Grade(d) Books

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Ms. Mentor (Emily Toth) provides her annual list of "Ackies" (academic novels) for your consideration. Top of the list is Isaac Asimov's "Foundation." In all of the entries--lots of legal issues. Ms. Mentor challenges you to evaluate the entries, or come up with your own candidates, and to send her suggestions for next year's list.

As an alternative, write your own "Ackie." A journey can begin with a single step, and a novel can begin with a single sentence. 

The Metaphorics of Copyright

Simon Stern, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, has published 'Room for One More': The Metaphorics of Physical Space in the Eighteenth-Century Copyright Debate in volume 24 of Law and Literature (Summer 2012).

This article focuses on literary texts and writings by copyright polemicists – those arguing for and against stronger copyright protection during the eighteenth century. The metaphor of the text as a tract of land has been cited by other commentators on copyright history, but has not been examined closely. Working through a series of writings on imitation and derivative use, the article shows how the metaphor seemed initially to provide an ideal basis for demanding stronger copyright protection and for policing piracy and derivative uses more aggressively, but turned out, in some writers’ hands, to offer yet another means of portraying the literary marketplace as endlessly expansive. Henry Fielding, in his literary journalism, insisted that there was always “room for one more” even in a crowded marketplace, and he invoked a series of legal doctrines to defend the practice of intercommoning and even poaching on a “neighbour” writer’s land. Far from dictating a particular view of the law, the metaphors of copyright are always capable of being revised and reinterpreted to support the writer’s own perspective.

Download the abstract from SSRN at the link. 

Insanity and Dostoevsky's "The Double"

Amy Ronner, St. Thomas University School of Law, has published Does Golyadkin Really Have a Double? Dostoevsky Debunks the Mental Capacity and Insane Delusion Doctrines at 40 Capital University Law Review 195 (2012). Here is the abstract.

In Dostoevsky's "The Double," one of the great, but lesser known Russian novels, protagonist Golyadkin suddenly meets his identical twin, who ostensibly wreaks havoc on his life.
While "The Double" appears to have nothing to do with the law of wills and trusts and has not been redacted into any law school case book, I now suggest what might irritate some staunch traditionalists -- namely that Dostoyevsky should claim an entire chapter on the mental capacity doctrine. It is this article's narrow thesis that "The Double" debunks, or, at least sheds doubt, on some basic mental capacity and insane delusion concepts. On a broader level, this article, diveded into four parts, explores Dostoevsky's proposition that in many cases, we (as lawyers or mere mortals) are incapable of determining unsound mind and insane delusions.
Part II focuses on wills and trusts because it boasts of having a sacrosanct policy in favor of testamentary freedom. Despite that policy's stronghold, courts have in some cases limited or eradicated a decedent's ability to direct the disposition of property upon death. One instance is where contestants argue lack of mental capacity or use a doctrine called "insane delusion" or "monomania" to invalidate estate plans that either omit them entirely or slight them as beneficiaries. Although in wills' law, sound mind and insane delusion are legal constructs, this article, borrowing from the psychiatric definitions of "bizarre" and "non-bizarre" delusions, cordons them to Dostoevsky's message in "The Double."
Part III, shifting from law to literature, summarizes the story in "The Double" and the raging debate over not just the novel's meaning, but also Golyadkin's mental condition. This part suggests that the controversy surrounding this novel belies the fact that in "The Double" we cannot ascertain what is real and what is hallucination. This part, linking Dostoevsky's thesis to the current mental capacity doctrines, suggests that Golyadkin, like many testators, would baffle our courts if his psyche were under the will-contest microscope. In fact, the uncertainty in "The Double" resembles the disquieting dubiousness of such contests, particularly in litigation in which individuals are alleged to have "non-bizarre" delusions. This part goes further than just complaining, however, but, taking a stab at a solution, proposes the sort of doctrinal revamping, which would heed Dostoevsky's wise admonition.
Part IV concludes by revisiting the one (or two Golyadkins) who disclose(s) the most deleterious effect of our current capacity law and demonstrates why it is so crucial to make change.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Ray Bradbury Dies

Ray Bradbury, author of such sf classics as "Fahrenheit 451" and "The Illustrated Man," has died aged 91. His work, which included the collection "The Martian Chronicles," made into a 1980 miniseries starring Rock Hudson and Gayle Hunnicutt, made science fiction fans out of many readers who would otherwise never have read such fare. More here from the New York Times.

