Law Commons^™

Free Battered Texas Women: Survivor-Advocates Organizing At The Crossroads Of Gendered Violence, Disability, And Incarceration, Cathy Marston Phd

Verbum Incarnatum: An Academic Journal of Social Justice

This article recaps my symposium presentation, where I argue that feminist organizing strategies are central to healing our society and creating restorative justice from my perspective as a survivor of occupational injury, battering, and criminalization for self-defense. This includes the creation of Free Battered Texas Women. We prefer to think of ourselves as survivor-advocates who use a variety of tactics to empower ourselves, incarcerated battered women, and citizens. These strategies include pedagogy; poetry and other written forms; art; and legislative advocacy. I blend this grassroots activism with feminist disability theory, radical feminist theory, feminist ethnography, and feminist criminology.

Exploring The Conflicts Within Carceral Feminism: A Call To Revocalize The Women Who Continue To Suffer, Krishna De La Cruz

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.

So Much Activity, So Little Change: A Reply To The Critics Of Battered Women's Self-Defense, Kit Kinports

Kit Kinports

Prior to 1970, the term "domestic violence" referred to ghetto riots and urban terrorism, not the abuse of women by their intimate partners. Today, of course, domestic violence is a household word. After all, it has now been ten years since the revelation of football star O.J. Simpson's history of battering purportedly sounded "a wake-up call for all of America"; ten years since Congress enacted legislation haled as "a milestone . . .truly a turning point in the national effort to break the cycle" of violence; and twenty years since Farrah Fawcett's portrayal of Francine Hughes in the movie The …

Battered Women: Society's Obligation To The Abused, David Winthrop Hanson

Akron Law Review

Abuse in our society is overwhelming and can only be combated through effective deterrence, education and a legal process which does not tolerate any form of human battery.

Our nation's ability to fashion constructive laws to serve society is unique within this modem world and separates our nation from so many other less fortunate societies. Although victims of violence come in every shape, color, creed and sex, of particular concern is the battered wife who lives in perpetual fear. The disturbing fact is that women in our society are traditionally discriminated against in several areas including, but not limited to: …

Encouraging Victims: Responding To A Recent Study Of Battered Women Who Commit Crimes, Andrea L. Dennis, Carol E. Jordan

Office for Policy Studies on Violence Against Women Publications

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Domestic Violence, Rethinking Violence, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Goodman & Epstein, Listening To Battered Women: A Survivor-Centered Approach To Advocacy, Mental Health And Justice, Julie Goldscheid

Pace Law Review

No abstract provided.

After The Reasonable Man: Getting Over The Subjectivity Objectivity Question, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article challenges the conventional notion of the “reasonable man.” It argues that we make a category mistake when we adopt the metaphor of a human being as the starting point for analysis of the criminal law and instead offers an alternate approach based on heuristic theory, reconceiving the reasonable man as a heuristic that serves as the site for debate over majoritarian norms. The article posits that the debate over having a purely subjective standard and a purely objective standard obscures the commonsense necessity of having a hybrid standard, one which takes into account the characteristics of a particular …

Gender Equality, Social Values And Provocaion Law In The United States, Canada And Australia, Caroline Forrell

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

So Much Activity, So Little Change: A Reply To The Critics Of Battered Women's Self-Defense, Kit Kinports

Journal Articles

Prior to 1970, the term "domestic violence" referred to ghetto riots and urban terrorism, not the abuse of women by their intimate partners. Today, of course, domestic violence is a household word. After all, it has now been ten years since the revelation of football star O.J. Simpson's history of battering purportedly sounded "a wake-up call for all of America"; ten years since Congress enacted legislation haled as "a milestone . . .truly a turning point in the national effort to break the cycle" of violence; and twenty years since Farrah Fawcett's portrayal of Francine Hughes in the movie The …

Engaging With The State: The Growing Reliance On Lawyers And Judges To Protect Battered Women, Jane C. Murphy

