Doing law, psychiatric expertise and “crimes of passion” in the Netherlands and Russia in the twentieth century

This chapter compares how ‘crimes of passion’ were defined in law and prosecuted in practice in Russia and the Netherlands in the twentieth century. Taking the approach of ‘doing law’, which entails looking at justice as a process of negotiation involving many participants, the chapter aims to show that what a ‘crime of passion’ is, is not self-evident: it is continually debated and negotiated by multiple actors, such as the legislature, the judiciary and psychiatrists. Both in Russia and the Netherlands the image of ‘crimes of passion’ revolved around ‘othering’: these crimes were seen as typ... Mehr ...