Exploiting the Limits of Law : Swedish Feminism and the Challenge to Pessimism

This book represents a challenge to both Swedish dogmatism and feminist pessimism and, more generally, to the concept of the limits of law: it includes essays which consider the issue of law's limits in a purely theoretical way, as well as essays which investigate the changing legal and policy environments in a more practical setting.

Moving beyond the question of whether an area of scholarly investigation can truly be characterized as ''legal'', Exploiting the Limits of Law combats the often unhelpful constraints of law''s subject-matter and formal processes. Through a process of reflection on the limits of law and repeated efforts to redraw them, this book challenges the general sense of pessimism among feminists and others about the usefulness of law as an instrument of change. The work combines theoretical analysis of the law''s boundaries with investigation of the practical settings for changing legal and policy environments. Both the empirical focus of this volume, and its underlying theoretical concern with the limits of the law and its gender implications, render it of interest to legal scholars throughout the world, whether of EU law, feminism, social policy or philosophy.