‘The Male Default in Law’ is a series of short legal essays exploring the hidden assumptions beneath supposedly “neutral” legal standards.
Across doctrine, legal systems often present concepts like reasonableness, foreseeability, fairness, privacy, and safety as universal. But whose experiences have historically shaped those standards, and whose harms remain harder for law to see?
This series examines the ways legal neutrality can quietly encode male social experience, particularly in areas where women’s lives are shaped by cumulative harm, invisible labour, housing insecurity, digital abuse, coercive control, and emerging AI systems.
Through doctrinal analysis, case law, and women-centred legal design, these essays ask not only where the law fails lived reality, but how better systems of justice might be built.
At its core, this is a project about making legal blind spots visible, and imagining what more inclusive law could look like.
Because neutrality is only meaningful if the law is honest about who it was first designed around.
THE COOL GIRL COURT 