Course 2024-2025 a.y.

Are women’s rights sufficiently protected in contemporary democratic societies? How gender discrimination and/or imbalance should be addressed by law? The course explores those issues by addressing the history of the recognition of women's rights and the contribution of women's studies in understanding how the legal system addresses (or fails to address) social issues raised by the increasing participation of women in the cultural, political and economic life of a country.

The course others reading of women’s rights through the lenses of gender discrimination, thus paying attention to the usefulness of gender studies to understand women's claims for recognition and protection of their content-specific rights.

Therefore, the course will address:

The history of recognizing women’s rights at both the domestic and the international level.

Discrimination based on sex and gender

The legal protection against gender-based violence.

The legal guarantees women are entitled to in the specific contexts they live and operate

(political, economic, everyday life).

The course will also host short sessions dedicated to specific topics (subjected to change every year). This year the topicals will be:

· Topical 1: Women and private law protection

· Topical 2: Gender Equality and Criminal Justice

1. Understand women’s rights as individual legal positions

2. Describe how women advocated and defended their rights in contemporary society by also using gender literature

3. Identify the tensions between some classical models of organization/division of labor and public responsibility and the role of women in societies

4. Explain how law can effectively correct imbalances in the role and position of women in societies

5. Distinguish between gender issues broadly defined and women’s issues

6. Understand the rights of women to defend themselves from any form of violence

1. Identify legal situations in which law should take into consideration the specific position of women.

2. Compare the framing of legal issues before and after women’s successful vindication of their rights.

3. Interpret the law by using a critical gender approach, by identifying the peculiar position of women within the broadly defined gender issues.

4. Develop arguments to identify and challenge gender-based violence.

Group assignment will be used to develop an original research path to present in class concerning specific

rights (es. Workers’ rights; political rights).

Role-playing will be used as experiments to identify and solve problems raised by gender awareness.

• Written individual exam (traditional/online)

• Active class participation (virtual, attendance)

Students will sit a written exam which will consist of one open question and 5 multiple-choice questions to be completed in 1 hour. It will count for the 80% of the grade.

The written exam is designed to test the knowledge and understanding of the ILO as well as to develop arguments to effectively defend women’s rights.

The group assignment, which will count for the 20% of the grade, is designed to test students’ ability to compare the framing of a given legal issue with or without gender awareness.

R. Rubio Marín, Global Gender Constitutionalism and Women’s Citizenship. A Struggle for Transformative Inclusion, Cambridge, CUP, 2022 (Cap. 1, 2 and 3) plus additional materials to be indicated at the beginning of the course.

Case law and further materials will be made available to students before the start of the class.