NCJ Number
125480
Journal
Florida Law Review Volume: 42 Issue: 1 Dated: (January 1990) Pages: 45-79
Date Published
1990
Length
34 pages
Annotation
The marital rape exemption denies married women protection against violent crime solely on the basis of gender and marital status.
Abstract
While virtually every judge or legislator who seriously has considered this issue has concluded that these laws violate equal protection, no major upheaval of the law reflects such progressive unanimity. There are three contrasting understandings of the meaning of equal protection: the Supreme Court's dominant rationality approach; the "antisubordination" approach; and the "pure protection" understanding. The three basic principles of rationality, relevance, and legitimacy provide the foundation for modern equal protection jurisprudence. The antisubordination model of equal protection perceives the equality that equal protection guarantees as substantive, not formal. The pure protection model states that to deny equal protection might mean that a State refuses to grant to some citizens the protection against private wrongdoing that it grants to others. Marital rape exemptions are unconstitutional under all of these approaches. Congress should enact a Federal law guaranteeing protection to all women against violent sexual assault. 106 notes.