Real Rape
Susan Estrich
Real Rape is a vital book for judges, lawyers, law students, legislators, police officers, and those working in rape crisis centers...Estrich's writing is calm, logical, eloquent, and often scathingly ironic. On its own terms, her book is valuable for its untangling of the various threads of illogic that have formed the centuries-old web that has prevented justice from being served.
--Catherine Foster, Christian Science Monitor
A powerful indictment of the sexism, double standards and institutionalized distrust of women that lie behind the legal system's refusal to treat 'simple' rape (the legal term for sexual assault in which the victim knows her assailant and no weapon or overt physical violence is used) as a real crime. This is an important book, well researched and tightly argued...Estrich addresses the issues directly, cogently and with the sense of urgency and outrage the seriousness of the crime deserves.
--K. Kaufmann, San Francisco Examiner
A persuasive argument for legal change.
--Carole Gould, New York Times Book Review
Real Rape is a powerful book. It reveals and empowers women's experiences in law. If it succeeds in creating a drive for the revision of rape law, it may enable women to get out from under the 'unfair struggle with the forces of perception.'
--Kim Lane Scheppele, University of Chicago Law Review
[A] brave, simply focused and powerfully reasoned book.
--Christina Robb, Boston Globe
No one will ever again be able to address the legal problems of rape without taking Susan Estrich's landmark work into account. It is a model of how to think about a perplexing legal issue without losing track either of logic or of human experience.
--Laurence Tribe
Susan Estrich is Robert Kingsley Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Southern California.