News of the Weird September 19 2008

LEAD STORY: Italian and U.K. legal authorities have recently discarded rule interpretations based on embarrassingly anachronistic stereotypes of women. In July, Italy’s Court of Cassation reversed a 1999 ruling creating a legal presumption that a woman wearing tight jeans could not be the victim of rape because such jeans would be impossible to remove without her assistance. Coincidentally, at about the same time, the British government formally removed the special, ameliorating defense of “provocation” for husbands charged with murdering their wives, thus putting domestic homicide on the same footing as other homicides. (Some husbands had received lesser penalties by claiming that their wives’ affairs had provoked them to murder.)

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