Home Run! The FIU Law Review's Microsymposium on Law and the Infield Fly Rule @FIULAWREVIEW @SWeberWaller @KarboraniAdrian @robneyer @oldfatherc @fiulaw

Look at this unusual and fresh approach to a law review symposium issue. I know less than nothing about baseball, as you can tell from the title of this post, but I enjoyed looking through FIU Law Review's Micro-Symposium: Infield Fly Rule Is In Effect: The History and Strategy of Baseball's Most (In)Famous Rule.  Here's a list of the articles included.

Adrian Karborani, Introduction to the Micro-Symposium: Infield Fly Rule in Effect

Richard D. Friedman, Just Say No To the Cheap Double Play

Mark A. Graber, Functionalism and the Infield Fly Rule

Andrew J. Guilford, Another Side to the Infield Fly Rule

Richard Hershberger, The Prehistory of the Infield Fly Rule

Rob Nelson, The Enfield Fly Rule

Rob Neyer, Teach the Controversy

Peter B. Oh, De-Limiting Rules

Chad M. Oldfather, Umpires, Judges, and the Aesthetics of the Infield Fly

Spencer Weber Waller, The Puzzle of the Infield Fly Rule

Howard M. Wasserman, Keeping the Infield Fly Rule in Effect 

Newly Published: The Media Method: Teaching Law With Popular Culture

Available August 16, 2019: The Media Method: Teaching Law With Popular Culture (Christine A. Corcos, ed., Durham, Carolina Academic Press, 2019). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Many law professors now teach courses by using examples from popular culture, but there is no comprehensive overview of ways to integrate non-law materials into the legal curriculum. In this text, more than two dozen law professors from the United States, Canada, and Australia demonstrate how to integrate fiction, poetry, comic books, film, television, music, and other media through the first year curriculum traditionally offered in U.S. law schools as well as a number of advanced courses in many subjects. The heavily illustrated book also includes best practices as well as pedagogical justifications for the use of such methods.

Here is a link to the table of contents.

Authors of the twenty-seven chapters are Michael Asimow, Cynthia D. Bond, Alex Glashausser, Cassandra Sharp, Deborah Ahrens, Susanna Frederick Fischer, Marybeth Herald, Stacey M. Lantagne, Richard J. Peltz-Steele, Jeffrey E. Thomas, Brandon Beck, Catherine Martin Christopher, DeLeith Duke Gossett, Brie D. Sherwin, Nancy Soonpaa, Sha-Shana Crichton, JoAnne Sweeny, Stephen Parks, Paul Bergman, Christine A. Corcos, Robert M. Jarvis, Madeleine June Kass, Kellyn O. McGee, Geraldine Szott Moohr, Jennifer L. Schulz, Kate Sutherland, 

Priya Baskaran, Laila Hlass, Allison Kron, Sarah Sherman-Stokes, Wendy-Adele Humphrey, Terri LeClercq, Kelly E. Collinsworth, and Rebecca Bratspies.

Visual Images and Popular Culture in Legal Education: A New Issue of the JLE @TheAALS

The latest issue of the Journal of Legal Education (v. 68. no. 1), a symposium, is devoted to the topic of Visual Images and Popular Culture in Legal Education. A number of law professors offer essays on the ways in which pop culture informs the teaching of law. As Michael Asimow and Ticien Sassoubre, the editors of the Symposium, explain, the essays are organized into three sections. The first section's essays discuss the use of images in teaching law school classes. The essays in the second section discuss how to use images to help students interpret and create their own materials. The third set of essays discusses courses that focus on the law and pop culture course as a sub-discipline.

Here's a link to the issue, and the PDFs of the content. 

Law Text Culture: Call For Proposals @popgoesthelegal @law_text

Law Text Culture: Call for Proposals for Volume 24 (2020), due May 1, 2019 

The Editorial Board of Law Text Culture is seeking proposals for the 2020 edition of the Journal (Volume 24), due for publication in December 2020.

