ICYMI: Some Recent Law and Humanities Publications From Robert E. Atkinson, Jr. @FSUCollegeofLaw

ICYMI:

Robert E. Atkinson, Jr., Florida State University College of Law, has published and is publishing:

Growing Up With Scott and Atticus: Getting From "To Kill a Mockingbird" Through "Got Set a Watchman," 65 Duke L.J. Online 95 (2016).

Liberalism, Philanthropy, and Praxis: Realigning the Philanthropy of the Republic and the Social Teaching of the Church, 84 Fordham L. Rev. 2633 (2016).

A Primer on the Neo-Classical Republic Theory of the Nonprofit Sector (And the Other Three Sectors, Too), in Research Handbook on Not-For-Profit Law (Matthew Harding, ed., Edward Elgar, 2018).

Sea Captains and Philosopher Kings: "Billy Budd" as Melville's Republican Response to Plato's "Republic,"  in the Hofstra L. Rev. (forthcoming 2020).

Writer Re-Written: What Really (Might Have) Happened to Atticus and Scott, 69 Ala. L. Review 595 (2018).

Murray on Zero Tolerance @murrayyxta

Yxta Maya Murray, Loyola Law School, is publishing Zero Tolerance in the Texas Hispanic Journal of Law and Policy. Here is the abstract.

Zero Tolerance is a legal-literary work in which the author seeks to understand the motivations and thought processes of immigration detention agents who have participated in separating families at the border. It is a work of fiction, which is part of a collection of short stories titled Americas. Conventional legal scholarship, such as that written by Josh Chafetz, David E. Pozen, and Jennifer Nou, has addressed radical or troubling shifts in norms, which scholars describe as “norm destruction” and “norm decomposition.” This story treats norm destruction in the context of atrocities committed in immigrant detention centers in furtherance of the Attorney General’s “zero tolerance policy” against illegal immigration. It is part of a larger project that addresses the political and jurisprudential catastrophes of the past several years through the expressiveness permitted by art.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

New From UVA Press: Melissa J Ganz: Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment @uvapress

Melissa J. Ganz, Associate Professor of English, Marquette University, has published Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment (University of Virginia, 2019). Here is the abstract.

In eighteenth-century England, the institution of marriage became the subject of heated debates, as clerics, jurists, legislators, philosophers, and social observers began rethinking its contractual foundation. Public Vows argues that these debates shaped English fiction in crucial and previously unrecognized ways and that novels, in turn, played a central role in the debates. Like many legal and social thinkers of their day, novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Eliza Fenwick, and Amelia Opie imagine marriage as a public institution subject to regulation by church and state rather than a private agreement between two free individuals. Through recurring scenes of infidelity, fraud, and coercion as well as experiments with narrative form, these writers show the practical and ethical problems that result when couples attempt to establish and dissolve unions simply by exchanging consent. Even as novelists seek to shore up the legal regulation of marriage, however, they contest the specific forms that these regulations take. In recovering novelists’ engagements with the nuptial controversies of the Enlightenment, Public Vows challenges longstanding accounts of domestic fiction as contributing to sharp divisions between public and private life and as supporting the traditional, patriarchal family. At the same time, the book counters received views of law and literature, highlighting fiction’s often simultaneous affirmations and critiques of legal authority.

 

Public Vows received the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize, University of Virginia, in 2018.

Weiner on Talking Animals and the Internationalist Liberal Imagination: The Case of E.B. White @MarkSWeiner

Mark S. Weiner,  Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School, has published Talking Animals and the Internationalist Liberal Imagination: The Case of E.B.White, at 2019 Juridisk Publikation 95. Here is the abstract.

