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19 Loy. L. Rev. 563 (1972-1973)
On Louisiana's New Homicide Statutes: Purpose, Constitutionality and Problems of Interpretation

handle is hein.journals/loyolr19 and id is 571 raw text is: LOYOLA LAW REVIEW
Volume 19, Number 3, 1973
ON LOUISIANA'S NEW HOMICIDE STATUTES:
PURPOSE, CONSTITUTIONALITY AND PROBLEMS OF
INTERPRETATION
Gerard A. Rault, Jr.*
It must be quite difficult to draft good legislation. This point
is underscored rather graphically by recent Louisiana legislation
which illustrates that, although there is usually but one way of
doing something correctly, there are any number of inventive ways
of doing it incorrectly. Some legislative enactments are intended to
implement notions of public order and policy; others have as their
raison d'etre the protection and fostering of vital social, economic
or penal interests of the society; and still others spring from the
necessity of regulating complex and unwieldy fields of commercial
intercourse. But occasionally legislation seems simply reactionary.
Such statutes sometimes are born of the union of a politically sensi-
tive legislature and the widely-received and deeply-felt notion that
federal courts ought not lightly cast asunder what state legislatures
have pieced together.
During the 1973 Session the Louisiana Legislature brought
forth several important revisions to the State Criminal Code.' Major
among these changes are the division of murder into the first and
second degree dichotomy existing in most states, and the creation
of the novel and somewhat curious crime of killing a child during
delivery.
It should be common knowledge that these statutes represent
a legislative reaction to recent decisions of the United States Su-
* Assistant Professor of Law, Loyola School of Law, New Orleans, Louisiana.
1.  LA. REv. STAT. 14 (1950).

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