All Faculty Scholarship

The passage of the federal Violence Against Women Act of 2000 (“VAWA II”) marked an important milestone in the evolution of the domestic violence movement. VAWA II created, among other things, a complex system for state and federal funding in all fifty states to provide civil legal assistance to battered women. Its passage completed a process that began in the early 1980s when domestic violence advocates shifted their focus from grass roots efforts to help battered women and their children leave abusive partners to building alliances with government and advocating for legal remedies to assist battered women. This paper looks …

Victim Wrongs: The Case For A General Criminal Defense Based On Wrongful Victim Behavior In An Era Of Victims' Rights, Aya Gruber

Publications

Criminal law scholarship is rife with analysis of the victims' rights movement. Many articles identify with the outrage of victims harmed by deviant criminal elements. Other scholarly pieces criticize the movement's denuding of defendants' constitutional trial rights. The point upon which proponents and opponents of the movement tend to agree, however, is that the victim should never be blamed for the crime. The helpless, harmed, innocent victim is someone with whom we can all identify and someone to whom we can all express sympathy. Victim blaming, by all accounts, is an act of legal heresy to feminists, victim advocates, and …

Domestic Terror (The Sniper Suspect's Divorce Records Show Patterns Of Power And Control And Missed Opportunities By The System To Intervene.), Jane C. Murphy

All Faculty Scholarship

Over the past few months, we have learned much about the violent, troubled life of sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad. Whether or not he pulled the trigger - some recent reports have pointed to his 17-year-old companion Lee Boyd Malvo as the main shooter - there is no doubt in the minds of domestic-violence experts that this adult is responsible for these deaths.

While many pundits conclude that we will never know what motivated the sniper suspect, to domestic violence experts his is an all-too-familiar story of a man whose relationships with the women and children - possibly including Malvo …

Dealing With Complex Evidence Of Domestic Violence: A Primer For The Civil Bench, Jane C. Murphy, Jane H. Aiken

All Faculty Scholarship

New laws and policies aimed at protecting victims of domestic violence have been adopted across the country throughout the last twenty years. The legal approaches taken to protect battered women and control family violence have brought about significant changes in family law. New laws include statutes permitting civil protection or restraining orders, and laws requiring that domestic violence be considered in custody and visitation decisions. Both of these types of statutory reforms can provide protection to adult victims of domestic violence and their children. Evaluating a parent’s fitness by considering past acts of violence to other family members results in …

Confronting The Agency In Battered Mothers, Elaine M. Chiu

Faculty Publications

Despite the progress of the last three decades, the American public and even feminists remain caught in a web of ambivalence and contradictory attitudes and beliefs about battered women. Are battered women traumatized victims who suffer at the hands of their individual abusers and from the systemic failures of a male-dominated culture? Are they, therefore, unable to save themselves or their children? In contrast, are these women survivors who manage to protect themselves as best they can under uniquely difficult circumstances? Do they deserve recognition for their efforts, or do battered women somehow contribute to or exacerbate their own abuse …

Issues In Representing Immigrant Victims

Fordham Urban Law Journal

Panelist Emira-Habiby Browne, executive director of the Arab American Family Support Center discussed the misunderstood community of Arab women adn the cultural barriers they experience when they come to America and particularly when they become victims of domestic violence. Panelist Margaret Retter, Executive Director of Din Legal Center Inc., discussed the cultural obstacles that stand in the way of Jewish women who are being abused and the obstacles they face in getting out of that situation. Panelist Julie Dinnerstein, staff Immigration Attorney at the Sanctuary for Families, gave a nuts-and-bolts discussion on remedies available to immigrant battered women. She discussed …

Overcoming Barriers In Communities

Fordham Urban Law Journal

Panelist Evelyn Cardona, discussed the work of the Brooklyn Coalition Against Family Violence, where she is the director, her own experience as a battered woman, and how she overcame it. Panelist Nechama Wolfson, president of the Shalom Task Force, then talked about the work of Shalom Task Force, a grasroots group of Orthodox Jewish women was doing on the community. Panelist Angela Lee, associate director of the New York Asian Women's Center, discussed the work her organization does with Asian battered women. Panelist Mircia Sanchez discussed the Harlem Dowling West Side Center for Children and Family Services, where she is …

Crime Control And Feminist Law Reform In Domestic Violence Law: A Critical Review, Donna Coker

Articles

No abstract provided.