This essay considers the significance of the literary representation of talking animals for the legal ideals of midcentury liberal internationalism. Its purpose is to contribute to the cultural history of international law. It does so by reflecting on the conceptual and aesthetic links between the American author E. B. White’s classic children’s stories Stuart Little (1945) and Charlotte’s Web (1952) and his analysis of: 1) the rules of English prose, in the treatise The Elements of Style (1959), and 2) the establishment of the United Nations, about which he wrote extensively. The method of the essay is that of literary analysis, which examines an author’s use of and approach to language. In White’s view, good English style and sustainable international order both depended on the creation of “hard” rules enforceable, respectively, through critical literary judgment and global legal institutions. White’s contemporaneous depiction of anthropomorphic animal speech invites readers to imagine a humankind that has transcended the particularity of nationalism—a global civilization to be forged through the application of critical reading practices within a rules-based international order. 

Download the article at the link.

Meyler on Allegory, Monument, and Oblivion in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant @StanfordLaw

Bernadette Meyler, Stanford Law School, is publishing Aesthetic Historiography: Allegory, Monument, and Oblivion in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant in volume 2 of Critical Analysis of Law (2018). Here is the abstract.

This essay turns to Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 book The Buried Giant for insights into the moral and political implications of the kinds of historiography chosen in the aftermath of atrocity. The Buried Giant foregrounds monument, oblivion, and its own form, allegory, as historiographical strategies. If monuments aspire to bring the past into an eternal present, functioning as a kind of symbol, the novel indicates the impossibility of this goal. At the same time, it rejects oblivion’s efforts to entirely remove the traces of prior atrocities. The Buried Giant instead presents a version of allegory as an alternative mechanism for engaging with and negotiating a troubled inheritance. The allegory in question neither involves a one-to-one correspondence between events of the novel and national or international struggle, nor does it simply bring the reader from its particulars to a universal truth. It rather suggests a reciprocal reading of particulars through the windows they furnish upon each other, looking at medieval Britain as though through the lens of post-WWII Japan or examining England’s imperial past from the perspective of its prehistory in a time out of memory. This variety of allegory bears a family resemblance to that extolled by Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man, both of whom contrasted allegory with the symbol, and to Christopher Tomlins’s efforts to produce a Benjaminian historiography.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Recent Publications in Law and Literature @routledgebooks

ICYMI: Recently published books in the area of law and literature, from Routledge: Chloe A. Gill-Khan, The Politics of Integration: Law, Race, and Literature in Post-War Britain and Frace (Routledge, 2019) (Studies in Migration and Diaspora).

After almost seven decades, Britain and France, nations with divergent political cultures and heirs to contrasting philosophies of 'integration', have proclaimed the failure to integrate their post-war ethnic minorities: at this present time, the ‘Muslim’. The ‘argument’ of this book, therefore, is a question: despite the legal, political and social commitments that emerged from the events of the Holocaust, why do both nations continue to govern minorities on the sites of the law and race? Through comparative readings of British Asian and Franco-Maghrebian literatures, the author examines the contours and patterns of British and French post-war governance and racism over four decades. Departing from prevailing theories in postcolonial studies that situate post-war racism within the narrative of colonialism or the politics of the nation-state, The Politics of Integration shows how we must re-appraise the inter-war histories of minorities if we are to ask more meaningful questions about the present. We are invited to take stock of how well theorization of post-war ethnic populations and their politics have served us in terms of asking: what does history tell us, and how and where do we - Europe and its minorities - go from here? As such, the book will appeal to scholars in multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences such as history, philosophy, literature, cultural and postcolonial studies.

 

Baber Johansen, The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent: The Peasants' Loss of Property Rights as Interpreted in the Hanafite Legal Literature of the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods (Routledge, 2018) (Routledge Library Editions: Islam, State, Society)

This book, first published in 1988, argues that a close inspection of the development of Hanafite law in the Mamluk and Ottoman periods reveals changes in legal doctrine which were not restricted to civil transactions but also concerned the public law. It focuses in particular on the interrelated areas of property, rent and taxation of arable lands, arguing that changes in the relationship between tax and rent led to a redefinition of the concept of landed property, a concept at the very heart of the Islamic legal system. This title will be of particular interest to students of Islamic history.

 

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.

