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Passion's Progress: Modern Law Reform And The Provocation Defense, Victoria Nourse
Passion's Progress: Modern Law Reform And The Provocation Defense, Victoria Nourse
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Based on a systematic study of fifteen years of passion murder cases, this article concludes that reform challenges our conventional ideas of a "crime of passion" and, in the process, leads to a murder law that is both illiberal and often perverse. If life tells us that crimes of passion are the stuff of sordid affairs and bedside confrontations, reform tells us that the law's passion may be something quite different. A significant number of the reform cases the author has studied involve no sexual infidelity whatsoever, but only the desire of the killer's victim to leave a miserable relationship. …
Legitimating The Illegitimate: A Comment On 'Beyond Rape', Robin West
Legitimating The Illegitimate: A Comment On 'Beyond Rape', Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Professor Dripps's provocative proposal, as I understand it, is that we think of sex as a commodity and rape as the theft of that commodity. Understood as such, the theft of sex accomplished through violence or the threat of violence is a twofold wrong: it violates our "negative" right to refuse to have sex with anyone for any or no reason, and violence or the threat of violence infringes our right to personal, physical security. Therefore, the violent expropriation of sex should be punished as a major felony, as is violent rape, at least in theory.
Furthermore, according to Dripps, …