Selected bibliography on law and sf in Ray Bradbury's works:

Smolla, Rodney A., Classic Revisited: The Life of the Mind and a Life of Meaning: Reflections on Fahrenheit 451, 107 Mich. L. Rev. 895 (April 2009).

Law and Poetry

Alexandra J. Roberts has published Constructing a Canon of Law-Related Poetry: Reviewing David Kader & Michael Stanford, Eds., 'Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present' (2010) at 90 Texas Law Review 1507 (2012). Here is the abstract.

Law and poetry make a potent, if surprising, pair. Poetry thrives on simultaneity and open-endedness, while legal writing aspires to resolve issues decisively, whether it advocates or adjudges. The law and literature movement has traditionally focused either on law as literature, applying literary theory and techniques to legal texts such as judicial opinions and legislation, or law in literature, i.e., law as portrayed in literary and artistic works. Poetry and poetics have garnered relatively little attention under either approach. While some scholars blame that omission on a supposed dearth of law-related poetry, the poems collected in Kader and Stanford's "Poetry of the law: From Chaucer to the Present" (2010) belie that claim. This essay considers the place of poetry in legal studies and advocates incorporating it into both the dialogue and the curriculum of the law and literature movement. It identifies themes that emerge from the juxtaposition of the poems in the anthology, examines the relationship of fixed-verse forms to law in the poems, and draws attention to those voices that are underrepresented in the collection and the movement. It relies primarily on the process of close reading several of the hundred poems included in "Poetry of the Law" and, in so doing, it practices law in literature while it models precisely the type of critical approach that would serve those participating in the study of law as literature. It prescribes a canon of law-related poetry and illustrates how the inclusion of poems and techniques of poetic interpretation stand to benefit students, lawyers, and theorists alike.

Download the book review from SSRN at the link.

Infanticide In Montreal

Ian C. Pilarczyk, Boston University School of Law, has published 'So Foul a Deed': Infanticide in Montreal, 1825-1850, at 30 Law & History Review 575 (May 2012). Here is the abstract.

This article argues that infanticide, and the legal and social responses thereto, exhibited a compromise between conflicting sentiments, realities, and paradigms. As a result, the actions of defendants, prosecutors, judges and jurors, and the public at large were characterized by competing motives and countervailing sympathies. The infant victims were nominally the focus of the law, but in reality these acts were viewed as crimes against social conventions. The issue of infanticide during this period therefore presents a fascinating study in this heavily gendered area of nineteenth-century criminal law, reflecting stark differences between law and custom. This article will provide a brief discussion of the historiography and underlying methodology, followed by the political and historical context for the Montreal experience, before moving on to the issue of infant abandonment, coroner's inquests, and the legal mechanics of infanticide prosecutions.

From Law and History Review's introduction: "Our final article, by Ian Pilarczyk, examines the phenomenon of infanticide and the legal responses to [it] in Montreal from 1825 to 1850, a period marked by significant economic, social, political, and legal flux. Working with thirty-one unpublished case files of infanticide, he illustrates that the legal and social ramifications of this heavily gendered crime were characterized by complexity, compromise, and conflict. He finds that the Canadian response largely mirrored that of other nineteenth-century Western jurisdictions. This finding suggests that local context matters, but should also remind scholars to consider the significance of transnational patterns in policing."

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Law and Humanities, Summer 2012 Issue, Just Published

The Summer issue of Law and Humanities (just published) includes the following:

Editorial by Paul Raffield and Gary Watt

free to view – please click on the link below:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/hart/lawhum/2012/00000006/00000001/art00001

Articles

Between the Nihilism of the Young and the Positivism of the Old: Justice and the Novel in DH Lawrence

Desmond Manderson

Screening the Law in China: Law, Image and Evidence in Three Documentaries on HIV/AIDS Cases by Ai Xiaoming

Marco Wan

Carry On Up the Aisle!

