MSU Law Professor Provides Feminist Perspective of Corporate Law in Newly Published Book
Feminist Judgements: Corporate Law Rewritten, a new book published by MSU Law Professor Anne M. Choike and her coeditors, is a collaboration by some of the most prominent corporate law scholars who have rewritten foundational corporate law cases from feminist theoretical and methodological perspectives. The book was highlighted at the 2023 Law & Society Association (LSA) Annual Meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from June 1-4, 2023.
The theme of the 2023 LSA Annual Meeting was “Separate and Unequal,” and Professor Choike’s book was chosen by the LSA program committee for speaking to this theme. The LSA Annual Meeting is one of the largest international gatherings of legal scholars in the world, with approximately 4,500 attendees from over 100 countries in recent years. Feminist Judgements: Corporate Law Rewritten will also be the subject of a forthcoming review in the Women Lawyers of Michigan Association Journal.
In the introduction, Professor Choike and her co-editors, Usha R. Rodrigues, University of Georgia School of Law, and Kelli Alces Williams, Florida State University, describe the book’s examination of corporate law as similar to the inaugural volumes that launched the global and U.S. Feminist Judgments Project. “Specifically, the task for this volume’s contributors is to engage explicitly with feminist issues – gender, privilege and oppression, and intersectionality, among others – in corporate law decisions, where such issues are relevant but typically overlooked.”
The co-editors continue by explaining how corporate law “cases were selected and the parameters provided to authors and commentators. We identify common themes, feminist theories, and methods in the rewritten opinions and the contract in this volume, and we situate this work in the context of larger concerns about gender equality and justice.”
Professor Choike contributed to the final chapter and conclusion in partnership with highly regarded scholars, Professors Martha Fineman and Cheryl Wade. They argue “that a feminist and feminist-inspired analysis is vitally important to corporate law and policy for the creation of a just legal framework. By showing how corporate law has sometimes been shaped by the false assumptions, blind spots, and missed opportunities of conventional frameworks, feminist and feminist-inspired analysis offers avenues for corporate law to promote prospects for fuller, freer lives among the persons who control and are affected by corporations.”
The final chapter concludes with the hope that the book will “prove helpful to students, scholars, and practitioners interested in exploring feminist corporate law….We are excited as we envision how the application of the insights in this chapter, and in the whole volume, might shape corporate law going forward. The possibilities for greater justice in corporate law, using gender as an initial impetus and inspiration to explore – in the spirit of many strands of feminism – even broader themes of equity in social ordering are within our collective imagination.”
Published by Cambridge University Press, Feminist Judgements: Corporate Law Rewritten was released in 2023. Professor Choike’s book is part of the John F. Schaefer Law Library’s permanent collection.
Professor Choike (center) and colleagues at the 2023 LSA Annual Meeting