Law and Dance

Miriam Aziz, Visiting Scholar at Cardozo Law School, has published Lost For Words: Embodying Law Through Tanztheater, 7 Law and Humanities 91 (2013). Here is a link to the abstract.

Professor Aziz also tells me that the project has its own blog at Lost For Words by Miriam Aziz and Artist(s) at Large. Lots of things to explore, including a soundtrack.

More Bloomsday!

A lovely Bloomsday post from our friend Jose Calvo Gonzalez of the University of Malaga at his blog, Iurisdictio-Lex Malacitana. Lots of excellent Joyce and the law citations to peruse here!

Bloomsday!

It's Bloomsday! More here from the James Joyce Centre, here from the Rosenbach Museum and Library.
Selected Joyce and the Law Bibliography here.

Balsamo, Gian, Legitimate Filiation and Gender Segregation: Law and Fiction in Texts By Derrida, Hegel, Joyce, Pirandello, Vico (Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1994).
Bauerle, Ruth, Date Rape, Mate Rape: A Liturgical Interpretation of The Dead,, in New Alliances in Joyce Studies 113 (Bonnie K. Scott, ed., 1988).
Denvir, John "Deep Dialogue"--James Joyce's Contribution to American Constitutional Theory, 3 Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 1 (1991).
In the Name of the Law: Marital Freedom and Justice in Exiles, 834/839 La Revue des Lettres Modernes 39 (1988).
Lowe-Evans, Mary, "The Commonest of all Cases: Birth Control on Trial In the Wake, 27 James Joyce Quarterly 803 (Summer 1990).
Lowe-Evans, Mary, The Mime Against Fecondité: Joyce Encodes the Code de la Famille, 37 (3/4) James Joyce Quarterly 509 (Spring/Summer 2000).
McMichael, James, Ulysses and Justice (1991).
Valente, Joseph, James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference (1995).

The Other Big Brother

According to the "Tuned In" column in the June 24, 2013 issue of Time, U.S. popular culture has been predicting government surveillance of U.S. citizens for a while now.Think shows like Chuck and Person of Interest, and next season's new series Intelligence.  The essay, by James Poniewozik, discussses the attractions that such issues have for writers. After all, a good secret makes for good drama. Time's content is available to subscribers online, but the issue is available for purchase on newsstands now.

Sally Draper On the Couch

Courtesy of Gwynne Watkins, who explains the Mad Men's teen's possible problems after catching her dad with a neighbor.  From New York Magazine's Vulture blog). Not to mention the adultery, the alienation of affections...

Legal Reform and Political Economy

Evgeny Finkel, George Washington University Department of Political Science, Scott Gehlbach, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Center for the Study of Institutions and Development, and Tricia D. Olsen, have published  Business Ethics & Legal Studies, University of Wisconsin, have published Does Reform Prevent Rebellion? Evidence from Russia's Emancipation of the Serfs. Here is the abstract.

Contemporary models of political economy suggest that unrest and revolution can be prevented by reforms that target excluded groups, but little is known about the actual effect of such reforms on social stability. We explore the impact of reform on rebellion with a new dataset on peasant disturbances in nineteenth-century Russia. Using a difference-in-differences design that exploits the timing of various peasant reforms, we document a large increase in disturbances among former serfs following the Emancipation Reform of 1861, a development completely counter to reformers' intent. Drawing on a simple global game that illustrates the various mechanisms by which reform might affect rebellion, we trace this outcome to elite divisions and limited state capacity, two political constraints that together contributed to a reform that favored the gentry in its design and was captured the nobility in its implementation.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Learned Hand, Recording Artist

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University School of Law; The Green Bag, has published Learned Hand Sings, Part One: Liner Notes for 'Songs of His Youth'. Here is the abstract.

This is part one of a two-part set of liner notes for Songs of His Youth – a complete edition of Learned Hand’s 1942 folk music recording session at the Library of Congress. This part deals with the immediate business of how Hand ended up singing and talking into a microphone at the Library, and with what he sang and said, including a lightly annotated transcript of the recordings, which can be difficult to follow in places. The second part (in the next issue of the Green Bag) will deal mostly with the background and aftermath of the recording session.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Blasphemy Laws: A Examination of Six Legal Regimes

Jeremy Patrick, University of Southern Queensland School of Law, has published The Curious Persistence of Blasphemy: Canada and Beyond. It is his PhD dissertation from Osgood Hall Law School (April, 2013).

Here is the abstract. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the history and future of the crime of blasphemy. In the introduction, several key questions are examined: (1) What is blasphemy? (2) Why do people blaspheme? and (3) What are the real or perceived harms of blasphemy? Subsequently, Part I examines the history of blasphemy and blasphemy-like laws in six jurisdictions around the globe: England, Ireland, Australia, Pakistan, the United Nations, and the United States. The jurisdictions chosen illuminate the fact that blasphemy is a complex concept which can be regulated in a wide variety of ways. These six provide an excellent picture of the varied and diverse ways the concept of blasphemy has operated and an understanding as to why it remains relevant today. Part II of this dissertation turns away from a global, comparative examination of blasphemy and instead provides a comprehensive, in-depth study of a single jurisdiction: Canada. This sustained history of blasphemy in Canada, the first ever published, allows for a valuable snapshot of the evolution of the crime into its modern form. Part III synthesizes the research and analysis in Parts I and II to answer the fundamental questions: what is the future of the crime of blasphemy in Canada and beyond?

Download the full text of the dissertation from SSRN at the link. 

Acculturating Copyright

Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder, both of the University of California, Davis, School of Law, are publishing Copyright's Cultural Turn in the Texas Law Review (2013). Here is the abstract.

