Gender, Religion, and Family Law: Theorizing Conflicts between Women’s Rights and Cultural Traditions

List of Contributors

list oF ContriButors Fatou Kiné Camara is an associate professor of law at the University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal. She is the Secretary General of cosef (Conseil sénégalais des femmes/Council for Senegalese Women), an association that works to promote the role of women in politics. She is also deputy secretary general of ajs (the Association of Female Jurists of Senegal ), an association devoted to the establishment of gender equality and children’s rights, as well as providing legal assistance, advice, and training to citizens in need. As a professor of law, she publishes extensively on “taboo” human rights subjects in Africa (right to abortion, discrimination against homosexuality, conjugal rape, child trafficking in the name of religion , and language rights). In November 2010, she was awarded the Prix des Droits de l’Homme du Cinquantenaire des Indépendances (Human Rights Prize for the Jubilee of the fifty years of independence of former French colonies in Africa) by the Académie des Sciences d’Outre-mer and the Secrétariat du cinquantenaire des Indépendances (France). Lisa Fishbayn Joffe is director of the Project on Gender, Culture, Religion, and Law at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute of Brandeis University. The Project focuses on identifying and disseminating innovative theoretical approaches to the reconciliation of conflicts between women’s rights and practices rooted in cultural and religious norms. She writes on issues of gender and multiculturalism in Jewish family law and African customary law. She has been a visiting scholar at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand and at Harvard Law School and a lecturer in law at the Faculty of Laws, University College London. She was a member of the Pan Commonwealth Expert Group on Gender and Human Rights. She is co-editor of the Brandeis Series on Gender, Culture , Religion, and Law. Pascale Fournier is University of Ottawa Research Chair in Legal Pluralism and Comparative Law, associate professor, and vice-dean of research at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law (Civil Law Section). Professor Fournier received her LLB from Laval University (1997), her LLM from 294 · list oF ContriButors the University of Toronto (2000), and her SJD from Harvard Law School (2007) as a Trudeau Scholar. Her scholarship focuses on comparative family law, Charter issues, Islam and Judaism in Europe and North America , criminal law and cultural diversity, and critical approaches to law. Her current research project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, investigates the migration of two forms of religious divorce (the Jewish get and the Islamic talaq) in Canada, France, Britain, Germany, and Israel and explores through field interviews the effects of such migration on Jewish and Muslim women. In 2008, she served as expert consultant for the United Nations Development Programme on issues of gender and Islamic law in Tunisia, Egypt, Malaysia, and Nigeria. Her publications were selected by the Harvard-Stanford Junior Faculty Forum (2008), the Québec Bar Foundation prize for “best law review article” (2009), and the Canadian Association of Law Teachers Scholarly Paper Award (Honorable Mention, 2010). Her book Muslim Marriage in Western Courts: Lost in Transplantation was published in 2010 by Ashgate Publishing. Since 2011, she has served on the Younger Comparativists Committee (YCC) of the American Society of Comparative Law (ASCL). Irit Koren has a PhD in gender studies from Bar-Ilan University. She is the author of the book You Are Hereby Renewed Unto Me: Gender, Religion and Power Relations in the Jewish Wedding Ritual (Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2011), and also of the book Aron Betoch Aron [Altering the Closet: Stories of Religious Homosexuals] (Yediot Acharonot, 2003). Dr. Koren was a visiting scholar at Rutgers University as well as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Colombia University. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender and Jewish studies, with a particular emphasis on the challenges faced by women at the juncture of tradition and modernity. Koren has taught at many institutions both in Israel and in New York. Rashida Manjoo holds a part-time post as a professor in the Department of Public Law at the University of Cape Town and is the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women. She is the former Parliamentary commissioner of the South African Commission on Gender Equality (CGE), a constitutional body mandated to oversee the promotion and protection of gender equality. Prior to being appointed to the CGE, she was involved in...