ABSTRACT
In English law this 'appropriate' standardisation was controversially transplanted by the government of the day into the final stages of the parliamentary process to exclude sexual infidelity as a qualifying trigger for fact-finder evaluation. In the context of sexual infidelity, as stated, if the defence is articulated via the legal prism of partial justification, the primordial consideration is on the provoker's conduct, and whether it may be stigmatised as wrongful, untoward or egregious in the first place. The two qualifying conditions in terms of provoking behaviour in Scottish law, those of violence and the discovery of sexual infidelity, reflect the historical lineage of the provocation defence set out in this chapter. The tension between these parameters can be satisfied through invocation of the power of the trial judge to withdraw the matter of loss of self-control in sexual infidelity killings when there is no predicate on which a reasonable jury properly directed could conclude that it might apply.
