Law Commons^™

Accommodating Victims With Mental Disabilities, Danielle Shelton

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The #MeToo movement has brought the voices of victims of sexual assault into the public’s eye and, in turn, into the legal system. As its name suggests, the movement’s strength lies in numbers—it is, after all, hard to ignore the collective voices of a group of considerable size and visibility. This Article argues that another group of victims—namely, victims who have mental disabilities— also are desperately in need of their own movement to raise public awareness and bring about reform. However, because of their cognitive and communication impairments, this group of victims is unlikely to effectuate reform itself. Instead, these …

An Examination Of How The Canadian Military's Legal System Responds To Sexual Assault, Elaine Craig

Dalhousie Law Journal

Although the Canadian military has been conducting sexual assault trials for over twenty years, there has been no academic study of them and no external review of them. This review of the military’s sexual assault cases (the first of its kind) yields several important findings. First, the conviction rate for the offence of sexual assault by courts martial is dramatically lower than the rate in Canada’s civilian criminal courts. The difference between acquittal rates in sexual assault cases in these two systems appears to be even larger. Since Operation Honour was launched in 2015 only one soldier has been convicted …

Rape And Sexual Violence: Questionable Inevitability And Moral Responsibility In Armed Conflict, Katherine W. Bogen

Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal at Clark (SURJ)

Wartime sexual violence is a critical human rights issue that usurps the autonomy of its victims as well as their physical and psychological safety. It occurs in both ethnic and non-ethnic wars, across geographic regions, against both men and women, and regardless of the “official” position of commanders, states, and armed groups on the use of rape as tactic of war. This problem is current, pervasive, and global in spite of the status of wartime sexual violence perpetration as a crime against humanity and the capacity of the international criminal court to indict offenders. Though some scholars have argued that …

The Right To No: The Crime Of Marital Rape, Women's Human Rights, And International Law, Melanie Randall, Vasanthi Venkatesh

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

More than half of the world’s countries do not explicitly criminalize sexual assault in marriage. While sexual assault in general is criminalized in these countries, sexual assault perpetrated by a spouse is entirely legal. The human rights violations inhere in acts of violence against women are now well recognized. Yet somehow marital rape is a particular form of gendered violence that has escaped both criminal law sanctions and human rights approbation in a great number of the world’s nations.

This silence in the law creates legal impunity for men who sexually assault or rape the women who are their wives …

A Feather On One Side, A Brick On The Other: Tilting The Scale Against Males Accused Of Sexual Assault In Campus Disciplinary Proceedings, Barclay S. Hendrix

Georgia Law Review

On April 4, 2011, the Department of Education's Office
of Civil Rights issued a "Dear Colleague" letter regarding
Title JX's applicability to sexual violence on college
campuses. This letter was sent to every college or
university receiving federal funding and instructed
recipients on how to meet their legal obligations. Some of
the most important changes in the letter pertained to how
schools must conduct their grievance procedures in
adjudicatingsexual assault claims. First, the 2011 letter
requires that schools use a preponderance of the evidence
standard to determine the accused's guilty or innocence.

Second, the letter strongly discourages schools from
allowing …

State Ex Rel., J.P.F., Janie Byalik

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.