Cornett on Hillbilly Atticus @UTKLaw

Judy M. Cornett, University of Tennessee College of Law, is publishing Hillbilly Atticus in volume 69 of the Alabama Law Review (2019). Here is the abstract.

In his controversial memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance implicitly asserts a connection between the individual and his or her culture. Vance’s work rests on a number of premises. An individual is a product of a particular culture, and that culture defines the choices available to that individual. Therefore, understanding a person requires an understanding of the culture from which that person comes. Conversely, by looking at individuals within a given culture, we can define the culture and generalize its characteristics to other individuals within that culture. Although several commentators have pushed back against the latter proposition by pointing out that not all denizens of Appalachia underwent the same experiences as Vance, few commentators have challenged the former proposition: that we can understand an individual better by understanding the culture from which he or she comes.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Newly Published: A Cultural History of Law, edited by Gary Watt (Bloomsbury Publishing) @BloomsburyPub @warwickuni

Newly published: A Cultural History of Law (Gary Watt, ed., Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019) (The Cultural Histories Series). Six volumes.

How have legal ideas and institutions affected Western culture? And how has the law itself been shaped by its cultural context? In a work spanning 4,500 years, these questions are addressed by 57 experts, each contributing an authoritative study of a theme applied to a period in history. Supported by detailed case material and over 230 illustrations, the volumes examine trends and nuances of the culture of law in Western societies from antiquity to the present. Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six. The six volumes cover: 1 - Antiquity (2500 BCE-500 CE); 2 - Middle Ages (500-1500); 3 - Early Modern Age (1500-1680); 4 - Age of Enlightenment (1680-1820); 5 - Age of Reform (1820-1920); 6 - Modern Age (1920-present). Themes (and chapter titles) are: Justice; Constitution; Codes; Agreements; Arguments; Property and Possession; Wrongs; and the Legal Profession. The total page extent for the pack is approximately 1200 pages. Each volume opens with a Series Preface, an Introduction and Notes on Contributors and concludes with Notes, Bibliography and an Index.

Includes Volume 1, A Cultural History of Law in Antiquity (Julien Etxabe, ed.), Volume 2, A Cultural History of Law in the Middle Ages (Emanuele Conte, ed.), Volume 3, A Cultural History of Law in the Early Modern Age (Peter Goodrich, ed.), Volume 4, A Cultural History of Law in the Age of Enlightenment (Rebecca Probert, ed.), Volume 5, A Cultural History of Law in the Age of Reform (Ian Ward, ed.), and Volume 6, A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age (Richard K. Sherwin and Danielle Celemajer, eds.).

Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Research Cluster Launch Event, University of Dundee

Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Research Cluster Launch Event

http://interlawdundee.eventbrite.com/

Law is a subject and a practice that is at all points open to its surroundings. Law regulates the world in numerous ways and in a wide variety of contexts. The constitutive effects of law are widespread throughout society and culture, mediating the structures and possibilities of social life and communal relations—locally, nationally, internationally.

The study of law in recent decades has accordingly and prominently focused on the law’s relations with other areas of understanding and knowledge, with leading examples including socio-legal studies, law and humanities, and critical legal studies. Significant arms of the global legal academy are now concerned not only with doctrine and principle, but with the interrelationships between law in terms of doctrinal or institutional phenomena and its wider constitutions and appearances throughout society, culture, and the material world.

Building upon this expansive energy, the Interdisciplinary Legal Studies research cluster adopts a similarly open-ended view of legality, bringing together scholars and other stakeholders working at the multiple intersections between or across legal and other disciplinary settings. Through this connectivity—both interpersonal and interdisciplinary—the cluster seeks to examine and gain rich and varied insights into complex contemporary questions of law, authority, and justice.

This event marks the launch of this cluster, showcasing a range of current research work related to law that is taking place at the intersection of a range of disciplines, including cultural studies, English, philosophy, geography, and art.

Speakers confirmed so far:

Anne Wagner, Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale

Chloë Kennedy, University of Edinburgh

Kimberley Bryson, University of Sussex

Dominic Smith, University of Dundee

Megan O’Neil, University of Dundee

Golnar Nabizadeh, University of Dundee

Jewel and Campbell, Death in the Shadows @ljewel

Lucy A. Jewel , University of Tennessee College of Law, and Mary Campbell are publishing Death in the Shadows in Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal (2019). Here is the abstract.

