Simpkins v. Grace Brethren Church of Delaware, Ohio involved a state constitutional challenge to Ohio’s law limiting damages for emotional harm, brought by a teenager who was raped by her pastor. The Ohio Supreme Court rejected her argument that the law as applied to minor sexual assault victims violated equal protection and the right to jury trial. The rewritten feminist opinion uses feminist scholarship demonstrating the disparate impact of damage caps on sexual assault victims to conclude that the law deprives minor sexual assault victims of such a substantial portion of their damages compared to other injury victims that it does violate equal protection and the right to jury trial. The accompanying commentary surveys tort reform damage cap laws and notes how feminist scholarship and the growing awareness of the institutional cover-up of sexual abuse can influence legislatures and courts to ameliorate the effect of these laws.

The Introduction to Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tort Opinions situates the sixteen rewritten feminist opinions and accompanying commentaries contained in the volume into the broader legal and scholarly landscape. Although the idea of a feminist tort law is still difficult for many to imagine, the Introduction details the rich history of feminist and critical torts scholarship. Many of its recurring themes echo those found in critical scholarship more generally, including taking a gender-aware approach, preferring contextual analyses that tap into women’s lived experiences, and being skeptical of abstract dichotomies that mask implicit hierarchies. The volume contains “classic” cases that appear in virtually every torts casebook as well as lesser-known cases that deserve more attention. A large number of the cases in the volume deal with gender-related injuries caused by sexual violence, abuse, harassment, and invasions of privacy. The portrait that emerges is that of a tort system that undercompensates for sexual and reproductive injury. When courts confront such gender-related injuries, they tend not to apply ordinary doctrinal rules or not to apply ordinary rules with the same force as in other settings. The Introduction lists promising strategies to correct for such bias and make tort law more inclusive and egalitarian.