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Abstract
This chapter asks whether there is a difference in the way male and female judges dispense justice in paternity dispute cases in Morocco, one of the first Arabic-speaking countries to appoint women as judges. Building on recent fieldwork in different courts in Morocco, it provides ethnographic detail to a hotly debated scholarly issue, namely whether men and women have different ‘voices’ in the way they dispense justice. This chapter concludes that both male and female judges adhere to a rule-based adjudicatory style, with male judges being slightly more inclined to authorize the use of DNA testing to solve paternity dispute claims.
Abstract
This chapter discusses the impact of legal education on women’s access to the judiciary, connecting the Western and Muslim worlds. Exploring the period lasting from the early twentieth until the early twenty-first century, it examines female students’ entrance to legal education in Egypt, Indonesia, and the Netherlands to see whether women’s increasing entrance to Law Schools leads to equally growing numbers of women judges. However, it finds that legal education alone is not sufficient in promoting women’s access to the judiciary. Other factors, such as a shortage of judges after independence from colonialization, the judicial rotation system, and the possibility of part-time employment need to be taken into account as well.
To what extent have notions of manhood and womanhood as incorporated in Egyptian Muslim family law changed over the course of almost a century of family law reforms, and why? In answering this question, I draw on the works of two Egyptian intellectuals, Qasim Amin and Azza Heikal, because they discussed ideas about manhood and womanhood in relation to Islamic religion and authoritarian rule. My analysis shows that there is a dire need within studies on gender in the Middle East to assess the effectiveness of family law reform on both women’s and men’s agency. After all, when an authoritarian government introduces legislation that enhances women’s legal rights with regard to the family but does not reform men’s legal rights inside that same family, it is not surprising that when political oppression ends, disenfranchised men will try to abolish the laws that expanded their wives’ freedom and curtailed theirs.