Call For Proposals: Conference on Prison Abolition, Human Rights, and Penal Reform: From the Local to the Global

From the email box:

Prison Abolition, Human Rights, and Penal Reform:

From the Local to the Global

Mass incarceration and overcriminalization in the United States are subject to critique by some on both the right and the left today. Many critics increasingly talk of prison abolition. At the same time, the international human rights movement continues to rely upon criminal punishment as its primary enforcement tool for many violations, even as it criticizes harsh prison conditions, the use of the death penalty, and lack of due process in criminal proceedings. What would it mean for the human rights movement to take seriously calls for prison abolitionism and the economic and racial inequalities that overcriminalization reproduces and exacerbates? And what might critics of the carceral regime in the United States have to learn from work done by international human rights advocates in a variety of countries?

September 26-28^th, 2019, the Rapoport Center will host in Austin an interdisciplinary conference to consider the relationships among the human rights, prison abolition, and penal reform movements. Do they share the same goals? Should they collaborate? If so, in what ways? The conference is co-sponsored by the Frances Tarlton “Sissy” Farenthold Endowed Lecture Series in Peace, Social Justice and Human Rights, Center for European Studies, William Wayne Justice Center for Public Interest Law, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, John Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, Department of Sociology, Center for Population Research, and Capital Punishment Center.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore will offer the keynote lecture on September 26. We invite proposals for papers, panels, art, or other forms of presentation from activists, practitioners, and scholars in all disciplines. We are eager to include those who study or advocate around criminal law and human rights in different regions and contexts, those who work on various forms of incarceration (including immigration detention), and those who explore alternatives to current criminal punishment regimes. We encourage discussion of the distributive effects of various constructions of and responses to crime. Topics might include:

• Racial capitalism and prison abolition
• Prison abolition: short- versus long-term goals
• Abolition and efforts to reform/transform conditions of confinement: are they in opposition?
• Capital punishment, human rights, and the goals of death penalty abolition
• Mass incarceration and surveillance
• Gender, sexuality, reproductive rights and the prison system
• Human rights and decriminalization
• The human rights movement and national and international criminal law
• Lessons from transitional and restorative justice
• Incarceration and the intersections of criminal and immigration law
• Immigration detention and the (private) prison industrial complex
• Potential responses to violent crime
• The UN and crime
• Exportation of criminal justice models: good and bad
• The role of victims in carceral regimes and anti-carceral responses
•  Reflections on the role human rights courts do and should play in the carceral state
• Black Lives Matter, human rights, and abolition
• Queer politics and abolition

Please send an abstract of your paper, panel, or project in under 500 words to Sarah Eliason by July 15, 2019. A limited number of need-based travel grants are available to support travel costs for selected participants. If you wish to apply for a travel grant, please complete this application form by July 15, 2019.

ICYMI: Boray on the Depiction of Disabilities in Movies

ICYMI:

Sameer Boray, NALSAR University of Law, has published Depiction of Disabilities in Movies: Disability Portrayal in the Media Through the Eyes of Bollywood and Hollywood. Here is the abstract.

This paper will journey through the stages of which the media through film has depicted people with disabilities. While every movie-maker has the creative freedom of making a film, certain aspects such as media portrayal of disabilities of movies cannot and should not go unchecked. The author has highlighted how this can be tackled by the intervention of law through censor boards. The Indian Censor Board with this respect has been analyzed and the author has provided how this responsible body can play a larger role, whilst remembering the creative freedoms movie-makers are endowed with. Few popular movies in both Hollywood and Bollywood have been discussed to throw more light on the kind of depictions and a basic study has been mentioned on how there is a change in studying disabilities as a subject.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

CFP: Law, Literature, and Human Rights, MLA Annual Convention, Seattle, January 9-12, 2020

From the mailbox:

Call for Papers: 

Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, Seattle, January 9-12, 2020

Law, Literature, and Human Rights

Papers examining legal and literary articulations of human rights, broadly conceived, from Jus Gentium to the U.S. Constitution to the European Union. 250-500 word abstract and brief CV. 

