Law as a Tool for Empowering Women within Marital Relations: A Case Study of Paternity Lawsuits in Egypt

How do women use courts within the context of paternity lawsuits? This study analyzes the challenges that the formal legal approach to empowering women faces once it is translated into every day socio-legal experiences and court repertoires. It also seeks to trace the pathologies inherent in personal status law reform and everyday legal practices in Egypt, attesting to the limitations of law as an agent of social change in the private domain of the family, and the difficulty of separating formal legal rules from informal social practices. Cairo Papers in Social Science 31:2.