How ironic that the scholarship on the area of law most directly regulating the culture industries has long resisted learning from scholarship on culture! Rather than turning to cultural studies, anthropology, geography, literary theory, science and technology studies, and media studies, over the last few decades, copyright scholars have relied largely on economics for methodology. In this review essay, we argue that Julie Cohen’s new book, Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice, is part of a cultural turn in intellectual property scholarship. Cohen’s book marks an important expansion of the tools available to analyze intellectual property.
In this paper, we contextualize her book through comparison with the reigning law and economics approach. We go further to highlight some aspects of a cultural analysis of copyright. We identify two central insights of the cultural turn in copyright: the relationship between cultural products and the self, and the relationship between culture and human development, which we characterize as the relationship between goods and a good life. Under Martha Nussbaum’s and Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, which Cohen embraces, intellectual property policy would be evaluated under a new metric, not simply increased products (in the form of patents, copyrighted works, or trademarked goods), or its contribution to the gross domestic product, but rather its role in enhancing human capabilities. A cultural approach to copyright would measure law’s success by its ability to better the lives of real people.

Download the full text of the article from SSRN at the link. 

A New Biography of Gandhi

Charles Richard DiSalvo, West Virginia University College of Law, is publishing M. K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law: The Man Before the Mahatma with the University of California Press (Fall 2013). Here is the abstract.

Students of Gandhi have long recognized that there exists a significant gap in the Gandhi scholarship. None of Gandhi’s many biographers has focused on Gandhi’s extensive practice of law. Similarly, scholars have not examined Gandhi’s experience in the law as a critical factor contributing to the development of his philosophy and practice of nonviolence. This book takes up those tasks. Using previously unexamined archival materials, it brings to light for the first time Gandhi’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to use the courts to defend Indian rights. It argues that Gandhi’s subsequent disillusionment with litigation as a tool for justice and social change led him to experiment with a new approach — nonviolent civil disobedience.
The book does not conclude that Gandhi abandoned his faith in the rule of law. Rather, it concludes that he discovered within the law the grand dynamic that converts disobedience to change — change even in the law itself.
As it makes this argument, the book does not ignore the person of Gandhi. It demonstrates that it was the practice of law that allowed Gandhi to transform himself from a shy and awkward youth into the competent and confident public person who would later lead India to freedom.
The appendix for the book is available at the following URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2268724.
The complete endnotes for the book are available at the following URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2268712.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

African-American Feminist Theory

Kristie Dotson, Michigan State University Department of Philosophy, has published Knowing in Space: Three Lessons from Black Women's Social Theory in the January/June issue of labrys, études féministes/estudos feministas.

In attempting to create a US Black feminist philosophy, I have uncovered three lessons in US Black women’s social theory. They are the following: 1) oppression is a multistable, social phenomenon; 2) many US Black women identify occupying a negative, socio-epistemic space as part of their experience of oppression; and 3) addressing oppression for many Black women will require grappling with politics of social spatiality. These insights are by no means new. However, the fact that these tropes can be identified in almost 200 years of Black women's social theory in the US is far more distinctive than many allow.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Jeremy Waldron and Jus Gentium

Kevin Toh, San Francisco State University, is publiishing Legal Relativism and Jus Gentium in the APA Newsletter. Here is the abstract.

In "Partly Laws Common to All Mankind," Jeremy Waldron advocates what could be called "the doctrine of jus gentium," according to which, roughly, courts sitting in one country must give some weight in their legal deliberations to some principles that have been accepted or adopted by the legal systems of many other countries. Waldron's arguments for this doctrine raise questions and worries about exactly what the content of the doctrine is, and what justification could be offered for it. Several different versions of the doctrine come into the picture as Waldron argues for jus gentium, and while some versions are plausible, some others are not. Unfortunately, the most plausible of the versions seems to be excluded by Waldron's commitment to a Dworkinian conception of the nature of law. This paper ends up recommending that Waldron drop his commitment to that conception of the nature of law in favor of the plausible version of the doctrine of jus gentium.
This paper is a contribution to a symposium on Jeremy Waldron's work organized by the American Philosophical Association. A revised version will be published in a forthcoming issue of the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Law, with Waldron's reply.

Download the full text of the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Comparative Popular Culture Images of Lawyers

Lorin Geitner, Claremont Graduate University, has published Social Architecture and the Law: Law, Through the Lens of Religion. Here is the abstract.

How can we account for the differing popular images of attorney in various countries? One way of doing so may be to bring a paradigm developed in religious studies to examine the most publically accessible and prototypical venue for attorneys, the courtroom. Specifically, applying the model of critical spatial studies developed by Lefebvre and Soja in order to examine religious ritual space to bear on a different kind of ritual space, the courtroom, its structure, organization, and use may illuminate both societal understandings of how the law relates to the citizen, but also inform the differing perception and status of lawyers in the United States, Britain, and China.

 Download the full text of the paper from SSRN at the link.

Law and Emotions

Jennifer Schweppe, University of Limerick, and John E. Stannard, Queen's University Belfast, School of Law, have published What is so ‘Special’ about Law and Emotions? at 64 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 1 (2013). Here is the abstract.

We are grateful to the editors of the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly for allowing us to put together this special edition on ‘Law and Emotions’. But what is so special about it? The very existence of such a field of study may appear at first sight to be counterintuitive; as has been so often pointed out, law and emotion have traditionally been seen as polar opposites, the former being based on ‘reason’ and the latter on ‘feeling’. However, this has been shown to be a false dichotomy in a number of respects, being an accurate reflection neither of the way the law is structured and administered, nor of the way emotion works, nor indeed of the way humans live. Indeed, such is the influence of emotion on human behaviour that the relevance of emotion to law has been said to be ‘a point so obvious as to make its articulation seem almost banal’. Be that as it may, the study of law and emotions, though now reasonably well established in America, is less familiar to students and practitioners of law, or indeed academics working in the area, on this side of the Atlantic, and this collection is therefore designed to provide an insight into the subject.

