Our Lives before the Law: Constructing a Feminist Jurisprudence. By Judith A. Baer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 276p. $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

It is a daunting assignment to review a book after it has garnered a major award bestowed by the organization that publishes this journal. Judith Baer's Our Lives before the Law not only is a very worthy recipient of the 2000 Victoria Schuck Award for the best book on women in politics but also is an erudite and wide-ranging critique of feminist thought with the goal of "forc[ing] feminists to confront mainstream discourse and mainstream discourse to confront feminism" (p. 175). This goal is in the service of Baer's desire to construct a new jurisprudence of sexual equality, one that avoids the pitfalls Baer perceives as inherent in the efforts of others to date.