Rebecca Probert

Edmund Spenser and Chancery in 1597

Andrew Hadfield and Simon Healy

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Law

Ben Herzberger

Comics, Law, and Aesthetics: Towards the Use of Graphic Fiction in Legal Studies

Thomas Giddens

Continuing Professional Education in Legal Ethics through Literature: An Example Using Dickens’s Bleak House

Kieran Dolin

Reviews

Christine L Krueger, Reading for the Law: British Literary History and Gender Advocacy

Austin Sarat, Cathrine Frank and Matthew Anderson (eds), Teaching Law and Literature

Audun Kjus, Stories at Trial

ONLINE ACCESS

To access this issue online, read the abstracts and purchase individual papers please click here:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/hart/lawhum/2012/00000006/00000001;jsessionid=5k5rc8ji04oih.alice

Information furnished by Jo Ledger, Hart Publishing

Nasty Popular Culture Attorney Association, General Division

Greedy Associates (Findlaw.com) nominates three fictional lawyers, Tom Hagen ("The Godfather"), John Milton ("The Devil's Advocate"), and Maurice Levy ("The Wire") as the most evil attorneys ever. Criteria? Corruption, immorality, and all-around nastiness (without redeeeming social value, of course). Which lawyers are your candidates for Most Evil Fictional Advocates Of All Time?

The History of Mandatory Copyright In Palestine and Israel

Michael Birnhack, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law, has published Mandatory Copyright: From Pre-Palestine to Israel, 1910-2007, in A Shifting Empire: 100 Years of the Copyright Act 1911 (Uma Suthersanan & Ysolde Gendreau eds.; Edward Elgar, 2012, forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

The development of copyright law in Mandate Palestine and then Israel during the past century is a story of gradual absorption of a foreign concept, constantly searching for direction and guidance, slowly distancing itself from the original British roots. Copyright law was imposed first by the Ottomans (1910) and then by the British (1920, 1924), but both foreign transplants were premature for some time. Foreign players and technological developments were instrumental in the initial integration of copyright. Later on and more so in its new status as an Israeli law, the legal (trans)plant took a life of its own: although emerging from British sources, it was affected by international commitments, Continental notions of authors' rights, then by American utilitarian-instrumentalist concepts, and finally by the reconceptionalisation of copyright as a subject of global trade, all mixed up with various original Israeli additions. Thus, current Israeli copyright law is a complex patch-work. Here I retell these developments as a story of an on-going search for theoretical and legal guidance. The discussion offers a case study of legal transplants, by providing a legal-historical discussion of copyright law in one particular region.
The discussion begins with the Ottoman and British copyright laws, and then surveys copyright law since the establishment of Israel (1948). I trace the continental impact on the law and then a growing tendency towards Americanisation, culminating in the Copyright Act 2007, with a fair use regime.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Rudolph P. Byrd, Paul Fussell Pass From the Scene

Two recent losses in academe. Rudolph P. Byrd of Emory University passed away in October 2011. Audrey Williams focuses on the impact his work and teaching had on students, colleagues, and the larger world here. On May 23, Paul Fussell died. Jay Winter pays tribute here.

Selected Byrd Bibliography

I Call Myself an Artist: Writings By and About Charles Johnson (1999).
Jean Toomer's Years With Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artist (2010).
Traps: African-American Men on Gender and Sexuality (2001).
The World Has Changed: Conversations With Alice Walker (2011).

Selected Fussell Bibliography

Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1982).
Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1992).
The Great War and Modern Memory: 25th anniversary edition (2000).
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1990).

The Origins of Law and Culture

Robin Bradley Kar, University of Illinois College of Law, has published On the Early Eastern Origins of Western Law and Western Civilization: New Arguments for a Changed Understanding of Our Earliest Legal and Cultural Origins (Part 1) (Part 2) and (Part 3), in the University of Illinois Law Review. Here is the abstract for Part 1.