Download this introduction to the issue from SSRN at the link. 

The Legal Theology of Nahmanides

Joseph E. David, Oxford University Faculty of Oriental Studies; Wolfson College, has published Dwelling within the Law: Nahmanides’ Legal Theology in 2013 Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 1.

The great medieval Jewish jurist and thinker R. Moses b. Nahman (1194-1270) developed an exceptional legal-theology unprecedented in traditional rabbinic thought. In jurisprudential terms, he reduces the Jewish traditional perception of the Halakhah (i.e. the Talmudic law) and introduces the view of the divine law as a territorial law. My article suggests reading anew his sayings about the God-law-land matrix against the background of his contemporary European Christendom. Our analysis raises new perspectives on his attentiveness to the conceptual vocabulary of the Crusades’ propaganda and the European legal reality.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Picture It

The ABA Journal highlights the work of Nathaniel Burney, author of the Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law. Mr. Burney practices criminal law in New York, and wants to make law more accessible, particularly to high school students. More here.

Amazon Announces First Choices For Its "Amazon Original" Network

Among the shows that Amazon has picked up as an "Amazon Original" to air on Amazon Instant Video is Garry Trudeau's Alpha House, starring John Goodman, Clark Johnson, Matt Malloy, and Mark Consuelos as four Senators sharing D.C. digs.

Customers chose Alpha House and four other shows as Amazon Studios'  first Internet series through open voting over the past few weeks. 

Call For Paper Proposals: Conference On Law, Literature, and the Humanities Association of Australasia, December, 2013

Reminder from Desmond Manderson: Abstracts for single papers or panel proposals for this year's Law, Literature, and the Humanities Association of Australasia Conference are due at the end of this week. More information on the Conference webpage. Link here.

New Reality Show Focusing On Brooklyn Prosecutor's Office Debuts

Legal dramas are perennially popular, and as usual, the networks are already rolling them out for the 2013 season. On Tuesday, May 29, at 10 p.m., 9 Central time, CBS launches a new show, Brooklyn D.A., starring the city itself and the office of the prosecutor, focusing on the ADAs and their work. What is different about this six part series? It's a chance for viewers to look behind the scenes. 

The show is already not without controversy. Abe George, who is running for the office of District Attorney, had attempted to object to the show, arguing that it constitutes election publicity for the office holder, Charles Hynes. A judge denied his motion last week. Today, meanwhile, a man suing the D.A. 's office for wrongful conviction is now attempting to obtain emails exchanged between that office and the show's producers.

More here from the New York Times, here from the New York Daily News.

Call For Papers: Law, Peace, and Violence Conference, March 14, 2014

From Yxta Murray at Loyola Los Angeles Law School, a call for papers for a conference on Law, Peace, and Violence: Jurisprudence and the Possibilities of Peace, a symposium at Seattle University School of Law on March 14, 2014, hosted by the Seattle Journal of Social Justice. Below is the description of the Conference, with more information about the CFP. We are working to get a webpage with this information loaded, and will update this post later.

Drink Up! Oh, and Live Long and Prosper!

Ah, the uses of trademark law! Check out Vulcan Ale, now for sale in Vulcan, Alberta, in honor of the town's centennial. If you'd rather have Romulan Ale, or a Star Wars, Monty Python, or Game of Thrones brew, check out the possibilities here.

Law's Sovereignty

Justin Richland, University of Chicago, is publishing Jurisdiction: Grounding Law in Language in the Annual Review of Anthropology. Here is the abstract.

Jurisdiction, a concept often demarcating law’s territorial scope, and thus the bounds of state sovereignty, is offered here as a theory of legal language and its relation to law’s social force. Reconsidered in light of its etymology as “law’s speech,” new theories of jurisdiction suggest how law is simultaneously founded and enacted through language both spectacular (such as courtroom arguments or in the preambles of Constitutions) and mundane (such as in legal aid in-take exchanges, or in the forms of bureaucratic records). Jurisdiction points up how the force of law, and the sovereignty that law’s force presupposes, can be seen as being made, and made seemingly unassailable, in the discursive and textual details of law’s actual accomplishment. This review considers a segment of legal language scholarship produced in recent decades, while arguing for the ground that language, as jurisdiction, always holds for law and sovereignty.

Download the text of the article from SSRN at the link. 

Tracing the History of Freedom of Sexual Expression Under the First Amendment

Ronald K. L. Collins, University of Washington School of Law, has published Theodore Schroeder and the Pre-1919 Defenses of Free Speech: The Case for Freedom of Sexual Expression as University of Washington School of Law Research Paper No. 2013-16. Here is the abstract.

The modern First Amendment began with a turn of the clock, on a Monday on March 13, 1919, the moment of the release of Justice Holmes’s seminal opinion in Schenck v. United States. At that pinpoint in time, First Amendment history was reconfigured and the liberty-denying past gradually began to fade away in the years and opinions that followed. Holmes laid his claim to the conceptual turf and what followed is what we call modernity. True, Learned Hand had his moment, too, in 1917 with his district court opinion in Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten. But that opinion, for all its insights, took on meaning primarily as a comparative point to the work of the Great Holmes. And then there is the work of Zechariah Chafee, the scholar who lent his own measure of staying power to the Holmesian notion of free speech law. Before these three Harvard men, however, there was Utah born man who came onto the First Amendment scene, a man far less credentialed and polished, a University of Wisconsin Law School trained lawyer who championed a libertarian creed and contested the will of a very powerful man, Anthony Comstock. That radical lawyer, whose name and work have largely remained cabined in the confines of forgotten history, was Theodore A. Schroeder. Like Holmes, he too had a vision of free speech law. What follows is the first of a series of articles that introduces the reader to Schroeder and his many works concerning free expression. Those works first took root not in political speech, but in area of freedom far more important to the progressives of his day – sexual expression. We come to his story thirteen years before Holmes’s glorious moment in 1919, on an occasion when Messrs. Schroeder and Comstock were to debate the topic of sexual expression. Several months later, Theodore Schroeder published an article in the Albany Law Journal (“The Constitution and Obscenity Postal Laws”), which is the main focus of this article. Drawing on a measure of history and analysis, the aim is to provide the reader with an idea of how Schroeder conceptualized his vision of free speech freedom.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Conference On Human Rights, Denmark, January, 2014

