This event features a discussion with Dr Meghan Campbell (Reader in International Human Rights Law and Deputy Director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub).
Meghan Campbell’s most recent book, 'Hanging in the Balance: The Function of Justification in Achieving Women's Equality' (Hart Publishing, 2025), examines the other half of the story of women’s equality: the function of justification. Her book fills a gap because the 'relationship between women’s enjoyment of equality and justification is overlooked, understudied and undertheorised'. Meghan offers not only a rich doctrinal and comparative case-law analysis of the apex courts in South Africa, India, the US, the UK, and Canada on the relationship between women’s equality and justification but also develops stimulating normative arguments. Not just the foundational normative pillar on which Meghan’s analysis rests is intriguing, 'that women’s right to equality is momentous, transformative and of the utmost significance'. Even more importantly, she convincingly analyses that unravelling the relationship between equality and justification is of immense value in understanding the role of law in achieving women’s equality.
The event will start with a Q&A, asking Meghan about her motivations, feminist methods, and the intellectual journey that led to the publication of this book. Discussants will then engage in depth with two chapters of Meghan’s book, Chapter 2 on Diluting Equality Through Justification and Chapter 6 on Enriching Justification.
Speaker:
Meghan Campbell is a Reader in International Human Rights Law and Deputy Director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub. Her research focuses on overlooked aspects of women's equality. Her first monograph, Women, Poverty, Equality examined women's poverty in the CEDAW and her second, supported with a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, Hanging in the Balance, looks at the relationship between women's equality and limits on rights. She is the editor of two collection, Human Rights and Equality in Education and Feminist Frontiers in Climate Justice. She has acted as an independent expert advisor to the Council of Europe on comprehensive sexuality education and the UK Cabinet Office on equal pay.
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