Notorious 2020 - Women and the Law
2020 will be remembered as a year of reckonings. The year in which the entire human race faces and adjusts as best it can to the fear and reality of a global pandemic. The year when ongoing racial injustice is called out on a massive transnational scale; when we are forced to face up to the devastating impacts of the climate emergency. More locally, it’s the year when the United Kingdom left the European Union and set sail on a more isolated and more precarious course. It all feels very uncertain and very uncomfortable. It isn’t yet over and it is already notorious.
In recent years, a more affectionate use of that term has been applied to US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and yet her sad passing on 18th September just makes 2020 more notorious, in its darkest sense. A most wonderful legal scholar, judge, advocate of women’s equality and defender of justice, her loss will be deeply felt and her contribution always remembered, quite apart from the wider political furore it has precipitated. This loss, any human loss, reminds us that 2020 is also just a moment in history like any other. And while that might invoke a sense of banality given the ‘big ticket’ issues we face, it can also ground us and connect us to our every day; reminding us that there is a past, present and future in which we have a stake.
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a feminist legal icon, takes place in the same year that we mark the centenary of women’s participation in the legal profession in the UK. In December 1920, Madge Easton Anderson, a graduate of this Law School, became the first woman solicitor in Scotland, also making her the first in the UK. The law itself prevented women from accessing the legal profession until 1919, and even when women could technically join the profession on equal terms to men, wider gendered cultural pressures and societal expectations meant that in practice, women were prevented from making any strides in the legal profession – both in terms of numbers and levels of seniority – for many, many more decades to come. It took 33 years for the first 100 women to graduate with a law degree from the University of Glasgow and after Dame Margaret Henderson Kidd KC became the first woman member of the Faculty of Advocates in 1923, it took a further quarter of a century for her to be followed by the second. The first women law professors in Scotland, both professors at this University, Noreen Burrows and Sheila McLean, were appointed on the same day in 1990.
In the new undergraduate law class of 2020-21, a ratio of 60/40 in favour of women students is by now typical, and there have been more women than men entering the solicitor profession in Scotland since 2015. For sure, societal expectations which firmly placed women in the home and actively prevented them from working in certain professions upon marriage have changed since the days of Madge Easton Anderson. Since the 1970s, laws to combat discrimination and promote gender equality in the workplace and beyond have played their part in this progressive shift. So, today we can and must celebrate the progress made in the last 100 years and honour the women who paved the way. It must have been a lonely and difficult path for Madge, just as it must have been for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who for a spell was the lone female Justice on the Supreme Court, and whose legal opinions in defence of rights were often recorded in dissent. Let us celebrate and honour, but always mindful of today’s realities, and with an eye to the path ahead for future generations.
The most recent data (not all of which is published) by the regulators of the main branches of the profession in Scotland tells us that only 30% of senior partners in law firms are women. 27 % of all advocates are women, a figure which drops below 20% if we look at the senior echelons of that profession – Queen’s Counsel. Women are also under-represented at almost every level of Scotland’s judiciary, with the data showing that women comprise only 23% of Sheriffs and 9 out of 34 Senators of the College of Justice. Women ‘firsts’ in notable legal roles are still being recorded in very recent times: in 2016 Lady Dorrian QC became Lord Justice Clerk, the first woman to hold that position, and in perhaps one of the most significant legal landmarks of the last century, Lady Brenda Hale became the first woman President of the UK Supreme Court when she assumed office in September 2017. In short, we face serious gender-based issues in the legal profession today and the picture is significantly worse if we look, as we must, at a wider range of characteristics and intersections such as race, ethnic background, disability and class. Today, neither the traditional arms of the legal profession nor law schools reflect the makeup of the society we live in. And that matters. It matters if we care about fairness and equal opportunities for all and it matters if we care about justice and the system from which it is dispensed.
In the School of Law, we are committed to uncovering and celebrating the often hidden stories of women in and of law, both the early pioneers and women in 2020. These stories are being researched in the archives (working collaboratively with many wonderful colleagues within and beyond the University) and gathered from women who have a connection to Glasgow School of Law. This is a work in progress but you can already be inspired by the stories of some of the early pioneers, and the powerful, sometimes shocking and often moving stories in our 100Voices collection – this includes stories from current students, senior judges, newly qualified solicitors, the first five female law professors and some of your tutors! More of your tutors, along with friends of the School of Law, have also knitted 100 squares, forming a blanket, to remember each of the first 100 women who graduated in law from this School. Their stories, we hope to learn more of. We shared our collaborative crafting handiwork earlier this year at an event on campus to mark International Women’s Day 2020 and we hope that it won’t be too long before we can display it in the Stair Building for you to enjoy, and perhaps even add to! As part of our women in law project we are delighted to bring you the beautiful words of our poet in residence Holly McKenna - words we hope to share in the form of an animation to mark the December 2020 anniversary. We are also actively engaged in bringing our research and privileged positions to bear on efforts to improve equality and diversity in this Law School and in the wider legal profession in Scotland. Please consider this an invitation to share any stories, ideas and aspirations you have in this regard. And where should we go next with our women in law project? Courses? Art work? Book group? We would love to be inspired by law students of 2020.
There is no room for complacency in the fight for gender justice and equality. Gains which are not fiercely guarded and protected can still ebb away: and gains which are not built upon, won’t allow us to move forward (see this Voice). Let us be energised and educated by our history, angered by (some of) our present and resolve to work towards a fairer and more equitable future. Let us remain determined, for there is still much work to be done. Striving for equality must be a collective endeavour: despite her gargantuan individual effort and contribution in that regard, I think there would be no dissent from Notorious RBG on that.
RIP Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020)
~ Maria Fletcher, Senior Lecturer in European Law, University of Glasgow School of Law
Interested to know more?
On the creation of a digital museum to chart the journey of women in law in the UK:
On re-imagining law from a feminist perspective:
On Ruth Bader Ginsburg:
RBG – documentary (available on Netflix)
On the basis of sex – film (available on Amazon)
On Lady Brenda Hale:
The life and legal career of Baroness Hale (produced by First100Years, 2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8sjn3DXuHE
“Brenda Hale: ‘I was right to choose law. I turned out to be quite good at it’” Financial Times, December 2019 https://www.ft.com/content/18352f14-1622-11ea-9ee4-11f260415385
Lady Hale, ‘Women in the Judiciary’ (Fiona Woolf Lecture for the Women Lawyers’ Division of the Law Society, 27 June 2014) available at https://www.supremecourt.uk/docs/speech-140627.pdf
On the gendered dimensions and impacts of:
Brexit,
https://www.soas.ac.uk/blogs/study/impact-brexit-women/
Covid-19,
https://eige.europa.eu/topics/health/covid-19-and-gender-equality
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/the-impacts-of-covid-19-are-gendered-but-there-may-be-cause-for-hope
Climate justice,
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/A-8-2017-0403_EN.html
https://insights.careinternational.org.uk/publications/why-climate-justice-is-a-gender-justice-issue
Racial justice,
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/GenderNormsAndRacism.aspx
http://lastradainternational.org/lsidocs/362%20Gender%20Dimnsions%20of%20Racial%20Discrimination.pdf
Suggested citation: M. Fletcher, Notorious 2020: Women and the Law, University of Glasgow School of Law Blog (6 October 2020) available at: https://www.uofgschooloflaw.com/
