ABSTRACT
One of the most innovative and influential recent developments in constitutional law is known as feminist legal theory. Informed by multidisciplinary feminist scholarship and inspired by new methods such as consciousness raising and speaking out, feminist legal theory has addressed a wide variety of issues concerning women and the law. Exploding the myth of the genderless legal subject, feminist legal theorists have shown how this apparently neutral construct has led to the neglect, in law and in legal theory, of women's needs and perspectives. The nineteenth-century American legal system recognized only three races: "white", "Negro", and "Indian". Surprisingly, traditional legal techniques actually provide fruitful starting points for avoiding passivity. Legal analogy is typically inseparable from precedential reasoning, telescoping the creative potential of a search for surprising similarities into a narrow focus on prior rulings that could "control" the instant case.
