Rule of Love: Wife Beating as Prerogative and Privacy

Efforts to reform a status regime do bring aboutchange - but not always the kind of change advocates seek. When thelegitimacy of a status regime is successfully contested, lawmakers and juristswill both cede and defend status privileges-gradually relinquishing theoriginal rules and justificatory rhetoric of the contested regime and finding newrules and reasons to protect such status privileges as they choose to defend.Thus, civil rights reform can breathe new life into a body of status law, bypressuring legal elites to translate it into a more contemporary, and lesscontroversial, social idiom. I call this kind of change in the rules and rhetoricof a status regime "preservation through transformation," and illustrate thismodernization dynamic in a case study of domestic assault law as it evolvedin rule structure and rationale from a law of marital prerogative to a law ofmarital privacy.