Ulrike Schultz

Editorial: Gender and judging

Does gender matter in judging? And if so, in what way? Who are the women judges? How did they get into office? How do they organise and live their lives? What are their professional careers? What constitutes a good judge? And finally: do women judge differently from men (or even better)? These are the questions which a Collaborative Research Network (CRN) of the Law and Society Association (LSA) on ‘Gender and Judging’ has put on its agenda. Work started in 2006 at the LSA Conference in Baltimore, and has since been continued vigorously at a number of major subsequent events: a conference for women lawyers in Latin America organised by Beatriz Kohen in Buenos Aires in April 2007; the international socio-legal conference in Berlin in July in 2008 organised jointly by the LSA, the Research Committee on Sociology of Law (RCSL) and national socio-legal organisations (where five panels presented a total of 18 papers); the LSA conference in Montreal in May 2008; the meeting of the Working Group for the Comparative Study of Legal Professions in Berder, France, in June 2008; and, most recently, the RCSL Conference in Milano in July 2008. The CRN’s future plans include a special workshop on gender and judging, to be held at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati, Spain, in June 2009. In short, ‘Gender and Judging’ has emerged as an issue of considerable and lasting interest to socio-legal scholars. The ‘Gender and Judging’ project, a truly international venture with contributors from around the world, builds on work of the Women and Gender in the Legal Profession Group (a sub-group of the RCSL Working Group on Legal Professions). This Group was established in 1994 and can, by now, point to a range of publications, most prominently the collection Women in the World Legal Professions and a special issue of this journal. In addition, many articles in books and journals have been inspired by the work of the group.

De jure und de facto: Professorinnen in der Rechtswissenschaft: Geschlecht und Wissenschaftskarriere im Recht

Nutzungsbedingungen: Dieser Text wird unter einer CC BY-SA Lizenz (NamensnennungWeitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen) zur Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu den CC-Lizenzen finden Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.de Terms of use: This document is made available under a CC BY-SA Licence (Attribution-ShareAlike). For more Information see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0

Biographie und Recht

Biographie und Recht stehen in einem komplexen Verhaltnis zueinander. Ihre Beziehung ist durch eine kontinuierliche wechselseitige Durchdringung gekennzeichnet. Das Recht knupft an Biographien an und kann extremste Auswirkungen auf sie haben. Biographien beeinflussen aber auch das Recht und die Rechtsanwendung. Der Beitrag nimmt dieses Verhaltnis in den Blick.

Gender and judicial education

Judicial education has greatly expanded in common law countries in the past 25 years. More recently it has become a core component in judicial reform programmes in developing countries with gender attentiveness as an element required by donor agencies. In civil law jurisdictions like France, judges’ schools have long played a role in the formation of the career judiciary with a focus on entry to the judicial profession and in-service education. In Germany judges get an intensive in-service education at judicial academies. Gender questions, however, tend to be neglected in the curricula. These judicial education activities have generated a significant body of material and experience which it is timely to review and disseminate. Questions such as the following require answers. What is the current state of affairs? How is judicial education implemented in developed and developing countries all around the world? Who are the educators? Who is being educated? What are the theories of gender and equality underlying and informing these programmes? How is judicial education on gender regarded by judges? How effective are these programmes? The contributions in this special issue deal with these questions. They provide a multiplicity of perspectives. Six countries are represented; of these four are civil law countries (Germany, Argentina, Japan, and Bosnia and Herzegovina) and two are common law countries (Canada and Uganda), although the principles which have traditionally characterized civil and common law countries are blurring. The education and recruitment for the judiciary differ among civil law countries. Balkan countries have adopted principles of American procedural law and in recent years Japan as well as China have tended to look more towards US American law and legal education rather than to continental Europe. Some of the countries, such as Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Argentina have a high percentage of women judges, at least at the lower echelons of the court systems, while in common law countries and Japan the share of women judges remains comparatively low. The importance of dealing with judicial education and the inclusion of gender aspects became evident when Gisela Shaw and Ulrike Schultz put together the INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION, 2014 Vol. 21, No. 3, 255–257, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09695958.2015.1066944

Raising gender awareness of judges – elements for judicial education in Germany

Abstract In Germany no need for gender education in the judiciary is felt. Judges perceive themselves as objective and neutral. Any attempt to deal with gender questions in judicial education tends to be met with hostility. Gender education is however necessary. The question is whether to offer special training or to integrate gender into any kind of judicial education. Careful approaches are necessary. In the following an overview of the situation in Germany is given, and examples of elements used in judicial education are presented.