Western law and Western civilization are often said to be parts of a distinctive tradition, which differentiates them from their counterparts in the “East” and explains many of their special capacities and characteristics. One common version of this story, as propounded by the influential legal scholar Harold Berman, asserts that Western civilization (including its incipient legal traditions) began in the 11th century AD with a return to the texts of three more primordial traditions: those of ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel. The basic story that Western civilization finds its origins in ancient Greek, Roman, and Hebrew culture is, however, so familiar and so pervasive that it has rarely — until recently — been questioned in the West.
This Article develops a novel set of arguments, rooted in recent findings from a broad range of cognate fields, to suggest that this standard story is nevertheless incomplete and even potentially misleading. If we are genuinely interested in understanding our origins in a way that will shed light on why the West has exhibited such distinctive capacities for large-scale human civilization and the rule of law, then the story we commonly tell ourselves starts abruptly in the middle and leaves out some of the most formative (and potentially transformative) dimensions of the truth. Western law and Western civilization are not just the outgrowths of three particularly creative cultures, which straddled the transition from human prehistory into human history and developed in either Southeastern Europe or the Near East. Rather, the West appears to be descended from a much deeper cultural tradition, which extends all the way back to some of our first human forays out of hunter-gatherer modes of subsistence and into settled agricultural living. The tradition in question began not in Greece, Rome, or Israel, however, but rather in and around the Indus Valley — which is a region that spans the Northwestern portions of the Indian subcontinent.
From approximately 4500 BC until approximately 1900 BC — and hence long before the rise of ancient Greece, Rome or Israel — the Indus Valley region gave rise to one of the very first large scale civilizations in our natural history as a species: the so-called “Harappan” Civilization. This civilization was also part of a much larger and highly integrated social complex, with strong ties to ancient Bactria and the eastern parts of modern day Iran. (Because this region does not correspond to contemporary political boundaries, I call it the "Eastern-Iran-Bactria-Indus-Valley" Region.) In this Article, I argue that this ancient socio-cultural complex is most likely the actual source of a range of important Western traditions. Through an unbroken chain of cultural transmission that has operated through an immense number of generations, we have likely inherited an important set of traditions from this ancient socio-cultural complex, which have specially equipped us to produce and sustain large-scale civilizations with the rule of law. If this is true, then our failure to understand our deep genealogical relationship to this ancient socio-cultural complex has limited our self-understanding in critical respects. It has also prevented us from realizing useful aspects of our traditions — including, in some cases, those aspects that make our current traditions in the West so capable of supporting large-scale human civilizations with the rule of law.
We live in an era in which it is, moreover, especially important to decipher the deepest origins of Western law and civilization. Scholars within the emerging “legal origins” tradition (e.g., Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny) have now produced an impressive body of empirical work, which suggests that we can explain a broad range of features of modern societies in terms of the origins of their laws. This literature suggests that legal origin variables can have strong effects on issues as diverse as corporate governance structure, labor regulations, the robustness of capital markets, and even literacy and infant mortality rates.
The present Article argues that this literature may nevertheless be working with legal origin variables that fail to track our deepest and most genuine lines of relevant descent. After developing a special methodology to discern the relevant genealogical facts, I use this methodology to propose a new (and fundamentally changed) account of the most plausible phylogenetic structure of the Indo-European legal family (including the socio-cultural traditions needed to support legal systems, along with the special psychological attitudes that animate these traditions). This novel account traces many of the most important developments of this family of traditions deep into human prehistory. A proper understanding of this new family tree should have important empirical implications: this work can, for example, be used to help explain why certain exportations of Western-style legal institutions have worked so well while others have not. Inquiries of this kind should have special urgency today, given the massive exportations of Western law and Western legal institutions to so many other parts of the world and given the increased pressures toward westernization that are being felt around the globe.
The origins story that I develop in this Article should, however, also have broader implications for a much wider range of cognate fields, which have typically presumed a primarily Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian origin for key developments in the West. The revised origins story that I will be telling should therefore be of more general human concern. 

Download the articles from SSRN at the links. 

Barthes, Deconstructed

The New York Times's Sam Anderson on a new, and complete, translation of Roland Barthes's Mythologies.

Henry's Man In Rome

One of the less known, and less understood, stories about Henry VIII's "great matter" is exactly how the king and his advisors pursued the issue of an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon before the authorities at the Vatican. Henry could certainly be a tenacious, single-minded, and supremely selfish man, and the way in which he held on, for years, to the idea that he could have both his annulment and continued (fairly) amicable relations with her nephew Charles V, demonstrates all these qualities. How, though, did the actual negotiations proceed? Who carried out the instructions to secure the termination of Henry's relationship to his first wife? Who was Henry's "man in Rome"?

