Citation

MacLean J, Verrelli N, Chambers L. Can. J. Women Law 2017; 29(1): 60-82.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, University of Toronto Press)

DOI

10.3138/cjwl.29.1.60

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The case of R. v Ryan presented the Supreme Court of Canada with a novel question: may a wife, whose life is threatened by her abusive husband, rely on the defence of duress when she tries to have him murdered? In this article, we argue that by answering this novel question in the negative, the Court missed an opportunity to clarify the nature and scope of the defence of duress in the context of battered and abused women in a principled manner and thereby enhance access to justice and equal benefit of the law. Instead, the Court retreated into a purely formalist doctrinal defence of the boundary separating duress and self-defence. In doing so, the Court not only failed in its responsibility to make the law less unsettled and piecemeal, more coherent, and more just, but it also set back the judicial treatment of battered woman's syndrome by more than a quarter century, harking back to the period prior to the Court's ground-breaking decision in R. v Lavallee.

Language: en