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Akron Law Review

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Rape

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License To Harass: Holding Defendants Accountable For Retaining Recidivist Harassers, Kerri Lynn Stone Jun 2015

License To Harass: Holding Defendants Accountable For Retaining Recidivist Harassers, Kerri Lynn Stone

Akron Law Review

This Article proposes that courts change the way in which they adjudicate Title VII disputes by evaluating the harm avoidance demonstrated by plaintiffs and employers in light of the totality of what each party knew or should have known about the potential harm, and what each party did or could have done to prevent it. Specifically, this Article is premised on the ideas that 1) harassment complaints are, typically, initially dealt with internally; often, an employer will remediate reported harassment by ordering or granting a transfer to separate a harasser and his victim; and 2) many harassers are, in fact …


An Analysis Of Thirty-Five Years Of Rape Reform: A Frustrating Search For Fundamental Fairness, Richard Klein Jun 2015

An Analysis Of Thirty-Five Years Of Rape Reform: A Frustrating Search For Fundamental Fairness, Richard Klein

Akron Law Review

This article will analyze the most significant changes in the manner in which individuals who are charged with the crime of rape are prosecuted for that offense. In the last thirty five years, there has been a steady erosion of the due process rights of those accused of rape. I have designated the first stage of “reforms,” which affected the arrest, pretrial, and trial phases of rape prosecutions, as the First Wave of rape reform. The Second Wave are the more recent changes in the law that have focused on measures, such as sexual registry or civil commitment statutes, that …


After Rape Law: Will The Turn To Consent Normalize The Prosecution Of Sexual Assault?, Donald Dripps Jun 2015

After Rape Law: Will The Turn To Consent Normalize The Prosecution Of Sexual Assault?, Donald Dripps

Akron Law Review

This essay explores the new rape exceptionalism. My thesis holds that rape exceptionalism is rooted in a divide between elite opinion, reflected in statutes, court decisions, and academic commentary, and popular opinion, as reflected in jury verdicts. Elite opinion values sexual autonomy and suspects, when it does not despise, sexual aggression. Popular opinion supposes that sexual autonomy may be forfeited by female promiscuity or flirtation, and views male sexual aggression as natural, if not indeed admirable...pressions of consent,8 is an academic exercise. If we really want to normalize rape law, we must bypass the jury openly. We can’t conceal the …


Constructing Consent: Legislating Freedom And Legitimating Constraint In The Expression Of Sexual Autonomy, Vanessa E. Munro Jun 2015

Constructing Consent: Legislating Freedom And Legitimating Constraint In The Expression Of Sexual Autonomy, Vanessa E. Munro

Akron Law Review

In the first section, the nature and parameters of the conventional understanding of consent will be examined in more detail and the contemporary challenges that have been lodged against it – particularly from those influenced by structural, post-structural, and communitarian analyses – will be considered. With the terrain of these debates on consent – and related concepts such as autonomy, agency, and self-determination – in place, the second section of this article will focus specifically upon their implications in the context of sexual consent in general, and women’s sexual consent in particular. It will outline the development of the Sexual …


The Trouble With Drink: Intoxication, (In)Capacity, And The Evaporation Of Consent To Sex, Dr. Sharon Cowan Jun 2015

The Trouble With Drink: Intoxication, (In)Capacity, And The Evaporation Of Consent To Sex, Dr. Sharon Cowan

Akron Law Review

The paper explores the contemporary concerns surrounding issues of intoxicated consent in cases of rape, particularly as expressed in U.K. case law, statute, and government policy. During the course of this paper, I will examine recent research on the problematic role of alcohol in sexual assault before going on to discuss specific policy and legislative responses to the problem of intoxicated consent. I will also engage in a close reading of several recent rape cases in the U.K. in which the capacity of the intoxicated complainant to consent to sexual intimacy has been of central concern. The paper deals only …


Rethinking Affirmative Consent In Canadian Sexual Assault Law: Neoliberal Sexual Subjects And Risky Women, Lise Gotell Jun 2015

Rethinking Affirmative Consent In Canadian Sexual Assault Law: Neoliberal Sexual Subjects And Risky Women, Lise Gotell

Akron Law Review

While the struggle for affirmative consent is typically framed as a feminist law reform project, I contend that we need to understand the legal elaboration of a positive and explicit consent standard in relation to wider shifts in governance. The second section of this article explores how the legal elaboration of affirmative consent in Canadian law might be seen as a specific expression of neoliberal governmentality, forging new normative sexual subjects who interact within a transactional sexual economy. In section three, I demonstrate how discourses of responsibilization and risk management inform recent Canadian sexual assault decisions, constituting the ideal victim …


Copulemus In Pace: A Meditation On Rape, Affirmative Consent To Sex, And Sexual Autonomy, Dan Subotnik Jun 2015

Copulemus In Pace: A Meditation On Rape, Affirmative Consent To Sex, And Sexual Autonomy, Dan Subotnik

Akron Law Review

Social change, to be sure, is not necessarily bad. But what if affirmative consent is not biologically or psychologically sound and, for that reason, women do not even desire it? Questioning the idea that increasing women’s power will be desirable even if not founded on the “the truth,” I ask: Can and should women — to say nothing of men — say “no” to affirmative consent? I examine this question in two parts. Part I evaluates the sexual environment today from which affirmative consent has arisen. Part II deals specifically with affirmative consent.


Rape, Affirmative Consent To Sex, And Sexual Autonomy: Introduction To The Symposium, Jane Campbell Moriarty Jun 2015

Rape, Affirmative Consent To Sex, And Sexual Autonomy: Introduction To The Symposium, Jane Campbell Moriarty

Akron Law Review

Introduction to the Symposium focusing on issues arising from determining when sex is the product of free choice, when it is the result of force, and the legal and philosophical implications arising from those issues. To introduce this Symposium, I first discuss the issues related to the crime of rape, the idea of sexual autonomy, and the concept of affirmative consent to sex. Then, I briefly summarize the symposium authors’ various approaches to these topics.


The Duke Rape Case Five Years Later: Lessons For The Academy, The Media, And The Criminal Justice System, Dan Subotnik Jun 2015

The Duke Rape Case Five Years Later: Lessons For The Academy, The Media, And The Criminal Justice System, Dan Subotnik

Akron Law Review

The time that has since passed allows for a more comprehensive evaluation of the cultural meaning of the Duke Rape case. This is the goal of the newly released “Institutional Failures,” which constitutes a point of departure for this review. The aim of this article is first to clarify the contribution this book makes to an understanding of the case. I will describe and analyze the content of the nine essays that make up the book; I will make reference to related works, and I will offer a concluding evaluation of the book’s likely impact.