A close engagement with law has long been a core dimension of feminist activism. However, it is only since the late twentieth century that a distinct and vital body of academic literature addressing the nature, effects, and limits of that engagement has emerged. In particular, from the 1980s onwards, a critical mass of scholarship has accumulated, establishing feminist legal studies not just as a recognizable subdiscipline, both of law and of feminist or women's studies, but also as a terrain of substance and complexity, the exploration and understanding of which requires increasingly sophisticated navigation skills.