The US Feminist Judgments Project, an international consortium of feminist legal scholars, is an initiative to create replacement feminist judgments for critical case decisions. They collaborate with women law professionals worldwide to present their feminist perspectives and focus mostly on US Supreme Court opinions.
Drawing inspiration from similar projects abroad, the movement intends to rewrite the framework of the law using original facts and create a fairer, and more just system. It does not want to revise history, nor invent new law from scratch. The idea is to expose any gendered assumptions, and use the perspectives to account gender, race, class and disability, groups that have historically been marginalized by law.
Method and Methodology – Bound by Law, Liberated in Perspective
Each rewritten judgment in the project adheres to the factual record, legal doctrine, and precedent available at the time the original opinion was issued. What changes is the lens.
The US Feminist Judgments Project gives a voice to the interpretations, using the real life and first hand experiences of people who have been affected by the law, but not properly represented by it. A special focus is placed on women, people of color, and marginalized communities who wouldn’t have been regarded in the same light by the laws. Laws which were made using abstract neutrality, but are heavily outdated by modern judicial standards.
Expanding the Scope Beyond the Supreme Court
What started with reimagining major U.S. Supreme Court cases quickly evolved into a broader legal critique. The project extended its reach into numerous areas, including reproductive rights, immigration laws, family legislation and health laws. It even examines basic foundations of the US legislation, such as taxation. The areas are interpreted through feminist analysis, and they look into how everyday legal decisions are fundamentally shaped by assumptions about gender, social hierarchy, and power.
These expansions also highlight the diversity of feminist legal thought. There is no single “feminist” answer in the rewritten opinions. Rather, the project embraces complexity, contradiction, and debate, qualities often flattened in traditional judicial writing.
Purpose and Vision to Make Justice Visible
At its heart, the U.S. Feminist Judgments Project is about reimagining how justice is constructed. Legislation has long been imagined as a neutral contract, executed judges who apply it like a formula. But this is not the case. The project reveals how the legal decisions are often interpreted by the individual, and that these can be filtered via personal or cultural ideologies. The US laws can often perpetuate inequality because they don’t cover the experiences of women and marginalised communities, and they are not thorough enough to understand their plights.
This project doesn’t just ask what a feminist outcome would be. It shows how feminist methods, listening to context, examining power, foregrounding harm, can reshape legal interpretation itself. In doing so, it reframes law not as static doctrine, but as an evolving narrative capable of incorporating justice more fully.
Practical and Educational Impact
The project also challenges the belief that the legal system is immune to change. By showing how different decisions were legally possible even within the same constraints, it invites readers to rethink the boundaries of what is considered “reasonable,” “objective,” or “just” in the courtroom.
A Living, Evolving Project
The US Feminist Judgments Project is growing, constantly. It doesn’t just work to bring justice to the laws nowadays and repair the bonds of community that are lost by the exclusion of women and marginalized communities. The Project is very much a forward thinking initiative that look towards shaping the future of US law. It shows the palpable effect these laws have on people, and how the law should surpass courtrooms and serve as something to protect and represent everyone. Law should also be a continuously evolving notion, that does not fall back on the ideals of yesteryear, and beyond.
Law as Narrative, Justice as Rewriting
The U.S. Feminist Judgments Project reframes the law as a narrative, a story that has always been told from particular vantage points. By rewriting judicial opinions with feminist insight, the project reminds us that legal outcomes are not inevitable. They are choices, shaped by interpretation and values.
In reimagining key decisions, the project opens a deeper conversation: Who gets to define justice? Whose realities are included in the legal process? And what would our legal system look like if it fully accounted for the voices it has historically ignored?