Law Commons^™

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 …

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 …