The Scarlet Letter | Season 2 | Episode 2 | Rosemary Hunter

Join us in this episode for a chat that spans decades, disciplines, and feminist breakthroughs. From her party-debate awakening in the '80s to becoming a trailblazer in feminist legal scholarship and judgment rewriting, Professor Rosemary Hunter reflects on the moments and mentors that shaped her career. She shares what it’s like rewriting judgments through a feminist lens, why real-life research matters, and how we could reimagine the university if we started from scratch.

First published 2017.

The Scarlet Letter podcast is produced by the Feminist Legal Studies Group. This podcast features interviews with feminists connected to the law, discussing their life, work, and feminist perspectives. It's perfect for anyone passionate about feminist legal scholarship.

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Transcript | The Scarlet Letter | Season 2 |Episode 2 | Rosemary Hunter

Becky Batagol: [00:00:00] Good afternoon. I'm Becky Batagol. Welcome to this episode of The Scarlet Letter, the podcast of the Feminist Legal Studies Group at Monash University's Faculty of Law. Today, we're fortunate to be joined by Rosemary Hunter, Professor of Law and Sociolegal Studies at Queen Mary University of London. As you'll hear when she speaks, Rosemary began her academic career in Australia.

In Australia, she worked at the University of Melbourne, the Justice Research Centre, which is in Sydney, and Griffith University, before moving back to the UK in 2006. In the UK, she was a Professor of Law at the University of Kent, before moving to Queen Mary University in 2014. She's been Chair of the International Working Group on Gender and Law, Chair of the Socio Legal Studies Association, which finished this year, and Academic [00:01:00] Editor of Feminist Legal Studies.

She's currently the Founding Editor of the AAPI online open access journal, Feminists at Law, and the academic member of the Family Justice Council for England and Wales. Rosamund's most recent book is Mapping Paths to Family Justice, Resolving Disputes in Neoliberal Times, published this year with Anne Barlow, Janet Smithson and Janet Ewing Ewing, thank you.

She's also co edited Feminist Judgements and Theory to Practice, Australian Feminist Judgements, and the book, and the feminist judgments of New Zealand that was just launched in spectacular fashion at Morea Otako near Dunedin last week. Rosemary is visiting our feminist legal studies group here at Monash to give us the latest updates.

To give a seminar on real life feminist judging, which we've podcast in two parts. Rosemary's also been helping us to brainstorm our next big project for our group, which is a feminist legislation project. I personally owe a lot to Rosemary, who won the grant for the project on community based family law mediation that I worked on for my [00:02:00] PhD, and who trained me to be a quality empirical scholar.

So Rosemary, welcome. Perhaps you could start by telling us about how you were introduced to feminism.

Rosemary Hunter: Thanks Becky, and it's great to be talking to you, and it's a great first question. I think probably I was a very typical young woman. In the early 1980s, where I had come out of a girls school, and done various things, and I was at university, and I thought I knew everything, and I certainly didn't need any help from feminism.

And I think I probably also held fairly stereotypical views about what feminists were. Those stereotypes are still going around. And, that they were rather unattractive people who hated men and had a very limited view of the world. And I remember having an argument with someone at a party about, These issues, and she was saying that I should be more interested in feminism, and I said I didn't see any need to be.

[00:03:00] And she challenged me to go and read some feminist literature. So I did. And when I started reading, these light bulbs started going off. So it was like a really transformative moment. And of course this was, early on when, those sort of foundational feminist texts like Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, and Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Kate Millett, and and all of those sort of early feminist work was, basically that was it, and that was what I was reading, and I just found it so useful, and so familiar, I mean it really spoke to my experience and so suddenly you could see that all of the sexism, and all of the being patronised, and all of the feeling.

Under pressure to appear in a certain way, and all of the, notions about what women can do, the double standards, all of that kind of stuff, suddenly I suddenly realized that it wasn't just about me, that it, this was a structural issue, that it [00:04:00] was a, that society was gendered etc, so I guess I developed a feminist consciousness and when you develop a feminist consciousness, you just see the world in a different way.

From then on and understand it an awful lot better and that's why I mean it really spoke to me And that's why I became a feminist

Becky Batagol: And did it change what you studied at university what you did at

Rosemary Hunter: university? It certainly changed the way I saw my studies at university So I suddenly started seeing everything through a gender lens But also wanting to particularly explore feminist aspects of everything that I was doing.

