BY
This is a landmark year for our Journal. After publishing for twenty-seven years as the Harvard Women’s Law Journal, we have now become the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender. Our new name does not signal a change in our Journal’s content. Rather, it reflects our long-standing commitment to publishing diverse feminist scholarship that approaches gender as an axis of power within law and throughout society.
Choosing the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender as our new name indicates our unwillingness to rely upon essentialist arguments based on biological sex or to demarcate any set of issues within the legal terrain as exclusive to women. At the same time, problems that disproportionately affect women are gendered issues, and as such, they will continue to be the central focus of our Journal. Our new name also more broadly encompasses our concerns with other mechanisms of power — such as race, class, and sexuality — that intersect with gender in rich and complicated ways.
In addition, we are proud to announce that from this volume forward, the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender will be publishing two issues each year. This will enhance our voice in the feminist legal community and enable us to respond to cutting-edge legal developments. Our additional pages will also allow us the freedom to engage in ongoing feminist inquiries as well as to initiate conversations on a variety of underexplored topics that merit attention. In these trying times for proponents of gender justice and social equality, we are energized by our Journal’s ability to face these challenges with renewed vigor and spirit. The Harvard Journal of Law & Gender looks forward to making some noise.
Naomi Schoenbaum and Katie WiikEditors-in-ChiefHarvard Journal of Law & Gender