Comparative law remains a small and relatively isolated area of inquiry. There are two barriers to development of the field. First, with the exception of taxation law and, possibly, divorce, comparative analysis of law is of little use to practicing lawyers. Second, as I discovered in a project on comparative rape law, it is difficult to gain access to the primary data sources, especially outside North America and Western Europe. In addition, there are few opportunities for interdisciplinary study—despite the attention of the Law and Society Association. Those who are not legal scholars need guides to the technical aspects of legal research to make the work of specialists more accessible.

Thus, the publication of The Gender of Constitutional Jurisprudence is especially welcome. Although the editors address their work to the small community of comparative law scholars, they bring together detailed case studies of constitutions and constitutional interpretation in 12 countries in a form that should be useful to a much wider audience, particularly in political science. In the first place, the study of different constitutional forms is a foundational element of every introductory comparative politics course; this book provides basic information on constitutions in countries usually not covered in basic texts, such as Costa Rica, Turkey, and Israel. In the second place, an examination of the policy implications of judicial decisions is an important component of public policy analysis. Here, each case study covers a wide range of policies relating to women and gender equality. Finally, the editors join a growing number of feminist scholars examining the cross-national variations in state response to women's movements for equality. They issue an invitation to interested scholars to start thinking about constitutions in a gendered way.

Despite the editors' intent to reach other comparative law specialists, it is highly likely that the main audience for this work will be not be comparative legal scholars but students of feminist comparative policy, another group that seeks to use conventional methods to study feminist questions. Most of the authors are law faculty, although some, such as Martha Nussbaum and Ran Hirschel, have interdisciplinary credentials. Overall, their approach is descriptive with appropriate legal citations. To enhance comparability, the editors set forth a framework—a feminist constitutional agenda—to guide the contributing scholars in organizing their chapters. The introductory chapter elaborates on each of seven components of this framework and previews some patterns that appear across the cases. The first item on the agenda is constitutional agency, which pertains to the ways in which women—in movements and as individuals—seek to have influence over constitutional forms and practices. The second topic, women and constitutional rights, examines the various means available to women in the different systems to address state action in the courts. The structural variations in constitutional forms—termed constitutional structured diversity—is the third category. Of special interest is the authors' treatment of ways in which constitutions and judges define constitutional equality, the fourth topic, contrasting discourses on formal equality, separate but equal statuses, and substantive equality. Three policy areas—reproductive rights, rights in the family, and socio-economic/democratic rights—complete the agenda.

The editors selected the countries to encompass differences rather than similarities: Australia, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, France, Germany, India, Israel, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, the United States. Each case study offers a window through which to explore the development of a national system of constitutional jurisprudence; at the same time, none of the chapters includes complete information on all parts of the agenda. The mix of formal common law and civil law regimes, along with the remains of legal traditions grounded in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Catholicism, offers many interesting questions for comparative inquiry. One involves the effect on women's legal status of various legal instruments. Citizens in common law systems (United States, Canada) may not use constitutional law to challenge private action; judicial review is limited to the review of state action. In Spain, Costa Rica, and Colombia, however, practices of amparo and tutela give individual women redress against violation of fundamental rights in the family, schools, and workplace. (It would have been helpful to have a fuller discussion in the introduction of these different instruments and their effects.) Another area for possible comparative inquiry is the extent to which international conventions and other legal instruments from the European Union, European Court of Justice, United Nations, and the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) limit choices in constitutional decision making.

A challenge for most of the courts in the countries included in the book involves coping with the conflict between international standards of gender equality and the dictates of religious, indigenous, and other traditions regulating the family, sexuality, and reproductive rights. Of particular interest to me is the range of responses to this conflict in constitutional jurisprudence about abortion. The eight cases where the authors included information on abortion laws show significant variation in the legal conceptions of the issue. Explanations for these patterns are not immediately evident. In Canada and South Africa, courts have asserted a constitutional right of women to make decisions about reproductive matters in the first trimester of pregnancy. German, Spanish, Israeli, and U.S. courts balance the rights and interests of women against the fetus with conditional abortion laws. Colombia defines abortion as an attack on human life and asserts that women have no rights over the fetus. India, as the result of an older policy stream motivated by worries about population growth, has a liberal abortion law. In India, in fact, feminists criticize their abortion law for its use for sex selection. Despite the differences among these constitutional systems on abortion, they are similar in that none of them integrates abortion rights with ideas of gender equality.

The Gender of Constitutional Jurisprudence is a “must have” addition to libraries in comparative policy and especially feminist policy. However, it remains primarily a reference book of descriptive case studies. The editors did not choose to offer a concluding chapter that would summarize and develop comparative themes; instead they leave it to the readers to make their own comparisons, a task hampered by the lack of uniformity of topics and methods across the cases.