everything.study
WGS 420

Law and Feminism in Canada

3 units

Winter 2026

Topics

  • Critically analyze law and feminist legal strategies from multiple theoretical, political, and social perspectives
  • Engage thoughtfully and knowledgeably in debates about law, power, and justice
  • Interpret and analyze primary legal materials, including judicial decisions and factums, and situate them within broader feminist and socio-legal debates
  • Synthesize insights from legal texts and feminist scholarship to assess the promises and limits of legal intervention
  • Develop well-supported written arguments that draw on evidence, including primary legal sources
Winter 2024

Topics

  • White Feminism Patriarchy Protection
  • and the Legal System

Readings

  • Felker-Matin, Gretchen. (2022). Manhunt. New York: Tor Nightfire, 296 pages
    unspecified
  • Lamble, Sarah. (2009). Unknowable bodies, unthinkable sexualities: Lesbian and transgender legal invisibility in the Toronto Women’s Bathhouse raid. Social & Legal Studies, 18(1), 111-130
    unspecified
  • Hooper, Tom. (2019). Queering ‘69: The Klippert v. The recriminalization of Queen [1967] homosexuality in Canada.The Canadian Historical Review, February LGBTQIA+ Queerness 100(2), 257-273. Halpern v. Week 8 28th and Canadian Law Canada [2002]
    unspecified
  • Seitz, David K. (2020). ‘Missing’ racialized violence, disturbing continuities: Counteropographies of violence in the Bruce McArthur murders. Journal of Canadian Studies, 54(2), 459-482
    unspecified
  • Backhouse, Constance. (1996). The white women’s labor laws: Anti-Chinese racism in early twentieth century Canada. Law and History Review, 14(2), 315-368
    unspecified
  • Brannigan, Augustine, and
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  • Goldenberg, Sheldon. (1986). Social science versus jurisprudence in Wagner: the study of pornography, harm, and the law of obscenity in Canada. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 11(4), 419-431
    unspecified
  • Cameron, Jamie. (1992). Abstract principle v. contextual conceptions of harm: A comment on R. v. Butler. McGill Law Journal, 37,
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  • Cossman, Brenda. (2018). Gender identity, gender pronouns, and freedom of expression: Bill C-16 and the traction of specious legal claims. The University of Toronto Law Journal, 68(1), 37-79
    unspecified
  • Smart, Carol. (1989). “The Quest for a Feminist Jurisprudence,” in Feminism and the Power of Law . London: Routledge, pp. 66-89
    unspecified
Sources