Feminist Legal Writing

Because feminist legal advocates must use legal writing to persuade their audience and push for change in the law, they must confront the dilemma of whether to follow legal writing conventions and risk altering or losing their feminist message or whether to break from convention and risk losing the legal audience. Feminist legal scholarship, in many different ways, has made great progress in dealing with this dilemma. The focus of this Article, however, is on several pieces of feminist legal scholarship that have confronted the dilemma by pushing the bounds of conventional legal language and legal writing. These pieces, by breaking what have become some of the most central rules of conventional legal advocacy, have created a legal writing genre that is simultaneously subversive and persuasive.