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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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