ON DISCIPLINE AND CANON

This conference takes place at a particularly interesting moment for feminist theory, a time when we can say that feminist jurisprudence has in many ways become a discipline. We have mountains of casebooks.(3) Many law schools -- not all, and I do not think that I can say most -- offer a course called feminist jurisprudence, feminist legal theory, or the jurisprudence of gender. There is even an endowed chair in feminist theory that [Martha Albertson Fineman] held up at Cornell Law School. We might even say that a kind of canon has been established in feminist legal theory, concretized, or canonized if you will, in the various readers that many of us know well. There is Fran Olsen's two-volume set collecting the writings that were, in 1995, formative and that "position[ed] feminist theory within the law."(4) There are Bartlett and [Rosanne Kennedy]'s reader,(5) [Adrien Katherine Wing]'s Critical Race Feminism,(6) and Martha Chamallas's Introduction to Feminist Legal Theory,(7) that many of us use in our own teaching. While there are doubtless new readers in press -- this is an evolving area ofjurisprudence -- I think you will see similarities across books that both create and reflect the canonical texts in feminist legal theory. A few examples will illustrate this concern although they surely do not capture the entire field or the entire range of the concern that I have. First, in the inaugural feminist theory lecture in 1999 for the Gender, Work, and Family Project at American University, Kate Bartlett provided one of her overviews of feminist theory in law. The lecture was called "Cracking Foundations As Feminist Method,"(8) in which she noted with puzzlement that some of our most prominent theorists in feminist theory do not cite or acknowledge one another's work. She and I share a worry about a tendency in some feminist theory to purport once and for all to have gotten it right. You do not need to cite anyone else if your own work has both considered and answered all the important issues facing women. (15) See, e.g., [Mary Becker], Care and Feminists, 17 Wis. Women's L.J. 57, 78-95 (2002). [Janet E. Halley]'s new work on sexuality harassment has frequently received a critical, if not hostile, response from audiences where she has discussed the work. Guido Calabresi, while not a prominent "feminist," but surely a prominent legal theorist and jurist, has recently described Halley's work as "nearly heretical." Guido Calabresi, An Introduction to Legal Tho