Welcome to feminists@law

Abstract

feminists@law is a new, peer-reviewed, open access journal published online and hosted by the University of Kent. The journal is aimed at promoting critical, interdisciplinary and theoretically engaged scholarship that extends feminist debates and analyses relating to law and justice (broadly conceived). It has a particular interest in critical and theoretical approaches and perspectives that draw upon postcolonial, transnational and poststructuralist work. The journal publishes material in a range of print and multimedia formats and in English and other languages. The journal is committed to an international perspective, to the promotion of feminist work in all areas of law and justice, and to making that work widely available through open access publishing.

Publishing the journal online allows us to provide open access to its contents to feminist researchers anywhere in the world where access to the internet is possible. It enables us to move beyond subscription barriers, as well as to reduce the time interval from submission to publication by adopting a rolling content format. This means that, within our two annual issues, articles will be posted as soon as they are ready for publication. It also enables us to interact with, and encourage interaction between, our readers. In addition, our peer-review process ensures the journal will produce high quality publications. Via the medium of open access, we aim to promote a culture of greater access to research output while simultaneously participating in current debates about alternative forms of academic publishing.

In the first issue of the journal, Carys J. Craig, Joseph F. Turcotte and Rosemary J. Coombe make a feminist contribution to this debate with their article ‘What’s Feminist About Open Access? A Relational Approach to Copyright in the Academy.  In addition, we mark the 20^th anniversary of the publication of Drucilla Cornell’s landmark postmodern feminist legal text, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law with a reflection on the book by Cornell herself, together with comments by two feminist legal scholars who have been notably influenced by Cornell’s work, Karin van Marle and Toni Johnson. 

We also invited a group of feminist legal scholars from across the globe to provide their perspectives on current issues and future directions for feminist legal studies. The resulting short pieces provide a richly diverse collection of reflections, ideas, arguments and manifestos. On a similar theme, in our ‘Multimedia’ section, we reproduce four presentations from a roundtable on the ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ of feminist legal scholarship, recorded at a 2010 conference in London, UK.

We hope you will find much that is stimulating and thought-provoking in our first issue. Please post comments on the articles, tell your colleagues about the journal, and send us your work for consideration for future issues.     

The journal has an online submission system. To submit a manuscript please visit the About page to see our guidelines for authors.

Rosemary Hunter

Stacy Douglas

Yvonne Rigby

Madhu Mukherjee

Gauri Nanayakkara

Donatella Alessandrini

feministsatlaw@kent.ac.uk

8 May 2011