Sally J. Kenney argues that female judges matter but not for the reason most scholars and activists expect. Study after study has demonstrated that female elected officials are more liberal than their male counterparts on a variety of issues and have a gender-related influence on public policy, especially in the areas of women's rights, the welfare of families and children, health care, and education. In contrast, research examining judicial decision-making has found little in the way of gender difference. Kenney respectfully and thoroughly reviews the pioneering research of scholars such as Beverly Blair Cook, Elaine Martin, and Sue Davis, who examined whether women on the bench decide cases differently than do men, only to find scarce evidence of consistent and statistically significant gender differences in judicial outcomes.

Despite the absence of gender differences in decision-making, Kenny argues that we need more women on the bench and that a gendered analysis focusing on female judges can provoke a rethinking of concepts and assumptions across several different areas of research. While acknowledging that using sex as a variable can be useful in documenting discrimination, Kenney views gender as a social process—a process “by which we attach meaning to sex differences, most often to devalue whatever society associates with women” (24). The five qualitative case studies she presents in this book are all aimed at showing the utility of this conceptualization—that is, how women “did” gender and thus how meaning was constructed in each situation. Each case also illustrates the important contributions that an analysis of gender as a social process can make to advancing our understanding of not only the judiciary, but also social movements, policy implementation, agenda-setting, representation, and backlash.

Kenney's first case study analyzes the initial appointment and later election of Rosalie Wahl to the Minnesota Supreme Court in the late 1970s. In this case, Kenney focuses on how Wahl, a feminist activist herself, forged an emotional connection and mobilized female activists in support of her candidacy not by promising substantive representation, but rather by becoming a symbol of women's hopes and aspirations. As the first woman on the court, she symbolizes the end of women's political exclusion and a manifestation of the growing influence of the women's movement. Wahl's case illustrates the significance of the understudied role of emotional connections in social movement mobilization.

Kenney's second case study suggests the importance of bringing a rarely employed gendered lens to the study of policy implementation. Arguing that an increase in the number of female attorneys does not automatically lead to increased representation of women in the judiciary, Kenney examines how an insider-outsider collaboration resulted in record numbers of women appointed to the federal bench during the administration of Jimmy Carter. This policy success occurred because of the commitment and efforts of Margaret McKenna, deputy White House counsel, working closely with a network of women's organizations mobilized around the objective of increasing the appointment of women.

In her third case, Kenney moves outside the United States to the United Kingdom. Contrary to conventional accounts of agenda-setting generally positing that a groundswell of support must be built before a problem can reach the government's agenda, Kenney finds that the British government came to see women's underrepresentation in the judiciary as a problem in the absence of any such groundswell. This issue reached the government's agenda because feminists took advantage of a wave of constitutional reform, arguing that gender equality was a necessary step in modernizing the judiciary.

In her fourth case study, Kenney offers a gendered analysis of courts as representative institutions, examining the European Court of Justice. Because judging involves applying the law rather than responding to or acting for constituents, courts often are not considered representative institutions. Yet Kenney argues that “standing for” or descriptive representation of women on the European Court of Justice is necessary to enhance legitimacy, just as the descriptive representation of different member states, parties, and types of legal systems is critical for the court's decisions to be viewed as legitimate.

Kenney's fifth case study focuses on backlash against female judges, analyzing the treatment of Rose Bird, the first female justice and chief justice on the California Supreme Court and the first California Supreme Court justice to be voted out of office. Kenney shows how gender interacted with other explanatory factors to contribute to the perception that she was a bad manager, was unlikeable, ran a poor campaign, and ultimately did not deserve to win her election.

Given the disparate nature of the topics Kenney considers and the very different literatures addressed in each case study, this book necessarily has a multipronged and multidimensional, rather than linear, structure. Clearly, this structure reflects an intentional choice, one that has its advantages even if the reader is sometimes left longing for stronger interconnections and transitions between chapters and cases. Perhaps the greatest advantage is that each case makes for fascinating reading on its own and could be utilized independently. For example, the case study of the European Court of Justice would be an excellent addition to a course on political representation, just as the case study of Rosalie Wald would be a useful reading for a social movements course.

Nevertheless, the sum is clearly greater than the parts, and Kenney's central focus on gender as a social process, with her objective of illustrating the utility of this approach, provides an overarching and unifying theme for the book. Years ago, Kenney urged us to think more seriously about how we conceptualize and study gender in her path-breaking essay, “New Research on Gendered Institutions,” and she continues to push our thinking forward in this book.Footnote ¹Gender and Justice is worth reading for its insights and provocative ideas on how political scientists should think about gender and do gender scholarship, even for scholars who may not be particularly interested in the judiciary.

Kenney, however, argues that all of us should be interested in female judges. She astutely observes that scholars of judicial politics generally fail to think about women or gender while women and politics scholars largely overlook female judges. I, for one, am guilty as charged. But Kenney's argument that female judges matter is compelling, and consequently she has made it very difficult for me to continue to overlook women on the bench simply because their decisions generally are not very different from those of their male colleagues. Like me, scholars, students, and activists who read Gender and Justice are likely to find Kenney's arguments persuasive, and they, too, will come to appreciate more fully the implications and importance of adding more women to the judiciary.