This paper is about the law and visual culture. Its centerpiece is Parson Weems’ Fable (1939), a painting by the American artist Grant Wood (1891-1942) that depicts the apocryphal story of George Washington and the cherry tree. At first glance, Wood’s image appears to celebrate an enduring myth of American virtue, namely Washington’s precocious inability to tell a lie. Studying the picture more closely, however, one finds a pair of black figures, presumably two of the Washingtons’ slaves. Stationed beneath dark storm clouds and harvesting cherries from a second tree, these slaves invoke yet another national myth, that of the domestic serenity that supposedly reigned on Virginia’s colonial plantations. In the process, they quietly invoke the country’s grievous history of racial oppression, coercion, and brutality.

This isn’t the only place where Woods’ painting speaks of racial violence. To the contrary, Parson Weems’ Fable also raises the specter of lynching. Examining the shadows directly beneath the Washingtons and their fabled tree, one discovers a hanging black body. Intentional or not, this dangling corpse conjures the spectacular acts of theatrical violence that mobs of Euro-Americans inflicted on African Americans during the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. By the 1930s, heated protests emerged against lynching—in popular songs, magazines, and art exhibitions, as well as more traditional political arenas. Unlike the painters most closely associated with him, Wood didn’t participate directly in such moments of artistic protest. Nonetheless, he would have been exposed to them as he painted Parson Weems’ Fable in the winter of 1939.

Regardless of Wood’s intentions, the work he created persistently connects the country’s origin myths to the murderous violence the U.S. has repeatedly inflicted on persons of color. Moreover, as the painting itself seems to realize, the law and culture forged by colonial Virginia planters like George Washington eventually morphed into a collective white psychopathy that found vicious expression in the practice of spectacle lynching. This colonial legal regime was deeply visual—a fact that accounts for not only its power, but also for the fundamental influence it continues to exert on current American conceptions of race.

A deep reading of Parson Weems’ Fable in the context of both its time (1939) and its setting (1736) reveals the extent to which the law is visual and the visual is legal. Indeed, the painting gives us a valuable lens for perceiving the pervasive connections that run between the two. Our thesis is that the profoundly visuo-legal nature of the country’s racial foundations helps explain the lack of progress the nation has made in dismantling the color line. As a result, the impulse to join the seemingly unrelated disciplines of legal study and art history isn’t an academic gimmick, but rather a necessity. For centuries, images have worked in tandem with statutes, judicial decisions, and various forms of legal (and illegal) punishment to indelibly imprint a logic of racial violence in our collective mindset. In order to fully excavate this logic, we need scholars who can analyze pictures as well as the law.

In terms of structure, we begin by introducing the painting and our analytical framework and method. After that, we explain the theoretical foundations for studying law and culture in this context. Finally, we connect colonial Virginia’s legal and cultural landscape to the traumatic racial violence that continues to haunt our national mythology.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Corcos on What We Talk About When We Talk About Law Schools @LpcProf @HedgehogsFoxes

Christine A. Corcos, Louisiana State University Law Center, has published What We Talk About When We Talk About Law Schools: Deconstructing Meaning In Popular Culture Images of Legal Education at Hedgehogs and Foxes. Here is the abstract.

Films, television, and novels often send us very specific messages about law schools and legal education that tend to replicate and reinforce both general notions about the ways in which we educate our lawyers, and in turn sustain our legal system. Most movies, tv shows, and novels mention the Ivy League law schools because they represent the first step toward guaranteed achievement in a legal career. Such mentions serve as proxies for several things, including that the character who attended the school is intelligent, ambitious, and possibly from a privileged background. Even viewers who know little about law schools are familiar with U.S. News Rankings and what those rankings mean. Viewers understand that Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Stanford lead the list. They know that these schools are the most selective and prestigious. If popular culture characters attend, graduate from, or teach at these schools, then they are likely to be smart, or wealthy, or ambitious.

Download the article from SSRN or from the website at the links.

Perlin on Bob Dylan, War, and International Affairs @NYLawSchool

Michael L. Perlin, New York Law School, has published 'You That Build the Death Planes': Bob Dylan, War and International Affairs. Here is the abstract.

