Denise Réaume and the Women’s Court of Canada: Feminist judgment projects and rewriting <i>Pierson v Post</i>

When Denise Réaume rewrote the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1999 decision Law v Canada, it would have been difficult to predict that its umbrella project, the Women’s Court of Canada (WCC), would give birth to such a successful and truly international legal academic movement, what has come to be known as the Feminist Judgment Projects (FJPs). These projects – rewriting cases thought to be wrongly decided or better decided on different grounds and specifically from a feminist perspective – have taken the world by storm. This article examines the role that Réaume played in the WCC and, by extension, the FJPs, a helpful introduction for readers who may not be familiar with the genre and also to celebrate one of Réaume’s important contributions to legal scholarship during her tenure at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law (from 1982 to 2023). The piece also explores my own rewrite of the (in)famous property law decision, Pierson v Post, the case about a hunted fox, which has long been used to introduce law students to the concept of first possession, providing a current-day snapshot of the FJP field. The conclusion ties the WCC to Karen Knop’s work on the Tokyo Women’s Tribunal and Knop’s idea of imagined courts and their (re)written decisions as a combination of historical fact and fiction: ‘fact-ion.’ Together, these three different perspectives offer a short history or genealogy of this specific legal literary device – the rewritten or reimagined judgment – and interpretations of it by three different female law professors at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Réaume set in motion this important mode of interdisciplinary and critical legal scholarship and it is fitting for the seventy-fifth anniversary special issue of the University of Toronto Law Journal to acknowledge and include that fact in its collective retrospective.