ABSTRACT
Since women’s rights activists first advocated that women serve as judges, to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement and replacement by a man, to President Obama’s nominations of Judge Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Dean Elena Kagan in 2010, many feminists and academics have argued that we need more women judges because they will decide cases differently from men—specifically, they will rule more favorably on women’s rights cases and bring a gender lens to all adjudication. In this chapter, I shall argue that the evidence shows that view to be largely misguided, reliant on dangerous assumptions about women’s essential difference and claims that are empirically untrue.
