Abysmally incompetent as Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke was in attempting to describe some new thinking about the law of rape, it did not merit the outrage of those who argued that rape is rape is rape and that is the end of the question. But the law is all about distinctions. Murder is murder is murder too, but it still has to be defined accurately and culpability assessed before justice can be done.
In 287 BC, the lêx Aquilia dealing with unlawful damage was passed in a Roman assembly. It was named after its proposer, the tribune Aquilius. Its opening chapter referred to the unlawful killing of a ‘four-footed beast of the class of cattle’. What taxed the Roman jurist Gaius was the question: since ‘cattle’ covered cows and bulls but also other farm and domestic animals, which came under the rubric? Were sheep, goats, horses, mules and asses ‘classes of cattle’? Yes, he thought.
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