Feminist approaches to legal argumentation

This chapter examines feminist insights about, and approaches to, argumentation, including legal argumentation. First, the chapter showcases existing feminist work on argumentation, drawing attention to the difference a feminist sensibility can provide. Secondly, it explores how feminist insights from this work might be applied to the special case of legal argumentation. Finally, it presents the authors’ views on how feminist approaches are best deployed to construct ethical modes of argumentation in legal settings. A feminist theory and practice of legal argumentation can highlight and ameliorate social injustices in law by challenging orthodox legal argumentation techniques; by centring alternative epistemologies; and by cultivating ethical methods of constructing legal arguments that consider these alternative ways of knowing, and the accounts they produce. Ethical argumentation must be motive-transparent, and should pay due regard to the aims of laws intended to promote social justice and protect marginalised ‘others’, to avoid being manipulative and/or grounded in prejudicial social norms.