Several years ago, I wrote that Bob Dylan was “a scholar with a well-developed jurisprudence on a range of topics including civil, criminal, public, and private law” (Perlin, 2011, p.1396). In that article, I discussed and analyzed Dylan songs that dealt with, variously, civil rights, inequality in the criminal and civil justice systems, institutions, governmental/judicial corruption, equality and emancipation, and the role of lawyers in the legal process. (Id.). But I noted that I was omitting – for space considerations – any discussion of Dylan songs dealing with war and international affairs (Id., p. 1398, n. 15). In this paper, I will address some of those songs that confront these topics directly (from John Brown, Highway 61, Masters of War, With God on Our Side, and Let Me Die in My Footsteps, to Slow Train and Neighborhood Bully), as well as others that do so more metaphorically or symbolically (e.g., It’s Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding); A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; Gates of Eden; Pay in Blood). I will conclude that, beyond the anthemic anti-war core of songs such as Masters, Dylan’s work reflects a keen understanding of geopolitics – why there is war, how profiteering is inevitably part of any pro-war movement, how alliances forged in war time are fragile in the aftermath, and how wars are, inevitably, “mistakes of a past history” (Footsteps) – all a reflection of the Political World in which we live. I also look at these issues through the lens of therapeutic jurisprudence, a model of looking at the law and the legal system to determine that system’s impact on the individuals whose lives are regulated.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call For Papers, Political Theology Theology Network Conference, NYC, October 17-19, 2019

Political Theology Network Conference

Columbia University & Union Theological Seminary

New York City

October 17-19, 2019

***Call for Papers Deadline Approaching: June 1
***Funding Available
***Keynote Speakers: Michelle Alexander, Gil Anidjar, Silvia Federici, Lap Yan Kung, Intisar Rabb, Najeeba Syeed

We invite proposals of 200-300 words for projects exploring political theology, broadly understood as an interdisciplinary conversation about intersections of religious and political ideas and practices. Under the sign of “political theology” political theorists have reflected on analogies between political and theological sovereignty, theologians have reflected on the role of memory and hope in political engagement, and cultural theorists have performed ideology critique. We are looking for projects that may draw on but also challenge and transform such classic conversations about political theology. We embrace the vibrant scholarly and activist work being done under the sign of political theology around the world, particularly in contexts of domination. African, Arab, Asian, and Latinx political theological traditions interrogate discourses around “sacred” and “profane” bodies. Indigenous activists organize to dismantle the anthropocentricism and “civilizing mission” of settler states. Scholars of secularism explore the relationship between caste, political culture, and everyday life in India. Black Muslim intellectuals theorize the power of popular protest and the religious nature of #BlackLivesMatter. Anti-colonial theologians from across the globe discuss abolition, anarchy, statelessness, and “higher laws.” Still others invite us to imagine “the end of the world.” We aim to bring together scholars, activists, and artists working with ethnographic, theoretical, theological, legal, historical, literary, and cultural studies methods motivated by a concern for justice. We are particularly interested in proposals that speak to the following themes:

• economies
• ecologies
• legalities
• embodiments
• gender and sexualities
• racializations
• citizenship, migration, place and displacement
• colonialisms (including settler colonialism and relations between settlers and Indigenous peoples)
• critical disability studies
• technologies and artificial intelligence
• fictions and poetics
• public scholarship and creative pedagogies
• religious nationalisms and religious pluralities

Proposals that address these themes from diverse global and religious perspectives are especially welcome. We invite five different presentation formats:

1. Paper presentation or pre-arranged papers panel (we anticipate allotting 90 minutes for each panel)
2. Poster
3. Dialogue or roundtable around a single theme (roundtables that include a combination of academics,
   activists, and representatives of the community are strongly encouraged)
4. Activist workshop (e.g. teach-in, facilitated conversation, skills-building session, etc.)
5. Performative piece (e.g. poem, spoken word, music, drama, dance, film, digital media, creative fiction readings, etc.) (Please submit either a general description of the piece or the performative work itself. Please
   also indicate any preferences for room and A/V setup.

This conference, hosted by Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, is also funded by grants from the Henry Luce Foundation and Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion. It hosts a professional network connecting scholars of political theology across varying fields and traditions, and we are eager for proposals to advance conversations about what political theology could look like both in and outside the academy.
Submit proposals to Winfield Goodwin, PTN Conference Coordinator, at ptn19.proposals@gmail.com

Proposals Due June 1, 2019.

A limited amount of funding will be available to offset conference travel costs. Note: this funding is not available to tenured or tenure-track faculty (or equivalent). If you would like to be considered for funding, please indicate that with your submission.

