Law Commons^™

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. …

Intimate Violence And The Problem Of Consent, Jane H. Aiken

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The juxtaposition of intimacy with violence is striking. Intimacy implies a closeness and a vulnerability that is treasured and inviolate. Intimacy should foreclose the possibility of violence. Intimate violence should be an oxymoron. Yet, intimacy sometimes creates its own special kind of violence, one that can erupt into rape or assault. On a less physical level, intimacy may cause violence to a woman's personal integrity and economic independence.

Intimate violence manifests itself with a certain subtlety that forces women to walk a careful tightrope in order to avoid threatened harm. This essay is about that tightrope: the double binds women …

Free Speech At Work: Verbal Harassment As Discriminatory (Mis)Treatment, Deborah Epstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In his reply to my article on workplace harassment law and freedom of speech, Professor Volokh does not respond to my most important critiques of his earlier work. For example, he fails to grapple with the true complexity of the problem by focusing exclusively on one side of this conflict of rights-the burden that the law imposes on workplace expression. Equal attention must be paid to the other side: the harm inflicted by discriminatory speech on employees of a single gender. As I describe in detail in my original piece, these harms may include: an adverse effect on the quantity …

Proposition 209, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I have a proposition for you. It's called Proposition 209. All you have to do is stop discriminating in favor of women and racial minorities, and your perpetual problems of race and gender discrimination will finally disappear. If this Proposition sounds too good to be true ... well, you know how the saying goes. In law, as in life, the seductiveness of a proposition owes as much to its disregard of established norms as to its underlying content. Eliminate the affront to social convention, and a proposition promises about as much excitement as a routine liaison with one's spouse. But …

Comparatively Speaking: The Honor Of The East And The Passion Of The West, Lama Abu-Odeh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Article, I will attempt a comparative review by examining in the United States the crime that has the most affinity with the crime of honor in the Arab World: the killing of women in the heat of passion for sexual or intimate reasons, which is seen in the United States as one of many instances in which the more generic crime of passion can occur. For the purposes of this Article, I will use the term "crime of passion" as it is so specifically defined. The reason for the exercise is to locate precisely the meaning of the …