Gender, Care and Financial Remedies on Divorce

Reinterprets the modern evolution of financial remedies law through the lens of social reproduction, exposing how judicial citation practices have embedded gender discrimination.

This open access book offers a ground-breaking reinterpretation of the modern evolution of English financial remedies law, exposing systematic under-valuation of women’s unpaid caring work.

It argues that the House of Lords in White and Miller; McFarlane sought to eradicate gender discrimination by promoting substantive equality of outcome, distributing the economic consequences of interdependence more fairly and alleviating earning capacity disparity. Through detailed analysis of key judgments, the book shows how judicial citation practices maintained the law’s pre-White trajectory and entrenched gender bias.

The book demonstrates how a small, homogeneous group of senior judges stymied this progressive shift and maintained a legal paradigm based on an individualised understanding of contributions that privileges financial contributions and the clean break over interdependence and care. Using an innovative methodology combining doctrinal analysis with critical discourse analysis, the book reveals how these judges distorted White and Miller; McFarlane, maintaining a veneer of fidelity to the judgments while minimising their impact. The book uses the feminist concepts of social reproduction and depletion as an analytic lens to reveal how ongoing judicial failure to value unpaid care in family law mirrors global patterns of institutional blindness to the value of socially reproductive labour.

The result is both a searing critique of the law’s development and a powerful exposition of how judicial homogeneity can combine with dubious use of precedent to sustain systemic inequality. The book calls for a more diverse and self-reflective judiciary, and for a long overdue shift to a relational understanding of fairness that places care at the heart of financial remedies law to address women’s persistently worse post-divorce financial outcomes.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.