Self-Defense And Subjectivity, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The law of self-defense has rarely produced as much academic or popular heat as it has in the past two decades. Widely publicized trials, such as the Goetz and Menendez cases, have generated deep-seated fears of a law unmoored from principle. Those fears have generated a standard public critique--that the criminal law has become too soft and subjective, too wedded to syndrome science and prone to weak-kneed affection for defendants. The criminal law has lost its "objectivity," so the argument goes. The poster child, and even the alleged cause of this development, is the battered woman.

In this article, the …

The "Normal" Successes And Failures Of Feminism And The Criminal Law, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

To write of feminist reform in the criminal law is to write of simultaneous success and failure. We have seen marked changes in the doctrines and the practice of rape law, domestic violence law, and the law of self-defense. There is not a criminal law casebook in America today, nor a state statute book, that does not tell this story. Yet for all of this success, we also live in a world in which reform seems to suffer routine failures. Many believe, for example, that feminist reforms have rid rape law of the resistance requirement; however, recent scholarship makes it …

Getting Ahead With Washington's Workfirst Program: Are Battered Women Left Behind?, Wendy Davis

Seattle University Law Review

This Comment will suggest that although the structure of Washington's WorkFirst Act could help victims become self-sufficient, the current implementation of the Act does not adequately address the particular needs of victims. As a result, a victim's chances of achieving financial independence from either the state or her abuser are minimal. Part II of this Comment will give a brief summary of the federal guidelines under which Washington's WorkFirst Act was developed. Part III will outline the requirements of the WorkFirst Act, and in particular, the Act's provisions that address or affect domestic violence victims. Included in this section will …

The New Normativity: The Abuse Excuse And The Resurgence Of Judgment In The Criminal Law, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article reviews Moral Judgment: Does the Abuse Excuse Threaten Our Legal System? by James Q. Wilson (1997).

There is growing interest within the academy in reviving the "normative" in criminal law scholarship. Enter a recent book, Moral Judgment, by the distinguished criminologist James Q. Wilson. Professor Wilson's work prompts the question: What is meant by the term ''judgment"? Considering three different models--judgment as community, judgment as character, and judgment as critique--this review argues that Professor Wilson's idea of judgment both departs from the "new normativity" in existing scholarship and shows how easily ''judgment" may stand in for partial …

Domination In The Theory Of Justification And Excuse, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The major currents driving legal theory have largely bypassed the field of criminal law. Neither the economists nor the advocates of critical legal studies ("crits") have had much to say about the theory of criminal responsibility or the proper mode of trying suspects. The economists have fallen flat in applying their rationalist models to the problems of punishing wrongdoers. The "crits" have had little to add-beyond Mark Kelman's one original and provocative article.

Of all the schools on the march in the law schools today, the feminists have had the most to say about the failings of the criminal law. …

When Battered Woman's Syndrome Does Not Go Far Enough: The Battered Woman As Vigilante, Elizabeth Ayyildiz

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Legal Images Of Battered Women: Redefining The Issue Of Separation, Martha R. Mahoney

Michigan Law Review

Part I of this article discusses violence in the ordinary lives of women, describing individual and societal denial that pretends domestic violence is rare when statistics show it is common, and describing the ways in which motherhood shapes women's experience of violence and choices in response to violence. Part II examines definitions of battering and evaluates their effectiveness at disguising or revealing the struggle for control at the heart of the battering process. I then describe in Part III the pressures that self-defense and custody cases place on legal and cultural images of battered women and contrast the development of …

Explaining The Legal System's Inadequate Response To The Abuse Of Women: A Lack Of Coordination, Matthew Litsky

NYLS Journal of Human Rights

No abstract provided.

Is "Psychological Self-Defense" A Solution To The Problem Of Defending Battered Women W Ho Kill?

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.