In Henry's Man In Rome (Palgrave, 2012), Catherine Fletcher investigates the identity and the activities of Gregorio Casali,who gets only an occasional mention in the literature of the time. She also illuminates the reasons for the ultimate failure of his delicate mission, which is part of an event that set in motion the establishment of a new church and led to the birth of a great queen. She introduces us not only to the work of a forgotten Italian diplomat of the period, but to the very sensitive activities of an emissary entrusted with a delicate matter such as the disentangling of a royal marriage and a diplomatic alliance. She also depicts life in the Rome of the early to mid 1500s (sometimes none too glamorous or safe, even for the wealthy). Casali's brother, a man "young, virtuous, and lovable, and not little esteemed by His Holiness," according to a member of the Mantuan diplomatic corps, is murdered in 1533.

A meticulously written and exciting look behind the scenes of Henry VIII's attempt to obtain that dissolution of his fateful marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and a worthy addition to the shelf of Renaissance biography and history.

[Based on an advance review copy of Catherine Fletcher, Henry's Man in Rome, Palgrave, 2012. British title:  The Divorce of Henry VIII. Copy courtesy of the publisher].

George V, Come Into the Court!

Robin Callender Smith, University of London, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Law, has published The Missing Witness? George V, Competence and Compellability and the Criminal Libel Trial of Edward Frederick Mylius. Here is the abstract.

A criminal libel trial in 1911 set the monarch against one of his subjects. Edward Mylius repeated a rumour that accused King George V of marrying Queen Mary when – secretly – the King had already married someone else and had three children. The criminal charge, the process used to bring the issue to court, the advice to the King of the relevant Ministers (including Winston Churchill as Home Secretary) and the trial itself stretched the boundaries of fairness. The legacy of the trial created a lingering problem. Can the monarch ever be required to face the direct scrutiny of examination by being required to appear as a witness in his or her own court to support a personal complaint?

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Nineteenth Century Novelists and Crime

Elizabeth Burney, University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology, has published Crime and Criminology in the Eye of the Novelist: Trends in Nineteenth Century Literature at 51 Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 160 (2012). Here is the abstract.

Many leading novelists of the 19th Century were deeply concerned with crime and its causes, reflecting concerns of the period and often raising ideas which find resonance with modern criminological theories. The structural causes of crime; the negative effect of ill‐treatment and harsh punishment; labelling theory; the possibility of redemption and desistance; the ingrained flaws in individual characters which result in a propensity to crime and deviance, enhanced by bad influences and criminogenic environments; the social pressures (labelled ‘strain theory’ by criminologists) which drive outsiders to gain wealth and status by illegitimate means – all these can be found in fiction of the period. This article takes examples from English, French and Russian literature to illustrate these themes. The article also links fiction to the development of perceptions about crime and criminals as the century progressed.

The full text is not available from SSRN. 

The Lawyer As Trickster 2.0

John Denvir, University of San Francisco School of Law, has revised his work "Guile is Good: The Lawyer as Trickster." The original was a top ten download in several categories. The revision is available here from SSRN. Here is the original abstract.

What is the lawyer’s genius — the talent that distinguishes us from other professions? Movies and television suggest that it is more than legal knowledge and technical skills; it is the way lawyers use creativity and cunning to outwit their adversaries. Lawyers in films and television act much like the Trickster figure in mythology and folklore. Moreover, study of the professional lives of the best real life lawyers reveals these same trickster talents. The paper argues that lawyers should embrace the trickster identity because it celebrates the valuable contributions lawyers make to the public good.

Interpreting Nat Turner's "Confessions"

Christopher L. Tomlins, University of California, Irvine School of Law, has published Demonic Ambiguities: Enchantment and Disenchantment in Nathaniel Turner’s Virginia as IC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2012-22. Here is the abstract.

