Capacitación Docente

How to include a gender perspective in the teaching of Law

BACKGROUND

The law, as a fundamental weapon of social control and distribution of resources, has a significant impact in the creation and reproduction of gender inequalities. The way in which the law is taught is the key to either deepen or reverse these inequalities.

For more than twenty years, Latin American feminists have been discussing the best way to make law better respond to the necessities of women, and thereby more appropriately protect their interests. This concern has been the main issue around which a group of law professors have met to build RED – ALAS. The key objectives of RED – ALAS can be described as follows:

Promote, provide and disseminate judicial knowledge regarding justice for women.
Promote in-depth research and debate among members of the academia and activists with the purpose of achieving proper solutions to sexual and gender inequalities.
Elaborate and implement activities to make the Latin American academy a crucial actor for social change, especially concerning issues of gender equality and struggle against discrimination. To this end, we propose the development of legal clinics to advice and represent women and sexual minorities in national and international judicial instances with the specific object of protecting their rights. An additional aim is to educate law students in the representation of clients and judicial practice geared towards the recognition, respect and safeguard of women and their rights.

The initiative proposed at this workshop was the result of the second meeting of the members of the RED ALAS and responds to the identified necessity to incorporate more thoroughly the debate around gender viewpoints in the universities of the region. San Carlos University was selected to carry out the first trial run, recognizing the efforts that this University has made, through the “Estudio de actualización en derechos de las mujeres y género” (“Update study on the Rights of Women and Gender”) in the L.L.M Program at the University, and then, with the creation of the “Maestría en Derechos de las Mujeres, Género y Acceso a la Justicia” (L.L.M in the Rights of Women, Gender and Access to Justice).

OBJECTIVES

The objective of this workshop is to enhance the discussion regarding the manner by which the gender perspective should influence the teaching of law, as well as to augment the diverse methods that have been suggested to introduce the gender point of view in judicial analysis. Thus, the basic idea of this workshop is to teach methods to transform the every day practices of law schools and move towards more egalitarian practices in legal education. In particular, the workshop proposes that the participants:

Become familiar with the discussion around gender and the different perspectives within feminism.
Know the methods of legal analysis from a gender perspective and understand how to apply them to concrete exercises in the classroom.
Understand feminism's contribution to the traditional interpretations of certain judicial norms that affect women in particular. For instance,

Constitutional Law: the equality dilemma;
Family Law: between dependency and protection;
Labor Law: the “glass ceiling” and sexual harassment;
Criminal Law: limits on violence control;
International Law: the obstacles to women's rights.

Know the main national and international documents about women's rights.
Elaborate on the study guidelines and syllabus on how to include gender perspective in law courses.

METHODOLOGY

To achieve these objectives, we will work in groups of a maximum of 15 professors during two mornings or afternoons. Separately, we will work with professors belonging to the Master/ L.L.M Program, who have a better understanding of the issues in question.

A lecture will be delivered each day, but the rest of the sessions will be dedicated to the discussion of concrete problems with the aim of encouraging the participants to elaborate on their previous knowledge of the subject and build on new knowledge.

activities

Day 1 (3 hours)

Two subjects will be dealt with: first, gender perspective in legal analysis and its relevancy in the teaching of law; and second, different feminist methods for the analysis of law. During the first two hours we will work with a case that has been subject to the CEDAW Committee, properly translated into Spanish. The debate will be around the following questions:

How would you solve this case in light of the current Guatemalan law?
Which problems would you expect to arise as a result of this interpretation?
How do you think a “gender perspective” would help?
What results could be achieved using a “gender perspective”?

During the last hour, a lecture will be delivered in order to structure the debate that has been carried out in the previous two hours and frame it in the general context of Latin American theory.