Calling for Change

Women, Law, and the Legal Profession

Unique in both scope and perspective, Calling for Change investigates the status of women within the Canadian legal profession ten years after the first national report on the subject was published by the Canadian Bar Association. Elizabeth Sheehy and Sheila McIntyre bring together essays that investigate a wide range of topics, from the status of women in law schools, the practising bar, and on the bench, to women's grassroots engagement with law and with female lawyers from the frontlines. Contributors not only reflect critically on the gains, losses, and barriers to change of the past decade, but also provide blueprints for political action. Academics, community activists, practitioners, law students, women litigants, and law society benchers and staff explore how egalitarian change is occurring and/or being impeded in their particular contexts. Each of these unique voices offers lessons from their individual, collective, and institutional efforts to confront and counter the interrelated forms of systemic inequality that compromise women's access to education and employment equity within legal institutions and, ultimately, to equal justice in Canada.