Joanne Conaghan

Intersectionality and UK equality initiatives

Abstract This article considers the viability of intersectionality as an analytical and strategic tool within the context of recent UK equality initiatives, in particular the expansion of grounds upon which a discrimination claim can be based, the establishment of a new single equality body, the Commission of Equality and Human Rights (CEHR), and the anticipated streamlining of equality legislation. The article contends that while intersectionality has played an important role in widening the terms of the debate around equality law and discourse, it has limited long-term purchase in the battle to combat inequality. The article considers the ways in which the concept of intersectionality has been deployed and explores current UK equality developments with an intersectional dimension. The article concludes with an analysis of the limits of intersectionality as a path to equality through law.

Enhancing Civil Remedies for (Sexual) Harassment: s.3 of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997

This commentary explores the scope and content of the Protection from Harassment Act, recently introduced in the UK, focusing in particular on s.3 which creates a civil cause of action for harassment. The author considers the strategic possibilities for feminists concerned with enhancing remedies for sexual harassment as well as the drawbacks of the Act, particularly its capacity to be deployed in a wide range of contexts not all of which necessarily promote justice or enhance civil and political rights. The author concludes by emphasising the important role of the courts in defining and delineating the scope of the Act as well as exploring the possibility of continued development of the common law principle in Wilkinson v. Downton.

Equity rushes in where tort law fears to tread: The court of appeal decision in Burris v. Azadani

In the present state of the law, there is no tort of harassment. Nor in the light of later authority can the view be upheld that there is no tort of harassment.

Pregnancy, Equality and the European Court of Justice: Interrogating Gillespie:

The object of this paper is to highlight and scrutinise the continuing difficulties which characterise national and European judicial efforts to reconcile the apparently conflicting needs of the workplace and its pregnant workers. In particular, the prevailing dominant legal conceptualisation of pregnancy as an aspect of sexual equality generates an unsatisfactory indeterminacy and manipulability in relation to the determination and application of womens legal rights. This is well illustrated in the decision of the European Court of Justice in Gillespie v Northern Ireland Health and Social Services Board [1996]. Both the decision itself and its legal aftermath suggest that the difficulties traditionally associated with the application of the equality principle to the condition of pregnancy are far from resolved.

Celebrating Duncan Kennedy's Scholarship: A ‘Crit’ Analysis of DSD & NBV v Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis

Abstract This article uses Duncan Kennedys analysis of legal reasoning to trace the discursive dynamics in DSD & NBV v Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, a recent English case on rape and human rights law. Against a doctrinal background historically unreceptive to imposing civil liability on the police in relation to their role in investigating and suppressing crime, the article explores how the judge in DSD & NBV managed to reach a verdict favourable to the complainant rape victims. In particular, drawing on Kennedys work on adjudication and legal reasoning, the article shows how the judge, Green J, ‘worked’ the legal materials, making a series of strategic moves which served to dislocate and reconstitute the core and penumbra of the relevant legal norms. As a result, a decision which might initially resemble judicial activism became, in the course of the judgment, an apparently inevitable outcome of the legal normative framework.