Deadline for submissions: Sunday, 10 March 2019

Melissa J. Ganz, Marquette U (melissa.ganz@marquette.edu ); Christine L. Holbo, Arizona State U (christine.holbo@asu.edu )  

Lazar and Hirsch on Human Rights Movies Through the Prism of Movie Advisory Boards

Alon Lazar, Center for Academic Studies, and Tal Litvak Hirsch, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, have published Human Rights Movies Through the Prism of Movie Advisory Boards. Here is the abstract.

Human rights is a topic of high importance in Western societies, and discrimination has been noted as a determining force in their violations. Films depicting human rights issues have been discussed as instrumental in bringing these matters to the attention of the general public and students. Their exposure is dependent largely on their age-classifications by movie advisory boards which determine who can watch them. Two studies were conducted to assess how films depicting human rights issues and held exemplary by the Political Film Society (PFS) are evaluated by movie advisory boards, providing justifications for their age-classifications. Study 1 found that the boards in the US and the UK identify these movies as suitable mainly for adults, while in Australia, in most cases, moviegoers are to decide their appropriateness. Each board stresses different contents as their main concerns, yet none mention discrimination. Study 2, assessing Netherland's NICAM evaluations, revealed that these movies are considered suitable mainly for adults, primarily because they are heavy with violence and fear arousing contents, with only some noted to include discriminatory contents. Thus, in these liberal-democratic societies, human rights movies considered of high value, in most cases are removed from the educational arena.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Heinze on Theorizing Law and Historical Memory @Eric_Heinze_

Eric Heinze, Queen Mary University, London, School of Law, has published Theorizing Law and Historical Memory: Denialism and the Pre-Conditions of Human Rights as Queen Mary School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 290/1018. Here is the abstract.

States’ efforts to mould historical memory have long attracted scholarly attention. In recent years, however, a focus on the role of legal norms and mechanisms as tools in those efforts has steadily sharpened. Most scholarship examines that role through particularist analyses, narrowing a specific period of history down to some particular state or region. As such studies accumulate, however, more general patterns emerge. This article explores not any such particular situation, but instead pursues a project of theorising the discipline of law and historical memory as a whole. One conspicuously shared element, particularly within the framework of modern states, is that the histories examined directly involve or ultimately trace back to human rights abuses. As a general matter, then, states’ efforts to deny past or ongoing conduct certainly pose a pragmatic obstacle by obstructing investigations into abuses. Yet it is argued in this article that the relationship between denialism and human rights is (in a Kantian-Habermasian sense) transcendental: the very possibility for the existence of a human rights system presupposes a sphere for open, public scrutiny of state conduct. That condition is not ‘all or nothing’: the extent to which a human rights system becomes possible depends upon the extent of that sphere of public discourse. Unsurprisingly, states with the best human rights records also maintain the types of open public spheres which most reliably ensue against state denials of human rights violations, and thereby provide models of best practice.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice Issues CFP @rapoportcenter

From the mailbox:

The Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice has posted a Call for Papers for its Working Papers Series. More information below:

Dedicated to interdisciplinary and critical dialogue on international human rights law and discourse, the Rapoport Center’s Working Paper Series (WPS) publishes innovative papers by established and early-career researchers as well as practitioners. The goal is to provide a productive environment for debate about human rights among academics, policymakers, activists, practitioners, and the public.

Authors from all disciplines and institutions are welcome to submit papers on any topic related to human rights.

Submissions undergo a rigorous selection process by the WPS interdisciplinary editorial committee, which includes graduate students and faculty from across the University of Texas. The WPS committee provides detailed comments and feedback to authors before the paper is published online.

Publication in the WPS does not preclude future publication elsewhere; in fact, many of our working papers have since been published in academic journals and edited volumes.

For the 2018-9 series, the Editorial Committee is accepting submissions on a rolling basis.

For more information, please visit: rapoportcenter.org/working-paper-series/or contact rcwps@law.utexas.edu.

de la Rasilla del Moral on Bartolomé De Las Casas: A Radical Humanitarian in the Age of the Great Encounter @hartpublishing

Ignacio de la Rasilla del Moral, Wuhan University, Institute of International Law, is publishing Bartolomé De Las Casas: A Radical Humanitarian in the Age of the Great Encounter in The Faces of Human Rights (Kasey McCall-Smith, Jan Wouters, and Felipe Gomez Isa, eds., Hart Publishing 2019). Here is the abstract.