From Daniela Carpi, Professor of Literature, University of Verona, writing for AIDEL, Associazione Italiana di Diritto e Letteratura. Here is an announcement of an upcoming conference, Negotiating Human Rights, and the associated call for papers.

Negotiating Human Rights: Aesthetic, Cultural, and Political FramingsArr. by Humanistic Studies of Human Rights
Aarhus University, Denmark, January 23.-25. 2014  The aim of this conference is to focus on the multiple ways that human rights are framed through specific aesthetic, cultural and political discourses. The conference will facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion about this in a both historical and contemporary context. The conference is motivated by the increasing use of human rights in global, political and cultural contexts and the simultaneous lack of consensus regarding their precise definition and function. Human rights discourses are used in the construction of cultural identity and political communities but at the same time, a question is raised regarding the nature of communality: we are all human beings but what is human about human rights and how does this human nature qualify us as bearers of rights within specific cultural and political contexts?
We invite papers on the rhetorical, aesthetic, and mediatised framing of human rights: how do human rights-narrations work, how are they used to create empathy, what is the form and function of atrocity tales or tales of victimhood, what is the relation between documentary and fictional strategies, how do we talk about human rights in political debates and in television shows, literature, movies, on the net etc.? There is a constant translation-process going on between law, politics, and culture. This ‘translation’ is not pure and neutral but motivated and based on selection and rhetorical choices. This conference focuses on the changes – losses and gains – of concrete mediatised human rights discourses in specific contexts.Furthermore, in order to understand the function of human rights discourses, this conference invites papers that focus both on historical and contemporary contexts. If we talk about human rights in a very strict sense in the western world, they only go back to 1948 but all modern human rights discourses draw on a much older heritage. In order to understand the implications and constitution of modern human rights discourses we welcome studies on their development within global history, from antiquity till today and from different parts of the world. Confirmed keynote-speakers:
Costas Douzinas (Professor of Law and Director of Birkbeck Institue for Humanities, Birckbeck, University of London)Susan Maslan (Associate Professor, Dep. of French, University of California, Berkeley, USA)Joseph Slaughter (Associate Professor, Dep. of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York, USA)Lena Halldenius (Professor of Human Rights, and Director of Human Rights Program, Dep. of History, University of Lund, Sweden)
We invite papers on the following (or related) subjects:
·         Cultural contextualizations of human rights
·         The relationship between universality and particularity in concrete human rights discourses
·         Political uses of human rights
·         Human rights in intercultural dialogue in a global world
·         Styles of human rights: rhetorical framings, narrativization, aesthetization, fictionalization
·         Human rights in art, literature, movies etc.
·         Human rights and global history
·         Human rights in different media
·         Gains and losses in the process of ‘translation’ from one field of knowledge to another.
 Fee: Participation fee will be 100 Euros.
 Paper-suggestions should be no more than 400 words and should be sent before September 1, 2013 to Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Associate Professor, Comparative Literature, Director of Humanistic Studies in Human Rights, Aarhus University, Denmark: negotiatinghumanrights2014@hum.au.dk
             

ABA Announces Silver Gavel Award Winners for 2013

From an ABA news release: (The information below is excerpted from the release)

The American Bar Association announced today its selections for the 2013 Silver Gavel Awards for Media and the Arts, which recognize outstanding work that fosters the American public’s understanding of law and the legal system. This is the ABA’s highest honor in recognition of this purpose, and no more than one Silver Gavel is presented in each category.

... 

SILVER GAVEL AWARDS

BOOKS

Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History
John Fabian Witt, Author
Simon & Schuster/Free Press
http://books.simonandschuster.com/Lincoln’s-Code/John-Fabian-Witt/9781416569831

DOCUMENTARIES

The Central Park Five
Florentine Films
Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, Directors/Writers/Producers
Michael Levine, Editor
Stephanie Jackson, Production Coordinator
http://www.florentinefilms.com/ffpages/BOS-frameset.html

NEWSPAPERS

Lax Controls Leave Ex-Cons Free to Kill
Detroit Free Press
L.L. Brasier and Gina Damron, Co-Authors and Staff Writers
Amalie Nash, Assistant Managing Editor
Andre J. Jackson, Staff Photographer
Elisha Anderson, Contributor and Staff Writer
http://www.freep.com/article/99999999/NEWS06/120928082

TELEVISION

Electoral Dysfunction
Trio Pictures in association with WTTW National Productions
David Deschamps, Leslie D. Farrell and Bennett Singer, Producers/Writers/Directors
Mo Rocca, Host
Jay Keuper, Editor
Joe Friedman, Cinematographer
http://electoraldysfunction.org/

HONORABLE MENTIONS

BOOKS

Stand Up That Mountain: The Battle to Save One Small Community in the Wilderness Along the Appalachian Trail
Jay Leutze, Author
Simon & Schuster/Scribner
http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Jay-Erskine-Leutze/402711770

DOCUMENTARIES

West of Memphis
Sony Pictures Classics
Amy Berg, Director/Producer
Damien Echols, Lorri Davis, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, Producers
http://www.sonyclassics.com/westofmemphis/

NEWSPAPERS

Loss of Trust
San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News
Karen de Sá, Staff Reporter
Dai Sugano and Pat Tehan, Photojournalists
http://www.mercurynews.com/trust

TELEVISION

The Real CSI
Frontline (WGBH Boston), ProPublica and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley
Lowell Bergman, Correspondent, Producer and Writer for Frontline
Andres Cediel, Producer and Writer
Leah Bartos, Reporter for ProPublica
Raney Aronson-Rath, Series Senior Producer
David Fanning, Executive Producer

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/real-csi/ 

For more about the Silver Gavel Awards and the ABA's Public Education Division, see here. 

