Women Lawyers: Rewriting the Rules

The very presence of women in the law—normal as it may seem to us today—signals revolutionary change in a social order that for centuries entrusted control over its rules to men. Mona Harrington examines both the problems women meet when they claim equal authority as rule makers, and the impact of new perspectives and issues that women bring with them into the profession.

On the basis of more than one hundred interviews with women lawyers, judges, law school professors, and law students, an...