Why does it matter how many women serve on state and federal courts in the United States, high courts in the United Kingdom, or the European Court of Justice? In Gender and Justice, Sally Kenney provides a groundbreaking argument for the importance of women’s presence on the bench.

Kenney makes the case for more women judges on the grounds of democratic citizenship, the symbolic role of judges, legitimacy, nondiscrimination, and representation. For one, judging is a core task of citizenship, just as serving on juries is a central component of being a citizen. If women are excluded from serving as judges, then women are excluded from exercising their rights and responsibilities as citizens. Second, when the general public sees a bench solely occupied by men, it sends a message of exclusion. Women’s presence on the bench signals to all that women are men’s equals. Third, with no or few women judges, “justice will not be seen to be done”: Judicial processes and decisions will lack legitimacy (p. 175). Increasing the number of women on the bench will enhance the legitimacy of the judiciary. Fourth, if women constitute 50% of eligible candidates or nominees but do not hold judicial office to a similar extent, the path to judgeship is discriminatory. We ought to demand more women on the bench, then, on the basis of nondiscrimination.

Fifth, and most intriguing, Kenney contends that if women judges are absent or few in number, then there is a problem of women’s underrepresentation. Here, she makes several important analytic moves. Recognizing that the lion’s share of the literature on representation focuses on the legislature, Kenney asserts that courts are representative institutions. Judges, however, are not legislators. Using Hannah Pitkin’s terminology (The Concept of Representation, 1967), Kenney suggests that judges can “stand for” a group, whereas legislators can both “stand for” and “act for” a broader collective (see p. 126). She points out that selectors already think of courts as representative institutions in the sense that judges stand for geographic regions. Ronald Reagan, who called for the appointment of justices from the West, nominated Justices William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court. On the same grounds of geographic representation, the U.K. Law Lords historically included two judges from Scotland and one from Northern Ireland (but no women until the 2000s) (p. 178).

What about the premise that women will judge differently than men? Kenney forcefully opposes this line of reasoning, for empirical and theoretical reasons (Chapter 2). Empirically, the findings of a large and still growing quantitative literature are highly mixed. There is little conclusive evidence that women judge differently than men. Nor should we expect there to be a coherent or stable set of findings about sex and judging. In line with feminist theorists who see gender as a process, Kenney challenges the underlying assumption of the “sex as a variable” approach, which sees women and men as inherently different and washes over differences among women and differences among men. If one understood gender as a social process, then one would not expect women judges to promote women’s rights or to expect that men judges would oppose women’s rights (or to be more or less lenient, moderate, or punitive). To return to the geographic analogy, “Iowa judges do not have to decide cases differently from Minnesota judges to justify their representation on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals” (p. 21).

This is not to say that scholars ought to abandon quantitative research. Kenney agrees with fellow scholars of law and society and of women and politics that statistical analyses can illuminate where and why there is discrimination against women in the selection process. But she challenges scholars to go further and take gender seriously. Rather than ask whether judges act differently based on their sex, the author sees it more useful to study how judges, regardless of their sex, come to value women and attain gender consciousness. Note, however, that Kenney is skeptical that simply adding a woman to the court or having a certain threshold of women on the bench will automatically make a bench feminist or attuned to gender. When it comes to judging, “individuals matter; life experiences matter” (p. 14).

In addition to Kenney’s lucid, nonessentialist argument for more women on the bench, what makes this book distinctive is the application of gender analysis to multiple countries (the United States in Chapters 3, 4, and 7, the United Kingdom in Chapter 5) and jurisdictions (state supreme courts in Chapters 3 and 7, federal courts in Chapter 4, the highest court in Chapter 5, the European Court of Justice in Chapter 6). The book also explores the interplay among gender, judicial selection, and various concepts (the mobilization of emotion, strategic partnerships, agenda setting, backlash). That is, the book integrates more than 10 years of the author’s research on judicial selection, women judges, and gender politics. The real heart of this book, however, is in Kenney’s nonessentialist case for having women in the judiciary.

Gender and Justice should inject urgency into, and inspire future research on, the judiciary and women for years to come. Looking beyond courts in the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Court of Justice, which arguments against the exclusion of women from the judiciary are more influential and under what circumstances? Globally, where are women underrepresented in the judiciary and why? In the United States and elsewhere, does having more women on the bench change attitudes toward women in power, increase girls’ interest in pursuing a career in law, or improve public confidence in those courts?

Yet even if scholars find no evidence of changed attitudes, interest, or confidence, Kenney’s case for more women still rests on the grounds of citizenship, nondiscrimination, and representation. Indeed, the assertion that courts are representative institutions is a major theoretical idea that needs to be addressed by future scholars. In the book, the author draws on Pitkin’s as well as Jane Mansbridge’s conceptualizations of representation, but, as Kenney notes, our discipline’s core theories of representation focus on elected officials. Consequently, much of the scholarship on women’s representation has examined women and men in the legislature. She has not only called for a corrective but also offers an analytic framework based on gender as a process.

Eschewing stereotypes about what women and men are like, Kenney asserts that the lack of women on the bench is a problem of citizenship, the symbolic role of judges, legitimacy, nondiscrimination, and representation. The most important scholarly statement to date for why women in the judiciary matter, Gender and Justice is a must-read for students and scholars of law and society and of women and politics.