On 10 September 2018, the Scottish Feminist Judgments Project, co-ordinated by Warwick Law School’s Vanessa Munro and Sharon Cowan and Chloë Kennedy from the University of Edinburgh, will be hosting an exhibition in the Scottish Parliament.

The event is the first of several exhibitions of creative works, as part of the Scottish Feminist Judgments Project, which aims to consider how key legal judgments might have been decided differently had the judge adopted a feminist perspective.

Several Feminist Judgment projects of this kind have taken place in other jurisdictions across the world including Australia, India, England, Wales and Ireland and many of which have contributors from Warwick Law School.

With input from academics, legal practitioners, judges, artists and representatives from the third sector, the Scottish project engages critically with a number of key Scots law decisions to show how, applying feminist perspectives and rewriting the judgment, the outcome or reasoning of the cases could have been different.

Speaking about the project, Vanessa Munro shares, ‘It’s a powerful medium that we can use to present a feminist argument. We could take these original judgments and we could write commentaries which criticise them from an academic perspective but by forcing the judgment writers to write as judges in those cases, you highlight really clearly the choices that the original judges made. They could have done x, y and z with the resources that were available within the constraints of the evidence, rules and the procedurals but they chose not to. It’s a very immediate and vivid way of highlighting discretion in operation. And in that sense, using the power of law to a different effect.'

The ambition of the project is to make a contribution to worldwide discussions about the power and potential of feminism(s) to critique and potentially shape the law and its application. At the same time, aiming to attend to the particularities of the Scottish social, political, and historical contexts, producing resources that will speak to Scottish and international audiences alike.

The creative works exhibited are responses to the rewritten Scottish judgments and showcases work by artists Jill Kennedy-McNeill, Rachel Donaldson, Sofia Nakou, Jo Spiller and Jay Whittaker. Jill Kennedy-McNeill has curated this exhibition and co-ordinates the creative strand of the Scottish Feminist Judgments Project.

The exhibition runs from September 10-14 2018 at the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood.

Follow the Scottish Feminist Judgments Project on Twitter @ScottishFemJP to keep up-to-date with the project and find out more about their up and coming exhibitions.

Image credit: Upcoming book cover designed by Rachel Donaldson