Feminist judgments: interrogating Zimbabwean judgments using anti-essentialist feminist legal theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2004, the first feminist judgments project was launched by a group of Canadian lawyers and scholars. This group, calling themselves the Women's Court of Canada, published a series of six rewritten opinions of the Canadian Supreme Court interpreting the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms from a feminist perspective. This model of rewriting original court opinions from a feminist perspective sparked the feminist judgments movement and has been taken up by feminist lawyers and scholars across the globe; in England, Ireland, Australia, the United States, India, New Zealand, South Africa, and Mexico, rewriting significant cases on an array of topics including criminal law, family law, international law, and constitutional law. In each of these projects, feminist scholars and lawyers apply their chosen strands of feminist legal theory to already decided cases to show the practical utility of feminist legal theory to a set of existing facts and laws. Loosely following on this model of rewriting existing judgments from a feminist perspective, this thesis offers commentary on how three Zimbabwean appeal judgments, selected from a reading and review of some of the most prominent cases in the last 20 years, could have been decided differently from an anti-essentialist feminist perspective. The three cases cover the following topics: matrimonial property rights, child custody rights and abortion rights. This commentary is offered as part of the exercise by feminist scholars around the world to put feminist legal theory into practice and to discuss the difference these differently decided judgments would have on women in Zimbabwe, the affected parties in each of the selected cases, and the Zimbabwean society at large. Beginning with a discussion on the development of feminist legal theory in courts, mainly starting in the United States before trickling down to other parts of the world, the thesis focuses on how the three selected judgments, retaining the same facts and legal principles they have been previously decided on, would be altered or bolstered using an anti-essentialist feminist legal theory interpretation. This commentary is followed by a concluding section commenting on the value of feminist legal theory to the Zimbabwean judicial system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".