This article explores the prospects and pitfalls faced by a feminist legal scholar wanting to set up a ‘sexual infidelity’ homicide public engagement project. Following Carol Smart’s suggestion that law is an important site of engagement, counter-discourse and critical feminist interventions, it argues that provocation by infidelity femicide cases are ideal sites for continuing the project of encouraging discursive struggle. The cases cry out for conversion into a critical, pedagogical means of mobilising consciousness about emotional excuses for violence against women.

This article examines the continuing use of problematic sexual stereotypes at appellate level in the English and Welsh legal system. Using five cases as illustrations, it argues that, notwithstanding professional training and guidance on sexual equality matters, certain senior judges in this jurisdiction still at least sometimes openly employ crude and problematic sexual stereotypes in their judgments or fail to deal appropriately with the use of these stereotypes by trial judges. The central point is that there is still a significant (...) problem with the open use of crude sexual stereotypes in legal reasoning at a senior level in this jurisdiction, despite the pressure on all members of the legal system to appear to be ‘politically correct’. (shrink)