So When I was doing history subjects. I wanted to know about, the feminist work that had been done in that area and the gender issues that I was looking at. And similarly with, I was studying history and English literature, so I started searching out feminist material on, Shakespeare, for example, and found that really interesting and started looking at things in, from that perspective.

And then in law also, there was very little feminist work But I [00:05:00] certainly started to consume it voraciously. And I suppose I was in the lucky position at that stage when you could just about read all of the feminist legal scholarship that had been written. You could work your way through it.

And it was also the time when, you know, Jenny Morgan and Reg Graycar were working on their, groundbreaking book The Hidden Gender of Law, and so having conversations, I was at Melbourne University with Jenny Morgan, so having conversations with her about what was going on and just learning everything and absorbing everything, with with their help was really fantastic.

But yeah, it certainly just changed the way that I saw my studies. And in fact, when I went on to do postgraduate studies, I had quite a gap between. When I finished my undergraduate degree and I started teaching and then I went off and did a postgraduate degree at Stanford. And that was a, it was a JSD, so I was doing coursework and a thesis.

And with the coursework, I actually went back and redid some of the subjects that I'd done as an undergraduate, but did them as a feminist. So I had never, when I first studied family law, It was just blackmail [00:06:00] law and it never occurred to me to think in any other way about it. And then, how on earth can you think about family law without thinking about it in a gendered sense?

Family law is about gender. And so when I I took a course in family law simply for the opportunity to think about it from, in a structured, systematic way from a feminist perspective. And did you ever practice or did you decide you were going to be an academic? I didn't practice, yes. I the one thing that I knew when I came out of law school was that I didn't want to practice.

I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I knew that I was interested in research, but I wasn't interested in practicing. And so I went into, I started doing research for, teachers that I had and so on, and then I fell into teaching. Now, ironically enough, I then ended up doing a lot of research about practice and research about family lawyers and judging and so on.

I think, maybe I could practice now, but at the time it wasn't something that I was at all interested in. So I was interested in law intellectually rather than [00:07:00] practically at that point.

Becky Batagol: And Rosemary, your academic work is across the fields of family law, courts and judicial practice, family violence, civil justice and dispute resolution.

In what ways has your feminism influenced your work?

Rosemary Hunter: I think it's really directed the things that I have decided to work on. So it's been, I've followed my interests and my interests have been about feminism and the way law affects women. And that has led in those various directions.

And when I actually started out doing, focusing on discrimination law and employment law, women's employment. And at the point when I came to, and I also taught torts and history and philosophy of law. But at the point when I came to do, go off and do my doctoral study, I was thinking about what I wanted to study.

And I thought I will use this opportunity to. branch out into something that I haven't done before because I've got the chance to do so through a [00:08:00] sustained study. I'd done all this work around, employment in the workplace, so I thought I'll do stuff on the home and the family. So I'd done the public and now I would do the private, as it were.

And I formulated a topic around, around violence really, and about violence against women. And I was interested in thinking about The feminist critique of criminal law, which was about the way in which the law silenced women particularly women as victims, but also, women as perpetrators in terms of women who killed their abusers and so on.

And thinking about whether that same argument worked in civil justice contexts, where, and particularly in areas that have been specifically set up to deal with the harms that women experience, such as sexual harassment. Domestic violence protection orders and family law and so that's, I basically had to learn family law properly and and all the stuff around violence and so on in order to do that, and that's when I started.

[00:09:00] Working in that area. So I suppose the thing that spanned both of those areas was always an interest in access to justice. And so when I was doing discrimination law, I was concerned not just with the black letter law, but also with how people mobilized that law and how they got access to it and could make it work for them.

And similarly with the sort of violence and family law, it's a lot about it. How are you being represented and how do you access the law? So even if there's systems set up to get intervention orders, how do you do that? And so on. And that's when I became interested in also in the dispute resolution side of things.

And and then the sort of, the courts and justice stuff followed a little bit on from that. And also part because I had done work about that. Barristers when I was in Victoria in Melbourne and did that sort of study on women at the Victorian Bar and That then led into thinking about women judges and so on from there.

Becky Batagol: So let's [00:10:00] talk about your feminist judging projects because I think That's something that of the last 10 or 15 years. That's I think a hallmark of your work is thinking about feminist judges Judging, so how did the project start and what was your involvement and what are the projects?