If You Need...

To take a break from grading, check out Anatasia Salter's post "Researching In Public On Tumblr." Professor Salter suggests a number of Tumblr sites for time-wasting refreshing thought while you rejuvenate your overloaded brain and shake out the snowflakes. My favorite: Academic Tim Gunn. Make it work.

Benjamin Franklin's Constitutional Convention Chaplin Proposal

Louis J. Sirico, Jr., Villanova University School of Law, has published Benjamin Franklin, Prayer, and the Constitutional Convention: History as Narrative, as Villanova Law/Public Policy Research Paper No. 2013-3026. Here is the abstract.

Anecdotes from the Convention continue to inform contemporary discussions on the Constitution’s meaning. This article discusses an anecdote from the Convention that shows how history and false history shape our laws and cultural traditions.
The article focuses on Benjamin Franklin’s proposal to hire a chaplain and begin each day with a prayer. The Convention deputies showed little interest in the proposal, and it died aborning. However, decades later, a fictional version emerged in which Franklin’s proposal succeeded and saved the Convention from collapse.
The factual and mythical Franklin prayer narratives offer us the opportunity to examine their history and rhetorical use in arguing for integrating religion into America’s public life. This examination also offers the opportunity to reflect on how advocates can use history to fashion a persuasive argument. The history of the narrative demonstrates how writers, government officials, lawyers, and judges have employed it to further their own purposes. As for the continuing popularity of the story, Franklin and the archetype he personifies play a critical role in making the narrative persuasive. And as the narrative shows, histories, both factual and mythical, can support persuasive narrative arguments.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

The Image of Lawyers and Legal Ethics

Amy Salyzyn, Yale University Law School, is publishing John Rambo v. Atticus Finch: Gender, Diversity and the Civility Movement in volume 16 of Legal Ethics (2013). Here is the abstract.

The need for increased civility has been a recurring theme in conversations about lawyer professionalism in the United States and Canada over the last several decades. In addition to having many advocates, however, the civility movement has also been subject to criticism. In large part, the critiques made to date have focused on the problems or risks created when civility rules or guidelines are enforced against lawyers. This article takes a different focus to provide a complementary, yet distinct critique. The object of analysis is the discourse of the civility movement. More specifically, the assumptions and concepts of lawyer professionalism embedded in our conversations about civility are explored.

Upon review, the discourse of the civility movement reveals a dominant narrative framed in terms of competing masculinities: the aggressive, testosterone fueled Rambo-lawyer is cast as the anti-hero to be vanquished against renewed calls for the return of the gentlemanly Atticus Finch. I argue that this ‘Rambo-Finch narrative’ is hostile to inclusive understandings of lawyer professionalism in three inter-related ways: (1) it renders women and other ‘outsider’ lawyers largely invisible; (2) it romanticizes past discriminatory concepts of lawyer professionalism; and (3) it reflects anxieties about the destabilization of traditional, exclusionary claims or modes of authority in the legal profession. The exclusionary understandings of lawyer professionalism contained in the Rambo-Finch narrative should be of concern to those interested with improving gender equity and diversity in the legal profession as there is good reason to believe that this discourse translates into ‘real world’ consequences in how ‘outsider’ lawyers are viewed and treated within the legal profession.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Working Together: Law and Social Science

Tristin Green, University of San Francisco School of Law, is publishing It's Not You, It's Me': 
Assessing an Emerging Relationship between Law and Social Science in the Connecticut Law Review. Here is the abstract.

This essay isolates and assesses an overlooked consideration on an emerging and significant issue in employment discrimination law. The emerging issue: When should employers be held liable for established widespread differential treatment within their organizations? The overlooked consideration: the relationship between law and social science. Although the essay focuses closely on a specific doctrinal issue in employment discrimination law, it also sets broad theoretical groundwork for thinking about the implications of the various relationships that might emerge between law and social science in a variety of legal realms.

Download the full text of the article from SSRN at the link. 

The Law of Offense

Ronald L. K. Collins, University of Washington School of Law, has published Comedy and Liberty: The Life and Legacy of Lenny Bruce at 79 Social Research 61 (2012). Here is the abstract.

Comedy takes liberties. Hence, it depends on liberty to survive. Sometimes it is divine, other times farcical, sometimes operatic, other times poetic, and still other times shamelessly vulgar. As it moves from sauciness and scandal to sacrilege and sedition, comedy mocks everything in its sardonic path. Over the ages comedy has been tapped to punch out the likes of the mighty or to make swift shrift of their imperatives. Such actions point to the role of the First Amendment in all of this. Conceptually, the two intersect whenever comedy is offensive, that is, when it mocks, scorns, derides, ridicules, or pokes fun at person, creed, or cause. In this regard, no figure stands out more in American history than the always offensive and often funny Lenny Bruce. How a society protects or prosecutes the likes of Lenny Bruce is a barometer of how much it values freedom of speech.

Download the full text of the article  from SSRN at the link.