Few lives may be as propitious to an understanding of the biographical genre as a way of addressing a larger historical theme than the life of the greatest advocate for justice and freedom for the Amerindian peoples in the sixteenth century. For generations, the life and works of Bartolomé de las Casas have served as lenses to look through at events and processes unleashed by the ‘great encounter’. Deeply intertwined with what came to be known as the ‘duda indiana’ (the ‘Indian Doubt’) among Spanish intellectual and political elites, were three interwoven dimensions that situate the praxis and theory of de las Casas’ life and work within the theological, moral and legal debates triggered by the Spanish Conquest of America. Traditionally, this has been considered as the birthdate of international law and, for some, building on the Lascasian legacy, of contemporary human rights law too.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Farrell and Hughes on Magna Carta and the Invention of "British Rights" @routledgebooks

Michelle Farrell, University of Liverpool, School of Law and Social Justice, and Edel Hughes, University of Limerick, are publishing Magna Carta and the Invention of 'British Rights' in Human Rights in the Media: Fear and Fetish (Michelle Farrell, Eleanor Drywood, and Edel Hughes, Routledge, 2018) (forthcoming).

In this chapter we argue that the antipathy towards human rights, and the Human Rights Act in particular, that is evident in certain sections of the media and political establishment, lies partly in its relationship with the European, and, therefore, foreign or ‘alien’, system of human rights protection. Somewhat paradoxically though, those who are most trenchant in their criticisms of the Human Rights Act nevertheless stress that Britain is a nation founded upon human rights. Through the lens of the Magna Carta we examine the invention of the tradition of British rights and how the Charter has been co-opted by those who seek to foment opposition to the Human Rights Act and, albeit to a lesser extent, by those who seek to defend the Act by demarcating a clear line of history between the Charter and the Act. Both approaches, we suggest, serve to crowd out the space required for a rational critique of rights.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Todres on The Trump Effect, Children, and the Value of Human Rights Education @jtodres

Jonathan Todres, Georgia State University College of Law, is publishing The Trump Effect, Children, and the Value of Human Rights Education in volume 56 of the Family Court Review (2018). Here is the abstract.

Since launching his presidential campaign, Donald Trump's rhetoric has often been divisive as well as demeaning of selected groups. This article examines the impact of Trump's rhetoric on children and their communities and explores the role that human rights education can play in responding to Trump and forging broader support for human rights. The article reviews the research on human rights education and considers how human rights education can be embedded in broader efforts to educate children. Using children's literature as a case study, the article argues for the importance of mainstreaming human rights education and meeting children where they are, in order to foster greater recognition of and respect for the rights of all individuals.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

McGuinness on Presidential Human Rights Talk

Margaret E. McGuinness, St. John's University, School of Law, is publishing Presidential Human Rights Talk in volume 56 of the Washburn Law Review (2018). Here is the abstract.

In response to Professor Harold Hongju Koh's March 2017 keynote at Washburn University, "The Trump Administration and International Law," this essay examines the diplomatic and political rhetoric deployed by past presidents in support of human rights to argue that such "presidential human rights talk" represented an important element of U.S. human rights policy and promoted the transnational transmission of human rights norms. President Trump's complete abandonment of presidential human rights talk signals an end to what remains of American "human rights exceptionalism." Combined with Trump's "America First" approach to foreign policy, which rejects the value of the international institutions the U.S. helped build and sustain over the past 70 years, the end of presidential human rights talk may also mark the end of U.S. human rights diplomacy.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Zinos on Fundamental Rights in Early American Case Law: 1789-1859

Nicholas Zinos, Mitchell Hamline School of Law, is publishing Fundamental Rights in Early American Case Law: 1789-1859 in volume 7 of the British Journal of American Legal Studies (2018). Here is the abstract.

Fundamental Rights Law is a ubiquitous feature of modern American jurisprudence. Where did the term “Fundamental Rights” come from, and how was it applied in early American case law? This article outlines the genesis of fundamental rights law in early 17th century England and how this law developed and was applied over time. The English Bill of Rights of 1689 was the first attempt to codify these rights in English law. When the English legal system emigrated to America along with the early American colonists, it included the English conception of fundamental rights. The framers of the United States Constitution incorporated and expanded these rights. Early American Case law kept strictly within this tradition for the most past, and used the term “fundamental rights” usually for rights which had long been recognized in Anglo-American society. This article notes the concordance between the application of fundamental rights in early American case law and the long tradition of fundamental rights which ripened in the Anglo-American legal tradition.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: Heritage, Culture, and Rights (Andrew Durbach and Lucas Lixinski, eds., Hart Publishing, 2017) @hartpublishing

ICYMI: Heritage, Culture, and Rights (Andrea Durbach and Lucas Lixinski, eds., Hart Publishing, 2017).

