This book examines women's access to family justice, offering a critical analysis of how law, judicial practice, and institutional structures combine to shape women's experiences of family courts.
Drawing on original empirical research, including interviews with fifty women litigants and ten family law practitioners, alongside analysis of court judgments, legislation, and official statistics, the study explores the gap between formal legal rights and the realities of legal outcomes for women.
Situating Iranian family law within broader debates on gender, access to justice, authoritarian legalism, and Islamic jurisprudence, the book demonstrates how legal systems can reproduce inequality through both institutional design and judicial interpretation. It investigates key areas of family law, including divorce, maintenance (nafaqa), conjugal obedience (tamkin), domestic violence, custody, and evidentiary standards, showing how apparently neutral legal doctrines often generate gendered consequences in practice.
The book combines feminist legal theory, socio-legal analysis, and empirical evidence to reveal how women navigate economic, cultural, procedural, and interpretive barriers when seeking justice. By engaging with the work of Carol Smart, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, and Pierre Bourdieu, it develops an interdisciplinary framework for understanding how legal institutions operate within authoritarian and religiously grounded systems.
Moving beyond doctrinal analysis, the book offers an integrated account of structural disadvantage and legal inequality, highlighting the limits of incremental reform while identifying the broader institutional conditions necessary for meaningful change. It will be essential reading for scholars and students of gender studies, socio-legal studies, Middle East studies, human rights, Islamic law, and comparative family law.
