and legislative drafting to growing interdisciplinary literatures on time and governance. Scholarship across politics, geography, science studies and anthropology continues to trace the productive force and specific qualities of diverse temporal horizons. At the same time socio-legal scholars increasingly focus on the work of making and negotiating law, engaging with the dogged, everyday work of legal experts and bureaucrats. Yet little attention has been paid, to date, to the work of legislative drafters. This paper follows the ‘legal lives’ of qualifying periods on family-friendly employment rights. As examples of legal technicalities that work with time, qualifying periods form an important part of the regulatory structure that separates precarious workers from ‘regular’ employees in UK law. Drawing on documentary research and interviews with policy experts, union activists and legislative drafters, this paper focuses on the formal qualities of qualifying periods, arguing that these legal technicalities conjure time and legal form as inextricable. Whenever law becomes relevant to conversations about time and governance, we could usefully pay attention to the idiosyncrasies and controversies occupying legal form and legislative drafting

Exploring the Textual Alchemy of Legal Gender: Experimental Statutes and the Message in the Medium

This article draws on original empirical research to explore the politics of experimental feminist statutes. It has two main aims. First, it traces how conventional legislative drafting techniques have participated in the wider social creation and continuance of sex/gender norms. It shows how dominant statutory expressions of sex and gender that might otherwise appear timeless have shifted with social change and legal innovation. The article contributes to debates in feminist legal studies, legal anthropology, and legislative drafting by making visible, and analysing the particular power of legislative text, its ‘alchemy’, in expressing and re-creating sex/gender as a social, cultural and political artefact. Second, drawing on this research, the article explores what the Future of Legal Gender project might consider and do when drafting an experimental statute to decertify legal gender. Addressing questions of positionality, believability, legal form and the use of potentially innovative or contested drafting techniques (the singular “they”, the second person), the article explores tensions between legislative drafting and feminist legal method, as well as the benefits for bringing feminist analysis and perspectives to this important aspect of legal practice. Given that legislative drafting does not merely inscribe pre-agreed policy ideas into legal text but helps to shape emerging ontologies of gender, then drafting an experimental statute invites feminists to pay attention to interlinked questions of substance and form in the exploration of prefigurative legal futures

Decertifying Gender: The Challenge of Equal Pay

‘The Future of Legal Gender’ project has assessed the potential implications for feminist legal scholarship and activism of decertifying sex/gender. Decertification refers to the state moving away from officially determining or registering sex/gender. This article explores the potential impact of such moves on equal pay law and gender pay gap reporting. Equal pay and gender pay gap reporting laws provide an important focus for the project because they aim to address structural dynamics associated with persistent pay inequality that women experience across occupations in the United Kingdom. These legal measures illuminate gendering as a large-scale social problem widely understood to operate structurally and systemically. What effect, then, could decertifying sex/gender have on the law and conceptual power of equal pay? Might decertification undermine the structure of equal pay law, with all hard-won gains it has brought for women? Or is it possible to imagine that decertification could accompany a more inclusive and effective legal architecture for equal pay

The Strange Temporalities of Work-Life Balance Law

This research paper is part of a broader project on law and time. I am in the midst of studying the time-related concepts and assumptions that structure some of the key initiatives in the area of equalities regulation in the UK over the past two decades. Time fulfils certain legal and political functions in equalities law and policy, establishing the parameters through which a person might claim a legal identity in order to argue a discrimination case, for example, or providing a paradigm for thinking about the allocation of care responsibilities. Yet, far from merely tracing how legal concepts and communities symbolise time, or how they use temporal concepts in their world-making features, I am also interested in the materialisation of time and interconnections between time, matter, form and objects in the making of law. Key temporalities within work-life balance law - balance, equilibrium and flexibility, for example - therefore become amenable to inquiry through the actions of documents and documentary practices, administrative forms and the form of law itself in materialising time alongside and in relationship with human legal subjects. As Michel Serres puts it: 'Time doesn't flow; it percolates' (Latour and Serres, 1995, 58). With this in mind we might ask: how has work-life balance percolated? What role have human and non-human legal actors played in confabulating this temporal form

Introduction to the Special Issue on the Future of Legal Gender: Exploring the Feminist Politics of Decertification

Introduction to the special issue on the Future of Legal Gender. The editors of the special issue are Flora Renz, Davina Cooper and Emily Grabham

Introduction: Gendering Labour Law

This special section of feminists@law is the outcome of a workshop on 'Gendering Labour Law' held at Kent Law School on 20-21 June 2013. Its aspiration is to help to revitalise labout law by infusing it with a robust feminist engagement with core concepts such as work, care, gender and social reproduction

Exploring Relationships between Time, Law and Social Ordering: A Curated Conversation

This interdisciplinary and international 'curated conversation' focuses on the relationship between time, law and social ordering. Participants were drawn from law, sociology and anthropology in the UK, Canada and the Netherlands. Their research is inspired by, and engaged with, feminist theory, post- or anti-colonial perspectives and/or critical race theory. In an extended written conversation lasting several days (and later edited), participants reflected on how questions of time have emerged in their research, the ways in which they have struggled with conceptual or methodological dilemmas to do with analysing time in relation to law or social ordering. The conversation focused in particular on how constructions of race are co-imbricated with dominant temporal idioms and practices and the challenges this poses for researchers interesting in unpicking the knotted relationships between race, colonialism, and specific legal technicalities or approaches