2003 Articles

Thinking About Feminism, Social Justice, and the Place of Feminist Law Journals: a Letter to the Editors

Goldberg, Suzanne B.

This essay offers a framework for thinking about the project of a feminist law journal. The framework builds on two central beliefs about our journals. First, feminist law journals have a self-consciously normative and transformative purpose. That is, feminist law journals deliberately set out, at a minimum, to advance views that will challenge sex and gender stereotyping and other barriers to women's equality. Second, this overt commitment to a vision of social change distinguishes feminist law journals from many others and has important effects on the journals' styles and contents. To build on the observation of Emma Coleman Jordan, feminist law journals play an insubordinate role in response to the subordinating effects of legal academia. My argument is that this role, in turn, plays a part in shaping the journals themselves. Specifically, the journals' commitment to feminist visions of social justice affects who is writing for the journals, how we are writing, and what we are writing about. The essay will look at each of these in tum.