The ‘Abuse Excuse’ in Law and Theology
Abstract: In the 1970s and 1980s, social movements in the US pushed for legal systems to take account of abuse in assessing criminal liability. Some thought this push went too far: in 1994, US law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote a book attacking what he called the “abuse excuse” in criminal law. In recent years, thanks in part to social media, there has been renewed attention to the way contexts of abuse should affect criminal liability. Yet legal systems struggle to respond adequately to contexts of abuse. I suggest that this is because abuse challenges the very foundations of normative order, and I explore what this means in both secular and ecclesial contexts.
Bio: Vincent Lloyd is Professor and Director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University, where he is an affiliate of the Africana Studies Program. His most recent books are Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale, 2022), the co-authored What Is Political Theology? (Columbia, 2025), and the co-edited Political Theology Reimagined (Duke, 2025).