Cultural heritage law and its response to human rights principles and practice has gained renewed prominence on the international agenda. The recent conflicts in Syria and Mali, China's use of shipwreck sites and underwater cultural heritage to make territorial claims, and the cultural identities of nations post-conflict highlight this field as an emerging global focus. In addition, it has become a forum for the configuration and contestation of cultural heritage, rights and the broader politics of international law. The manifestation of tensions between heritage and human rights are explored in this volume, in particular in relation to heritage and rights in collaboration and in conflict, and heritage as a tool for rights advocacy. This volume also explores these issues from a distinctively legal standpoint, considering the extent to which the legal tools of international human rights law facilitate or hinder heritage protection. Covering a range of issues across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and Australia, this volume will be of interest to people working in human rights, heritage studies, cultural heritage management and identity politics around the world.

 

CFP: The Body and Human Rights: A Symposium to be Held at Friends House, Kings Cross, London, February 12, 2018 @Bruneluni @DimitriosGian

From the mailbox (via the ever-vigilant Thom Giddens!):

 CALL FOR PAPERS
 The Body and Human Rights

A symposium to be held at
Friends House, 173-177 Euston Rd, Kings Cross, London NW1 2BJ on Monday 12 February, 2018

 Hosted by Brunel University London's Global Lives Research Centre, Knowing Our  Rights research project, and Britain in Europe think tank.
Convened by Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos and Meredith Jones
 In recent decades the body has become a major area of research across many disciplines, especially in the arts and social sciences. Feminist scholars have made important interventions in the ways that bodies are represented, managed, regulated, treated medically, and modified. Simultaneously, human rights scholars have engaged with challenging questions of how the human body should be legally understood and defined, and what may legitimate the State to become involved with individual choices about what to do with one's body (or how individuals might protect their autonomy from state invasions). This symposium will draw together these two areas. We invite scholars from any discipline to submit abstracts for 15-minute papers that address the body and human rights. Topics may include (but are by no means limited to):

Refugee Bodies and Borders
Transgender Issues
Abortion / Contraception
Body Modifications
Healthcare / Surgery
Euthanasia
Slavery
Egg harvesting / sperm donation
Incarceration
Torture
 Please send titles and brief abstracts for consideration to meredith.jones@brunel.ac.uk by Wednesday 10 January.

Niezen on Street Justice: Graffiti and Claims-Making in Urban Public Space @mcgillu @LAWMcGill

Ronald Niezen, McGill University Faculty of Law, has published Street Justice: Graffiti and Claims-Making in Urban Public Space. Here is the abstract.

It is getting increasingly difficult to avoid the notion that justice claims are not limited to the formal venues of law or even the public accountability processes of journalism, but are also expressed in everyday activities of public outreach. We can see this outreach in informal efforts toward mass communication, in graffiti and Internet communication (and connections between the two, as we will see) oriented toward passers by and browsers, consumers of information, the possible-to-convince sympathizers of the plights of others. This non-professional realm of justice claims tells us something about the extent to which justice is experienced and expressed outside the law, but at the same time through the influence of law. Human rights in particular can be seen as a source of inspiration and expression of new and emerging forms of rights-consciousness and the public expression of grievance. This consciousness, in turn, relates to the popular dynamics of human rights lobbying and a corresponding awareness of humanity as a reference point for what is fair, equitable, and honorable, grounded as they are in the “soft” processes of persuasion and mass influence.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Tourkochoriti on Comparative Rights Jurisprudence: A Essay on Methodologies @IoannaTourkocho @HarvardLaw

Ioanna Tourkochoriti, Harvard Law School; National University of Ireland, Galway, School of Law, is publishing Comparative Rights Jurisprudence: An Essay on Methodologies in Law and Method. Here is the abstract.

