The Constitutional Heroines Project explores the role of female judicial leadership in comparative constitutional governance.  Just one to two decades ago, there were only a handful of female-identifying judges on appellate and constitutional courts worldwide.  Today, there are dozens of women serving as appellate and constitutional judges, and an increasing number of female chief justices or court presidents.  The aim of this Project is to document this development and investigate its relationship to ideas about institutional leadership and notions of female and feminist leadership. By focusing on theories and practices of female leadership in other disciplines and how they may apply to or in a judicial context, the Project will explore what effective court leadership means and challenge recent contributions to the comparative judicial studies field, which have privileged an individualistic, heroic (and often male) vision of the “towering judge.”

We invite attention to the role of leading female judges on their own terms, albeit with a gender-conscious lens or perspective, not to reproduce existing national studies on female judges and a different judicial voice.  We are thus also interested in discovering the changes in the role of women in the legal process across countries and across time, to help us understand different aspects of constitutional design as well as the role of courts and judges in different constitutional systems.  And we aim to promote an inter-disciplinary conversation, which can inform the development of a common framework of inquiry into the role of female court leadership, including the possibility of promoting more egalitarian, democratic, and trustworthy models of democratic governance.

The questions we hope to answer by engaging in this inter-disciplinary conversation are:

• How should we define notions of judicial leadership – and what lessons do other disciplines have about understanding different styles or modes of leadership in this context?
• What is the relationship between identity, gender, and experience, and leadership style and/or jurisprudential approach?
• What does it mean to adopt a feminist approach to judicial leadership?
• How does a judge’s role conception affect their contribution to constitutional governance? Do female-identifying judges have a different role conception, given the historic baseline that judges are men?
• What are the broader political and social conditions that support or impair female or institutional leadership of this kind?

The Project will also adopt a self-consciously feminist approach to knowledge production: one that is collaborative, dialogic, reflective and that seeks to create the time and space needed to produce high-quality scholarship in a context compatible with care responsibilities.

The Project is co-sponsored by the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University, and University of New South Wales.