Novelist Herman Wouk Dies

Herman Wouk has died at the age of 103. The acclaimed author of The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War,  and many other works died at his Palm Beach home. Below is a short bibliography of works discussing law in some of his writing.

Harvey Couch, III, Law and Literature: A Comment, 17 Vanderbilt Law Review 911 (1963-1964). Discusses The Caine Mutiny.

Laurence W. Mazzeno, Herman Wouk (Twayne Publishing, 1994) (Twayne United States Authors Series).

Norman L. Rosenberg, The Caine Mutiny: Not Just One But Many Legal Dramas,  31 Journal of Maritime Law and Commerce 623 (Oct. 2000). Discusses The Caine Mutiny.

Gregory J. Sullivan, Children Into Men: Lawyers and the Law in Three Novels, 37 Catholic Lawyer 29 (1996-1997). Discusses The Caine Mutiny.

Brooks on Dying Declarations @Princeton

Peter Brooks, Center for Human Values, Princeton University, is publishing Dying Declarations in Fictional Discourse and the Law (Hans J. Lind, ed., New York and London: Routledge, Forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

In Chavez v. Martinez, where a police officer interrogated a badly wounded—blinded and partially paralyzed—suspect undergoing treatment in the emergency room, Justice Kennedy evoked the ancient doctrine of “dying declarations,” which provides an exception to the exclusion of hearsay evidence in the case of words spoken where “the expectation of almost immediate death will remove all temptation to falsehood.” In a context once marked by the fear of eternal damnation, the brink of death was considered to produce the truth. One can find in the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts—containing confessions from those about to be hung at Tyburn—material that may both confirm and throw some doubt on the unconstrained truth of the dying declaration. But here I am especially concerned with deathbed scenes in the nineteenthcentury novel as moments of the transmission of truth—or sometimes a kind of cosmic lie. My examples are drawn from Balzac, Dickens, Collins, and Conrad.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Kortvelyesi on Game of Norms: Law, Interpretation, and the Realms in Game of Thrones

Zsolt Kortvelyesi, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies, Centre for Social Sciences, has published Game of Norms: Law, Interpretation, and the Realms in Game of Thrones as MTA Law Working Paper No. 2019/3. Here is the abstract.

In this paper I will use Game of Thrones (the TV series) and its oath of the Night’s Watch to discuss some basic questions related to the nature and functioning of law. This will serve a dual goal: assessing the concept of law used in the series (making the paper part of a long-thriving academic field, law and literature, or law and film), but, more importantly, also to present theoretical questions in a friendly way – something I also tested in introduction to law classes. It is not easy to draw students into discussing questions of the right interpretation or functionalist understandings, but by driving them to a friendly (if deadly) territory, one can engage with them and show how the discussion is intimately related to fundamental dilemmas of legal theory.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: Joseph Jenkins, Inheritance Law and Political Theology in Shakespeare and Milton (Routledge, 2016)

ICYMI:

Joseph Jenkins, Inheritance Law and Political Theology in Shakespeare and Milton (Routledge, 2016).

Reading God's will and a man's Last Will as ideas that reinforce one another, this study shows the relevance of England's early modern crisis, regarding faith in the will of God, to current debates by legal academics on the theory of property and its succession. The increasing power of the dead under law in the US, the UK, and beyond-a concern of recent volumes in law and social sciences-is here addressed through a distinctive approach based on law and humanities. Vividly treating literary and biblical battles of will, the book suggests approaches to legal constitution informed by these dramas and by English legal history. This study investigates correlations between the will of God in Judeo-Christian traditions and the Last Wills of humans, especially dominant males, in cultures where these traditions have developed. It is interdisciplinary, in the sense that it engages with the limits of several fields: it is informed by humanities critical theory, especially Benjaminian historical materialism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, but refrains from detailed theoretical considerations. Dramatic narratives from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton are read as suggesting real possibilities for alternative inheritance (i.e., constitutional) regimes. As Jenkins shows, these texts propose ways to alleviate violence, violence both personal and political, through attention to inheritance law.