More About the History of the Second Amendment

Patrick J. Charles, United States Air Force Special Operations Command 352nd Special Operations Group, is publishing The Statute of Northampton by the Late Eighteenth Century: Clarifying the Intellectual Legacy, in the Fordham Urban Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

In a article examining the “myths and realities about early American gun regulation,” Saul Cornell provides new insight as to how the right to arms outside the home evolved in Antebellum law. Cornell’s article is arguably the first to seriously examine this legal development and I do not challenge his general findings in this regard. Where we seemingly diverge is the role that the Statute of Northampton served in this process, particularly its intellectual application by the nineteenth century. This article addresses those concerns and the Second Amendment outside the home.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

New Issue of International Journal for the Semiotics of Law Now Available

Just received:  from the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law/Revue internationale de Semiotique juridique, a link to volume 26, number 2. 

This issue includes Bryan H. Druzin, Eating Peas with One's Fingers: A Semiotic Approach to Law and Social Norms; Gail Bruner Morrow and Richard W. Murrow, A Biosemiotic Body of Law: The Neurobiography of Justice, Stephen Skinner, Violence in Fascist Criminal Law Discourse: War, Repression and Anti-Democracy, and several other extremely interesting articles.

Twenty Years Later: Anniversary of a Lawsuit

Today on NPR: Oliver Wang looks back at the 1991 copyright infringement lawsuit that composer/singer Gilbert O'Sullivan brought against singer Biz Markie. Mr. O'Sullivan alleged that Mr. Markie's sampling of Mr. O'Sullivan's song "Alone Again (Naturally)" was an impermissible use. Mr. O'Sullivan had previously denied Mr. Markie a license to use the infringing material. The judge in the case ruled in favor of the plaintiff, and even thought the matter was a criminal one. Here's more background from Copyright Casebook. The case made legal history, since sampling was a tradition in hip-hop.

Two years later, Mr. Markie released an album, without the infringing song. The album's name: All Samples Cleared. Indeed.

CBS Now Streaming Some Episodes of "Perry Mason" On Its Website

For those who are nostalgic, or who missed Perry the first time around, CBS is now streaming selected episodes from the first two seasons of the iconic series Perry Mason, which starred Raymond Burr as the legendary trial lawyer, Barbara Hale as his ever-loyal secretary Della Street, William Hopper as the trustworthy P.I. Paul Drake, William Talman as the feisty courtroom adversary Hamilton Burger, and Ray Collins as Lieutenant Tragg. Perry Mason ran on CBS from 1957 to 1966. Check out the selection here under TV Classics. If you must have Perry in your video library, DVDs are available now available through season 8; season nine, volume 1 will be available for sale in about a month.

The show has influenced any number of people including Sonia Sotomayor, who has said that depictions of the judge in the show persuaded her that the most important person in the courtroom was the judge. Even so, Perry's a pretty memorable guy.

Domestic Relations Law in Seventeenth Century Moldavia and Walachia

Cosmis Dariescu, Alexandru I. Cuza, University of Iasi, has published How to Beat Your Wife: Regulations on Domestic Violence in the 17th Century - Moldavia and Walachia. Here is the abstract.

Nowadays, domestic violence, may it be it physical or emotional, is fiercely condemned both by both the law and the public opinion. In the eyes of society there is no justification for a husband or a wife to impose his or her thoughts by hurtful means. The repulsion one feels for home violence is an effect of the necessity to respect the human rights, among which sex equality is one of the most important. In the past, however, when gender equality was rejected even in legal texts, the society had a more permissive opinion on the use of domestic violence.
This paper aims to present a 17th century regulation, enforced by the ecclesiastical justice in Moldavia and Walachia, on the husband's right to beat his wife. We shall present in an accessible form the provisions of two very similar codes of laws (both ecclesiastical and secular) enforced by the Metropolitan Bishops and by the Princes of Moldavia and Walachia, on the requirements the violent husband had to meet in order to evade judge's punishment. Thus, we shall analyze the provisions of Article 23 of the Romanian Book of Learning from the Imperial Laws and Other Judgements (Moldavia, 1646) and of Article 185 of the Guidance of the Law by God That Has All the Canon and Imperial Judicial Authorities on All the Priestly and Secular Crimes – Walachia, 1652). The reader will find out that husband had the unrestricted right to beat his wife with his fist or palm, often or seldom as he pleased. But he had to hit his wife only when she was really guilty of a fault. If he had beaten his wife without fault or if he hit her with arms or sticks or with cruelty or without any restraint, the judge was compelled by the law to divorce them. The husband had the right to detain his wife in chains or in a cellar on two grounds: adultery and conspiracy for killing him.
These provisions should not be judged too harsh because at that time, anywhere in Europe, domestic violence was allowed by law and society.

Download the full text of the paper from SSRN at the link. 

"Liking" Hamlet

Norman Ferguson, Jr., a professor at Georgia State, describes incorporating social media into a production of Hamlet, an experiment which he calls "Hamlet 2.0." Brilliant! There has to be something in this idea for the legal academy...

The Meaning of "Uncle Tomism"

Brando Simeo Starkey has published Uncle Tom & Social Norms: Improving Legal Interests and Affecting Public Policy: Introduction. Here is the abstract.

