The analysis indicated that courts both then and now accept some justifications for battering and reject others, in the process of constructing the boundary between legal and illegal violence. Throughout this period, the legal system claimed to focus only on the violent act itself, not on the emotional or personal violation. The law interprets the violence as brute fact, knowable without regard to the social relationship of system of cultural meanings within which it occurs. The analysis indicated persistent contradictions between the law's construction of domestic assault as an unambiguous physical act and litigants' and judges' views that these violent acts are moments within the social dynamics of gender-based power relations. At the same time, recurrent tensions exist between the legal system's efforts to portray violent acts against women in terms of rational categories of action and, in contrast, the experience of violence and the meanings within which it occurs that are often impossible to define in such straightforward terms. Footnotes (Author abstract modified)