ABSTRACT
Despite all this, the appellant wished to hold the marriage together, partly because o f her sense o f duty as a wife and partly for the sake o f the children.
This essay is concerned with the processes of judgment faced by a battered woman who kills her abusive partner. My objective is to provide a reading of two cases in which a battered woman killed her spouse after undergoing
repeated violence at his hands. Such a reading will suggest how law operates to judge the abused woman who kills, not merely in terms of the formal doctrines of criminal law, but also through recourse to the laws of gender difference. The abused woman’s judgment, then, occurs not only in the court’s application of legal rules, but also through its representation of propriety in identity and in femininity.
