Feminist Jurisprudence Discussion Group Annual Workshop
The Feminist Jurisprudence Discussion Group is thrilled to advertise our fifth interdisciplinary Annual Workshop held 9:30-5:00 on Friday, 13th June 2025 at St Hilda’s College Oxford.
You are welcome to attend the full day or attend for just one or some of the sessions that are of most relevance to you or your work.
For catering and other logistical purposes, please sign up here: https://forms.office.com/e/L8Fy14gwCm
Our theme this year is embodied and disembodied feminist realities. This workshop takes these two strands and holds them in parallel to weave a picture of modern and emergent feminist jurisprudence. Embodiment has been and remains a central concern of feminist legal theory and research. This concern remains valid in the present day with feminist jurisprudence, feminist legal academics and feminist lawyers engaging with matters such as women’s and reproductive health, obstetric violence law, violence against women, women in climate change, and gender and sport. Equally in the modern world ‘disembodied’ issues demand the attention of feminist legal thought. Such issues include the regulation of deepfakes, AI, and structural and political issues.
9:00-9:20 Arrival, tea & coffee
9:20-9:30 Welcome & housekeeping
9:30-10:30 Panel 1: Adjudication Feminist Jurisprudence
Sonakshi Grover (Lawyers' Ambivalence towards Professionalism: The nature of Family Law, Courts and Divorce in Lucknow); Natalia Bórquez (Indigenous women before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights); Silvina Sanchez Mera (The Embodiment of the victim: The ICC’s representation of female fighters)
10:30-11:30 Keynote speech: Prof Nicola Lacey (Making the Case for Feminist Jurisprudence in 2025)
11:30-11:45 Short tea break
11:45-1:00 Panel 2: Therapeutic interventions into feminist jurisprudence: when law & medicine meet
Amélie Courtine (Conversion Practices and the ECHR: a critical analysis of the Court’s approach on cases related to SOGIE non-conforming individuals); Anna Nelson (Barriers to care-full and lawful birthing care: understanding midwives as gendered and devalued care labourers); Yihong Chen (Rethinking the Legalisation of Non-marital Births in China: A Constitutional and Gendered Analysis)
1:00-2:00 Lunch
2:00-3:00 Panel 3: Accessing feminist jurisprudence in contested spaces
Favour Borokini (Legal Embodiments: A Socio-Legal Exploration of the Experiences of African Women Law Doctoral Candidates); Kyra Wigard (Using Feminist Judgment Projects as a Framework in Legal Education: Challenges and Opportunities); Natalia Cwicinskaja (Embodied and Disembodied Feminist Realities in Unrecognized States: Women’s Rights in Post-Soviet Unrecognized Entities)
3:00-4:30 Methods panel Prof. Jonathan Herring & As. Prof. Barbara Havelkova
4:30-5:00 Closing
Speaker biographies
Nicola Lacey
Nicola Lacey is School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy at the London School of Economics. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, served as a member of the British Academy’s Policy Group on Prisons, which reported in 2014, and was from 2014-2019 the Academy’s nominee on the Board of the British Museum. In 2011 she was awarded the Hans Sigrist Prize by the University of Bern, for scholarship on the rule of law in modern societies; and in 2022 she won the Law and Society Association’s International Prize. She has been shortlisted for the 2025 Law Teacher of the Year Award. Her publications include A Life of HLA Hart (OUP 2004); Women, Crime and Character: From Moll Flanders to Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008); The Prisoners’ Dilemma (2008), and In Search of Criminal Responsibility (2016).
Jonathan Herring
Jonathan Herring is a Professor of Law at Oxford University and the DM Wolfe-Clarendon Fellow in Law at Exeter College Oxford. He has written extensively on issues around family law, medical law and ethics, care law, and criminal law. He focuses on how the law interacts with the important things in life.
Barbara Havelkova
Barbara is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and a Tutorial Fellow at St Hilda's College. She was previously the Shaw Foundation Fellow at Lincoln College and held other posts at the University of Cambridge (Emmanuel College) and Oxford (Balliol). She worked for Clifford Chance Prague, trained at the Legal Service of the European Commission and in the Chambers of AG Poiares Maduro at the Court of Justice of the European Union. She was an academic visitor at several law schools, including Harvard University and University of Michigan as a Fulbright scholar and the Jean Monnet Center of NYU Law School as an Emile Noël Fellow.
