The trespass torts are some of the oldest causes of action in the common law. These torts create a number of fundamental common law rights protecting our personal dignity, our desire for autonomy, and our interests in the physical integrity of our bodies and the exclusive possession of land and goods. This chapter examines the nature of these torts and focuses on the three forms of trespass to the person: battery, assault and false imprisonment. It also briefly considers the potential development of a tort of privacy. Chapter 6 looks at the torts of trespass to land, trespass to goods, conversion and detinue.

This chapter covers offences of violence, with the concept of violence encompassing both physical aggression (here termed ‘contact assaults’) and threatening behaviour (‘non-contact assaults’). The latter category includes stalking, intimidation and harassment, offending behaviours that have gained increasing social prominence and recognition by the criminal law in recent decades. Following this, the chapter turns to consideration of domestic violence, the response to which comprises a mixture of substantive and procedural law, and violence against children.Aside from the important common law principles of assault and battery, the offences under consideration here are primarily statutory and are largely, though not exclusively, contained in the states’ Crimes Acts (Crimes Act 1900 (NSW), Crimes Act 1900 (ACT), Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 (SA), and Crimes Act 1958 (Vic)). The title of this chapter reflects the enduring use and influence of common law assault as the base offence of violence and an underpinning concept in many offences of personal violence and other forms of unlawful intimidatory and threatening behaviour.

Trespass is a very old tort that can be used to address wrongs to the person of the plaintiff and also wrongs to the property of the plaintiff. This chapter deals only with trespass to the person, which arises in the case of forcible, direct and immediate injury to the person of the plaintiff.The tort of trespass reflected the interests of the law to maintain peace. Trespass to the person could be used where the plaintiff’s interest in their person – their bodily autonomy, freedom of movement and freedom from apprehension of unlawful touching – has been injured. Unlike the later tort of ‘trespass on the case’ (or ‘case’), which evolved into the tort of negligence, trespass to the person dealt with direct interference. The distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘consequential’ actions can be difficult to draw, as can been seen by the dissent of Blackstone J in Scott v Shepherd. As we will see, even though trespass and case/negligence are two discrete causes of action, the same facts may give rise to liability in both torts.

This chapter moves from the semi-privacy of homes to the more public arena of urban courts. It looks at the surprising role of the pox in two different kinds of legal cases involving unlawful sex: suits for separation and rape cases. In both types of case, the disease served as a proxy for sex, material evidence of otherwise unprovable acts. Yet its role in court was much more complex than this. Marks of the disease were visible and long-enduring, an early form of medical forensics, and women could talk about the disease more freely than they could talk about sexual matters. Mothers of rape victims could bear witness to the horrifying effects of disease and disgruntled wives could frame their husbands’ abuse as contagion stemming from illicit sex. The disease allowed women to speak the unspeakable. What is more, cases did not rest wholly on women’s words, which were accorded little value in courts. Confirming the existence and transmission of disease called for the allegedly more trustworthy testimony of medical men. The disease centered legal cases about sex on to the words and bodily inspections that the court deemed reliable.

It was not implausibe for Spanish inquisitors and their wider staff to provoke scandal in their communities through moral, sexual, physical, and financial offenses. The same held true for Spanish Catholic clergy at large. This essay examines the varieties and possible sites of inquisitorial malfeasance, as well as the special legal privileges that constituted one of the main attractions of being employed in an inquisition tribunal. The essay also ponders in particular the crime and heresy of clerical solicitation of female penitents for sexual favors. Those clerical malefactors were sentenced in secret and punished via exile that took them out of their communities. They thus kept their identities and offenses a secret. At the same time, however the Spanish Inquisition offered a legal platform for female complainants to voice their grievances.

The five punishable acts of genocide are listed in the paragraphs of article II: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The list is an exhaustive one rather than an indicative one. The Secretariat draft of the Convention divided the acts into three categories, physical genocide, biological genocide and cultural genocide. Cultural genocide was rejected but one act from the category was retained, that of forcibly transferring children. A proposal to add a crime of driving people out of their ancestral homeland was rejected by the General Assembly. Sexual and gender-based violence is encompassed by the act of causing serious bodily or mental harm.

This chapter charts the processes by which deceptive sex came to be regarded as potentially constituting rape. Through tracing these developments, the chapter shows how doctrinal features of the law, such as the way consent and deception are thought to be related and the modes of deception punished by law, were important to this process. Yet the chapter also argues that to fully appreciate how and why the changes occurred, it is necessary to pay attention to the array of interests the law has sought to protect and how these have shaped the range of topics of deception that might ground a charge of rape. This argument leads to the conclusion that, in the context of deceptive sex, deception has not been considered wrongful because it invalidates or precludes consent, as is commonly thought; rather, deception has invalidated or precluded consent because it has sometimes been considered wrongful. The chapter ends by introducing some reasons why this insight is important to ongoing debates regarding the criminalisation of deceptive sex.