Want To Review a New Law-Related Film, TV Series, Or Book? Hedgehogs and Foxes Wants To See Your Work!

The online site Hedgehogs and Foxes (https://hedgehogsandfoxes.org/) is seeking essays, book reviews, articles, teaching materials, and original works (including works of fiction, poetry, and other materials related to law and the humanities. Would you like to review a law related film or television series, such as For the People, Proven Innocent, Goliath, Bosch, Les Miserables, The Red Line, or Sneaky Pete? What about a law-related novel or non-fiction book? Let one of the Board of Editors know of your interest.

Davies on Sherlock Holmes: Expert Witness @GB2d

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School; The Green Bag, is publishing Sherlock Holmes: Expert Witness in Canon Law: Lawyers, Law and the Sherlockian Canon (William A. Walsh and Donny Zaldin, BSI Press, 2018). Here is the abstract.

This paper explains the treatment of expert witnesses in late-Victorian English courtrooms, using a scenario drawn from a Sherlock Holmes story -- “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” -- and a prosecution for murder.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

A New Book On Law in Games of Thrones @Mare_et_Martin

New from Mare & Martin:

Du droit dans Game of Thrones (Quentin Le Pluard and Péran Plouhinec, eds., 2019). Here is the description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

La série Game of Thrones et la saga littéraire du Trône de Fer dont elle est tirée connaissent un retentissement mondial. Au sein de cet univers de fiction dépeignant une société médiévale brutale, cruelle, intégrant quelques éléments fantastiques tels les dragons, on ne compte plus les meurtres, viols, incestes, tortures et autres actions blâmables, à tel point que le droit et la justice ysemblent absents. C’est pourtant tout l’inverse. Il existe un droit propre au monde de Game of Thrones. Un individu ressuscité par magie, par exemple, demeure-t-il une personne au regard du droit et conserve-t-il les liens juridiques qu’il avait pu nouer avant sa mort ? Un mur de glace de plusieurs dizaines de mètres de haut constituet-il une frontière au sens juridique du terme ? De même, de quel droit est-il question à l’égard des personnages féminins présentés dans la série ? C’est à toutes ces interrogations, et à bien d’autres mêlant toutes les disciplines juridiques, que les auteurs apportent des réponses en convoquant leur connaissance de la fiction et du droit. Cet ouvrage entend démontrer que l’étude de l’un peut s’enrichir des apports de l’autre. Se voulant accessible à tous – néophytes du droit comme de Game of Thrones, ou naturellement juristes confirmés comme fans inconditionnels de la saga –, il s’agit là d’une autre preuve que, comme le veut l’adage, le droit est véritablement partout. Il l’est donc aussi dans Game of Thrones.

PEN America Writing For Justice Fellowships: Call For Applications @PENAmerican

PEN America is accepting applications for its Writing For Justice Fellowships. These fellowships support emerging or established writers in creating written works of lasting merit that illuminate critical issues related to mass incarceration and catalyze public debate.

The Fellowship aims to harness the power of writers and writing in bearing witness to the societal consequences of mass incarceration by capturing and sharing the stories of incarcerated individuals, their families, communities, and the wider impact of the criminal justice system. Our goal is to ignite a broad, sustained conversation about the dangers of over-incarceration and the imperative to mobilize behind rational and humane policies. As an organization of writers dedicated to promoting free expression and informed discourse, PEN America is honored to have been entrusted by the Art for Justice Fund to engage the literary community in addressing this pressing societal issue. Applications for the 2019 Writing For Justice Fellowship will open April 1, 2019 and close May 15, 2019. Read the application requirements here.

Alton on Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Holmes: A Tale of Two Testaments

Stephen R. Alton, Texas A & M School of Law, has published Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Holmes: A Tale of Two Testaments as a Texas A& M University School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper. Here is the abstract.