Law Text Culture is a transcontinental, peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal which aims to produce fresh insights and knowledges about law and jurisprudence across three interconnected axes:

Politics: engaging the relationship of force and resistance

Aesthetics: eliciting the relationship of judgment and expression

Ethics: exploring the relationship of self and other.

The annual thematic special issue, curated by guest editors, is selected by the editorial board. Each issue explores its theme across a range of genres, with scholarly essays and articles sitting alongside visual and literary engagements. In this way, Law Text Culture excites unique intersectional and interdisciplinary encounters with law in all its forms.

Proposals by potential guest editors should include: a concise description of the proposed theme; a draft call for papers setting out the aims and concepts of the issue; and how it fits within the remit of the journal; an indication of the intended authors and how they are to be identified/contacted (eg whether the proposal arises out of a seminar series, conference or workshop); the range of genres (poetry, scholarly essays, visual arts etc) expected to be included; an explanation of how the copy-editing will be completed, including whether the guest editor/s will secure appropriate funding for copy-editing (usually approx $1000), or undertake the copy-editing themselves; and brief details of the guest editor(s).

Proposals should be 1000 words (approx) and should be emailed to the Managing Editor by close of business 1 May 2019.

For further information, including the role of guest editors, and the journal style guide, please visit: LTC at LIRC. Details on the editors and themes of previous editions of Law Text Culture are available at: UOW Research Online. Associate Professor Cassandra Sharp Managing Editor Law Text Culture School of Law, University of Wollongong NSW Email: csharp@uow.edu.au

A Blog Devoted To Strange Tales of Crime @HorribleSanity

If you enjoy odd tales of crime and death, check out the very entertaining blog Strange Company, devoted to the weird and the macabre. Your host is Undine, who also maintains The World of Edgar Allan Poe. Follow her on Twitter @HorribleSanity.

Funny, Funny Judges @laphamsquart

Lapham's Quarterly offers this selection of interesting footnotes from cases, some well-known, some obscure. Included is a Ninth Circuit case that introduces the phrase, "Holy Copyright Law, Batman!" to the legal lexicon, and a cite to "Who Let the Dogs Out?" with the wry comment from Judge Philip S. Straniere that although the song "allegedly has nothing to do with canines[,] ...I have not been able to understand the lyrics to any song written since the Fillmore East closed, I have appropriated the title solely to make a point and will ignore the content of the song."

Strong Female Characters On Television: Is the Message That the Battle For Gender Equality Is Over?

From BBC News: Strong women in leading roles on British TV, like Bodyguard's Anne Sampson (played by Gina McKee), and Killing Eve's Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) and Villanelle (Jodie Comer),  send the message that sexism in society is no longer a problem, according to Victoria screenwriter Daisy Goodwin.

Good Dad @washingtonpost

Sonia Rao discusses the emergence of the caring, sensitive father in popular culture, here, for the Washington Post (subscription may be required). 

van Geffen on Gender and Racial Identity in the Star Trek Universe @hannaaahhxx @UniLeiden

Hannah van Geffen has published Gender and Racial Identity in Star Trek; Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Discovery (Master's thesis, University of Leiden, 2018).

ABA Journal's 25 Greatest Legal Movies @ABAJournal

From the ABA Journal: The 25 Greatest Legal Movies: Expanding the Boundaries. This story follows on 2008's The 25 Greatest Legal Movies (disclosure: I was one of the judges for that story). 

New From Routledge: Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture @routledgebooks @thomgiddens

New from Routledge: Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture: From Crime Fighting Robots to Duelling Pocket Monsters (Ashley Pearson, Thomas Giddens, and Kieran Tranter, eds., 2018). Here's a description of the book's contents.