Sonakshi Grover
An MPhil student in International Development at the University of Oxford, specializing in the intersections of legal practice, social inequality, divorce, and family law in North India through an ethnographic lens. Previously trained in Economics, with experience conducting both quantitative and qualitative research on gender dynamics within households and the analysis of legal discourse.
Natalia Bórquez
I am a PhD student working in international human rights law at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. My research interests include gender equality, intersectionality and the anti-stereotyping approach in the argumentation of regional human rights courts, among other topics. I have also gained valuable experience working in feminist and human rights NGOS in Chile and in Germany.
Silvina Sanchez Mera
Dr Silvina Sánchez Mera is a Lecturer in Law at Robert Gordon University where she teaches law and criminology. She holds a PhD from La Trobe University. Her research focus on the International Criminal Court’s practice and engages with feminist and criminological theories. She has previously worked as a tutor at La Trobe and as a Lecturer in Public International Law and Human Rights Law in Argentina. Her professional experience also includes working as legal officer at a State Juvenile Court, as a researcher for the Defence Counsel at the ICTY and interned at the ECCC.
Amélie Courtine
Amélie Courtine is a PhD researcher at the University of Leicester. She holds a law degree from the University of Bordeaux and an LLM in Public International Law from Maastricht University. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she worked as a research consultant for the French organisation La Cimade, focusing on access to healthcare for migrants in the French territories of the Indian Ocean. Driven by a commitment to defending the rights of vulnerable people, Amélie chose to focus her PhD on a subject of personal significance. Her research aims to offer a queer reading of the European Court of Human Rights’ approach to violence and discrimination, through the prism of conversion practices.
Anna Nelson
Anna has a PhD in Bioethics and Medical Jurisprudence from the University of Manchester. Her doctoral research looked at the intersection of artificial womb technology and autonomy during childbirth. Since completing her PhD, Anna has held Research Associate positions on a number of projects. Her own research explores the gap between law and reality in the context of gendered experiences of healthcare, with a particular focus on childbirth and maternity care. It takes a socio-legal approach to interrogating the impact of the circumstances within which consent is sought and given, and the dynamics which shape (and constrain) maternity care.
Yihong Chen
Yihong Chen is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law, China University of Political Science and Law, and a visiting PhD student at the University of Bristol’s Faculty of Social Sciences and Law. Her research focuses on women’s rights, feminist constitutional studies, human rights, and legislative theory, exploring the intersections of gender, law, social justice, and global governance.
Favour Borokini
Favour Borokini is a Law PhD Researcher with the Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training, hosted at the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham exploring ethical concerns in the design and use of avatars. She holds a Law degree from the University of Benin, Nigeria. She has successfully leveraged her legal background to investigate issues such as the impact of technology on human rights, particularly women's rights, the impact of AI on African women, and the experiences of African women working in AI across various sectors.
Kyra Wigard
Kyra Wigard is an Assistant Professor at the Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology at Utrecht University (UU). She teaches courses on international and domestic criminal law and criminal procedure and judicial decision-making to master and bachelor students. Prior to joining Utrecht University, Kyra was a Lecturer and Research Fellow at the KU Leuven Centre for Public Law where she also completed her PhD with a dissertation titled "Tracing legal traditions in the decision-making of international judges: evidence from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC)" under supervision of professor Gleider Hernández and professor Carsten Stahn (Leiden University).
Natalia Cwicinskaja
Dr. Natalia Cwicinskaja is an assistant professor at the Department of International Law and International Organisation, Faculty of Law and Administration, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her research focuses on international law, with particular emphasis on recognition, self-determination, and the legal implications of territorial disputes. She specializes in the legal status of unrecognized entities and the application of international human rights law to such entities, particularly in the post-Soviet region. Dr. Cwicinskaja has published in leading academic journals, including the European Yearbook of Human Rights, Yearbook of International Disaster Law, and Polish Yearbook of International Law.