Our Lives Before the Law: Constructing a Feminist Jurisprudence.

• Position: Book Review

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xvii, 276.

At the beginning of this book Judith Baer proclaims, "This book was born out of anger and hope." This seems hot quite accurate. Her book is a food critique of modern American cultural values and feminist legal scholarship. It is divided into two parts. Part I explores the law's impact on women's lives by examining feminist theory, jurisprudence, and epistemology. Part II discusses the constitutional law of equal rights protection, reproductive rights, and fetal protection policies. Two major themes prevail throughout the book: feminism's interaction with mainstream cultural values and the dialogue within feminist circles.

Baer is concerned with how mainstream political discourse depicts community and family values. In her opinion, it obliges women to conform to burdensome conventional expectations imposed upon them by a male-dominated society. She contends that women are pressured to be family and community "caregivers". In her opinion, modern feminist jurisprudence is guilty of errors of commission and omission. The former result from relying on unsound and retrograde theories. The latter come from an incomplete understanding of the real issues and an overemphasis on the behaviour and attitudes of women. Feminists have marginalized themselves, she argues, by withdrawing from traditional intellectual discourse and adopting a conciliatory tone that she regards as apologetic. As a partial solution, she proposes to reinvigorate the relationship between feminism and liberalism. Traditional feminists are skeptical of any association between the two. Baer, however, believes that liberalism's emphasis on individual autonomy can be applied to feminism.

Its possible contribution to feminist legal literature aside, this book reveals some analytical problems. First, the conceptual framework of her analysis fails to acknowledge the independent interests of other social actors. Instead, all social institutions are presumed to have the same interests. This presumption is based on the conclusion that society is dominated by males and that as a group they share common interests. While at a macro level this may be true, it would clearly be a mistake to...