My thesis is that the management of “constructive” social norms to police racial loyalty, by helping forge solidarity, can aid blacks in promoting their legal interests and ability to affect public policy. This is observable by following the life of Uncle Tom. A person, in other words, is called an Uncle Tom when he or she violates a racial loyalty norm that actually exists or that the speaker wants to exist. This signals to the rest of the black community to conform or else. That is, the real power of Uncle Tom as a sanctioning device is the deterrent effect it has on the broader group. Shadowing Uncle Tom through black history helps us to understand where and how these norms were constructed, disseminated, applied, and enforced. From there, we can assess the propriety of these norms.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Body Talk

Genevieve Lakier, University of Chicago Law School, is publishing Sport as Speech in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Sports play a tremendously important role in American public culture, yet games of spectator sport are not generally recognized as expression protected by the First Amendment. This is notwithstanding the extension in recent years of First Amendment protection to a wide variety of other kinds of nonverbal art and entertainment. This Article argues that the denial of free speech protection to spectator sport is wrong both doctrinally and when considered in light of the aims and purposes of the First Amendment. Drawing upon an extensive body of social scientific research examining the practice and cultural significance of spectator sports, it argues that games communicate the sorts of messages to which First Amendment protection extends. In providing viewers dramatic spectacles of victory and defeat, and in offering fans a symbol around which to rally around, spectator sports also reflect and help shape public attitudes and beliefs about individual excellence, political community and identity, race, gender, and sexuality — even competition itself. The Article argues that the same justifications that support the extension of First Amendment protection to art and entertainment therefore support extending protection to spectator sport, and that the exclusion of spectator sports from the category of expressive conduct furthers none of the purposes of the First Amendment. Instead, it merely distorts the doctrine, by relying on an ultimately unjustifiable distinction between artistic and athletic performance, and live and mediated speech.

Download the full text of the article from SSRN at the link.

Legal Positivism and the Pluralist Legal World

Mauro Zamboni, Stockholm University Faculty of Law, has published 'A Legal Pluralist World'… or the Black Hole for Modern Legal Positivism. Here is the abstract.

One can see how the modern legal positivism, on one hand, is in front of a reality of legal globalization and increasing legal pluralism in many areas of law, that is a reality (e.g. soft-law) challenging some of the fundamental paradigms endorsed by this legal movement (e.g. the pedigree thesis). On the other hand, modern legal positivists have taken a quite passive attitude toward this challenge, either by abandoning the legal positivism as a whole to its destiny or by simply continuing to focus upon traditional (i.e. pre-globalization) issues as the fundamental ones to be tackled.
In this respect, the goal of this paper is certainly neither to tackle these potential dangers hanging over the modern legal positivism’s future nor to rewrite the basic dogmas characterizing legal positivism. The goal is much humbler: to suggest a shift of attention among legal positivists towards questions which have always been present in their program (though often in secondary terms), as also their solutions (often already present in the legal positivist works). This shift would possibly help the legal positivism movement to circumvent the black hole represented by legal globalization (and its legal pluralism), a black hole where the distinction between law and non-law (i.e. the major tenant of legal positivism and, I would dare say, of the modern Western legal culture) seems to vanish, putting the very existence and legitimacy of the legal phenomenon under question.
In order to fulfill this task, this paper will start in Part One by describing what it means nowadays to have a legal positivist approach and in particular what its core message to the legal (and non-legal) community is. In this respect, Herbert L. A. Hart’s idea as to the nature and role of the rule of recognition will be briefly sketched. Once it has been established what being a legal positivist actually means, Part Two will present some of the reasons why the ongoing process of globalization, and the consequent establishment of a pluralist legal world, appears to threaten some of the fundamental tenants of modern legal positivism (or, as I will try to show, “supposedly fundamental” tenants). Finally, in Part Three, some changes of focus in the legal positivist program will be suggested, in order for this legal theoretical movement not only to be able to survive the challenges of the legal globalization but also in order for it to keep its predominant position among the legal actors in a pluralist legal world.

Download the full text of the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Lost In Translation

Andy Martin muses on the difficulty of translation for the Opinion section of the New York Times. Think about how much more treacherous the task is in law, in which a great deal of what we cling to is words and the methods in which we fit them together. 

New Books On Law and the Humanities From DeGruyter

New books available from DeGruyter:

Karen-Margrethe Simonsen has edited Law and Justice in Literature, Film and Theatre: Nordic Perspectives (Law & Literature; 5). 

Aims and Scope

This volume is a Nordic contribution to research on law and humanities. It treats the legal culture of the Nordic countries through intensive analyses of canonical Nordic artworks. Law and justice have always been important issues in Nordic literature, film and theater from the Icelandic sagas through Ludvig Holberg and Henrik Ibsen to Lars Noréns theatre and Lars von Trier's Dogme films of today. This book strives to answer two fundamental questions: Is there a special Nordic justice? And what does the legal and literary/aesthetic culture of the North mean for the concept of law and justice and for the understanding of the interdisciplinary exchange of law and humanities? The concept of law and literature as a research area was originally developed in countries of common law. This book investigates law and humanities from a different legal tradition, and contributes thus both to the discussion of the general and the comparative studies of law and humanities.

Table of Contents

Karen-Margrethe Simonsen

Preface 1

Ian Ward

Crossing Borders 5

Ditlev Tamm

Law and Literature in a Nordic Legal Perspective 11

Hans Hauge

Nordic Sameness and Difference 25

Peter Garde

“With Laws Shall Our Land Be Built Up”.

The Law in the Sagas – Ideal and Failure 45

Toomas Kotkas

Two Conceptions of Justice in the Kalevala: A Nietzschean Reading 63

Arild Linneberg

From Natural Law To The Nature Of Laws: Ludvig Holberg 77

Karen-Margrethe Simonsen

The Confession of a Judge.

On Narrative Desire and Law in Steen Steensen Blicher’s Early Crime Story

“the Pastor of Vejlbye” 85

Bjarne Markussen

Contesting Narratives: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Trygve Allister

Diesen’s Hold My Heart 103

Ari Hirvonen

The Subject of the Law 119

Helle Porsdam

From ‘Law and Literature’ to ‘Law and Humanities’: Transatlantic Dialogues

on Film – the Case of Lars von Trier 149

vi Contents

List of contributors 167

Daniela Carpi and Jeanne Gaakeer have edited Liminal Discourses: Subliminal Tensions in Law and Literature (Law & Literature; 6).

