Gender Justice in Social Security: Towards a Feminist Judicial Review
This project is a collaboration between the Universities of Glasgow (Nicole Busby PI), Birmingham, Bristol and Ulster and the Child Poverty Action Group and Women’s Budget Group. Building on the international success of the Feminist Judgments Project, the project utilises a feminist judgments methodology (FJM) as a means of highlighting and responding to the gendered inequalities caused and perpetrated by the UK’s social security system.
A specific focus is on recent reform including the introduction of Universal Credit (UC). FJM applies a feminist lens to established jurisprudence to demonstrate how judgments could have been written and cases could have been decided differently. By taking this established methodology and applying it to a ‘live’ area in which the use of judicial review as a means of challenging UC’s implementation is still developing, the project will develop new thinking on the judicial review process, to inform and influence strategic litigation and to identify a related research agenda.
The use of FJM is extended to include policy and law-making processes and their implementation alongside judicial decision-making. The overarching objective is to develop a broader feminist law methodology to be used to frame and critique current provision and to identify recommendations for reform. The project was awarded funding by the Socio-Legal Studies Association in 2019 and a further funding application is currently under development.