University of New Brunswick

Changing the Core Courses
Generally these courses were taught by women professors (usually untenured, often on contract) but there were exceptions; for example, at the school where I now teach (the University of New Brunswick), the first women's law course was introduced at the end of the eighties by a male professor who taught it as overload in order to get it on the curriculum. In contrast, the "core" courses (meaning the courses that matter in the law school tradition) were taught by men; the resistance to changing them was one reason for the development of separate women's courses.

These early courses looked fairly traditional in format. As one teacher, who was involved as a law student in creating one of these courses, explained, ''as law students who had fully absorbed legal teaching methods, we proceeded to create a course, not surprisingly, that focused in a typically uncreative, detached, and structured way chiefly on laws, cases, and legal doctrines pertinent to women. The result was insufficient contact with real visceral issues and feelings and an over structured intellectualism" (4).

Now there are courses in women and law which specialize in different areas, such as women and violence, reproductive issues or feminist legal theories, and they are as much concerned with process as content. Reading will contain material from variety of sources, not restricted to law (5). One of the characteristics of feminist scholarship is to break down the compartments of disciplines and categories of law. It is almost impossible to talk about feminist legal theory without calling on feminist analyses in the areas of politics, philosophy, psychology or sociology, for example.

Having only "women and law" courses, we might be concerned that they could be used to marginalize women's experiences, to treat women as "the other" and feminist concerns as "special interests," outside what really matters. As it is, the majority of students (men in particular) do not take these (and comparable) courses. They will leave law school without systemic exposure to most women's experiences (or to the experiences of women and men excluded for other reasons) or any understanding that these concerns are an important thing to know about law.

In quite recent years, however, there has been a renewed attempt to transform the core courses with the goal of integrating women's experiences into the very definition of law. This process has barely started and may in some cases take place more outside the classroom (in scholarly discourse) than in it. Some courses lend themselves easily to this process because they directly affect women's lives in obvious ways; this is true of torts and criminal law. Other areas so deeply incorporate the patriarchal assumptions of law or are so closely associated with male areas of interest that it is more difficult to change them. Commercial law is one example.

Yet there have been significant incursions into the underlying assumptions of those courses, and not only on the basis of gender. As Joseph Singer asks in his article on "Re-Reading Property": "How can issues about race, gender, disability, and the like be integrated into the law school curriculum so that we are not merely reversing what is at the margin and what is at the centre but preconceiving the system as a whole?" (6). This process does not displace the "women and law" courses because they are necessary to "educate in a feminist perspective, ...encourage original scholarship on women's law, ... provide a base for organizing other projects, and ... support female students in a male world" (7). These purposes are less likely to be served by the regular curriculum than by separate courses, although they are often met by mainstream courses taught by feminists (of which there are not nearly enough).

Another interesting development in law schools is the so-called "bridge week." The University of Toronto has now held five or six feminist bridge weeks, and we at the University of New Brunswick held a similar (well-received) event for the Faculty of Law in January of 1993 and will be holding it again next year. During the specified week, the regular first year courses are suspended and workshops, lectures and discussions are held on gender or feminist concerns in various areas of the law, perhaps around a specific subject such as reproduction or violence. Similarly, female students are taking what they have learned and communicating it to their counterparts in practice. Female students at the University of New Brunswick organized a "Networking Conference" for female practitioners in early 1992. The response was so great they had to turn away potential registrants.