Domestic violence is a major cause of social exclusion and human rights violations affecting millions of human beings around the world, making them victims of murder, physical, sexual and psychological violence, subjected to humiliation and various types of abuse.The vast majority of these acts of violence are committed against women in intimate relationships. In recent decades, the reflection produced by multiple studies has challenged and encouraged international organizations and governments to develop measures to prevent and combat the phenomenon. However, despite some important steps taken and innovative legal frameworks, there is still a large gap between the law and practice. This chapter presents a critical analysis of the phenomenon considering three dimensions: the contribution of theoretical approaches to its social and political unveiling and to the development of new conceptual paradigms; the evolution of the international political and legal agenda; and, based on the experiences of two countries, Portugal and East Timor, the challenges to public policies and the role of the courts in preventing and combating domestic violence against women.

Disagreements over a religion’s interpretation can cause a schism – a formal division into variants with their own officials, doctrines, and rituals. Islam’s Sunni–Shii split over succession disputes came early in its history. One might expect either Muslim modernizers or liberal Muslims to have split Islam further. They have done so only informally, in that the global Muslim community is divided between practicing and nominal Muslims. But nowhere in the Middle East is discontent lacking among practicing Muslims over state-approved interpretations. This is evident in the popularity of unregulated fatwa services. Substantial constituencies consider rituals outdated, clerics unprincipled, and gender discrimination unacceptable. But widespread discontent within a religious community need not generate a disunion. If the risk of joining the leavers is grave enough, disaffected members will stick with the status quo. A successful schism requires, at some stage, open collective action on the part of a constituency with a shared religious vision, possibly under leaders able to strategize, represent the membership, and coordinate moves. Also necessary is that supporters of the religious status quo lack the organizational capacity to erect roadblocks. At present, any group trying to develop an alternative to Sunnism or Shiism would face major resistance.

Jessica Kiser situates the chapter, explaining that the plaintiff in Donahue was a minority shareholder who sued the company and its directors for breach of fiduciary on account of causing the company to purchase the stock of a former director and controlling shareholder, but refusing to treat her equally by purchasing her shares at the same price. The court held that the company and its directors had breached their fiduciary duty, reasoning that shareholders in a close corporation owe a heightened standard of good faith and loyalty as compared to public companies. Cindy Schipani’s feminist judgment preserves the original opinion’s holding, but expands on the nature of the Donahue’s oppression – not just as a minority shareholder, but as a woman shut out of employment opportunities by virtue of class and gender. Kiser highlights the intersectionality of Schipani’s rewritten opinion.

This chapter explores different modes of systemic critique employed by women writers of crime fiction around the world. It begins by introducing “systems-focused crime fiction,” a mode used by women crime writers to combat the endemic challenges posed by gender discrimination in their cultural settings. After examining the differences between this and other feminist approaches, the chapter surveys the inequalities disproportionately affecting women worldwide that are demonstrated by the systems-focus. By way of illustration, the chapter reads two subgroups of crime fiction. The first highlights women impacted by systemic oppression, as exemplified in novels of by Claudia Piñeiro, Marcela Serrano and Angela Makholwa, and the second positions women as investigators and challengers of oppressive systems, as in the works of Unity Dow, Kishwar Desai and Han Kang. The chapter concludes with a case study of femmes fatales in world crime fiction, based on a comparison of Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister the Serial Killer and Natsuo Kirino’s Out. Overall, the chapter highlights the compelling ways that women crime writers utilize genre conventions to contest systemic inequalities.

This chapter examines the contested concept of constitutional identity in the comparative constitutional law literature and situates it in the specific jurisdictional context of Nepal. In particular, the analysis concentrates on the foundational function of constitutions and explores the relationship between constitutionalism, identity politics, and constitutional design. Nepal is an ideal case study for exploring the notion of constitutional identity because it sits uneasily within the traditional taxonomies used in the discipline. For instance, Nepal is the only South Asian country that was never colonised and whose legal system does not operate in English, but in the country’s national language, Nepali. This unusual level of historical continuity in the process of nation-building has complicated the construction of constitutional identity, as demonstrated by the embattled historical relationship between the Shah-centered “national monarchy” and democracy, the enduring and controversial position of Hinduism in the constitutional framework, and the patterns of legal discrimination on the basis of identity that persist in the new 2015 constitution.

