Exploiting the Limits of Law: Swedish Feminism and the Challenge to Pessimism

This book deepens our understanding of Swedish legal feminism by contextualising it within the paradigms and epistemologies of Nordic legal scholarship. The authors' thoroughgoing excavation of the field and their sustained, feminist challenge to the boundaries and limits of accepted legal knowledge, are both thought-provoking and inspiring.Professor Rosemary Hunter, University of Kent, UK and Chair, Working Group on Gender and Law, Research Committee on Sociology of LawThis joint Swedish-Australian edited book is useful and inspiring for those generally interested in contemporary understandings of law in a changing world. It takes advantage of the fact that this world is legally plural. The challenges to Nordic understandings of law and to feminist pessimism offered in the diverse theoretical and practice oriented contributions are both timely and uplifting.'Professor Hanne Petersen, University of Copenhagen, DenmarkThis book represents a challenge to both Swedish dogmatism and feminist pessimism and, more generally, to the concept of the limits of law: it includes essays which consider the issue of law's limits in a purely theoretical way, as well as essays which investigate the changing legal and policy environments in a more practical setting.Moving beyond the question of whether an area of scholarly investigation can truly be characterized as 'legal', Exploiting the Limits of Law combats the often unhelpful constraints of law's subject-matter and formal processes. Through a process of reflection on the limits of law and repeated efforts to redraw them, this book challenges the general sense of pessimism among feminists and others about the usefulness of law as an instrument of change.The work combines theoretical analysis of the law's boundaries with investigation of the practical settings for changing legal and policy environments. Both the empirical focus of this volume, and its underlying theoretical concern with the limits of the law and its gender implications, render it of interest to legal scholars throughout the world, whether of EU law, feminism, social policy or philosophy. Contents: Preface;Introduction: reflecting the epistemology of law - exploiting boundaries, Åsa Gunnarsson, Eva-Marie Svensson and Margaret Davies; Boundary-work in legal scholarship, Eva-Marie Svensson; An apparent boundary between law and politics, Åsa Persson; Legal texts as discourses, Johanna Niemi-Kiesiläinen, Päivi Honkatukia and Minna Ruuskanen; Beyond constructed boundaries in criminal law discourse, Monica Burman; Children crossing borders - on child perspectives in the Swedish Aliens Act and the limits of law, Eva Nilsson; Challenging the heteronormativity of law, Görel Granström ; social insurance law - the core of Swedish welfare law, Ruth Mannelqvist; Challenging one fundamental norm in labour law - the exception of the employer's family and home, Catharina Calleman; Exclusion of solo mothers in the welfare state, Lena Wennberg; Gender equality and the diversity of rights and obligations in Swedish social citizenship, Åsa Gunnarsson; Notes towards an optimistic feminism: a long view, Margaret Davies; Index.About the Author: Åsa Gunnarsson is Professor of Tax Law at Umeå University, Sweden. Eva-Maria Svensson is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, and Professor of Law at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Margaret Davies is Professor of Law at Flinders University, Australia.