This paper discusses three approaches that can be helpful in the area of comparative rights jurisprudence, oriented in reference to three different kinds of studies that are possible in that area. To a large extent the methods for a comparative legal research depend on the research question and the goal of the researcher. First, a comparative law study may focus on the sociocultural context that led to the elaboration of differences or similarities in the protection of rights. In this respect a study of comparative law is by definition an interdisciplinary study. Second, a comparative law approach can be a normative enterprise. It can focus on engaging in a philosophical analysis enlightened by the differences or similarities in the regulation of rights, in order to propose concrete solutions for the regulation of a right. Third, a comparative law approach can combine both elements of the two previously mentioned approaches. It can aim at studying the sociopolitical frame that led to the emergence of legal rules and challenge them in the cases where it seems that there is some flagrant injustice in the application of rules upon concrete cases of human rights. It may aim to reach a "reflective equilibrium" between and the is and the ought. This means that it can engage in a study that can be articulated as a back and forth movement from the differences in the operation of legal rules to how they should be operating. The paper discusses further the challenges that the researcher faces in her attempt to use these methodologies and how these challenges can be overcome. These challenges arise in the selection of cases that are appropriate for comparison, in assuring comparability. What is at stake is the question of commensurability. If what motivates a comparative law study is the search for principles of justice the researcher needs to persuade that her methodological approach serves her aim. Second, challenges emerge for the comparatist concerning the research question that she uses, her theoretical framework and her criteria of evaluation. Furthermore, these challenges concern the validity of the interpretative schemata that she refers to or that she creates in order to interpret the legal phenomena she is studying. These interpretative schemata may be defined by conscious and unconscious bias. To some extent it is impossible to the researcher to transcend the subjectivity of her perspective. Nevertheless, there is a moral obligation for the researcher to make an effort to transcend this bias. Interdisciplinary collaboration as well as collaboration with scholars whose background was formed in the foreign legal system under study can help transcend these challenges. Another concern for the comparativist is the danger of being trapped in the relativity of her background which would prevent her from thinking critically on the object of her study. The solution to the problem comes from the reflection on the just character of the rules that is implicit in any attempt to compare legal rules. The inherent normative dimension of the law can help transcend the circumstances that define the subjectivity of the researcher. The law as a normative discipline has its own constraints of justifiability. The researcher is led to transcend her conditioning in a context that provides to her a frame of evaluation and to think in abstracto about principles of justice that can be accepted intersubjectively. The comparatist who studies legal rules inevitably transcends her horizon and is led to think about the justness of the legal rules she is studying.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Selkälä and Rajavuori on Traditions, Myths, and Utopias of Personhood @TSelkl @Ger_Law_Journal @UniTurku

Toni Selkälä and Mikko Rajavuori, both of the University of Turku Faculty of Law, have published Traditions, Myths, and Utopias of Personhood: An Introduction at 18 German Law Journal 5 (2017) 18 German Law Journal 1017 (2017). Here is the abstract.

Legal personhood continues to serve an important role in the legal system. The millennial distinction of persons and things, while often unarticulated, is an essential building block of all legal relations. This introduction to persons and things outlines the past tradition, draws on present myths, and construes a utopia of which the articles on this special issue will comment, clarify, and criticize. The tradition of personhood has been well-established in recent academic commentary on personhood. Often construed as a gradual evolution and expansion from its modest original scope covering only adult male heads of household to present universal human personhood, the concept of legal person is tightly connected to the rule of law and the emergence of human rights. On this tradition, personhood is reserved an emancipatory role: Personhood is a legal fiction that sets everyone on an equal footing before the law. Also, due to its fictional character, collective human enterprises from state to corporation are donned with personhood as tools for realization of humane personhood. As such, the tradition serves an important part in perception of law and justice as ultimately egalitarian and often blind. Recent interest in legal personhood has come to criticize the traditional narrative, claiming that it construes a myth concealing the fact that law remains profoundly discriminatory and unjust partly because of the way legal personhood is defined. A range of new entities commanding some or all features of a legal person — such as animals, cyborgs, and fetuses — are left outside legal protection due to their wanting personhood. Clinging on ideas equating humans to persons lead to affronts of morality in name of legality, the critics of the traditional narrative argue. According to them, rather than maintaining a material bind to a human being, a legal person should be a concept of art reserved to an artificial bundle of rights that can be allocated to anyone or anything. As truly artificial, legal personhood would better serve justice by providing rights to everyone and everything unlike the traditional account. The utopia proposed by this introduction as well as by all of the articles forming this special issue pushes both the tradition and its critics to their limits. The utopia, on the one hand, argues for a fully material account of personhood where all things stand initially on an equal footing and, on the other hand, demands that also artificiality takes itself seriously in its denouncement of any material bind. We argue that such a utopia will better highlight the functions personhood serves in law and allows for a reevaluation of our appreciation of things.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Rossner, Tait, McKimmie, and Sarre on Courtroom Design and the Presumption of Innocence @meredithrossner @blakemckimmie @UniversitySA

