First and second year researchers as well as LLM researchers can gain 3 credits by attending one of the researcher-taught seminars in each academic year; they can also register for and attend further researcher-taught seminars without gaining credits. 

Feminist approaches to law have recently experienced a revival in academic debates and, as a result, are increasingly adopted as a research framework. The questions that emerge with it include: how does gender shape law, legal thought, and practice? Conversely, how does law shape our understanding of gender? On a more theoretical level, how is feminism applied as a legal framework? Does it dialogue with critical legal studies? Those questions concern a wide range of topics across all areas of law, being thus of interest for the projects of many researchers at the Institute.

This seminar is designed to provide an overview of different conceptions of feminist approaches to law. Participants will gain an understanding of the key critical concepts and contributions by feminist scholars from different regions of the world. We will introduce the researchers to the role of feminist approaches in both the private and the public spheres of the law while at the same time problematising such traditional distinction. The classes will discuss the theoretical foundations of feminism and of the feminist approach to law, including its postcolonial, queer, and posthumanist facets, and its applications to public, private, and international law.

The seminar will include theoretical elements, as well as comparative law analysis of the role of feminism in European and non-European legal contexts. Further, we will devote some space to collectively think about how the content of the class relates to current issues. The seminar will be dynamic and interactive in its form: we will encourage participants to consider how their own research questions can dialogue with and potentially benefit from feminist approaches to law. At the end of the seminar, researchers will be able to look at both traditional legal issues and current events from a different and mostly neglected angle and will have acquired some essential tools to apply a feminist analysis to their own research projects.

First, Second & Third Term: registration from 25 to 28 September