Introduction: the Indian feminist judgements project

The Indian Feminist Judgements Project (IFJP) is a collaboration between feminist scholars, practitioners, and activists, drawn from law and other disciplines, who are using a feminist lens to write alternative opinions to existing judgements. The aim of this project is to critically examine judicial archives using feminist tools. The project aspires to be a blueprint for alternative feminist futures of juridical practices and critical lawyering. This special issue of the Indian Law Review presents a set of six re-written judgements and accompanying commentaries that were prepared as part of the IFJP. IFJP is inspired by similar efforts in other jurisdictions. The precursor to the present trend of feminist rewriting of judgements is the setting up of the Women’s Court of Canada in 2004. This was a collaborative project by Canadian feminist scholars, activists and lawyers who rewrote Canadian Supreme Court decisions on section 15, the equality clause in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom. The goal of this “shadow judgment” project was to explore what substantive equality could look like in judicial expression. The Canadian experiment was repeated in the UK, Australia, the USA, New Zealand, Ireland and Northern Ireland. Taking a leaf from its sister projects, IFJP imagines the possibilities of collaboratively writing alternative feminist judgements for landmark Indian cases across a broad range of legal issues such as substantive equality, sexual autonomy and consent, employment discrimination, religious freedom, legal pluralism, and law’s relation to indigeneity, disability, and caste, among others. Feminist scholarship in India has extensively explored how legal rules and their application by the courts continue to remain sites of embedded patriarchy. IFJP builds upon this literature by translating the vast body of feminist legal theory into practice by rewriting the