In a world of globalised media, Japanese popular culture has become a significant fountainhead for images, narrative, artefacts, and identity. From Pikachu, to instantly identifiable manga memes, to the darkness of adult anime, and the hyper-consumerism of product tie- ins, Japan has bequeathed to a globalised world a rich variety of ways to imagine, communicate, and interrogate tradition and change, the self, and the technological future. Within these foci, questions of law have often not been far from the surface: the crime and justice of Astro Boy; the property and contract of Pokémon; the ecological justice of Nausicaä; Shinto’s focus on order and balance; and the anxieties of origins in J- horror. This volume brings together a range of global scholars to reflect on and critically engage with the place of law and justice in Japan’s popular cultural legacy. It explores not only the global impact of this legacy, but what the images, games, narratives, and artefacts that comprise it reveal about law, humanity, justice, and authority in the twenty-first century. 

 

e twenty-first century.

Do You Teach Criminal Law Using Pop Culture? If So, Here's a Publication Opportunity

For a book that is being published later this year by Carolina Academic Press, I am looking for someone to write a short chapter (2,500 words or so) on using movies and TV shows to teach criminal law.  The catch is that the deadline for the chapter is August 15 (the person who was supposed to do this chapter unexpectedly bowed out, hence the reason I am now looking for a fill-in).  However, as the chapter is a “how to” with few footnotes, I think someone could write this piece relatively quickly. If you are interested, please contact me at ccorcos@lsu.edu 

Anne Marie McElroy Examines Canada's Former Supreme Court Chief Justice's First Legal Thriller @McElroy_Law @simonschuster

Anne Marie McElroy checks out the law in former Canadian Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin's first novel Full Disclosure (Simon & Schuster, 2018) and gives her verdict on her blog, McElroy Blog, here.

Ms. McElroy points out some inaccuracies, such as that under Canadian law, there's no right to have an attorney present during police interrogation, or that in a first degree murder case, bail is not a simple matter. Other criticisms also seem tied to substantive criminal law. Perhaps Justice McLachlin wasn't a criminal lawyer before going on the bench? (She was a law professor at UBC). But Ms McElroy concludes that "Despite my whining about some creative liberties taken by the author, Full Disclosure was actually a fun read. It included some subtle commentary on sexism in the profession and delays in the courts, and presents a smart protagonist and an engaging plot. And while some have said that the character of Jilly Truitt is based on Marie Henein, I know a lot of spunky thirty-something female defence lawyers who could have just as easily inspired this story, and will hopefully inspire more entertaining (and legally accurate) stories to come."  NB: Marie Henein is a leading Canadian criminal defense lawyer. 

Sounds good to me. Full disclosure: I'm ordering the book. 

Davies on A Grand Game Introduction, or the Rise and Demise of "Sherlock Holmes"

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School; The Green Bag, has published A Grand Game Introduction, or the Rise and Demise of 'Sherlock Holmes' at 2 The Newspapers 25 (2018). Here is the abstract.

On April 12, 1904, “Sherlock Holmes” became a registered trademark of Parker Brothers, one of the biggest makers of card games, board games, and the like in the United States. Of course, that did not mean that Parker Brothers controlled the great man’s name outright. Rather, it meant the U.S. Patent Office had granted the company the right to use the name in the category of “games played with cards.” According to the official report of the registration, Parkers Brothers had been using the words “Sherlock Holmes” in connection with “games played with cards” since February 15, 1904. To the best of my knowledge, that settles the incept date of the first Sherlockian game. (A few days later, Parker Brothers also completed its copyright registration of “Rules for the playing the game of Sherlock Holmes.”) “Sherlock Holmes” suffered a quick fade, at least when compared to some of its contemporaries in Parker Brothers product line. (“Rook” for example, was introduced in 1906 and is still popular today, while “Ping-Pong,” introduced in 1902, has become a generic term for table tennis.) Why was “Sherlock Holmes” so short-lived and then so thoroughly forgotten? Here are two possibilities to consider. First, Parker Brothers may have run into intellectual property problems, despite its trademark and copyright registrations. Second, maybe “Sherlock Holmes” turned out to be a not-very-grand game. Indeed, its defects may well have been obvious to its creators from day one, or close to it. Parker Brothers completed its copyright registration of “Rules for the playing the game of Sherlock Holmes” on April 18, 1904, and a mere five months later the company was back, copyrighting “improved” rules for the game on September 23. This despite the fact that George Parker, the chief game developer for the company, “still played every Parker game over and over again himself, with employees, family and friends to make certain that every wrinkle was ironed out, that confusion was eliminated and that “actual playing qualities” were excellent. Even though he was the very busy head of a good-sized business, he personally wrote the rules for every game the company produced, working over them evening after evening to clarify and simplify them.”

