Law Commons^™

The Female Legal Realist Inside The Common Law, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

This essay, a response piece to Anita Bernstein’s thought-provoking book The Common Law Inside the Female Body, examines the powerful tool of the common law and the role that judges play in wielding it. I begin by drawing on my twenty-four years of teaching and looking at the questions that I, and my students, grapple with every year while studying the common law: Do the uncoordinated actions of individual judges, juries, and lawyers and parties generate an efficient legal system? And does that system result in some version of justice for most of the parties, most of the time, …