Legal systems are constantly facing new challenges and configurations of inequality. Migration represents one of the most recent ones, which combines - for instance- with gender, race and LGBT issues. This requires a change in the tools employed in legal analysis and litigation, in order to address the systematic exclusion of some social groups and guarantee their access to justice and legal remedies.
The focus on structural intersectionality in legal analysis can be useful for this purpose. Indeed, drawing attention to the interaction between power systems allows going at the roots of inequality. It also enables us to look for similarities between social groups and for the differences within each of them, thus avoiding essentialization. Although intersectionality gained a lot of attention among equality scholars, it has not been implemented in the European legal system, nor has the ECJ/CJEU engaged with structural analysis to address complex inequality cases.
Through the lens of feminist legal theory and discourse analysis, this paper aims at shedding light on the mechanisms of legal reasoning that reinforce and reproduce exclusion and inequality, such as the relevant comparator or the definition of disadvantage. In doing so, it contributes to introduce a concern for the structural nature of inequality in legal analysis and fosters its capacity to tackle complexity and new challenges to equality.
