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Gender, Multiculturalism and Dialogue: The Case of Jewish Divorce

Can the law act as a catalyst to change minority practices that discriminate against women? Can civil law merely impose remedies from outside the minority culture or can legal mechanisms be devised which spur internal change? Theorists of gender and multiculturalism have argued that civil law can play a role in creating the conditions which allow, and indeed compel, cultural communities to engage in internal dialogue to transform their norms into more egalitarian ones. This article explores this thesis through considering the development of Canadian civil family law remedies to alleviate the plight of women whose husbands use their power to withhold divorce under Jewish law to extort advantages in civil divorce settlements. It considers whether the process of negotiating, drafting and implementing amendments to the Divorce Act has supported the renegotiation of norms in the Canadian Orthodox Jewish community regarding the issuance of divorce decrees, the development of novel solutions or the re-invigoration of traditional forms of religious legal authority. In particular, the article evaluates whether these civil law strategies have had the effect of generating the sort of transformative dialogue about norms envisioned by theorists of multiculturalism and gender.