The case involved a mother who was charged with aiding and abetting her boyfriend for assaulting her one-year old son with a belt with a metal buckle. The mother was present at the time of the assault but the prosecution did not cite any other conduct by her to encourage the attack on the small child. The court upheld the conviction even though the defendant took no affirmative action in furtherance of the underlying crime. Rewriting this opinion offers an opportunity to explore the real-world dynamics of domestic abuse and the unique legal obligations placed on mothers to care for their children.

This vintage rape case concerns an Alabama court’s determination that the jury may consider “social conditions and customs founded upon racial differences, such that the prosecutrix was a white woman and the defendant was a Negro man” in assessing a Black defendant’s culpability for assault with intent to rape. This case represents how rape law was weaponized against Black men and is an ideal case for a feminist rewritten opinion to interrogate how race and rape are closely intertwined.

This case is the first tribal appellate court case included in any of the Feminist Judgments volumes. The case deals with equal protection and gender discrimination, with facts somewhat analogous to Michael M. v. Superior Court, 450 U.S. 464 (1981). Three male juvenile defendants were charged with second-degree sexual assault (a gender-neutral statute), whereas their purported female sex partners were not charged. The Supreme Court of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska concluded that gender discrimination is subject to strict scrutiny under Winnebago law, and that the government had a compelling interest in charging only the male juveniles.

Tennessee’s fetal assault law was originally proposed in the spring of 2013. It became law about a year later, in the spring of 2014. It remained in effect until June 30, 2016. The law was proposed again in the spring of 2019, but that proposal did not make it out of committee. Although the United States has a long history of prosecuting women for this conduct, Tennessee’s law was the first and, as of this writing, the only state law of its kind in the United States.2 Before moving on to how the law was justified by those who supported it, we first need to understand some information about how the law was structured. This chapter begins with that information and then moves into the hearing rooms where the fetal assault law was debated.

The previous chapter dealt with the general disciplinary issues that can arise in government and non-government schools. The most extreme aspects of a student’s conduct might well amount to criminal behaviour. This chapter focuses on the criminal and potentially criminal conduct that can arise in a school, and various responses that can be made by principals and teachers.

Chapter 5 examines how, via the daily parade of summonses, a variety of actors employed local courtrooms to shape the social and cultural contours of marriage and affiliation. As in other aspects of metropolitan life, the courtroom was not merely a venue for the expression of law or norms that were constituted elsewhere or a space for the enforcement of middle-class standards of morality. Legal structures originally developed to protect patriarchal privilege could, to some degree, be co-opted by women instead. Several decades before working-class women could directly shape the terrain of formal politics, they were effectively navigating the terrain of local courtrooms and influencing both their daily practices and the meanings that emerged from them. Their engagement demonstrates how crucial working-class women were to recasting the nature of the state in this period. The adaption of the state to address familial matters occurred in tandem with the adaption of women to the mechanisms of the state.

Chapter 4 examines the wide array of daily activities that became the subject of courtroom contests in the decades prior to the First World War. The ease of access and broad participation of the local community as principals and witnesses helped make the police-court summons process the most egalitarian aspect of metropolitan law. As courtrooms incorporated an ever-wider segment of the urban population in a diverse array of operations, courtroom language and its implications also became integrated into personal contests outside the court. And just as particular phrases or concepts changed their meanings when used in a courtroom, their employment outside the courtroom carried other meanings still. Accordingly, the final section of the chapter examines not just what it meant for men and women to summons one another, but what it meant to use the language of summonses in different contexts. With such practices, men and women brought the courtroom, as an imagine space, into an interpersonal contest well before they brought their contests into the courtroom itself.

This chapter considers three different torts: battery (unlawful physical touching); assault (an apprehension or threat of unlawful touching); and false imprisonment (unlawful confinement or constraint). While their common aim is to protect the integrity of C’s person, the ingredients of each tort are quite disparate.

As a preliminary matter of terminology: trespass to the person is a form of action, but assault, battery, and false imprisonment are causes of action.

This chapter explores the contexts of spousal violence, and considers the evolution of the legal discourses and judicial practices around this issue, and examines what this violence tells us about power, control and intimacy within marriages.It was widely believed in the nineteenth century that spousal assault was rare in Ireland, while it was thought to be a common practice in England.In the evolution of Irish national identity in post-Famine Ireland such beliefs distinguished the Irish from the English.Irish men were held to be morally superior to English men.But such beliefs were unfounded. More husbands abused and killed their wives, than wives did husbands. Husbands used their wives’ behaviour, their disobedience, intemperance, infidelity, lack of female virtue, inadequate fortunes, as excuses for causing a turn to violence or their wives’ deaths. Verbal and physical conflicts, could in the context of alcohol, spiral out of control. Money and property were also the causes of violence, as was the distribution of household resources.Some women feared the loss of their homes and other property and killed to protect their interests. Certain acts of violence were judged legitimate when particular contexts were taken into consideration.A drunken wife or a brutish and violent husband could, for example, see murder charges being reduced to manslaughter charges.