Release date: March 24, 2005

Emory's Levine Examines Statutory Rape Law

Contact:
Elaine Justice: 404-727-0643, elaine.justice@emory.edu
April Bogle: 404-712-8713, abogle@law.emory.edu

Emory University law professor Kay Levine will explain how prosecutors use the level of intimacy between sexual partners to determine the severity of charges and sentencing in statutory rape cases at a lecture titled "The Intimacy Discount in Statutory Rape Cases," at noon, Wednesday, March 30 at Emory Law School's Tull Auditorium, 1301 Clifton Road. For information, call 404-712-8710, or go to www.law.emory.edu/cisr.

"Understanding why prosecutors make certain decisions in certain cases, how they decide which cases to press and to bargain, how they treat victims and their families--all of these issues matter," says Levine, "not just to our understanding of how prosecutors do their jobs, but also to our eventual community understanding of the crime of statutory rape."

Levine joined the faculty of Emory Law School in 2003. After earning her law degree in 1993 from the University of California at Berkeley, she clerked with Judge David A. Ezra of the U.S. District Court in Hawaii and was a deputy district attorney in California for three years. She then resumed her studies and earned her Ph.D. from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley in 2003.

The lecture is part of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion's Family Forum Series. The center, one of The Pew Charitable Trusts' Centers of Excellence, brings together diverse academic perspectives to explore the influence of religious traditions on law, politics, society and culture.

Emory University is known for its demanding academics, outstanding undergraduate college of arts and sciences, highly ranked professional schools and state-of-the-art research facilities. For more than a decade Emory has been named one of the country's top 25 national universities by U.S. News & World Report. In addition to its nine schools, the university encompasses The Carter Center, Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory Healthcare, a comprehensive metropolitan health care system.

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