Meredith Rossner, London School of Economics & Political Science, David Tait, University of Western Sydney College of Arts, Blake McKimmie, University of Queensland, and Rick T. Sarre, University of South Australia School of Law, have published The Dock on Trial: Courtroom Design and the Presumption of Innocence at 44 Journal of Law and Society 317 (2017). Here is the abstract.

This article examines the place of the criminal dock in courtroom design. Challenges to the use of the dock have been based upon the inability of the defendants to hear effectively, to communicate with counsel, to maintain their dignity, and to benefit from the presumption of innocence. Increasingly courts are incorporating secure docks, where defendants are partially or completely surrounded by glass (or in some countries, metal bars). To what extent do these changes and modifications undermine the right to the presumption of innocence? We present the results of an experimental mock jury study that was designed to test whether the placement of the accused influences jurors’ perceptions. We find that jurors are more likely to convict defendants when they are located in a traditional dock or a secure dock, compared to sitting next to their counsel at the bar table. We conclude by discussing the implications for trial procedures, counsel communications, and courtroom design.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Bijl on Human Rights and Anticolonial Nationalism In Sjahrir's "Indonesian Contemplations"

Paul Bijl has published Human Rights and Anticolonial Nationalism in Sjahrir's Indonesian Contemplations at 29 Law & Literature 247 (2017). Here is the abstract.

In 1945 and under the pseudonym Sjahrazad, Indonesia's first prime minister Sutan Sjahrir and his wife Maria Duchâteau published a book in Dutch entitled Indonesian Contemplations about Sjahrir's exile to and incarceration in the 1930s in the Dutch colonial concentration camp Boven-Digoel. Through an analysis of the book's critique of the legal spatialities of the Dutch empire and its imagination of the space of the Indonesian nation-state, this article makes a double argument: on the one hand, for the importance of scholarly analyses of Indonesian writing on the Dutch colonial-legal project and, on the other, against the idea that national liberation and international human rights were mutually exclusive in anticolonial nationalism.

Download the article from the website at the link.

Literature and Human Rights: The Law, the Language and the Limitations of Human Rights @degruyter_lit

New in paperback from de Gruyter:

Literature and Human Rights: The Law, the Language and the Limitations of Human Rights Discourse (Ian Ward, ed., 2017) (to be released July 26, 2017)

This very interesting volume includes essays by Maria Aristodemou, Daniela Carpi, Jeanne Gaakeer, Ian Ward, and many other scholars. Available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook.

Are These the Principles We're Looking For? Watching "Star Wars" and Thinking About International Relations

Roy Lee discusses international law, policy, and human rights lessons we can draw from Star Wars, here, in a column for Jurist. Mr. Lee is Legislative Counsel, Law Officers of the Crown, Guernsey, Channel Islands, UK.

Selected readings about Star Wars, law, and the practice of law, below:



Omar Ha-Redeye, Star Wars, Like All Things, Is Legal, at Slaw, December 27, 2015.

Timothy D. Peters, 'The Force' As Law: Mythology, Ideology and Order in George Lucas's Star Wars, 36 Australian Feminist Law Journal 125-143 (2012).

Cass Sunstein,  The World According To Star Wars (Dey Street Books, 2016).

Evan Weinberger, May the Law Be With You: Become a Legal Jedi With Star Wars, at LAW360, May 31, 2016.



And for fun:

If Star Wars Launched a Law Firm, at Above the Law, August 23, 2012.

Star Wars: Law and Order(short: parody opening credits)