Sherwin and Celermaier's Introduction to A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age @RKSherwin

Richard K. Sherwin, New York Law School, and Danielle Celermaier, University of Sydney, are published Introduction to 'A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age' in A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age (Forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

A distinguishing feature of the twentieth century is the loss of any unitary foundation for truth, ethics, and the legitimate authority of law. With the emergence of radical pluralism, law became the site of extraordinary creativity; on occasion, a source of rights for those historically excluded from its protection. At the same time, it was a century convulsed by worldwide violence within and among states. Amidst pervasive fragmentation, however, the century also saw an unprecedented surge in mass communication (radio, film, television, and the Internet). It was as if for each new perspective on reality there arose an alternative medium for its transmission. 'A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age' braids these centrifugal movements. Each chapter tells a story about how state power – or resistance to power – has been exercised within a particular expressive medium. From the instigation of genocidal state violence through the acoustics of radio, to the performance of Aboriginal land claims in traditional songs and ceremonial dance, to live street theater as a form of local resistance to corporate power, these case studies show how discrete modes of communication construct, memorialize, and disseminate political and legal meaning. They suggest that we will need to grow adept in multiple ways of knowing, wielding a diverse array of expressive and interpretive tools and modes of attunement, if we are to steady the course of judgment in the ongoing quest for truth and justice under the rule of law.

Download the Introduction from SSRN at the link.

Morehead on The Devil In Recent American Law @JoeDunman @moreheadstate

L. Joe Dunman, Morehead State University, is publishing The Devil in Recent American Law in the Pace Law Review (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Despite its secular aspirations, the American legal system is permeated by Christian and other religious ideas. One of the religious ideas that frequently appears in recent American law is the devil – the unholy antithesis of all that is good in the world. Called by many names, such as Satan, Lucifer, or the Antichrist, the devil is no stranger to the United States court system. The devil arises from the depths primarily in five contexts: (1) as a source of injury to reputation in defamation cases; (2) as a prejudicial invocation made during criminal trials to secure conviction, harshen sentences, or discredit witnesses; (3) as a symptom of mental illness or delusion severe enough to qualify criminal defendants for insanity pleas and incapacitate decedents in probate; (4) as a source of religious conflict between inmates and their wardens; and, sometimes (5) as a party to litigation. This article broadly surveys each of these five contexts, exploring how courts have adjudicated recent disputes that involve accusations or admissions of Satanism and associated rituals. Readers will learn how American courts have dealt with religious ideas that many people find distasteful, dangerous, or downright abhorrent. So far, no grand unifying theme or theory is evident, so this survey will hopefully be a springboard for further, more focused research and argument as to how the American legal system should handle disputes that implicate the “archvillain of world culture.”

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call For Papers: 2019 Critical Legal Studies Conference, September 12-14, 2019

From the emailbox:

The University of Perugia invites streams and papers for the 2019 Critical Legal Conference. The event will take place between September 12 and 14, 2019. The deadline for submission of abstracts is July 15th.

The theme of this year's conference is Alienation. More here from the conference website. 

Launch of Visible Justice: The Exhibition

An announcement from Max Houghton regarding the launch of Visible Justice, the Exhibition:

David Birkin and I have been working since January with LCC post grad students, ngos Reprieve, PlanB and Refugee Journalism, artists Poulomi Basu and David Blandy & Larry Achiampong … to create Visible Justice, the exhibition. The students have responded to briefs and created self initiated work on such themes as the death penalty, torture and rendition, climate change, knife crime, surveillance and the experience of migration. Their work forms the public programme for LCC’s School of Media 2019.

The show also features work by aforementioned artists plus LCC’s Syrian Artist Protection Fund Fellow in Residence Abd Doumany, Corinne Silva, Edmund Clark and Nathaniel White, who have each supported the collaborations, and whose work resonates with the themes.

It would be wonderful to see you at our associated events. See links for info on brilliant speakers.

Visible Justice launch 16 April - with performance, music and poetry readings:

https://www.arts.ac.uk/whats-on/visible-justice-launch-night

30 April: Young Blood: A Round Table Discussion on Knife Crime and Restorative Justice:

https://www.arts.ac.uk/whats-on/young-blood-knife-crime-and-restorative-justice-discussion-and-film-screening

03 May: the second symposium of our research collective, also called Visible Justice - looking at the injured body - Visible Justice: Embodied Activism

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/visible-justice-embodied-activism-symposium-tickets-59523729076

It’s all free, but booking is essential via the links above.

