Gender issues in the criminal law

This essay examines some of the gender issues in the criminal law that are, or engage, issues of deep philosophical interest. My focus is on the law of sexual assault and on two defenses, self-defense and the heat of passion defense. I take care to avoid simply providing a report on "the feminist critique" or a sampling of feminist attacks on the law of self-defense, the provocation defense, and sexual assault law. Instead, I seek to pinpoint what I take to be the serious problems and to trace those problems to their sources in the law, with attention both to the distinction between (a) problems of application and (b) problems rooted in the law and to the interplay between (a) and (b).