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Maillard on Hollywood Loving @noblemaillard

Kevin Noble Maillard, Syracuse University College of Law, is publishing Hollywood Loving in volume 86 of the Fordham Law Review (2018). Here is the abstract.

In this Essay, I highlight how nongovernmental entities establish political, moral, and sexual standards through visual media, which powerfully underscores and expresses human behavior. Through the Motion Picture Production Code (the “Hays Code”) and the Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters (the “TV Code”), Americans viewed entertainment as a pre-mediated, engineered world that existed outside of claims of censorship and propaganda. This Essay critically examines the role of film and television as persuasive and integral legal actors and it considers how these sectors operate to maintain, and sometimes challenge, racial order.

Download the Essay from SSRN at the link.

Corcos on Some Popular Culture Images of AI In Humanity's Courtroom @LSULawCenter @SavLawRev

Christine A. Corcos, Louisiana State University Law Center, is publishing ‘I Am the Master’: Some Popular Culture Images of AI in Humanity’s Courtroom in the Savannah Law Review (2018), as part of the symposium Rise of the Automatons. Here is the abstract.

Both serious literature and popular culture are flooding us with discussions of the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As we note the rise of the subject of robot law and particularly the question of whether AI could possibly become sentient we begin to take seriously concerns about the regulation of the use of robots and the possibility that AI might pose a threat to the physical safety and privacy of human beings. In particular, we are beginning to wonder how we might control this new technology, which seems both more intelligent and more powerful than human beings. Suppose unethical or negligent programmers create situations in which AI escapes human controls and thus contravenes human norms or rules? Can we bring that AI to account? Ought we to do so, particularly if that AI is sentient or approaches sentience? At first, we might think that the answer should be “yes,” because after all we have created the AI and we should continue to control it. But the question is, I would submit, more complicated. We have created computers and robots as useful tools, but we have continued to develop them as far more — as devices that far outstrip our own capacities to decipher the mysteries of the Universe. If we deliberately endow them with characteristics that mimic our own, if they develop those independently, or develop others by analogy allowing them to function in ways that mirror human activities, can we continue to insist that we should treat them as property and that they should do our bidding? If at some point, they make some demand for the right not to follow commands that we issue, for whatever reason, ought we to ignore that demand? Novelists, filmmakers, and other artists who create popular culture have already considered this question for decades, if not centuries. In this Article, I discuss some of the ways in which some of them have thought about these issues and the insights they have had, which could guide us as we move through this important area.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

See other articles in this symposium:  Brian L. Frye, The Lion, the Bat, & the Thermostat,  Philip Segal, Legal Jobs in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Moving From Today's Limited Universe of Data Toward the Great Beyond.

Thomas Giddens, On Comics and Legal Aesthetics (Routledge, 2018) @ThomGiddens @LawDundee @routledgebooks

Thomas Giddens, St. Mary's University, Twickenham, and soon to be at Dundee Law School, has published On Comics and Legal Aesthetics: Multimodality and the Haunted Mask of Knowing (Routledge, 2018). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

What are the implications of comics for law? Tackling this question, On Comics and Legal Aesthetics explores the epistemological dimensions of comics and the way this once-maligned medium can help think about – and reshape – the form of law. Traversing comics, critical, and cultural legal studies, it seeks to enrich the theorisation of comics with a critical aesthetics that expands its value and significance for law, as well as knowledge more generally. It argues that comics’ multimodality – its hybrid structure, which represents a meeting point of text, image, reason, and aesthetics – opens understanding of the limits of law’s rational texts by shifting between multiple frames and modes of presentation. Comics thereby exposes the way all forms of knowledge are shaped out of an unstructured universe, becoming a mask over this chaotic ‘beyond’. This mask of knowing remains haunted – by that which it can never fully capture or represent. Comics thus models knowledge as an infinity of nested frames haunted by the chaos without structure. In such a model, the multiple aspects of law become one region of a vast and bottomless cascade of perspectives – an infinite multiframe that extends far beyond the traditional confines of the comics page, rendering law boundless.

