Revising the Canon: Feminist Help in Teaching Procedure, Introduction to a Symposium

Abstract

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected profession, I thought, opening the door. VIRGINIA WOOLF, A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN 41 (1929). In the first decades after women gained access to studying and teaching law, the understanding of "women's issues" was that these issues arose under discrete topics of inquiry—such as family law and sex discrimination. Over the past decade, however, feminists within the legal academy have thought about the relationship between feminism and the first year law school curriculum. In 1992, I was the chair of the Section on Procedure of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), and in conjunction with the Section on Women in Legal Education, we hosted a program, Feminist Procedure, at the annual meeting of the AALS. This symposium is the result. All of us who participated joined in thinking about the relationships and cross-currents between feminism and procedure. As is plain from the other essays from the symposium published here, there is a wealth of material from which to draw.