ABSTRACT
Feminist socio-legal theory has been developing in exciting and controversial ways over the last twenty years. The developments that lawyers can see almost certainly parallel developments in feminist thought elsewhere. But feminist socio-legal theory faces another difficulty in as much as the tension that has always existed around the issue of whether to try to 'use' law for 'women' has taken on a new shape. Law is undoubtedly sexist at one level. The problem with these approaches is that the meaning of differentiation tends to become collapsed into the meaning of discrimination and the fulcrum of the argument rests with the idea that women are treated badly in law because they are differentiated from men. The idea that 'law is male' arises from the empirical observation that most lawmakers and lawyers are indeed male. Woman has always been both kind and killing, active and aggressive, virtuous and evil, cherishable and abominable, not either virtuous or evil.
