 Work in relational metaphysics has helped in analysis of how legal institutions should reflect connections among people, including care relationships (McClain 1992; West 1988). Many feminist writers in this tradition have taken pains to distance themselves from simplistic essentialist assumptions about the way women think or the role of women as caregivers, emphasizing instead the importance of context to understanding. Feminist theory has inspired and deployed new forms of legal realism—the view that law reflects its social context—to criticize the frequent formalism of approaches to law in terms of economic relationships and rational choice (Nourse &amp; Shaffer 2009). Feminist scholarship on human rights—viewed in the abstract as universal—has also emphasized the importance of lived experiences in context (Halley et al. 2006). Debate about whether all forms of prostitution should be prohibited, or whether there is room for a liberal view that would distinguish coerced trafficking from voluntary sex work, is but one illustration of such scholarship. Legal archaeology, understood as exploration of cases in their full context, is a method developed by Threedy (2010) and others for criticizing the formalism of much legal analysis and revealing the extent to which gendered norms permeate legal doctrines such as defenses in contract law. Feminists interested in criticizing paradigms of rationality and breaking down supposed divisions between reason and emotion have questioned whether there is a too-ready willingness to reject emotions in supposedly non-gendered contexts such as the law of evidence where the rules are constructed to eliminate appeals to emotion as irrelevant—but a too-ready acceptance of emotion in contexts where women are stereotyped and disadvantaged, as with the Supreme Court’s assertion that the state has an interest in protecting women from partial birth abortion because they might later come to regret their decisions (Abrams &amp; Keren 2010).