Feminism, deconstruction and the law

Drucilla Cornell is Professor in the Departments of Law and Political Science at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and author of a series of books - Beyond Accommodation (1991), The Philosophy of the Limit (1992), Transformations (1993) and The Imaginary Domain (1995) - which work at the boundaries between feminism, European philosophy and legal theory. Best known for her advocacy of an ethical interpretation of deconstruction as the basis for a feminist critique of the law, her latest writings outline a programme of equivalent rights for a legal recognition of sexual difference.

RP: Perhaps you could begin by saying something about the Critical Legal Studies movement in the USA. What is its relationship to feminism? And where do you see your own work as fitting in?

Cornell: Regrettably there's very little organized presence of either Critical Legal Studies or what were called the `femcrits' in the legal academy in the United States in 1994. In the late seventies and early eighties when I was a law student, there was something that was called the Conference of Critical Legal Studies, and it had the effect of being a movement. We had yearly conferences; there was a sense of political intervention in the academy, as well as academic discourse promoted by critical legal studies. The femcrits came out of a confrontation of feminists with critical legal studies over the impossibility of feminists being heard. In 1982 or '83, there was a conference run by women which led to the establishment of the femcrits. For several years the femcrits were an organized presence, but all that has been dispersed. There are still women who would consider themselves as writing in feminist jurisprudence, and there are still people who would consider themselves associated with the Conference of Critical Legal Studies, but the experience of movement has disappeared. There was some repression, meaning that people were fired - myself and Clare Dalton being two examples, although there are many more.

RP: From law schools?

Cornell: Yes, Clare and I were denied tenure within one week of each other. It was seen by people in the Conference of Critical Legal Studies as a response to our association with them. I'm a leftist, so when I became a law professor I affiliated with the left that was available to me, but my own intellectual and political history is very different from the Conference of Critical Legal Studies.

RP: How did you come to be a lawyer?

Cornell: I was a student radical and a feminist very early on. I was active in civil rights activities in high school from the age of sixteen. I went on to college, but I dropped out for a while and went to study Marxism in Germany, in 1969, when there was still a great deal of uproar at the Free University, which is where I went. I considered myself a Left Hegelian. Then I came back to Berkeley, briefly; then went to Santa Barbara. I went to study Heidegger in Freiburg and I ended up at Stanford, where I became involved in the student movement. I joined a Marxist-Leninist organization, since I had decided that if feminism was going to be a truly popular movement it would have to go into factories and organize.

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