Quote:
Originally Posted by Bebe
Pretty much everyone from the web links you provided 
It was used in New Zealand to refer to this law, until fairly recently too. Pretty much all the law professors at the university I taught at would disagree with the Straight Dope Digest  |
That doesn't mean people didn't start recently (or within the last hundred years) referring to a new zealand law by that name, it just means the phrase "rule of thumb" did not START from a law about beating your wife. It is not the origin, it is something that came along afterward.
There are no credible sources that say this phrase came from beating your wife, and a ton (all of them that I could find) that say it wasn't.
And with that...a new phrase that applies ,
"to eat crow"