Immortalize Those Peeps! Enter the ABA's Peeps in Law Contest @ABAJournal @Molly_McDonough @Stranger_Things

ICYMI:

They're not just for eating: use those marshmallow peeps to express your legal connection to the Upside Down. Enter the ABA's Peeps in Law contest. From the ABA Journal's website;

Those delightful marshmallow treats from Just Born aren't just for eating anymore. They now come in so many shapes and sizes that there are full sites devoted to honoring the beloved candy.
Our whimsical annual contests include diorama galleries created by our readers, highlighting legal stories, places and ideas with sugary sweet Peeps as the main characters.
Our rules are as follows: Create a law-related diorama with Peeps, take a photo of the diorama and send the photo (JPG, GIF or PNG) to peeps[at]abajournal[dot]com by 11:59 p.m. Central Time on Sunday, March 25, 2018. Include a title of the diorama, how you would like to be identified, and a short (no more than 150 words) description. ABA Journal staff will select finalists, looking for creative expression of legal themes. Finalists will be posted online for readers to vote for their favorites. Winners will be announced on April 2, 2018. The ABA is not responsible for late, lost, or misdirected entries, or for computer errors or technical failures.
By submitting a photo, you are acknowledging that you understand and agree to the ABA’s Terms of Use available at http://www.americanbar.org/utility/terms.html and the Fine Print Rules below. In addition, by submitting a photo you also agree to allow the ABA Journal to reprint your photo and description in all forms of media at any time. Individual email addresses will not be posted. 

More here, including all the legalese. Hey, they're lawyers. And check out prior Peeps in Law contests, including 2017 Peeps in Law: Rogue Peep, 2016 Peeps in Law: Peep Wars, and 2015 Peeps in Law: Game of Peeps. The contest began in 2009.

I'm looking forward to future Peeps in Law contests. Maybe Peeps in Law: Host Peeps (Westworld) or Peeps in Law: The Good Peeps (The Good Fight).

The Serial Killer in Popular Culture @bucketorange

Bucket Orange magazine discusses how television portrays serial killers and criminal profiling. Here's the link.

More about serial killers and tv here, from Garin Pirnia at Complex, and here, some information about the serial killer trope, from TV Tropes.

Paste Magazine offers a list of memorial serial killers here. And here, a 2013 article from The Hollywood Reporter about our interest in the subject.

Here, a selected bibliography:

Jane Caputi, The New Founding Fathers: The Lore and Lure of the Serial Killer in Contemporary Culture, 13 Journal of American Culture 1 (1990).

Brian Jarvis, Monsters, Inc.: Serial Killers and Consumer Culture, Crime, Media, and Culture (2007).

David Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture (Routledge, 1998).

Philip L. Simpson, Psycho Paths (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).

An Interesting Twitter Feed: @PopDetective

A twitter feed to follow: @PopDetective. @PopDetective is run by Jonathan McIntosh, who creates video essays about pop culture. More below.

WELCOME TO THE POP CULTURE DETECTIVE AGENCY! A series of critical video essays looking at media through a critical lens with an emphasis on the intersections of politics, masculinity and entertainment.

ABOUT THE PROJECT This video essay series primarily focuses on examining the representations of masculinity that we see embedded in movies, television, comic books and video games. The messages pop culture sends to men and boys about our own manhood are often both limiting and harmful. The critical analysis I use is inspired by both sociology and feminist theory. My hope is that this video series can open up conversations about how we, as a society, can work to achieve more constructive, cooperative and empathetic forms of masculinity.

Mr. McIntosh also curates the twitter feed @radicalbytes.