This article takes the form of an epistolary exchange across the centuries, comparing and contrasting two noted wills in Victorian literature. The first of these testaments is the final will of Dr. Henry Jekyll, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; this will bequeaths the doctor’s estate to his friend and attorney, Gabriel John Utterson. The second testament is the putative will of Jonas Oldacre, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Norwood Builder; this will bequeaths Oldacre’s estate to the young solicitor who drafted the will, John Hector McFarlane. Taken together, these two testaments raise the issues of the testator’s capacity and intent to make the will, undue influence and bequests to attorneys (notably to the drafting attorney), due execution of the will, and the effect of the beneficiary’s possible murder of the testator. A comparison of these two fictional Victorian-era wills remains relevant today because the legal issues that these two testaments raised in 19th century England are still very much present in 21st century America.

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 )  

Stern on Reorienting the Connections Between Law and Literature @ArsScripta

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published Literary Analysis of Law: Reorienting the Connections Between Law and Literature at 5 Critical Analysis of Law 1 (2018). Here is the abstract.

This special issue of Critical Analysis of Law, devoted to new work in law and literature, features articles that dispense with the choice between “law in literature” and “law as literature,” to ask how legal and literary forms, methods, concepts, and attitudes can be productively explored in tandem. Conventionally, when scholars ask how legal actors and problems are portrayed in literature, or how hermeneutic theory may shed light on statutory or constitutional interpretation, these questions are meant to help solve a legal problem, at a doctrinal or conceptual level. But once we abandon the requirement that literature serve as an assistant in this fashion, many new possibilities for the literary study of law come into visibility. The essays in this special issue explore some of those directions.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Castilho on The Press and Brazilian Narratives of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" @celso_thomas

ICYMI: Celso Thomas Castilho has published The Press and Brazilian Narratives of Uncle Tom's Cabin: Slavery and the Public Sphere in Rio de Janiero, ca. 1855, at 76 The Americas 77 (2019). Here is the abstract.

In March 1855, a literary newspaper in Rio de Janeiro printed the first installment of Nísia Floresta's “Páginas de uma vida obscura,” a serialized short story inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Seven more chapters followed, keeping “Páginas” in the public eye for months. The Jornal do Commercio, arguably the national paper of record, mentioned the story in its announcements. Floresta (pseudonym of Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto, 1810–1885) centered her storyline on the Congo-born Domingos, the “Brazilian Tom,” who exemplified the attributes of Christian virtuosity and resignation found in Stowe's internationally famous novel. Set in the nineteenth century, “Páginas” begins with the ten-year-old Domingos's enslavement on the African coast, and highlights the human devastation of the internal slave trade through his movements across Minas Gerais and on to Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro. It ends with Domingos's death, at age 54, grief-stricken over his son's recent passing. In part, Floresta's “Páginas” emerged from the Brazilian schoolteacher's longstanding critiques of patriarchy, nation, and education. Twenty years earlier, Floresta had drawn from Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to write Direito das mulheres e injustiça dos homens (1832), a book that went through three editions in its first decade. More directly though, Floresta had connected to the so-called “Tom mania” while living in Paris in 1852. The following year, back in Rio, she wrote a pamphlet on women's education—Opúsculo humanitário (1853)—that parsed key aspects of Uncle Tom's Cabin, among a larger discussion of women's achievements internationally. Two Rio newspapers excerpted the pamphlet, and, boldly, published the chapters focused on Uncle Tom. This attention in the press raised the profile of a book the public already knew to be controversial, as newspapers had earlier carried reports of port authorities seizing shipments of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Rio, Salvador, and Fortaleza. In writing “Páginas,” then, two years after the Opúsculo, Floresta not only carried forward her literary dialogue with Stowe, but also posed the work as a challenge to the status quo. “Páginas” was necessary, she explained, because “slavery is not an issue of concern in the press.” If overstated, given that the topic of slavery was quite prevalent in public discourse, Floresta's assertion nonetheless signals an opportunity for scholars to probe further into the relationship between slavery and the public sphere in the mid nineteenth century. More specifically, it suggests connections to be explored between the press and the early reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Brazil, and, more broadly, connections between the representations of slavery in the press, and the institution's enduring legitimacy.

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