Not if she’s dead (and maybe right before she dies). Look, Eugene keeps making these goofy threads, so they deserve goofy responses. A lot of these questions can be answered by reading What Law Is by Clayton. I’ll post an excerpt that I think is particularly relevant:
So what is the law? Law is the alternative to violent conflict when conflict-avoidance strategies (such as property lines) have failed to avoid conflict. In terms of rights in property, law is the production of new, stipulated property-lines which resolve real conflicts without further violence.
This definition immediately raises the question of how disputes can be resolved between asymmetrically powerful parties. In modern law systems, the aggressor (accused) has an incentive to resolve the conflict with his victim by means of law because the state will immediately retaliate against the accused for failure to comply with a court trial. In other words, the state offers the options of non-violent dispute resolution or immediate, overwhelming retaliatory violence (appear in court or be arrested or possibly even killed for failure to comply). In a stateless society, it appears that an aggressor would have no incentive to seek non-violent resolution of a dispute with his victim. After all, an aggressor usually will not attack unless he reasonably believes he can get away with the attack in the first place. That is, he has already calculated that he can win a martial contest with the victim.
Therefore, the victim must be able to present a sufficient threat to the accused in order to motivate the aggressor to come to court. That is, both parties must have an incentive to seek a peaceful settlement of the matter. Law and security, then, are inseparable. You cannot have real rights without the capacity to present a real threat to aggressors who refuse peaceful settlement of disputes. In other words, if you steal my television, and I send you a notice saying, “You must appear in court regarding the matter of the theft of my television,” I must also be able to take forcible action in the event you refuse to settle the matter through non-violent means. Otherwise, you will simply ignore my summons.
So far, I have not mentioned the non-aggression principle. In the characterization of rights and law that I have presented so far, what is called the “non-aggression principle” follows from the simple fact that prior success in redrawing the boundaries of property does not constitute a valid verbal argument for the property lines remaining unchanged. If I steal your purse and you bring me to court, simply noting that I won the physical contest for your purse does not constitute a valid verbal argument for the purse remaining in my possession. It is, in fact, a circular argument. The point in contention is whether the outcome of that physical contest should remain unchanged. If I refuse to defend my actions or if I am unable to defend my actions in court (using reason, ethics and accepted principles of law), the ultimate recourse is a new martial contest. In other words, rejecting the non-aggression principle is no different than saying “I don’t care to settle this through non-violent means, let’s just settle this matter through martial contest.” Note that this argument is inspired by Hoppe’s argumentation ethics which is essentially a presuppositional approach to the non-aggression principle. However, I find Hoppe’s attempt to elevate the NAP to an axiom to be deficient because it is not useful to real parties to a real legal dispute, as noted above.
Clearly, Eugene’s dead girlfriend (EDG) cannot press charges against Eugene, so where is the conflict? It is with whoever has a conflict with Eugene over this, most likely EDG’s family, but it could be anybody. Eugene’s question just misses the whole point:
If Eugene kills his girlfiend, and there is some other person in the world that gives a damn (sopinwtgad), there is a conflict. Period. We cannot know how an anarchic society would resolve the conflict. If Eugene and sopinwtgad cannot resolve the dispute, there will be open conflict. If sopinwtgad wants Eugene dead for his transgression against EDG, then there will be open conflict until one or the other dies. I mean really, what kind of question is this…If I kill my girlfriend through especially crafty means, will someone else care if I killed her?