ABSTRACT This article draws on the work of North American Black feminist activists and scholars, particularly Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis, alongside other anti-carceral and abolitionist perspectives, to ask what happens when abolition feminism perspectives are brought to international law to study legal responses to the current ecological and climate breakdown. Building upon recent abolition feminist literature and activism against what Braz and Gilmore term the ‘three Ps’, referring to ‘police, pollution, and prisons’, we aim to illuminate and address the connection between transnational criminalisation, capitalism, patriarchal structures, and environmental exploitation. Our argument is that abolition feminism can inspire different legal engagements with the ongoing environmental catastrophe and its uneven racialised and gendered impacts. We identify three key features of abolition feminist thought that are particularly poignant in this regard. The first is abolition feminism’s use of intersectionality, not merely as a tool for better inclusion, but as a way of understanding the interlocking nature of multiple forms of oppression. The second is the ‘both/and’ approach, which embraces what appear as contradictory legal strategies to pursue longer-term political goals. The third is abolition feminism’s critique of the violent nature of racial capitalism that calls for the need to repel the state’s coercive apparatus, while exposing the role that corporations play in fostering extractivism. Whereas the complicity of the international legal order in producing ecological privileges and vulnerabilities has been discussed in the literature, in this article we contend that abolition feminism can offer fresh intellectual tools to develop both a generative critique of international legal approaches to the socio-ecological collapse, particularly those that reproduce a carceral logic, and compelling visions of more liveable societies.

ABSTRACT Rush v Nationwide News, a defamation case between Geoffrey Rush and the publishers of the Daily Telegraph, has been credited with exerting a ‘chilling effect’ on the #MeToo moment in Australia. The case presents an opportunity to explore both the influence of the #MeToo moment on testimony and how such testimony is received, interpreted and evaluated through legal institutions and the processes of justice. Through a close textual reading of court transcripts, media reporting and the judgment of Justice Michael Wigney, this article traces connections between the #MeToo moment, the testimony of the alleged victim-survivor, Eryn Jean Norvill and its circulation and reception within and beyond the courtroom. Taking a law and performance theoretical framework, I argue that both chief protagonists engaged in a performative approach to narrative self-construction in the adversarial courtroom – Rush as a theatrical genius, and Norvill as a #MeToo advocate – that profoundly influenced Justice Wigney's assessment of their credibility as witnesses, providing a platform for the judicial destruction of Norvill's credibility and denying her the truth of her own experience as a victim-witness of workplace sexual harassment. Indeed, the highly performative nature of this case and its connection to the assessment of witness credibility exposes the influence of a range of sexual harassment myths within Justice Wigney's judgment. In this way, Rush v Nationwide News starkly exposes the ongoing epistemic priority of masculine normativity within adversarial justice, veiled within the cloak of neutrality, objectivity and reason that frames the assessment of witness credibility.

ABSTRACT This roundtable discussion focuses on the collective commitment and the praxis of a feminist collaborative ethos in international law to imagine and centre alternative futures in the field. This discussion took place as part of the virtual workshop ‘International Law Dis/Oriented: Queer Legacies, and Queer Futures Workshop’ from which this special issue emerged. In this transcript of the roundtable, Shaimaa Abdelkarim, Farnush Ghadery, and Rohini Sen discuss with Lena Holzer how turning to feminist collectivity – focused on care, collaboration, and solidarity – can help to disrupt and push against gendered, racialised, and colonial power structures embedded in academic spaces. They examine their intertwined positionalities along with various pedagogical and methodological approaches to determine the functions of critical feminist and queer thoughts in international law. Inculcating a praxis of feminist collaborative ethos in the scholarship and teaching of international law, they hope to present a challenge to the artificial individualisation of the profession and its increasing neoliberalisation.

ABSTRACT Feminists working in the law may experience tension between mainstreaming feminist ideas to make the everyday life of women better and maintaining a critical feminist method of law-making. Some (including myself) might at times feel pessimistic for the present, and future of, critical approaches to law. Mainstreaming feminist demands can be a powerful and effective method, potentially monopolising feminist engagements with law. In this article, I take this concern seriously by exploring the hope and possibility of an improvised coalition between mainstream and critical feminist approaches. To show this, I use the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, specifically its finding that gender-based violence constitutes a form of torture, as a methodical example of law-making. The result of this is an identification of an imitative space in which critical feminist law-making could maintain its possibility. I argue that the imitation embedded in both mainstream and critical feminist approaches to law, and the Court’s autopoietic method, could create this imitative space to safeguard feminist critical engagements with law. My analysis shows how feminist demands, mainstream or critical, carry the potential to activate an imitative space, where subversion becomes a possibility.

