Judicial Decision-Making in Intimate Partner Violence Cases: A Scoping Review and Critical Analysis

Abstract

Family courts have increasingly made decisions in intimate partner violence (IPV) cases that extend or restrict protections for certain groups of survivors, impacting both the individuals and their family systems. Understanding how judicial decisions are made in cases involving IPV is critical to addressing systemic issues and advocating for fair, predictable outcomes for underrepresented populations. This scoping review paper identifies scholarships that inform us on how court decisions are made for cases involving IPV in the literature. Scholarships in the literature are analyzed based on the framework of intersectionality – a lens that many IPV scholars have suggested to be appropriate in revealing how structural forces reinforce social inequalities – and American Legal Realism – a legal theory that provides a useful theoretical perspective in analyzing judicial decision-makings. The analysis addresses knowledge gaps in the literature and ends by suggesting directions for future research including, an integration of the two frameworks to better understand court decisions of IPV cases.This is an original manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Family Transitions on Jan 25, 2025, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/28375300.2025.245377