Emilyn HazlebrookUndergraduate Humanities Honors Fellow

Emilyn Hazelbrook is a senior majoring in history on the pre-law track.

Her honors thesis project will map the trajectory of the battered woman legal defense from 1970 to 2000 in the United States. The project will also examine how the legal defense’s development coincided with the events of the second and third waves of the feminist movement. The battered woman legal defense is situated at a fascinating intersection between the academic fields of psychology, law, woman’s studies, and history. Its path to widespread recognition in the criminal justice system has upended traditional conceptions of victimhood and has been the focus of feminist political efforts throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Through oral histories of attorneys involved in consequential cases such as the Framingham Eight trials and careful analysis of case records involving the legal defense, Emilyn’s research will reconstruct a timeline for the defense’s development and the role of feminist movements in establishing the admissibility of expert witness testimony regarding battered woman syndrome in courtrooms across the United States.