"Abuse Excuse"

[Fred Shapiro]

All right, so I spoke too soon.  Further research (on Dow Jones) retrieves
a pre-Dershowitz citation:  Danny R. Tipton wrote in a letter to the
editor in the Dayton Daily News, 4 Dec. 1993, "Don't be so quick to
believe every woman with an abuse excuse."  And I notice that in
Dershowitz's Jan. 16, 1994 column, he puts the phrase "abuse excuse" in
quotation marks throughout the column.  So it was probably not original
with Dersh.


Fred R. Shapiro                             Coeditor (with Jane Garry)
Associate Librarian for Public Services     TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES
Yale Law School                             Oxford University Press, 1998
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               ISBN 0-19-509547-2