Gender Equality in Law : Uncovering the Legacies of Czech State Socialism

A feminist approach to a book review requires recognition that a book is embodied, in the sense that it is part of its author and has its own `story'. Taking up this task, I interviewed Havelkova at Oxford University in the late Spring of 2018 to explore how Gender Equality in Law befits and `belongs' to the woman who has written it. Mindful of Czech accession to the EU in 2004, Havelkova describes herself as a `first-generation' law student for whom key topics at law school were EU membership and EU law. In this quietly ambitious monograph, her investigation is both rich and accessible. HavelkovaÂ's account provides the first socio-legal exploration of gender equality law in the post-socialist space and takes a long historical view to consider its legal functioning, underpinnings, and trajectory. The central question for investigation is why gender equality law has proven so ineffective in Czechia. This question is inspired by the hard fact that, fourteen years on from accession, the Czech higher courts have yet to uphold a single case of alleged sex discrimination by a female claimant, despite the uncomfortable similarity of facts contested with those recognized in other EU member states as incontrovertible breaches of EU law. Nevertheless, the Czech courts take the injustice of discrimination seriously indeed, finding discrimination almost exclusively where the perceived discrimination lacks any specific `equality' grounds. When Havelkova began to formulate an explanation for the evident failures of equality law in Czechia, she found it fruitful to consider problematic perceptions about the impact of anti-discrimination law rather than the problems of anti-discrimination law itself. Accordingly, general understandings of the rule of law could impact on the gender discrimination project quite deeply. Judicial decision making in Czechia is structured by a legal formalism, inherited from its past. The mechanical task of textual interpretation is discordant with purposive interpretations of law but its application in the field of anti-discrimination is little different to judicial treatments of other areas. However, it hurts anti-discrimination decision making in specific ways because discrimination is an area of law that presupposes certain extra-legal understandings, for example, the need to understand the dimensions of inequality, to recognize that while the impact of gender bias can be devastating for an individual, it can be subtle in its operation at a societal level. As Havelkova espouses: