The African Feminist Judgment Project

The African Feminist Judgment Project is coordinated by Dr Sibongile Ndashe (Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa, Johannesburg), Dr Sharifah Sekalala (Warwick Law School) and Professor Ambreena Manji (Cardiff Law School). It builds on similar projects (Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and USA) to draft and disseminate alternative judgments for important African landmark cases on a range of legal issues.

At the heart of the project are the following questions — what might we mean by a landmark case in the African context? What is feminist judicial practice in Africa and what might we want it to be? How might alternative feminist judgments contribute to African jurisprudence, legal practice and judicial decision-making? What are the specific Constitutional and historical contexts within which the project must be understood?

The practice of academic rewriting of judgment is not new, nor is the practice of feminist rewriting of judgments. The African Feminist Judgment Project draws from sister projects around the world in which feminist academics, lawyers and activists have written alternative feminist judgments in leading cases.

Can we provide better judgments or write them differently if we do so from an explicitly feminist standpoint? Our project explores the potential of the device of the ‘shadow feminist judgment’.

We invite contributions from interested collaborators in two categories:

Judgments: If you would like to propose to write a judgment (6000-8000 words), please submit a proposal of 300-500 words. Please indicate the name of the case you wish to write on, and briefly explaining how the case would benefit from a feminist analysis.
Commentaries: If you would like to propose to write a commentary (3000-4000 words), please indicate in a 200-300 word proposal the case selected and explain why you think it merits a feminist analysis.

The judgments may be written by a single individual or jointly by two or more authors.