ABSTRACT
The widespread references to ‘men’s rea’ in my students’ criminal law scripts each year doubtless have everything to do with their command of punctuation and nothing to do with the feminist perspective which I have introduced to their course. But, 20 years ago, in a thought provoking paper which anticipated many subsequent theoretical developments, Mark Cousins reflected critically on whether a feminist analysis might lead to the conclusion that the apostrophe should indeed be where my students often place it. Since the publication of his “Men’s rea: a note on sexual difference, criminology and the law’,2 both critical analyses of the general principles of criminal law and feminist critique of the substance and practice of criminal law have flourished. Yet, notwithstanding the increasing theoretical ambition of feminist legal scholarship and, in particular, its preoccupation with underlying questions of legal method and conceptual framework as a supplement to its analysis and political critique of the substance of legal norms, the dialogue between feminist criminal law scholarship and critical analysis of the general principles has remained relatively undeveloped.
