The controversial trial of five men accused of gang-raping a young woman during the 2016 San Fermín festival and their conviction not for rape, but for a lesser crime of sexual abuse in 2018, known as La Manada (the Wolf-Pack) case, brought the Spanish law under intense public scrutiny. The case led to an outpouring of protests across the country and called for the urgent reform of rape laws, which then led to the drafting of new provisions to address the outcry. To set the analysis in the context of feminist activism, this Article is organized around the hashtags used during the protests. Accordingly, this Article examines three aspects of considerable debate: Namely the distinction between sexual abuse and rape (“it’s not abuse, it’s rape!”), the murky legal understanding of consent (“only yes is yes”), and the introduction of the gender perspective in the legal system (“sister, I believe you”). By addressing these issues, this Article demonstrates the pervasive influence of feminism over recent Spanish law-making, and the continued resistance which such efforts meet. This Article concludes by scrutinizing this effect and examining the conditions under which a civil society network may succeed in challenging socially outdated legal provisions.

Twenty U.S. states permit the indefinite detention of civilly committed sex offenders after the end of their prison sentences if their dangerousness is due to a “mental abnormality.” This article explores the origins of one such law by examining its predecessor, the Minnesota Psychopathic Personality Act of 1939. Passed in the wake of a panic over sex crimes and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1940, Minnesota’s psychopath statute extended a 1917 eugenics law providing for the compulsory civil commitment and institutionalization of “defectives” to persons alleged to have a psychopathic personality. Analyzing the 1917 and 1939 laws together shows how one state’s psychopath statute had less to do with psychiatric authority than with the legal and administrative framework established by Progressive-era eugenics. From the 1910s until today, dubious claims about the ability of science to identify potential criminals legitimized politically popular, but constitutionally questionable, forms of administrative and social control.