Flexible Choice-of-Law Rules: Panacea or Oxymoron?
Flexibility is not an acknowledged legal concept, however, and there is no common understanding what fl exibility really means. In fact, the term “fl exibility” is hardly ever defi ned, it is not used uniformly and it may consequently carry rather different meanings depending on the context.2 Furthermore, the doctrinal viability of fl exibility normally remains unexplained. I have previously discussed related general aspects in an article which was published in 2011.3 Based on feedback which I have received in the meantime and further research, this article refi nes my conclusions and – more importantly – explores the signifi cance of fl exibility in the choice-of-law context. To set the scene the fi rst section provides a brief introduction to the potential meanings of “fl exibility” and how this term is used in the legal discourse.4
The Critical Legal Studies Movement
Critical Legal Studies (CLS) is a network of leftist legal scholars hostile to American political ideology and liberal political theory that traces its beginnings to the ‘Conference on Critical Legal Studies’ at the University of Wisconsin in 1977. 1 The movement has since seen many derivations. One of its main figures, legal scholar Duncan Kennedy, conceives CLS as both a network of leftist activists and as a branch of scholarly literature, arguing: ‘... critical legal studies has two aspects. It’s a scholarly literature and it has also been a network of people who were thinking of themselves as activists in law school politics. Initially, the scholarly literature was produced by the same people who were doing law school activism. Critical legal studies is not a theory. It’s basically this literature produced by this network of people.’ 2 Political and legal theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger notes that while the movement ‘continued as an organizing force only until the late 1980s, ... its founders never meant it to become an ongoing school of thought or genre of writing.’ He delves further into the movement’s activist role in this book-length revision of his long, seminal 1983 article, ‘The Critical Legal Studies Movement.’ Interesting for Unger’s followers, this new edition is accompanied by an extended discussion on the potential of law and legal thought to inform the self-construction of society under our current democracy. Put differently, Unger proposes a shaping of society based on a vision of human personality devoid of the hidden interests and class domination, which, for the CLS movement, are the pillars sustaining liberal legal institutions in the West.
Letting Women in? Gender Mainstreaming in Regional Policies
Gender mainstreaming has over the last ten years become the dominant strategy of integrating gender issues in public policy. This article presents regional policy as a broad and increasingly important policy field to study, and analyses gender mainstreaming in this policy field in the Norwegian and the Swedish contexts. How do problem representations surrounding “gender equality” and “gender mainstreaming” produce meanings of gender as well as construct possibilities for change? The article shows that, despite some differences between the two countries, gender mainstreaming in regional policy can to a large extent be read as meaning “women”. Women are in this context given a narrow subject position and are constructed as lacking what it takes to produce sustainable regional growth. The concluding discussion highlights the relations between the implementation of gender mainstreaming and neo‐liberal political trends.