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Legal Reform and Social Construction: Violence, Gender, and the Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 December 2018
Extract
As scholars and activists have addressed the problem of violence against women in the past 25 years, their efforts have increasingly attuned us to the multiple dimensions of the issue. Early activists hoped to change the structure of power relations in our society, as well as the political ideology that tolerated violence against women, through legislation, education, direct action, and direct services. This activism resulted in a plethora of changes to the legal codes and protocols relating to rape and battering. Today, social scientists and legal scholars are evaluating the effects of these reforms, questioning anew the ability of law by itself to redress societal inequalities. As they uncover the limitations of legal reforms enacted in the past two decades, scholars are turning—or returning—to ask about the social and cultural contexts within which laws are formulated, enforced, and interpreted.
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- Symposium: Women, Law, and Violence
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- Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1994
References
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If truths about what constitutes the core of human personhood are partly contingent, disputes over them can be resolved only through struggles over social reality like those that go in highly localized legal disputes. The common law is a social dialogue that accommodates pressures for preservation as well as for change, creating cultural space for the emergence of shared values as well as for criticism and transformation of past commitments … by the accretion of regularities in human experience over time, it gains moral and political authority, and thus provides the society with a basis for judging right from wrong.Google Scholar
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