Feminist Legal Scholarship: Charting Topics and Authors, 1978-2002

In their call for papers, the organizers of this symposium posed several questions, including: "Are feminist law journals a victim of their own success? Have they outlived their usefulness?" and "What is the state of feminist legal scholarship today? What constitutes feminist scholarship?" As a new member of the legal academy, my answers to their questions depend on answers to two more basic questions: What has been published in feminist law journals? And, how do those articles relate to feminist articles published in non-specialty, or flagship, law journals? After searching the legal literature and finding no easy answers to my questions, I decided to do the work myself. The following essay describes what I found and proposes some tentative answers to the symposium organizers' questions. I. METHODOLOGY To develop a sense of what feminist scholarship has been published in feminist law journals and non-feminist law journals, I collected data about two sets of law journal articles that are arguably feminist in nature. First, I assumed that all articles published in w omen's law journals were feminist. Therefore, I looked at virtually every article punished in the eighteen women's law journals that have come into existence since Harvard began to publish the first academic women's law journal in 1978, (1) as set forth in Chart below. The only articles published in these journals that I excluded from my analysis were book reviews, case comments, and pieces written by students currently attending the school publishing the journal. (2) Through this method, I collected information about 1,448 feminist articles, including information about the subject matter and authorship of the articles. Second, for the same time period, 1978 to 2002, I looked at all feminist articles published in seven of the top flagship law journals: California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. (3) I adopted an expansive definition of feminism and included in this data set all articles that explicitly considered women or gender; I excluded articles that discussed an area of the law that could have concerned women--such as family law or employment discrimination--but which did not specifically discuss those issues as they related to women or gender. Using this method, I collected information about 189 feminist articles. II. FINDINGS These two sets of feminist articles by no means provide a comprehensive overview of all the feminist legal scholarship that has been published. (4) However, the data sets do reveal much about the topics considered by feminists in the legal academy over the past twenty-five years, and about who has been participating in the debates. A. Subject Matter After collecting the two pools of articles described above, I looked at the primary topics covered by each article. Although the topics were diverse and nuanced, there eventually appeared to be a critical mass of articles discussing certain general topics. (5) I focused on those general topics found in at least five percent of the articles in both the women's law journal and flagship article pools, first during the entire twenty-five-year period and second, during four subsets of that period: 1978 to 1987; 1988 to 1992; 1993 to 1997; and 1998 to 2002. Throughout the entire twenty-five-year period, five topics were discussed in at least five percent of the women's law journal and flagship articles: (1) employment, in which I included all articles discussing workplace issues affecting women, including sexual harassment; (2) family, in which I included all articles concerning adult intimate relationships, child rearing, and legal formations of the family, such as adoption; (3) feminist legal theory in general; (4) reproduction, in which I included all articles discussing child bearing (as opposed to child rearing) issues, including abortion; and (5) violence against women, in which I included all articles concerning domestic violence, rape, and other forms of abuse. …