Kathleen Waits is a contemporary legal scholar and feminist jurisprudence theorist whose work addresses gender, sexual violence, and the limits of empathic imagination in legal reasoning. Her scholarship engages with standpoint epistemology as applied to law, arguing that experiential positionality shapes epistemic access to harm in ways that matter for adjudication and policy. She has contributed to feminist legal theory's critique of neutral or universal perspectives in legal reasoning about sexual and domestic violence.
Applied standpoint epistemology to legal reasoning about sexual violence
Argued for the epistemic limits of cross-gender imaginative perspective-taking in rape adjudication
Contributed to feminist critiques of legal neutrality and the 'reasonable person' standard
Engaged the relationship between lived experience and credibility in sexual assault cases