ABSTRACT
Writing a queer or feminist judgment, or indeed a judgment informed by some other set of alternative ethical principles, involves the writer in 'a kind of hybrid form of critique and law reform project'. Judicial rhetoric, narrative style and tone are important as techniques of persuasion, as means of establishing affective relations between judge and reader. They are matters to which the counter-judgment will pay attention. In approaching legal judgment-writing from a queer theory perspective it is necessary to confront the charge that such an endeavour, as an engagement with law, is distinctly unqueer. As Fineman et al note, queer legal theory is 'something of a paradox given the tension between "queer" and "legal"'. The danger that law will reproduce, and thereby entrench, the very problem to which queer theory is now offered as partial solution, or at least strategic intervention, is acknowledged.
