Law's Knowledge: The Judge, The Expert, The Battered Woman, and Her Syndrome

With the increased public sympathy for women who kill their abusers, a return to examination of law's handling of these deaths is timely.' The sympathy springs from criticism of the trial process as mediated to the jury by the judge. There seems to be an intuitive public understanding that long experience of being a victim of violence may lead a woman to kill. The focus of this paper is on the resistances of English law to women's accounts of their experiences. This is marked when compared to developments in Australia and Canada. Some common law jurisdictions can accommodate the experiences of woman as 'other'; to allow her knowledge to enter a body of law hitherto male. Central to this paper are the mechanisms of evidence and narrative which judges operate as a mise en scene for the jury. These mechanisms control law's knowledge: what law permits itself to know of the death, the events which preceded it, and whether the killer's act can be justified or partially excused.