This chapter focuses on the gendered experiences of Asian women scientists drawing from interviews with forty such scientists from China, India, Japan, Pakistan, Singapore and Taiwan. It outlines their experiences as they decide to pursue a graduate education, postdoctoral training, and subsequently a career in science. It clarifies why they deemed Western countries to be more accepting of women scientists, though certainly not discrimination free. The chapter shows that when these women began shifting their status from “student of science” to “practitioner of science,” they began encountering more gendered prejudice. The idea of a “gender shock” is introduced, which captures the experience of entering a social and symbolic space where the attitudes, norms and beliefs surrounding one’s gender are unexpected in either a positive or negative way. The corrective actions taken in response to gendered social forces are termed “gender compromises,” a settling for a less-than-preferred course of action in one life domain to satisfy gender pressures in another life domain. However, gender compromises do not always involve these women giving up career ambitions for the sake of family.

This chapter examines the limits of state interference in proscribing cultural norms by considering gender discrimination, the right of people to leave their community free of penalties, denying women appropriate education, and forced or arranged marriages for girls and young women. The discussion opens by reflecting on the discriminatory practices of the Pueblo tribes against their women and analysing an American court case, Santa Clara v. Martinez. It is argued that the severity of rights violations within the minority group, the insufficient dispute-resolution mechanisms and the inability of individuals to leave the community if they so desire without penalty justify state intervention to uphold the dissenters’ basic rights. Next, a Canadian case, Hofer v. Hofer, illustrates the problematics of denying reasonable exit right to members who may wish to leave their community. Subsequently, the discussion turns to the issue of arranged and forced marriages of girls and young women. While the latter is coercive the former is not. While forced marriages should be denounced as unjust, arranged marriages can be accepted. Finally, the chapter considers denying education to women, arguing that such a denial is unjust and discriminatory.

This is the introductory chapter to the edited collection on 'Data-Driven Personalisation in Markets, Politics and Law' (Cambridge University Press, 2021) that explores the emergent pervasive phenomenon of algorithmic prediction of human preferences, responses and likely behaviours in numerous social domains – ranging from personalised advertising and political microtargeting to precision medicine, personalised pricing and predictive policing and sentencing. This chapter reflects on such human-focused use of predictive technology, first, by situating it within a general framework of profiling and defends data-driven individual and group profiling against some critiques of stereotyping, on the basis that our cognition of the external environment is necessarily reliant on relevant abstractions or non-universal generalisations. The second set of reflections centres around the philosophical tradition of empiricism as a basis of knowledge or truth production, and uses this tradition to critique data-driven profiling and personalisation practices in its numerous manifestations.

This chapter takes up the challenge to see the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as integrated and indivisible, and does so through the lens of slavery survivors’ own accounts. It draws from a major new collection of contemporary survivor narratives to answer a key question: which SDG target achievements are more likely to prevent or end enslavement? Focusing on India and on forced marriage as a case study, it looks beyond the SDG targets on forced labor (8.7) and forced marriage (5.3) themselves to identify three main SDG target issues as drivers of enslavement: 1.2 (poverty), 4.5 (gender disparities in education), and 5.1 (discrimination against women). Survivors also highlight the multi-directional relationships between these target issues that led to their exploitation. As an approach, this multi-SDG coding of narratives suggests that survivors’ own voices could be more central to the global antislavery and development agendas. In the detail of individuals’ unique lived experiences, we can identify the interrelated causal factors for vulnerability, and better enable the global antislavery community to tackle the socio-economic, cultural, and political drivers for slavery that are embodied in a range of SDG target combinations.

In Chapter 1, Sophie Fuller considers the musical landscape which composers working in the earlier twentieth century inhabited. From the early days of the twentieth century, when women were expected to concentrate upon song and small-scale piano works, to the wider opportunities which opened up during the interwar period, Fuller considers a range of composers, including Cécile Chaminade, Maude Valérie White, Louise Adolpha Le Beau, Ethel Smyth, Adela Maddison, Poldowski (Irene Wieniawska), Marguerite Canal, Jeanne Leleu, Elizabeth Maconchy, Grace Williams, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Elsa Barraine, Germaine Tailleferre, and Alma Mahler.

This chapter examines the history of efforts to ensure gender equity in education. Special attention is paid to the provisions, case law, and enforcement actions of Title IX of the Eduational Act of 1972. Key precedents are examined, including Grove City, Cannon, Gebser, and Davis. The chapter also examines the use of the Equal Protection Clause to create equal educational opportunities for women - most notably exemplified by Justice Ginsburg’s majority opinion in United States v. Virginia. The chapter compares the disparate approaches to Title IX enforcement taken by the Obama and Trump adminstrations, contrasting the standards, emphases, and procedures outlined in their respective regulatory documents. Finally, the chapter examines the ongoing prevalence of gender discrimination in American education and American society at large. The tenets of social constructivism promise to help mitigate both harmful tendencies.