Child Abuse and Legal Intervention In Early Nineteenth Century Quebec

Ian C. Pilarczyk, Boston University School of Law, has published 'To Shudder at the Bare Recital of Those Acts': Child Abuse, Family, and Montreal Courts in the Early Nineteenth Century in IX Essays in the History of Canadian Law 370 (G. Blaine Baker and Donald Fyson eds., Toronto, University of Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2013).

This paper uses archival and other primary sources to reanimate the judicial response to child abuse by family members in Montreal for the period 1825-1850. In a period before the operation of child protection agencies, the records reveal a tentative but growing engagement with issues related to child abuse and a limited judicial response to impose limitations on parental authority. Parents and guardians were prosecuted and imprisoned for a range of offences, including assault, aggravated assault, ill-usage, and attempted murder. While incest was not a cognizable offence during this period, the judicial archives also reveal some evidence of the existence of incest as a social phenomenon, as well as some prosecutions (generally brought under the charge of ravishment or, more unusually, abduction). This paper contributes to our understanding of Quebec socio-legal history for an understudied time period, and adds dimension to our understanding of the manner in which the legal system grappled with compelling social phenomena before widespread legislative or public action on these issues.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Dr. Seuss and Children's Rights

Jonathan Todres, Georgia State University College of Law and Sarah Higinbotham, Georgia State University, have published A Person's a Person: Children's Rights in Children's Literature. Here is the abstract.

Although the Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history, children’s rights are still seen in many circles as novel and quaint ideas but not serious legal theory. The reality, however, is that the realization of children’s rights is vital not only for childhood but for individuals’ entire lives. Similarly, although the books children read and have read to them are a central part of their childhood experience, so too has children’s literature been ignored as a rights-bearing discourse and a means of civic socialization. We argue that children’s literature, like all narratives that contribute to our moral sense of the world, help children construct social expectations and frame an understanding of their own specific rights and responsibilities. Arguing that literature is a source of law for children, we explore children’s literature with a view to examining what children learn about their own rights, the rights of others, and the role of rights more broadly in a democratic society. Using Dr. Seuss as a test case, this Article explores the role of children’s literature in children’s rights discourses. This Article also examines recent empirical work on the benefits of human rights education, connecting that research with law and literature perspectives. Ultimately, this Article aims to connect and build upon the fields of children’s rights law, law and literature, children’s literature criticism, human rights, and cultural studies to forge a new multidisciplinary sub-field of study: children’s rights and children’s literature.

The full text is not available from SSRN. 

Baby, Esquire

Alyssa A. DiRusso, Samford University Cumberland School of Law, and Letitia Van Campen have published Law and Literature Junior: Lawyers in Books for Young Children at 11 Whittier Journal of Child & Family Advocacy 39 (2012). Here is the abstract.

Are children’s perceptions of lawyers an open book? The genre of law and literature has demonstrated the power that popular texts hold in shaping societal perceptions of law, but little attention has been given to little readers. This Article explores the perspectives children have of lawyers and how books for young children may reflect or affect those perspectives. A unique collaboration between a law professor and a children’s librarian, this Article reviews a variety of books intended for preschool and early elementary readers. Several themes and narratives emerge from these texts, telling stories of lawyers as historical heroes or workaday joes. The books promote ideals – realistic or unrealistic – relating to the transience of legal practice, the motivation and character of lawyers, and the diversity of the legal profession. The relative absence of relatable fictional lawyers in books for young children is also notable. Outside of books, the relationships between lawyers and children are too often less than positive. Lending greater attention to the books that shape perspectives of lawyers may foster happier endings to these real-life stories.

 Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Oh, That Anne Shirley

Two articles on IP rights and Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables have crossed my desk recently. First is

Andrea Slane, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Legal Studies, Guarding a Cultural Icon: Concurrent Intellectual Property Regimes and the Perpetual Protection of Anne of Green Gables in Canada, forthcoming in the McGill Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

The article examines problems for the public domain raised by the ongoing intellectual property protection afforded to the classic Canadian children's novel Anne of Green Gables. The author suggests that three conceptual difficulties in distinguishing between different intellectual property regimes have allowed the owners of rights in the novel wider and longer protection than they should enjoy: 1) confusion between concepts of source in copyright and source in trade-mark; 2) confusion between an author's moral rights and personal reputation in copyright and goodwill in trade-mark; and 3) willingness to grant public benefit to public authorities seeking official marks protection without consideration of the public interest in limited copyright terms.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The second is

Cecily Devereux, University of Alberta Department of English and Film Studies, "Not a 'Usual' Property": A Hundred Years of Protecting Anne of Green Gables, 7 Law, Culture, and the Humanities 121 (February 2011).

Why might redhaired, freckle-faced Anne still be controversial, especially after a hundred years? Because the Montgomery heirs and the Prince Edward Island Provincial government jointly own the rights to the trademark (they administer it through the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority), and they guard those rights. Creators of a website established in 2008, Anne's Diary, began using images of Anne without permission. The creators billed it as "the most secure website for children in the world," and it certainly boasted many security features, including a fingerprint reader and registration papers. The problem was that it used the Anne of Green Gables trademark and image (friendliness, security, safety, home) without a license, although the creators apparently tried to get permission. The PEI government and its attorneys began to investigate, according to the Canadian Trademark Blog.  I clicked on a number of the links at Anne's Diary, none of which seem to work now, and the girl's image now on the home page, while redhaired and straw-hatted, does not really resemble Anne Shirley.