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This article reviews the background, introduction, and critical response to new criminal offenses of coercive control in England/Wales and Scotland. How the new Scottish offense is implemented will determine whether it can overcome the shortcomings of the English law. We then review new evidence on four dimensions of coercive control: the relationship between “control” and “violence,” coercive control in same-sex couples, measuring coercive control, and children’s experience of coercive control. Coercive control is not a type of violence. Indeed, level of control predicts a range of negative outcomes heretofore associated with physical abuse, including post-separation violence and sexual assault; important differences in coercive control dynamics distinguish male homosexual from lesbian couples; measuring coercive control requires innovative ways of aggregating and categorizing data; and how children experience coercive control is a problem area that offers enormous promise for the years ahead.

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Good Judgment, based upon the author's experience as a lawyer, law professor, and judge, explores the role of the judge and the art of judging. Engaging with the American, English, and Commonwealth literature on the role of the judge in the common law tradition, Good Judgment addresses the following questions: What exactly do judges do? What is properly within their role and what falls outside? How do judges approach their decision-making task? In an attempt to explain and reconcile two fundamental features of judging, namely judicial choice and judicial discipline, this book explores the nature and extent of judicial choice in the common law legal tradition and the structural features of that tradition that control and constrain that element of choice. As Sharpe explains, the law does not always provide clear answers, and judges are often left with difficult choices to make, but the power of judicial choice is disciplined and constrained and judges are not free to decide cases according to their own personal sense of justice. Although Good Judgment is accessibly written to appeal to the non-specialist reader with an interest in the judicial process, it also tackles fundamental issues about the nature of law and the role of the judge and will be of particular interest to lawyers, judges, law students, and legal academics.

From the perspective of prominent positions in both moral philosophy and legal scholarship, tort law can seem baffling: people are made to pay damages when they are barely or not at fault, yet some serious harms go uncompensated. Many of these puzzles grow out of the assumption that the law's concern must either be to compensate losses or penalize misconduct. In private wrongs, Arthur Ripstein provides a philosophical and systematic account of the rights protected by tort law. The law of tort protects what people already have: their person, understood as bodily integrity and reputation, and property. Ripstein articulates the form of these rights, and provides a simple but compelling explanation of the sense in which the point of damages is to make it as if the wrong had never happened. He explains why this matters even though damages are at best an imperfect substitute and why enforcing private rights is consistent with the other activities of a liberal state without being reducible to them.--Publisher's information.

A growing body of empirical research has demonstrated that intimate partner violence is not a unitary phenomenon and that types of domestic violence can be differentiated with respect to partner dynamics, context, and consequences. Four patterns of violence are described: Coercive Controlling Violence, Violent Resistance, Situational Couple Violence, and Separation-Instigated Violence. The controversial matter of gender symmetry and asymmetry in intimate partner violence is discussed in terms of sampling differences and methodological limitations. Implications of differentiation among types of domestic violence include the need for improved screening measures and procedures in civil, family, and criminal court and the possibility of better decision making, appropriate sanctions, and more effective treatment programs tailored to the characteristics of different types of partner violence. In family court, reliable differentiation should provide the basis for determining what safeguards are necessary and what types of parenting plans are appropriate to ensure healthy outcomes for children and parent–child relationships.

Jennifer Koshan, Janet E Mosher, Wanda A Wiegers, 2020 CanLIIDocs 3160

This article criticises the government's rejection of proposals by the Prison Reform Trust that would have extended self-defence in householder cases to victims/survivors of domestic abuse. The authors argue that the Prison Reform Trust proposals should be enacted, and further supported by novel complementary reform of the option to retreat, and the exclusion of intoxicated mistaken belief in self-defence claims. Specifically, the authors advance a statutory rebuttable presumption regarding the option to retreat in cases involving domestic abuse, namely, an assumption that the victim/survivor was not realistically able to retreat safely, unless it is proven otherwise. The authors also examine the appropriateness of the policy decision to exclude intoxicated mistaken belief in all self-defence cases and advocate for its removal. It should be replaced with a requirement that all mistaken beliefs must be reasonable regardless of the presence of intoxication. Procedural recommendations are also advanced, including amendment of the Crown Court Compendium to include judicial directions on self-defence which adopt a social entrapment approach in domestic abuse cases, and supported by the admissibility of non-medical expert evidence on the nature and impact of coercive control.

By drawing on a range of theoretical traditions emerging from feminism, criminology, and sociology, Women and Gendered Violence in Canadasignificantly expands the conversation on violence against women.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) has both serious consequences for its victims and high rates of recidivism. Risk assessment measures are an integral part of preventing IPV recidivism. The use of brief IPV-specific measures is particularly relevant in settings, such as corrections, where resources are limited. The RBAC-VPI is a 15-item IPV risk assessment designed as a supplement to general risk measures, making it efficient to use in various settings. Validity was tested in a sample of 222 men in the province of Quebec, Canada convicted of a violent offence where the victim was an intimate partner. Participants were evaluated using the RBAC-VPI, a general risk assessment (RBAC-PCQ), a standalone IPV risk assessment (SARA-V3), and a psychopathy assessment (PCL:SV). The RBAC-VPI showed acceptable reliability and very strong convergent validity with the other measures, most notably with the SARA-V3 (r = .51), while containing fewer items and being quicker to administer. A Rasch model item response theory analysis further supported the validity of the measure’s items. Items showed excellent model fit and a good difficulty distribution. Only two items were identified as redundant and one as less informative. This suggests that the RBAC-VPI is both brief and highly informative.

For women seeking to extricate themselves from the web of entrapment woven together by the multiple threads that make up the coercive control repertoire of their abusive intimate partners, it is often difficult to avoid engagement with legal systems. Yet, the legal systems they encounter—criminal, family, child welfare, immigration among them—are frequently unwelcoming (if not hostile), controlling, demeaning, fragmented and contradictory. While there has been a recent explosion of interest in “access to justice,” little attention has been paid to how we might conceptualize access to justice in a manner that speaks meaningfully to the circumstances of women who experience abuse in their intimate relationships. For such women, access to justice is curtailed not only by lack of representation, delays, costs, and procedural complexities—the obstacles commonly associated with access to justice failings—but by three inter-related phenomena: the enduring hold of an incident-based understanding of domestic violence; the failure of legal actors to curb men’s strategic use of legal systems to further their power; and the host of complications—contradictory expectations, inconsistent orders, repetitious proceedings, sweeping surveillance—that arise when women are compelled to navigate multiple intersecting legal systems. What is required, I argue, is a conceptualization of access to justice that places women’s safety and well-being at its core.