ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the ways in which feminist methods can be deployed in empirical socio-legal research, and highlights its utility in the context of studying the parameters, content and dilemmas of lay decision-making. It begins with a hefty disclaimer: there is no such thing as a unified feminist jurisprudence, nor a universally shared feminist legal method. Common to much feminist work is an insistence that social and legal problems cannot be understood by techniques that require abstraction, not only because such abstraction obscures important detail about the concrete particularities of people's daily lives, but because it can disguise the operation of problematic power relations. Feminists have engaged with the 'legal' in a variety of contexts and spaces, but lay decision-making provides a particularly apt terrain for feminist analyses that emphasise the relevance of concrete context, the discretionary nature of legal outcomes, and the ways in which 'non-legal' factors influence the application and impact of legal rules.