ABSTRACT In 2005, Reg Graycar and Jenny Morgan published ‘Law Reform: What’s in It for Women?’ in which they raised a number of issues and tensions faced in feminist engagements with law reform processes. Relying on Graycar and Morgan’s work I explore three recent law reform processes focused on whether coercive control should be criminalised: the NSW Joint Select Committee on Coercive Control, the Queensland Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce, and the South Australian exposure Bill. All answered this question in the affirmative. However, there were distinct differences in terms of their respective terms of reference, processes undertaken, participation of diverse and marginalised groups, consideration of implementation issues, and engagement with existing research. This article explores the strengths and weaknesses of these processes. The importance of Graycar and Morgan’s work is that it insists that we examine the processes of law reform, and not just the outcomes. While outcomes are obviously critical, the processes necessarily shape what those outcomes might be. The diversity of views around criminalisation of coercive control meant that attention to these processes was critical, particularly for those who are most likely to experience violence and state interventions in their lives.

ABSTRACT This text considers Hélène Cixous’ écriture feminine (‘writing feminine’) as one way to do feminist legal translation. It discusses the importance of ‘writing one self’ as legal scholars in our own time as a reflection both on what law as well as what the self is or can be. To write one self through écriture feminine is a feminist act in contestation to the ‘phallocentric’ search for the law’s (phallo-)‘originary first term or logos’. Drawing on Yoriko Otomo’s feminist legal scholarship, I show that écriture feminine writes the world differently through the writing of the self; something which is urgently needed in a time of, as Anna Grear puts it, ‘necrotic, predatory imperative of Euro-centric petro-capitalism and rampant industrial consumerism’. Legal scholarship has often considered Cixous’ work in the context of ‘the linguistic turn’ – a turn that has been out of vogue for some time now. Hence, Cixous’ écriture feminine is rarely explicitly part of contemporary critical legal scholars’ efforts. In this text, however, I argue that Cixous’ scholarship, and her écriture feminine, is necessary to contemporary legal scholarship in its turn to new materialism, tech and AI: The feminist translation, transformation, transgression and translactation in écriture feminine interrupt the phallocentric predatory imperative embedded in the world such legal scholarship tries to make sense of and rework.

ABSTRACT This paper argues that a new institution of motherhood was constructed through modernising reforms in law and medicine in semi-colonial Egypt. It shows that Egyptian women were characterised as ignorant of basic principles of health and hygiene and blamed for the high infant mortality rate in turn-of-the-century Egypt, which coincided with an ongoing reorientation of the Egyptian family in popular and religious literature, wherein the woman was being recast as the central figure in shaping the child and tending the home. At the intersection of these phenomena, new discussions emerged about the significance of women as mothers and the proper way to perform motherhood as an Egyptian woman. A new institution of motherhood was then constructed, concretised, and enforced through medical and legal discourse and interventions that were opposable against women across Egypt. This article shows that British and Egyptian lawmakers privileged the role of women as mothers in debates surrounding the drafting of new labour legislation and that they sought to ensure the maturity of mothers and the mental and physical health of the Egyptian family in a series of controversial personal status law reforms throughout the semi-colonial period. Through a socio-legal history of the institution of motherhood, it examines how colonialism, nationalism, and claims to modernity affected Egyptians’ daily lives and accessed family homes and women’s bodies. Throughout the article, a conceptualisation of modernisation as a dialectical process is emphasised. Modernisation claims to liberate individuals, women, or a nation, but, at the same time, it creates elaborate structures for their discipline. This article treats the institution of motherhood as one such structure and explores the roles of hygiene and domestic cleanliness, coloniality, and law in its construction in semi-colonial Egypt.

State and police brutality around the globe in 2020 brought into sharp focus the role of legal apparatuses in causing death, particularly of black and Indigenous lives. Against the backdrop of Black Lives Matter (#BLM) events and protests, #endSARS in Nigeria and amid the ongoing fight against Aboriginal deaths in custody in Australia, the critique made by Isobell Coe in Nulyarimma v Thompson, the case that sought to have the crime of genocide and its impact as part of ongoing colonialism recognised in Australian law, is more urgent than ever. Following Coe’s critique that Australian law becomes complicit in genocide if it fails to hear Indigenous peoples protests, how do and how should legal thinkers engage with the system of Australian law especially in a climate where the direct link between settler-colonial legal infrastructures (courts, prisons, police and legislators) and the violation of Indigenous and black lives has been laid bare. A legal system lacking consent at its foundation and characterised in the present day by a refusal to hear and engage with its violent origin, while seeking to acquire consent retrospectively is nomocidal. Nomocide captures the function performed by all arms of the law in committing genocide in Australia. As such, the complicity and culpability of a system of law founded in non-consensual conditions must be reckoned with, without delay. This requires a willingness among scholars and practitioners of law to see it as deathly or nomocidal in order to begin addressing the colonial violence that stems from it.