Domestic Violence Law Reform and Women’s Experience in Court: Th ...

My research incorporated theoretical, doctrinal, and empirical components. The theoretical component involved a wide-ranging study of feminist and “difference” scholarship on violence against women and related areas of feminist (legal) and critical race theory, reports on violence against women, feminist and nonfeminist work on law reform and women’s engagements with the state, voice scholarship, narrative scholarship, and law and society scholarship. This material is mostly found in this and the following chapter, and provides a framework for the subsequent discussion of the empirical material. The doctrinal component consisted of a study of case law under the legislation governing the two courts examined: the Crimes (Family Violence) Act (1987) and the Family Law Act (1975), both up to and subsequent to the period of the fieldwork. There have been far more appellate decisions under the Family Law Act (1975) than under the Crimes (Family Violence) Act (1987), reflecting the relative doctrinal complexity of the two pieces of legislation and the different extent to which doctrine impinges on day-to-day practice under the legislation. Doctrinal discussions are found at the beginning of chapters 3 and 6, prior to the discussion of the empirical material.

The core of the study is its empirical component, discussed in detail in chapters 3–7. My empirical research consisted of court observations in the two courts, a review of files in the Family Court, and interviews with lawyers, support workers, and women litigants. I obtained ethics approval for the conduct of the empirical research from the Stanford University Panel on Non-Medical Human Subjects. I conducted court observations in various city and suburban Magistrates’ Courts in Melbourne, and in the Melbourne Registry of the Family Court in 1996–1997. When attending court, I sat at the back of the courtroom and took notes on a form developed for the purpose (see appendix A).