We are working on the build this week and it’s all looking very exciting indeed.

Best wishes

Max

visible-justice.org

Call For Chapters: Reader on Cultural Expertise

From the mailbox:

Reader on Cultural Expertise - Call for Chapters Cultural expertise is an emergent concept defined as special knowledge provided by various fields in the social sciences for conflict resolution in the form of cultural expert witnessing or cultural argumentations that help deciding authorities for better decision-making (Holden 2011 and Holden 2019).*

Cultural expertise connects with the great debates of anthropology regarding the concept of culture, race, ethnicity, gender and allows for a new scrutiny of the potential of social sciences, in particular anthropology, to problem solving. I am planing a collection of essays designed as a trajectory starting from theory to praxis and using socio-legal and critical studies for a reader on cultural expertise whose target audience is undergraduate students in the social sciences. This reader connects with the collaborative design of a course on cultural expertise within the framework of EURO-EXPERT.

Contributors to this reader may be invited to participate to the upcoming workshop to be held on the first week of October in Oxford.  5000 words chapters are solicited on the following non-exhaustive list of topics: current representations of culture and law, race and ethnicity, gender, regulations concerning cultural expert witnessing and mediation from a national and comparative perspective, patterns of litigation involving a sample of multicultural-settings, and more (other topics can also be proposed). Both theory and praxis oriented contributions will be accepted. Theory-chapters should provide a state-of-the-art survey of one of the great debates in the social sciences and highlight how the notion of cultural expertise connects with those as umbrella concept including anthropological experts witnessing, mediation in court and out of court, cultural defence, and more. Praxis-chapters should focus on the application of cultural expertise to a particular field (such as gender rights, migration, indigenous rights, detention, education, health, and more) and offer quantitative and/or qualitative data that support the analysis. Both theory- and praxis- chapters should be accompanied by a list of further readings and can include boxed contents for exercises, multiple choice questions, definitions, and long extracts from leading scholarship. 

Prospective authors are requested to send a 800 words proposal and a 250 words BIO to Livia Holden at livia.holden@csls.ox.ac.uk by the 3rd June 2019. Preliminary enquiries are welcome. Readings on cultural expertise are available on request.  Holden, L. ed. (2011) Cultural Expertise and Litigation, Aldershort: Routledge.Holden, L. Ed. (2019) Cultural Expertise and Socio-Legal Studies, Bingley: Emeraldinsight.  

Forthcoming from Desmond Manderson: Danse Macabre (Cambridge University Press)

Desmond Manderson, Australian National University, is publishing Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts (Cambridge University Press) (forthcoming June 2019). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

The visual arts offer refreshing and novel resources through which to understand the representation, power, ideology and critique of law. This vibrantly interdisciplinary book brings the burgeoning field to a new maturity through extended close readings of major works by artists from Pieter Bruegel and Gustav Klimt to Gordon Bennett and Rafael Cauduro. At each point, the author puts these works of art into a complex dance with legal and social history, and with recent developments in legal and art theory. Manderson uses the idea of time and temporality as a focal point through which to explore how the work of art engages with and constitutes law and human lives. In the symmetries and asymmetries caused by the vibrating harmonic resonances of these triple forces - time, law, art - lies a way of not only understanding the world, but also transforming it.

 

Call for Abstracts: JurisApocalypse Now! Law in End Times, December 2-4, 2019 (LLHAA)

Southern Cross University School of Law and Justice, in partnership with the Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia (LLHAA), is proud to convene and organise the 2019 LLHAA conference titled JurisApocalypse Now! Law in End Times, which will be held at Southern Cross University Gold Coast Campus on 2-4 December 2019.

The conference will explore the intersection of legality, temporality and eschatology, the normatively uncertain and yet inherently creative space originated by the conflicting encounter between the orderly desire of law and the entropic tendency of apocalyptic narratives, with both forces cast against the backdrop of the ever-­deferred notion of time itself.

Furthermore, the conference is organised in conjunction with the 2019 Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand (LSAANZ) conference, titled Survive, Thrive, Die: Law in End Times, which will be held on 5-7 December 2019, still at Southern Cross University Gold Coast Campus. The two conferences, although distinct and separate, are nonetheless connected by a shared overarching theme, and are articulated around a shared Postgraduate Day, which will be held on the 5^th December. Scholars are invited, in a profoundly interdisciplinary manner, to participate in either or both conferences.