Rosemary Hunter: Yes, it's actually just a bit less than 10 years.

And a lot of things have happened in that 10 years that I never could have dreamed of, I think. It really started with the whole, the idea of feminist judging originated in Canada, with the Women's Court of Canada, and I had been I'm quite well networked in the International Feminist Scholarship group, and so I had been aware of this work being done in Canada, and I thought it was a really good idea, and I had tried to persuade various people to do something like that elsewhere, and hadn't really had much success but I was [00:11:00] at a conference at the Society of Legal Scholars, which is the English equivalent of the alter.

Yep. And they there was a conference at Durham University, and the organisers of that conference asked me, in fact, to run a session, or to do a plenary session where I interviewed Baroness Hale. Which was really interesting, which then I had to rush off and read all of her stuff, and of course I didn't.

She didn't possibly have time to read everything she'd ever done, so I focused on her academic work and her published articles rather than cases and judgements. And she apparently afterwards was very impressed about how well I knew her work. I was like, cool, really? Yes there's that old trick about cramming it all into your head.

But then Claire and Erica, who had been involved in organising that conference, said to me, do you know about this thing that's happening in Canada with the judgments? I said, yeah, I knew about that. They said, would you be interested in doing something like that here? And I said, would I ever?

You bet. I've been looking for [00:12:00] you. So that's when we started and we worked about how to do and that we wanted to, so the Canadian one had come out of the LEAF, the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund. So it's already an existing lobby group, but of course there was nothing like that in Canada.

So we basically put out a call for expressions of interest amongst all of our various feminist networks. And got a really great response. And then invented it from there. And we decided to hold workshops to think about what we might do. And then to workshop the draft judgements to, provide a feminist process as well as just a feminist outcome.

We got, we drafted a grant application and got some funding for it for people to come to the workshops and then produce the judgments and I suppose along the way taught ourselves a lot about judgment writing and about editing judgments and so on. And then yeah, then it was it was something that just really captured people's imagination.

Becky Batagol: Was there [00:13:00] much debate on what a feminist judgment?

Rosemary Hunter: Yeah, certainly in the course of the workshops we had debates around that. So we, posited some ideas around what feminist judgement is, and I had already written, so I had been thinking about this in a, from a slightly different angle, thinking about what feminist judging was.

And I'd written an article about that, which came out in 2008 and which then formed a kind of conceptual basis for the project. Thank you very much. Everybody read that, but we could certainly then argue about it. But that gave people sort of something to hang on to. And it was really about the sort of, the processes of feminist judging and how you might do this.

You might, be trying to aim for a substantive equality, or you might be mobilising an ethic of care in the process of decision making, or you might be trying to combat gender bias, or Understand the realities and write the realities of women's lives into the judgment and so on.

So there's various [00:14:00] processes and techniques that I suggested people could use which quite a lot of people then did use or found themselves using in the course of Writing their judgments, but certainly in the workshops we had debates about what's feminist about this, People would come up with a draft and would say call that feminist Why is that feminist and then we would have the discussion about it and make suggestions for different because obviously there is more than one feminist approach to many things.

It's not a monolithic program or agenda. There's many different feminist genre ways of doing things, and sometimes there might be feminist disagreements about the approach to something. And, ultimately it was up to the particular judgment writer to decide what feminist approach they wanted to take.

But they would be subject to challenge and debate in the workshops. And, people making other suggestions about different ways of doing things. And then it was up to them whether they took that on board and to what extent they decided to take that on board.

Becky Batagol: So aside from feminism, a prominent feature of your work is your commitment to empirical scholarship.

And [00:15:00] by empirical scholarship I mean that you examine how the law applies to real people's lives and affects people's decision making. So your research involves a lot of going out and speaking to people or surveying or observing. How do you connect empirical methods with your feminist scholarship?

Rosemary Hunter: I think empirical methods are absolutely designed to, to assist feminist scholarship. They really dovetail because one of the key points about a feminist approach is that you start with women's lives rather than with the law. So that's a sort of key point in feminist legal theory.

And so if you're starting with women's lives rather than the law, the kinds of questions that you are asked. are about how does this operate in practice? How do people experience this? How do people mobilize this? What do people think of this? How does law impact on people's lives? And you can't answer those questions by reading appellate case law.

