Legal Forms, Family Forms, Gender Norms: What is a Spouse?

The limits of the normative nature of law may be illustrated in the current English Canadian context by apparently contradictory phenomena: Legal defeats of welfare mothers (e.g. Masse and Falkiner), and the legal victories of lesbian mothers (Re K). Drawing upon Fine, this paper employs the analytic frame of form and content to analyse contradictions within the legal form, notably in respect of the definition of spouse and the regulation of relations of property and poverty, and the struggles of lesbian parents who have applied to the courts to formalize their relationships to their children by way of adoption, and who, in so doing, have challenged the normative content of spousal relations. In analysing law as a gendering strategy, it is necessary to be mindful that law may not be the dominant site through and in which gender relations are constructed, regulated, reconstructed, or resisted. In this paper, the author examines and analyzes the contradictions in the legal form that have been mobilized, the \u27stirring up\u27 of the content that has been done, and the constraints and limits that shape the results

Paradise Lost, Paradox Revisited: The Implications of Familial Ideology for Feminist, Lesbian, and Gay Engagement to Law

In this article the author addresses the theoretical and political challenges issued to feminists and feminist scholarship by recent debates and litigation concerning family and family-based benefits. The argument proceeds in four parts: first, the discussion is relocated within socialist feminist theory. The implications of the qualified pro-family stance in the critiques advanced or influenced by women of colour is considered next, followed by an examination of some proposals to extend the definition of spouse and family to lesbian and gay relationships. The author is critical of both critiques and illustrates with reference to Canadian welfare and immigration law that feminists, lesbians, and gays must be attentive to the complex and contradictory implications of family-based strategies

A History of Law in Canada, Volume One: Beginnings to 1866 by Philip Girard, Jim Phillips & R. Blake Brown

This is a book that every student of Canadian law should read in the first month of law school, before the smoke of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms gets in their eyes and they succumb to the notion that Canadian law really began in 1982. The smoke that blurred the eyes of previous generations of law students carried the message that law arrived in Canada in whatever year English law had been deemed to be received in British North America. With this first volume, A History of Law in Canada Volume One: Beginnings to 1866, and the anticipated publication of volume two, the authors might be able to keep law students clear-eyed and engaged with legal history through their upper years as subsequent volumes roll out. All to the good

On Bringing on the Menses : The Criminal Liability of Women and the Therapeutic Exception in Canadian Abortion Law

In this article, I examine the historical development of the criminal liability of women seeking to obtain or self-induce abortions within the general abortion prohibition in Canada. I argue that the development of medical technology which may bring with it safe methods of self-induced abortion and menstrual regulation ought not to be regarded with complete suspicion and apprehension. Without succumbing to the illusion that this issue is wholly determined by either law or medicine, I hope to be able to illustrate that creative challenges to the law are on the horizon, challenges even more exciting when one considers the historically documented struggle of women to control their fertility and their resistance to the law

Paradise Lost, Paradox Revisited: The Implications of Familial Ideology for Feminist, Lesbian, and Gay Engagement to Law

In this article the author addresses the theoretical and political challenges issued to feminists and feminist scholarship by recent debates and litigation concerning family and family-based benefits. The argument proceeds in four parts: first, the discussion is relocated within socialist feminist theory. The implications of the qualified pro-family stance in the critiques advanced or influenced by women of colour is considered next, followed by an examination of some proposals to extend the definition of spouse and family to lesbian and gay relationships. The author is critical of both critiques and illustrates with reference to Canadian welfare and immigration law that feminists, lesbians, and gays must be attentive to the complex and contradictory implications of family-based strategies

Petit Treason in Eighteenth Century England: Women\u27s Inequality Before the Law

This article examines the English law of petit treason (murder of a husband by his wife or a master by a servant or a religious superior by a religious inferior) and its implications for married women charged with murdering their husbands. From 1351-1828, a woman accused of killing her husband was liable to be indicted not for willful murder but for the aggravated offense of petit treason and, until 1790, she faced public execution by burning if convicted. Relying on eighteenth century legal treatises, reported cases, press accounts of women\u27s trials, and second my sources, the author discusses the cases of several women tried for petit treason. The general legal position of married women in eighteenth century England is also examined, and it is argued that the law of petit treason was a logical extension and consistent expression of women\u27s unequal position in marriage and subordinate status more generally.With the elimination of the aggravated penalty of burning at the stake, and the ultimate repeal of petit treason altogether, married women who killed their husbands achieved a measure of formal equality previously denied them. However, the author argues that the significance of petit treason cannot be explained adequately by a trans-historical concept of patriarchy or male dominance. Analysis of both the form of Iaw, and the form of patriarchal relations enforced and reinforced, is identified as of paramount importance

On Bringing on the Menses : The Criminal Liability of Women and the Therapeutic Exception in Canadian Abortion Law

In this article, I examine the historical development of the criminal liability of women seeking to obtain or self-induce abortions within the general abortion prohibition in Canada. I argue that the development of medical technology which may bring with it safe methods of self-induced abortion and menstrual regulation ought not to be regarded with complete suspicion and apprehension. Without succumbing to the illusion that this issue is wholly determined by either law or medicine, I hope to be able to illustrate that creative challenges to the law are on the horizon, challenges even more exciting when one considers the historically documented struggle of women to control their fertility and their resistance to the law