For further information, or if you have any query about the conferences, please visit https://sljresearch.net.au/lawinendtimes/

Southern Cross University School of Law and Justice, in partnership with the Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia (LLHAA), is proud to convene and organise the 2019 LLHAA conference titled JurisApocalypse Now! Law in End Times, which will be held at Southern Cross University Gold Coast Campus on 2-4 December 2019.

The conference will explore the intersection of legality, temporality and eschatology, the normatively uncertain and yet inherently creative space originated by the conflicting encounter between the orderly desire of law and the entropic tendency of apocalyptic narratives, with both forces cast against the backdrop of the ever-­deferred notion of time itself.

Furthermore, the conference is organised in conjunction with the 2019 Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand (LSAANZ) conference, titled Survive, Thrive, Die: Law in End Times, which will be held on 5-7 December 2019, still at Southern Cross University Gold Coast Campus. The two conferences, although distinct and separate, are nonetheless connected by a shared overarching theme, and are articulated around a shared Postgraduate Day, which will be held on the 5^th December. Scholars are invited, in a profoundly interdisciplinary manner, to participate in either or both conferences.

For further information, or if you have any query about the conferences, please visit https://sljresearch.net.au/lawinendtimes/

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Submission deadline: 31 July 2019

The Organising Committee invites the submission of abstracts of original work. Abstracts can be submitted for consideration for an oral presentation or a hard copy poster.

The Organising Committee will endeavour to notify presenters whether their proposed paper has been accepted at the beginning of each month following the abstract’s submission.

Submissions can be made using the following link:

https://sljresearch.net.au/lawinendtimes/call-for-abstracts/llhaa/

ICYMI: Liverpool Law Review's Special Issue on Reimagining Justice: Aesthetics and Law @LivUni_Law

Volume 38, issue 1 (April 2017) is devoted to the topic "Reimagining Justice: Aesthetics and Law." It includes a number of fascinating articles. Below is the table of contents, with links to the full text of the articles.

Julia J. A. Shaw, Introduction

William P. MacNeil, His Dark Legalities: Intellectual Property's Psychomachia in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy

Honni van Rijswijk, The Continuing Problem of the Universal to Questions of Justice: A Feminist Reading of Lars von Trier's Dogville

Sarah Sargent, Truth and Consequences: Law, Myth and Metaphor in American Indian Contested Adoption

Patricia Branco, Exploring Justitia Through Éowyn and Niobe: On Gender, Race and the Legal

Julia J. A. Shaw, Aesthetics of Law and Literary License: An Anatomy of the Legal Imagination

CFP: Special Workshop at the "Dignity, Diversity, Democracy" Conference of the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, Lucerne, Switzerland, July 7-13, 2019

CFP for Special Workshop at the "Dignity, Diversity, Democracy" Conference (Annual Congress of the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy) Lucerne, Switzerland, July 7-13, 2019 (at the University of Lucerne)

Special Workshop 48: Immigration & Nationalism: Finding Common Ground Between Narrative Extremes

Convenors: Andrew Majeske, Gilad Ben-Nun

Workshop Description: 

In the United States the contentious midterm elections of 2018 will occur shortly. The narratives dominating the public conversation in respect to immigration (currently in the news is the migrant caravan of Honduran refugees, and the move to restrict birth-right citizenship) and nationalism (“make American great again”, and “America first”) by all appearances are controlled respectively by the far right and the far left of the political spectrum. Certain it is that these more extreme narratives garner the bulk of mainstream media attention, and offer the least opportunity for identifying a common ground upon which productive public discussion can work to counter the fear-mongering and demonizing that constitute the core of these narratives. A similar dynamic has been playing out in many if not most of the nations that constitute the EU. 

It is the hope of the conveners that the papers that will be shared in this special workshop will work towards addressing , from the interdisciplinary standpoint of law, literature & culture, the problem of the missing middle, and to identify ways in which a different narrative can be structured that can either bridge the extremes of the political left and right, or if that is not feasible, to work towards creating a new narrative (or resurrecting an older one). This new or restored narrative must be one that creates a broad and stable middle ground, a middle-ground that highlights the core values of dignity, democracy & diversity, and the principles that support these values—namely, that the only legitimate government is one based on the consent of those governed, and its necessary analogue, that there is at the least a fundamental initial political equality of all persons. Whether this new or restored narrative will be of sufficient power and vitality to push the extreme narratives back to their native ground, the margins, is uncertain; but it is the position of the conveners that we have a duty to try. 

