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Feminist Interest Groups

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Since its establishment in 1985, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) has been dedicated to advocating for the rights of the most marginalized groups. The inclusion of section 15 in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the Charter) allowed interest groups, like LEAF, to pursue Charter litigation “in an effort to influence the course of judicial policy development to achieve particular policy goals” (Manfredi, 2004,10). Interest group litigation has given LEAF another avenue to evoke change within the Supreme Court of Canada and society as a whole. LEAF has become one of the leading feminist equality rights interveners, working to ensure that section 15 rights are upheld to the fullest extent. Through their participation …show more content…
There is some contention around the impact of LEAF and other feminist advocacy groups on changing or protecting Charter rights. For some like, Michael Mandel and Sherene Razack, they are skeptical about politics by lawsuit (Mandel, 1994, 376; Razack, 1991, 127). While Lauri Haussenger argued that LEAF’s factums have had some positive influence on the Supreme Court (Hausseger, 1994). This contention leads to the question what impact has feminist interest groups, had on feminist issues? In this paper I will specifically look at LEAFs Charter litigation, and will argue that LEAF has positively impacted feminist issues, by upholding the policy status quo, setting precedents and rallying public support to force legislative change. The research for this paper will help assess the impact that feminist interest group litigation has had on feminist issues like reproductive choice, fetal rights, regulation of expression, violence against women and sexual orientation. Furthermore, it will contribute to further analysis of the impact of LEAF in establishing equality …show more content…
This paper specifically focuses on just the feminist interest group LEAF because with smaller interests group it can be difficult to determine the type of interest group they are and the magnitude of their impact. Moreover, smaller interest groups often have less data and studies conducted on them. With smaller interest groups they tend to intervene in a variety of cases in order to gain more credibility. The tradeoff of this is that LEAF does not necessarily represent all feminist views in Canada. For example, in the Butler case LEAF was arguing that pornography is a form of hate speech directed against women; however, not all feminists agree that pornography is offensive to a women’s dignity. While LEAF’s views may not match the views of all feminists in Canada, the mandate of LEAF does resonate throughout. The criteria of selection for this essay was that the cases had to be a Supreme Court of Canada ruling, LEAF had to be an intervener in the case and the decision had to have been made between 1990 and 2016. I have chosen to focus on Supreme Court cases because this is the highest court of Canada and where final judgments on important cases are made. The year 1990 was chosen as the start date because I wanted to focus on LEAF’s work once they became a more established interest group and had gained more traction. In examining the impact of LEAF’s Charter

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