PHIL 3040 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Catharine Mackinnon, Feminist Legal Theory, Parenting
18 Oct 2018
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Feminism questions: the neutrality of law, the ideal of the rule of law, the impartiality of judges, the model of judicial reasoning as logical deduction, etc . Thus feminism like legal realism is in part a skeptical view. They not only believe that traditional myths about law and politics are false but also that such myths are harmful. Catherine mackinnon contends that in liberal democracies there is a pernicious dependency between law and patriarchal values. Law reinforces the values, and the values in turn ground the law. Gender is viewed not as a construct of perception but as ontology, referring to state of being. These different ontological beings- man and women- are then put in relation of domination and subordination. And law always takes part in this transformation of perspective into being. This legal mediation not only makes make dominance a feature of life, but also institutionalizes the power of men over women.