So you have to go out and do the empirical research. So the first. The first empirical research that I [00:16:00] did was around sex discrimination cases and thinking about what was actually happening in the conciliation process, which was hidden and not public and completely opaque, versus what was happening in the courts, which was very little and so in order to answer that question, you had to go and look at files and talk to conciliators and talk to parties who had been through the process and then I got hooked because, e.

g. I find it exciting to do that kind of work because you're creating new knowledge out of nowhere. Things that other people haven't done before. And then I did the work on the Victorian bar which involved quite a sort of complicated design with different sort of elements looking at how women barristers were being briefed and how they were regarded, their experience of the culture of the bar.

And the experience of the bar as a workplace and all of those kinds of things. Their aspirations what other people thought about women and [00:17:00] women's possibilities and so on. So that, that, and that was again really, a really interesting kind of process and produced some knowledge that Challenged, I think, some existing orthodoxies.

And then, yeah, I've just gone off and so have always been asking the kinds of questions to which you need to have an empirical desire in order to answer them. And what's been your favourite project that you've worked on and why? Probably Feminist Judgements, I would say. Although, there have been many projects that I am very fond of, and and many of them that I enjoy doing.

But that's, I think that's the one where the word fun would come up. And that's not a word that often comes up in conversation with research. The other F word. Yes, that's right. Feminist fun. It was just enormously difficult. It's really rewarding and interesting, but partly because of the collaborative process and working with all of these other people, and really intellectually interesting in terms of [00:18:00] forcing me, as an editor of these books, to learn much more about other areas of law in order to edit the cases, so you really had to get on top of a whole lot of things, but understanding, what the issues were and what the original case decided, and then how the feminist.

Judge was doing something differently, and then I suppose the fact that it's spun off in all of these different directions and that people are using it in their teaching and it's great to use for teaching in terms of, being able to show, demonstrate concretely to students how feminist theory can be put into practice, but also being able to show the kind of mechanisms of legal reasoning, if you like and that decisions aren't inevitable and that they could have gone a different way or could have been.

Cases could have been decided differently. And then the sort of spin offs to other countries, the Australian project, the New Zealand project, and then helping with the Irish project, and the US project, and all the other ones that are still going. And then it's also been interesting for me, [00:19:00] because it's taken me off in a direction in terms of looking at this sort of real life feminist judging and thinking about ways in which, you know there are judges out there already doing this kind of thing, or what is it that they're doing?

Does it replicate the kinds of things that are happening with Feminist Judgement Projects? Are they different, are there different things? Thinking about, and I suppose that my ultimate question now is a question about the capacity of the law to, to incorporate a feminist perspective while still being the law, if it, there's all this sort of feminist theory about how law and feminism are antithetical, and I don't think that's true. And, but I also, and I think that we haven't quite explored the extent to which the law is permeable and is open textured, and can be pushed, and can be made much more inclusive.

So rather than just giving up on it and going and doing something else and, talking about things theoretically or practically [00:20:00] or going and doing something else altogether, to really work out where the limits are is something that I'm very interested in now.

Becky Batagol: I look forward to your next piece.

So Rosemary, you've been a professor at a few institutions. You've been dean of a law school. You've led many research teams and ran research centres across multiple countries, particularly in Australia and the UK. What do you think a feminist university would look like? I thought that was a great question too.

Rosemary Hunter: Wow. And it's almost, it's an imaginative exercise, like feminist judgements in some ways. Instead of thinking what would it look like if we had feminist judges, what would it look like if we had feminist vice chancellors. But you have to have an awful lot more than just the vice chancellor.

So I suppose, and this is a question that I asked myself when I first became a dean. Because I'm thinking, okay, here I am, I'm a dean, what's a feminist dean look like? Where are my role [00:21:00] models? Not many of them out there. And I talked to a few people who were feminist deans, and I don't know that we ever came to any kind of an agreement, but it was certainly something that was exercising my mind.

And in fact, one of the things that then got me thinking about feminist judging, in terms of, it's an issue about feminism and power, because Often, as feminists, we construct ourselves or consider ourselves to be powerless, and many women are indeed powerless and so we have a critique of power, and we have a critique of the existing power structures, but when we get into positions of power, what do we do with it I think is a really a live question, and one that hasn't really been explored very far, because often we have disavowed our power, or not seen ourselves as powerful but when we are.

