On the cover, Little Girl from Harlem © Soraida Martinez

Soraida Martinez is a New York-born artist of Puerto Rican heritage who, since 1992, has been known for creating the art of “Verdadism,” a contemporary form of the style of hardedge painting where every painting is accompanied by a written social commentary. Soraida's paintings depict her life experiences for the purpose of promoting peace, tolerance, and understanding. Soraida's Verdadism art can be seen at soraida.com.

What would United States Supreme Court opinions look like if key decisions on gender issues were written with a feminist perspective? To begin to answer this question, we brought together a group of scholars and lawyers to rewrite, using feminist reasoning, the most significant U.S. Supreme Court cases on gender from the 1800s to the present day. While feminist legal theory has developed and even thrived within universities, and feminist activists and lawyers are responsible for major changes in the law, feminist reasoning has had a less clear impact on judicial decision making. Doctrines of stare decisis and judicial language of neutrality can operate to obscure structural bias in the law, making it difficult to see what feminism could bring to judicial reasoning.

The twenty-five opinions in this volume demonstrate that judges with feminist viewpoints could have changed the course of the law. The rewritten decisions show that previously accepted judicial outcomes were not necessary or inevitable and demonstrate that feminist reasoning increases the judicial capacity for justice, not only for women but for many other oppressed groups. The remarkable differences evident in the rewritten opinions also open a path for a long overdue discussion of the real impact that judicial diversity has on law and of the influence that perspective has in judging.

How would U.S. Supreme Court opinions change if the justices used feminist methods and perspectives when deciding cases? That is the central question that we sought to answer by bringing together a group of scholars and lawyers to carry out this project. To answer it, they would use feminist theories to rewrite the most significant gender justice cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court from the passage of the final Civil Rights Amendment in 1870 to the summer of 2015.

As an initial matter, we provided no guidance to our contributors on what we meant by “feminism.” We wanted our authors to be free to bring their own vision of feminism to the project. Yet it would be disingenuous to suggest that we ourselves do not have a particular perspective on what “feminism,” “feminist reasoning,” or “feminist methods” are. Indeed, without such a perspective, we would not have undertaken the project.

We recognize “feminism” as a movement and perspective historically grounded in politics, and one that motivates social, legal, and other battles for women's equality. We also understand it as a movement and mode of inquiry that has grown to endorse justice for all people, particularly those historically oppressed or marginalized by or through law. We believe that “feminism” is not the province of women only, and we acknowledge and celebrate the multiple, fluid identities contained in the category “woman.” Within this broad view, we acknowledge that feminists can disagree (and still be feminist) and that there are no unitary feminist methods or reasoning processes. So when we refer to feminist methods or feminist reasoning processes, we mean “methods” and “reasoning processes” plural, all the while acknowledging that there is a rich and diverse body of scholarship that has flourished under the over-arching label “feminist legal theory.” Indeed, those are the methods and reasoning processes examined and employed by many of the authors represented in the book.

Nevertheless, in shaping the project from its early stages through the finished pages, we as editors have been motivated by a broad and expansive view of what “feminism” is. This capacious understanding undoubtedly shaped the project in many ways, including our choice of cases, our selection of authors, and our edits, even if we did not define feminism for our contributors.