"The essays in this volume confront the inroads that economics has made into the legal academy.... Law and Economics uses principles of neoclassical economics to develop laws and social policies that maintain if not bolster current allocations of power."—from the Introduction The Law and Economics school has had a significant impact on the legal and governmental landscape in the United States. It posits a perfectly rational "economic man"—homo economicus—who is unconstrained by familial and communal ties and who can and should make decisions solely in light of considerations of economic value. Feminism Confronts Homo Economicus offers a major intervention in debates about how law has come under the influence of economic principles. Drawing on the latest thinking in the fields of feminist legal theory, critical legal studies, and feminist economics, the essays critique the notion that legal and policy decisions should be made solely through the lens of economics. While the contributors question the wholesale incorporation of the neoclassical economic model into legal analysis, they do not all discard economic analysis and theory. Situated at the intersection of feminism, law, and economics, Feminism Confronts Homo Economicus will appeal to scholars and students of these disciplines as well as policy analysts and social theorists interested in family, education, labor, and welfare.

Hewitson (business, La Trobe U., Australia) uses a feminist poststructuralist approach to expose the masculinity of the allegedly unsexed figure of the neoclassical "rational economic man". Employing a wide range of poststructuralist writings, she argues that neoclassical economics does construct sexual differences and that the notion of the exchanging agent, commonly perceived as a universal and sexless individual, cannot accommodate sexual differences, thus concluding that neoclassical economics cannot accommodate women's differences.

This book is the first volume to consider feminist concerns across the entire domain of economics.

This is the first book to examine the central tenets of economics from a feminist point of view. In these original essays, the authors suggest that the discipline of economics could be improved by freeing itself from masculine biases. "Beyond Economic Man" raises questions about the discipline not because economics is too objective but because it is not objective enough. The contributors--nine economists, a sociologist, and a philosopher--discuss the extent to which gender has influenced both the range of subjects economists have studied and the way in which scholars have conducted their studies. They investigate, for example, how masculine concerns underlie economists' concentration on market as opposed to household activities and their emphasis on individual choice to the exclusion of social constraints on choice. This focus on masculine interests, the contributors contend, has biased the definition and boundaries of the discipline, its central assumptions, and its preferred rhetoric and methods. However, the aim of this book is not to reject current economic practices, but to broaden them, permitting a fuller understanding of economic phenomena. These essays examine current economic practices in the light of a feminist understanding of gender differences as socially constructed rather than based on essential male and female characteristics. The authors use this concept of gender, along with feminist readings of rhetoric and the history of science, as well as postmodernist theory and personal experience as economists, to analyze the boundaries, assumptions, and methods of neoclassical, socialist, and institutionalist economics. The contributors are Rebecca M. Blank, PaulaEngland, Marianne A. Ferber, Nancy Folbre, Ann L. Jennings, Helen E. Longino, Donald N. McCloskey, Julie A. Nelson, Robert M. Solow, Diana Strassmann, and Rhonda M. Williams.

This classic study extends feminist analysis to economics, but rejects setting up an economics solely for women. It is the first full length, single authored book to focus on gender bias in contemporary economics.

Transcending the Boundaries of Law is a ground-breaking collection that will be central to future developments in feminist and related critical theories about law. In its pages three generations of feminist legal theorists engage with what have become key feminist themes, including equality, embodiment, identity, intimacy, and law and politics. Almost two decades ago Routledge published the very first anthology in feminist legal theory, At the Boundaries of Law (M.A. Fineman and N. Thomadsen, eds. 1991), which marked an important conceptual move away from the study of "women in law" prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s. The scholars in At the Boundaries applied feminist methods and theories in examining law and legal institutions, thus expanding upon work in the Law and Society tradition. This new anthology brings together some of the original contributors to that volume with scholars from subsequent generations of critical gender theorists. It provides a "retrospective" on the past twenty-five years of scholarly engagement with issues relating to gender and law, as well as suggesting directions for future inquiry, including the tantalizing suggestion that feminist legal theory should move beyond gender as its primary focus to consider the theoretical, political, and social implications of the universally shared and constant vulnerability inherent in the human condition.

Transcending the Boundaries of Law brings together three generations of the most respected feminist legal theorists in order to assess the past, the present and the future of feminist legal thought in the Law and Society tradition. It is a ground-breaking collection that will be central to the further development of feminism and related critical theories.