This project has received funding via the EUI Widening Programme call 2025. The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
The research question animating this project is whether a FJP-CEE project can offer effective tools to respond to the current gendered backsliding in the region. The working hypothesis is that reimagining judging through a feminist lens indeed offers both normative and practical answers on two fronts: doctrinal and pedagogical. This research project is the first comparative feminist judgments project bringing together contributors from seven civil law jurisdictions (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Serbia) and adopting an intersectional understanding of feminism that covers Roma, LGBTQI+, and migrants’ rights.
Feminist judgments projects originated in common law countries as academic exercises in critical legal imagination. Their aim is to move beyond critique – of the gendered legal subject, the patriarchal legal order, and judicial bias – and illustrate how applied feminist methods can transform judging. They rewrite key judgments in a given jurisdiction from a feminist perspective. The academic would-be-judge typically works under the same constraints as a real judge, including the existing legal framework, available precedents, and established interpretive canons. They nevertheless reach different, gender-sensitive outcomes and judging styles. For example, they employ the feminist method of narration and empathetic writing, centre the victim, or adopt a performative attitude to the law. This scholarship, however, remains dominated by common law jurisdictions. Within these, courts typically are more discursive than in their civil law counterpart; judges are more likely to write individual opinions, and there may be more leeway to create rather than simply apply the law.
At the same time, the literature on feminist approaches to law in Central and Eastern Europe has grown significantly. There are now in depth studies of the post-socialist institutional legacies that continue to influence the entire legal system, of the gendered exclusion that laws in these countries continue to enable of the role and shortcomings of European institutions in addressing the gender discrimination in the region, and of the centrality of gender in the illiberal political projects some countries in the region have adopted. Contributors to this project have been central in building this body of knowledge. However, there is often a disconnect between these critical interventions and the more practical tools legal practitioners and activists in the region need in order to fight for gender equality
The project will produce doctrinal innovations that can inform gender equality activism and litigation in the region. FJP-CEE will create bridges with national and European judges, legal practitioners, civil society actors, and members of the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls in the search for effective solutions to the gendered backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe.
For more information about the EUI Widening Europe Programme, please visit the official webpage.