Aims and Scope

The past few decades in legal and literary studies have challenged the boundaries raised by the different concepts of law and literature espoused by a great variety of theorists. Law's traditionally assumed disciplinary autonomy has been challenged by those who have pursued interdisciplinary methods of research. In particular, the concept of the sublime has moved out of the strictly philosophical and literary fields and crossed the borders between disciplines, finding an application also in the juridical field. On one hand, this volume proposes that the ethical aspect involved in the legal sublime is to contain the arrogance of the law. On the other hand, the volume draws attention to the "and" of interdisciplinary literary-legal studies and offers new daring comparisons between philosophical fields and between apparently distant historical periods.

Table of Contents

Daniela Carpi

Introduction 1: The Sublime of Law fi 1

Jeanne Gaakeer

Introduction 2: On the Threshold and Beyond:

An Introductory Observation fi 15

Cristina Costantini

Representing Law: Narrative Practices, Poetic Devices, Visual Signs and the

Aesthetics of the Common Law Mind fi 27

Maria Aristodemou

Bare Law Between Two Lives: José Saramago and Cornelia Vismann on Naming,

Filing and Cancelling fi 37

Melanie Williams

Liminal Tensions in Public to Private Conceptions of Justice: Nussbaum, Woolf

and the Struggle for Identity fi 53

Julián Jiménez Heffernan

“Under the Force of the Law”: Communal Imagination and the Constitutional

Sublime in Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor fi 73

Jeanne Clegg

Moll Flanders,Ordinary’s Accounts and Old Bailey Proceedings fi 95

Sidia Fiorato

Ariel and Caliban as Law-conscious Servants Longing for Legal

Personhood fi 113

Laura Apostoli

Altered Bodies, Fragmented Selves: Reconstructing the Subject in Fay Weldon’s

The Cloning of Joanna May fi 129

Jeanne Gaakeer

The Business of Law and Literature: to Compose an Order, to Imagine

Man fi 149

Daniela Carpi

Renaissance into Postmodernism: Anticipations of Legal Unrest fi 177

Conference On Law and Literature In Diaspora Studies To Take Place in May, 2013

Dr. Daniela Carpi, University of Verona, and President of the Associazione Italiana Diretto e Letteratura announces a Conference on Law and Literature in Diaspora Studies, May 6-9, 2013. Details below. More information available by clicking on the link here.

CENTRO ITALO-TEDESCO

DEUTSCH-ITALIENISCHES ZENTRUM

Law and Literature in Diaspora Studies

Villa Vigoni-Gespräche

Villa Vigoni, 6-9 MAY 2013

programme

Programm und Teilnehmerliste / Programme and Participants:

Monday, 06 May 2013

19.00 Welcome Reception, Aperitif

19.30 Dinner

Tuesday, 07 May 2013

9.30   Opening addresses

Prof. Dr. Immacolata Amodeo, Generalsekretärin, Villa Vigoni

Prof. Dr. Daniela Carpi (Verona), Convenor

Prof. Dr. Klaus Stierstorfer (Münster), Convenor

9.30   Opening Discussion: Set-up, Procedures, Possible Outcome

All Participants

Chair: Profs Carpi and Stierstorfer

10.30  Coffee break

11.00  Forum 1 – Theorizing diaspora from the perspective of ‘law and literature’
Chair: Prof. Dr. Fabian Wittreck (Münster)
Prof. Dr. Leif Dahlberg (Stockholm)
Prof. Dr. Jeanne Gaakeer (Rotterdam)
Prof. Dr. Peter Schneck (Osnabrück)
Forum 1 – Plenary discussion

13.00-14.30       Lunch

14.30  Forum 2 – Theorizing the law from the perspective of ‘literary diaspora studies’
Chair: Prof. Dr. Klaus Stierstorfer (Münster)
Prof. Dr. Avtar Brah (London)
Prof. Dr. Janet Wilson (Northampton)

16.00  Coffee break

16.30  Forum 2 – continued
Dr. Franziska Quabeck (Münster)
Prof. Dr. Sridhar Rajeswaran (CASII, India)

18.00  Concluding discussion

19.30 Dinner

Wednesday, 08 May 2013

9.30   Forum 3 – Theorizing literature from the perspective of ‘legal diaspora studies’

Chair: Prof. Dr. Paola Carbone
Dr. Sidia Fiorato (Verona)
Emma Patchett, M.A. (Münster)

Dr. Riccardo Baldissone (London)

11.00  Coffee break

11.15  Keynote: Prof. Dr. Melanie Williams (Exeter)

11.45  Forum 3 – Discussion

13.00-14.30       Lunch

14.30  Forum 4 – Conceptual common ground between legal studies, literary studies, and diaspora studies
Chair: Prof. Dr. Daniela Carpi (Verona)
Prof. Dr. Nilufer Bharucha (Mumbai)

16.00  Coffee break

16.30  Forum 4 – continued

Prof. Dr. Pier Giuseppe Monateri (Torino)
Prof. Dr. Fabian Wittreck (Münster)

18.00  Closing panel discussion: Resume, Outcomes

19.30 Dinner

Thursday, 09 May 2013

9.30   Forum 5 – Prospectus: Methodological, terminological, and conceptual desiderata
Chair: Prof. Dr. Jeanne Gaakeer (Rotterdam)
Dr. Florian Kläger (Münster)
Dr. Karen-Margrethe Simonsen (Aarhus)
Dr. Chiara Battisti (Verona)

13.00-14.30       Lunch

Departure