Advancing Gender Justice: Insights from the Feminisms and Law 101 Panel

Feminisms & Law 101 by Parul Kanwar (JD Student, Peter A. Allard School of Law)

On September 16, 2025, the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies at Allard Law hosted "Feminisms & Law 101." This event was an opportunity to hear from several Allard Law professors about how they bring diverse and intersectional feminist lenses to their research across a range of subject areas. 

The discussion, chaired by Professor Debra Parkes, Chair in Feminist Legal Studies, highlighted the works and research of the event’s speakers.  Attendees got the opportunity to hear from each speaker about their current focus in the field. 

Professor Mary Liston’s current work in the fields of public and administrative law focuses on analyzing law as relationships and examining how legal systems connect humans and the world around them. She is particularly interested in understanding how the state can better support vulnerable people through democratic theory and institutions.

Professor Ireh Iyioha, the Hon. Selwyn Romilly UBC Professor in Race and Access to Justice, works in the fields of health law and policy, international human rights law, torts, public health law, and women’s health law and policy. She is studying how laws actually affect people's lives, especially women of colour, tracking three decades of progress while documenting current threats from rising ultra-conservatism.

Professor Andrea Hilland, speaking as a Nuxalk woman from a matriarchal community, discussed how Canadian law systematically fails Indigenous women. Her research on legal ethics and the lack of Indigenous representation in the Canadian legal profession and judiciary investigates how legal systems built on male, Christian values continue to marginalize Indigenous ways of knowing.

This theme of structural exclusion carried through Professor Carol Liao's corporate law research, which scrutinizes how business structures reproduce white male interests while creating "structural invisibility" for others. Professor Liao is Chair of the Canada Climate Law Initiative and Co-Director of UBC’s Centre for Climate Justice 

The practical challenges of legal reform further emerged in Professor Janine Benedet's work as a criminal law and labour law scholar on law’s responses to male violence against women. Her research emphasizes that feminist academics must stay connected to, and be informed by, the work of feminist groups working on the front lines of these issues. 

Professor Margot Young's constitutional and social justice law scholarship also explores these complexities, questioning fundamental assumptions about rights theory, revealing "the fallacy of choice" in how we understand both individual and group decision-making in the context of structural inequality.

Professor Moira Aikenhead's research on technology-facilitated  gender-based violence highlights contemporary challenges in addressing these harms through law. Her work advocates for shifting legal frameworks from "reasonable expectation of privacy" to approaches based on consent and autonomy. 

Thirty faculty members are affiliated with the Centre, with research expertise in fields such as criminal law, environmental law, Indigenous and Aboriginal law, immigration law, family law, business law, international law and more. This event, featuring just eight of those CFLS faculty affiliates, provided a rich introduction to the depth and breadth of feminist scholarship at Allard Law.

What struck me about this panel was how these diverse approaches pointed toward the same insight: feminist legal analysis is more than just one approach among many; rather, it is a framework for creating genuine pathways to a just society.