The conveners are therefore hopeful that given the myriad of perspectives and approaches that characterize the interdiscipline of law, literature & culture, that the workshop will be productive in identifying such new or restored narratives with which we can begin to confront what is presenting itself as the fundamental crisis of our times.  We trust that the urgency of establishing a trans-Atlantic (and hopefully even broader) dialogue on this theme is evident to all.

The special workshop will be held in English. 

If you are interested in presenting a paper in this workshop, please send a short abstract (max. 300 words) to the workshop conveners by January 31, 2019. Decisions will be made by February 28, 2019. Full papers will be circulated among the workshop participants approximately two weeks before the start of the conference. 

Conveners: 

Andrew Majeske (John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), New York)

            ajmajeske@gmail.com

Bilad Ben-Nun (University of Leipzig)

            gilad.ben-nun@uni-leipzig.de

Hammill on 40 Years At the Baldy Center: A Law and Society Hub in Buffalo @baldycenter

Luke Hammill, University at Buffalo Law School, has published 40 Years at the Baldy Center: A Law and Society Hub in Buffalo in Buffalo. Buffalo: University at Buffalo Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy. 2018. Here is the abstract.

The University at Buffalo’s Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy just turned 40. That’s 40 years of groundbreaking sociolegal research, conferences, teaching, support for graduate students and much more. To commemorate the Center’s many accomplishments, this monograph traces through its history, showing that it helped put (and keep) Buffalo on the map as a hub in the Law and Society movement. The monograph draws on a year’s worth of research and interviews with the key characters in the Baldy Center’s story. Thousands of pages of University at Buffalo archives, court records, academic papers, historical documents and more were reviewed to piece together a narrative showing the Baldy Center’s tremendous impact on institutions, the academic literature and people’s careers. What emerges is a picture of a place where interdisciplinary collaboration and unique ideas find a home that wouldn’t exist if not for an endowment created by a civic-minded Buffalo lawyer who died in the mid-20th century and couldn’t have imagined the legacy that awaited him.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

CFP: Workshop on the Protection of Cultural Heritage and Municipal Law, April 5, 2019 @asilorg

From the American Society of International Law's Cultural Heritage and the Arts Interest Group (CHAIG) and Fordham University School of Law's Urban Center, in collaboration with the Quebec Society of International Law (SQDI), a Call for Papers for a Workshop on the Protection of Cultural Heritage and Municipal Law.


The workshop will be held at Fordham University’s School of Law, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on Friday, April 5, 2019. The protection of cultural heritage has long been understood as the province primarily of international law, but this workshop will highlight the place of municipal or local law in the discourse, exploring continuities and discontinuities with international law. Do international law and municipal law draw on each other’s strengths? Do they complement each other in terms of their shortcomings? Do they connect, or are they disconnected, in practice? While international law is addressed to nations, local governance is highly relevant to the protection of cultural heritage, and yet sometimes working in silos from other cities, provinces or states, as well as national governments.

Paper proposals of no more than 500 words should be sent to sabrina.tremblayhuet@usherbrooke.ca before Sunday, December 30th, 2018. The authors of the selected proposals will be notified by Friday, January 18th, 2019. Proposals from emerging scholars and graduate students are highly encouraged. Draft papers must be submitted no later than Monday, March 18th, 2019, for circulation to the selected participants in preparation for the workshop. Please note that no funding is available to cover transportation and accommodation for participants. Attendance at the workshop is, however, free of charge, subject to prior registration. Lunch will be provided to workshop participants.

More about the CFP here.

