Tort Law and Feminist Strategy: Lessons from Social Movement and Community Lawyering

Tort law can be considered antithetical to radical politics for transformative social change. Predicated on incremental reforms and intertwined with a market-based insurance system, tort law commodifies and (re)produces hierarchies of harms along the lines of gender, race, class and other social relations. Nevertheless, feminists have explored whether it can be harnessed to address social and gendered harms while recognising that improving the current system can entrench it and the underpinning structural injustices. As such, the critical question is about knowing how and when it is worth mobilising tort law. Drawing on law and social movement scholarship and abolitionist conceptions of non-reformist reforms, I set out a taxonomy of indirect impacts of law and alternative political goals to legal change. This taxonomy should guide decision-making as to when, in relation to a specific issue at a particular time, it is strategically useful to mobilise tort law for intersectional feminist struggles.