Native Peoples and Water Rights: Irrigation, Dams and the Law in Western Canada (review)

preting law. Through her clever integration of Leila and Samir the reader is reminded of the role of emotion in the motivations and choices of individuals. Given that mahr is situated in the throes of the beginning and ending of a relationship at times when emotions run high, Fournier’s subtle reminder is a beautifully crafted integration of legal analysis, religious studies, and the recognition that legal and religious doctrines situate themselves in the lives of people. Thus, love, fear, bitterness, and indifference all enter into the decision-making process about the ways in which mahr is constructed, contracted, and enforced by individuals. This work raises one of the thorniest questions in feminist scholarship: that of women’s agency. Religion is often seen as an oppressor of women. Although some view mahr as an early marker of the equality and power of women within Islam that carries forward to today’s context, others see mahr as the selling of a woman’s vagina (p. 13). How does women’s agency play out in such contexts? If there is any issue that has dogged feminist scholarship it is the issue of agency and when women “really” exercise it. Despite more than three decades of scholarship on this issue, there is no resolution to the dilemma, and false consciousness discourse continues to permeate thinking about whether and how religious women make decisions. Mahr, notes Fournier, is positioned at an interesting juncture of individual contract, social and religious convention, and a broader symbol of fairness. As something that is individually negotiated as a contractual obligation, mahr satisfies the liberal notion of the freely acting agent who is imagined as autonomously existing. This model of human life that permeates law does not understand human beings as relational beings who make their decisions in the context of those relations. The question becomes, then, how do we imagine agency in a relational context and its possibility among religious women?