Then what happens? And that was the question I was asking myself as a dean, and that was the question I was then thinking about judges. But, a feminist university, I think, you'd have to think about, because a university is a complex structure, so you'd have to think about it on a whole lot [00:22:00] of different levels.

So one level is who are the staff of the university, and you'd want to make sure that from top to bottom you had good gender representation. So you didn't have a, the sort of classic pyramid with all the women down the bottom and all the men at the top, or all the top being men. So you'd have, vice chancellors and deputy vice chancellors and so on, who were, who could have an equal chance, women would be equally represented there.

But also I suppose not just women, that you would be wanting to make sure that there were levels of representation for differently situated people, ideally reflecting something about your student body. So for one of the issues that I have at Queen Mary for example, is that we have A majority non white student body, but an overwhelmingly white staff.

And that's something that I'm interested in seeing change and, doing what I can. Although it's very difficult for one person to do that. But I think that, that's an absolutely [00:23:00] important thing in terms of what kind of role models you're providing for students and what kind of possibilities you're modelling for them in terms of their future lives.

We worry about why our students don't go on to do PhDs. We worry It seems like a bit of a no brainer. So it would be something about the staff. Then also, there'd be something about the curriculum. And making sure that, again, there's a sort of broad representation of sources of knowledge in the curriculum.

That it wasn't all just white men. So you would not have a jurisprudence course that was just about the canon, the white male canon. And then, ditto with your history and your literature and your everything else, and, that was one of the issues I remember starting out and one of the sort of basic points about within feminist legal scholarship was the fact that women's knowledge and women's scholarship was invisible and is, continues to be rendered invisible by things like [00:24:00] citation practices where you don't have the person's name, where you just have initials and so everybody assumes it's a man.

How many times have you seen students? They're talking about, Gordon J. and they'll say he, because they just assume that it's a man and so making the identity of the knowers and the producers of knowledge visible, but, and making sure that they are well represented. So again, women, black, minority colonised people as well as the colonisers, all of those kinds of things.

that would need to be in the curriculum. And I think there's probably something about work practices within the institution and being family friendly and being pay gap. Yeah, dealing with gender pay gaps, absolutely. And you, I would want to do something more than family friendly.

I would want to do something not just to facilitate to look after their children, but to facilitate men to look after their children. And yeah, so all of [00:25:00] those kinds of things. And making it, not having the kind of penalty that women currently bear when they take time out. So in some of the English universities now they've got these great schemes where you get post maternity leave, research leave to make sure that you get back to your research when you come back and reconnect with that, so that, those kinds of things.

Becky Batagol: You also mentioned mentoring when you were becoming a dean, is that important in a feminist work practice?

Rosemary Hunter: Definitely that. Mentoring and but also role modelling, I think. But, and transparency, I think, is in fact one of the things. So people know how the institution works and how you progress within the institution.

And, because that's one of the things that is actually sometimes quite difficult. That processes are opaque and you have to know people. Somebody has to tell you how things work. So it shouldn't be necessary to be on the inside. Or be the kind of person who people talk to. Or be in the right place, or be [00:26:00] in the right network in order to work out how things happen, but to have those levels of transparency.

Consultative, I think, is really important. And communicative, so telling people what's going on. I would want my institution to have a very clear set of values, which are substandard values about justice and fairness and all those kinds of things, and I would want that, follow through in everything that the institution did.

And then I think possibly also, being supportive of a range of different kinds of research. So not just having your standard indicators, for you have to do this, you have to publish this kind of an article in this kind of a journal and get this kind of money, funding and so on. But letting people pursue, agendas that are important to them.

So communicating to a particular audience group or constituency or audience which might not be in a referee journal but might be a very important way of getting a message across should be, valued as much as some of the other things. [00:27:00] So I suppose attention to the value system both in terms of valuing teaching as well as research but the kinds of research and the kinds of teaching and those kinds of things.

Becky Batagol: That's just the kind of transformative idea that I often read in your work, Rosemary So thank you very much. If you're, those of you listening, if you're interested in reading some of Rosemary's work, her most recent book is Mapping the Path to Family Justice published in 2017 which is available through Palgrave Macmillan.

If you're interested in hearing Rosemary speak about feminist judging in the real world, where she presents results of her empirical research on real world feminist judging, we have two special episodes about this Scarlet Letter podcast which have been released in December 2017. Thank you all for listening to The Scarlet [00:28:00] Letter.