CFP: Interface: Journal of European Languages and Literatures: Visual Discourse and Its Circulation Between Europe and Asia

From the mailbox:

Call for Papers for Issue 9 (June 2019)

Submission Deadline: March 31, 2019

Guest Editor: Go Koshino (Hokkaido University)

Visual Discourse and its Circulation between Europe and Asia

Language-focused discourses have long lost their privileged position in humanities since discourse came to be understood as any communicative social practice through which meaning is created. In interface Issue 9 we would like to focus on Visual Discourse (i.e., those social practices that depend extensively on visual cues for the production of meaning) and its Circulation between the East and the West. Pictorial texts (such as still and moving images, the built environment, etc.) are easy to get across language barrier on the one hand; on the other hand, the ambiguity of visual image can generate more cultural misunderstandings and even new meanings in the course of cross-cultural communication

While we very much welcome articles seeking to expand the realm of research in Visual Discourse, we also invite articles that pay attention to the boundary of visual text itself so as to examine the very nature of visuality in the multiple cultural contexts. Firstly, an important issue we would like to see discussed is translation (adaptation) between visual and other types of text and medium (literary, acoustic, etc.). Secondly, we would appreciate discussions of the effects in the meaning-creation of invisible elements (visually unrepresentable) appearing alongside the visual discourse, and which are often influenced by the historical, cultural, and political contexts.

interface –Journal of European Languages and Literatures is inviting original unpublished papers written in English, French, German, Spanish Russian or Italian for interface Issue 9, to be published in June 2019 that could address, but need not be restricted to, the following topics:

-Transcultural and cross-genre translation (adaptation) including visual language.

-Visualization of invisible or invisiblization of visual factors in the process of cross-cultural interface

-Visual aspects of cultural commemoration and “memory-scape” on wars, revolutions, and other significant events

-Politics of visual representation in the media discourse.

Papers should be submitted online at http://interface.org.tw/ no later than March 31, 2019.

All potential authors should consult our website for Author Guidelines

(http://interface.org.tw/index.php/if/about/submissions#authorGuidelines)

CFP: Handbook of Heritage Law and Discourse: A Triadic Dimension: Protection, Regulation, and Identity

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR AN EDITED VOLUME

Handbook of Heritage Law and Discourse A Triadic Dimension: Protection, Regulation and Identity Editors: Le Cheng and Anne Wagner

The past four decades has witnessed the remarkable extension of enthusiasm in cultural heritage or property from the perspective of international laws, or international legal framework as the multilevel legal instruments for safeguarding, protection and maintenance of cultural heritage, property, or rights. In our project, the identification of “Heritage” employs specific discourses, codes, transcending values, and images that conceal assumption about members of a people comprising a people within a nation. Heritage narrates constructions of belongings that become tethered to negotiations for power and resistance over time and throughout a people’s history leading to powerful discursive narratives.

While such likeness may be preserved, conserved or even perpetuated, the idea of “Heritage” may be socially, politically, culturally, and historically contested to reveal competing pasts, presents, and futures, esp. with innovation in arts leading to new social norms and identities. Besides, the visual decoding of heritage is evocative and ideologically representative with meanings that prescribe a story of Protection, Regulation and Identity, since these meanings are subject to multiple interpretations and reinterpretations related to Rights, among the integrity of heritage right and human rights, and the integrated framework of right in rem and right in personae. Yet, through semiotic accumulation, evolution and confrontation, there may be different interdisciplinary paths leading to different truths, to tensions (contestation and/or negotiation), and applications of significance.

We should then investigate these transmitted values, discourses over time and space. We should therefore investigate these transmitted values under various perspectives (amongst others but not limited): - How to transmit Heritage and which values are being transmitted? - How are the narratives created? - Is there a social stratification in transmitting, preserving and conserving Heritage? - What are the cognitive and symbolic aspects of Heritage through different temporal parameters? Is there a shift in cultural and/or collective meaning from one space to another? - What are the sources? - What is the relationship between law and “heritage” (tangible or intangible elements) in visual representations? - What is the shared collective and/or cultural memory beyond this visual representation? - How Heritage is connected to the preservation and conservation of a people’s memory? - How Heritage is interpreted within legal settings or international legal framework from temporality and spatiality? - What are the interactions between cultural heritage and human rights within the diversity and tolerance within socio-legal contexts? Considering the complexity and diversity in the building of a common memory or discourse community through tangible and intangible cultural heritage, we would suggest our contributors interrogate the complex sign system of a particular country or region and their meanings attentive to a complex configuration of historical, social and cultural conditions that shift over time and space.

Keywords: Heritage, Sign System, Law, Discourse Narratives, Conservation, Preservation. Editors: Le Cheng & Anne Wagner Please send abstracts to both Anne Wagner (valwagnerfr@yahoo.com) and Le Cheng (chengle163@hotmail.com) by 28 Feburary 2019 at the latest.