Social Exclusion through Legal Naming Events: The Case Study of Violence against Women by Male Partners

My research investigates the relationship between mechanisms of legal-knowledge production and the meanings accepted or excluded by legal discourse. I explore this relationship by focusing on the act of legal naming: the act of granting a legal name to a social phenomenon or constructing the legal meaning of a name already given. I investigate how mechanisms of knowledge production, operated in legal naming events, influence the legal name produced and legal meaning constructed. Through researching this relationship, I aim to reveal the nature of the act of legal naming as social struggle between meanings that compete to become accepted by legal discourse. Through revealing the struggle nature of legal naming acts, I examine the ability of women who are the subjects of legal proceedings to take part in the process of constructing legal meaning, and on the ability of actors from non-legal disciplines to alter legal meanings according to their disciplinary knowledge. I am researching this question by analysing the legal naming of violence against women by male partners as a case study. I analyse 67 judgments given by courts in England between 1972 and 2012, in which courts named violence against women by male partners or constructed, altered or reinforced the meanings of the name granted. Through the research, I aim to contribute to feminist legal scholarship which revealed the gap between the way women experience domestic violence and the way it is legally represented by revealing the role of discourse mechanisms in constructing and enforcing legal meanings. Furthermore, I aim to be able to contribute to socio-legal thought on how legal meanings are formed and become accepted and how other meanings are dismissed or marginalised