ABSTRACT
Feminist legal theorists are in a particular predicament. Much of early feminist thought about the law (especially that hailing from critical legal theory) was situated, in important ways, around establishing that American jurisprudence is a highly subjective project, rather than the set of universal norms and standards it is so often presumed to be (see, for example, Ackerman 1984; Dworkin 1977, 2000; Raz 1983, 1994; Sunstein 1994). This early work pointed to the ways in which a legal system premised upon a gendered (i.e. male) conception of the citizen, but widely considered universal, in practice leads to unequal treatment.