This paper conjoins three texts – the “Confessions of Nat Turner,” Walter Benjamin’s “Capitalism as Religion,” and Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation.” Benjamin and Weber provide interpretive prisms through which to examine Turner’s confession. Though quite unlike each other, each glances at the demonic – a matter of some significance when one considers the meaning of the “full faith and credit” held due the decision of the Southampton (Virginia) County Court to hang Turner for his attempted 1831 slave rebellion. Like guilt/debt, the dual meanings of Schuld that, for Benjamin, confirmed the existence of a religious – specifically a Christian – structure in capitalism, the conjunction of faith and credit has its own demonic ambiguity, simultaneously sacralizing (faith) and secularizing (credit) the authority of the law. In capitalism as religion and as law, these demonic ambiguities fuse together in an overwhelming simultaneity that is at once economic and juridical, moral and psychological, profane and sacral. This simultaneity – and Turner’s attempt to disrupt it – is the paper’s chief concern.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Harry's Law Cancelled

NBC has cancelled the David E. Kelley legal drama "Harry's Law," starring Kathy Bates as former corporate attorney turned street lawyer Harriet Korn. The series ran for two seasons.

A Law and Pop Culture Research Guide

The Law Library staff at IIT's Chicago-Kent College of Law maintains a Law and Popular Research Guide, and updates it regularly. Check it out here.

The Finalists In the Harper Lee Prize Winner Contest

Vote for this year's Harper Lee Prize winner here. (From the ABA's Journal's blog).  In the running: Michael Connelly's The Fifth Witness; Robert Dugoni's Murder One; David Ellis's Breach of Trust.

Baby, Esquire

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

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

 Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Feminism and the Museum

Yxta Maya Murray, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, has published Feminist Engagement and the Museum in volume 1 of the British Journal of American Legal Studies (2012). Here is the abstract.

One day in the summer of 2011, Los Angeles law professor Yxta Maya Murray visited the Tate Britain and was shocked to see there Cathy Wilkes' installation (We are) pro-choice, a phantasmagoria involving a "weeping" naked mannequin sitting on a toilet, as well as a ladder and some banged up kitchenware. Murray gleaned that something feminist was in the offing, but couldn't tell quite what that might be. It seemed evident that Wilkes was making a case that women are miserable in today's brutalist western-capitalist society. However (she wondered), were there any other, more hopeful, conclusions to draw from the work? Pro-choice sent her off on a six-months long adventure of trying to understand this amazing art – intellectual travels that drew her to the lands of French/Bulgarian feminist Julia Kristeva, U.S. legal theorist Drucilla Cornell, and to the strange ways of Irish Wilkes herself. In the resulting essay, Murray asks the following questions: What is this suffering that Wilkes' describes in (We are) pro-choice? How does art help us understand subordination that might be reversed through legal reform? And what kinds of radical changes have to be made to museum law and policy that would allow art institutions to help us liberate the oppressed?

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

The Legal Historian and the Text

Steven Wilf, University of Connecticut School of Law, has published Law/Text/Past at 1 Irvine Law Review 543 (2011). Here is the abstract.

How might legal historians read text? What is particular about their modes of reading as opposed to those employed by readers in other disciplines? This essay will analyze the distinctive features of legal texts such as those stemming from the pervasive reliance upon conventions or boilerplate as part of a bricolage construction, the focus upon legitimizing gestures to official authority, and the normative, almost instrumental nature of many legal texts. While other sorts of texts might be more expressive, statutes, for example, always include a sanction. Drawing upon numerous examples, the paper identifies an expansive array of texts, including extra-official legalism; rituals, procedure, and nonverbal texts; and imagined law. While seeking to provide sharp, analytic definitions of what is a legal text, it will forge a path somewhere between establishing a new dichotomy of text/context and, alternatively, proclaiming that everything is text (il n’y a pas de hors-texte). Without making a fetish of the problem of reading, I underscore the ways text might be chimerical, indeterminate, multivocal, slippery, and generally untrustworthy. Text has come to mean too much and too little.
Let me make clear what this paper is not about — it is not a guide to literary techniques for reading, a meandering meditation on the craft of history, or a manifesto for the importance of close readings. But I will situate the problem of text reading in our own historiographic milieu as legal historians. It is not simply the breakdown of the binary construct of law/society that leads to a more self-conscious understanding of how to read a legal historical text.
Legal history is particularly subject to a postmodern sensibility, which erodes interdisciplinary borders, jurisdictional boundaries, and divisions between official and extra-official justice, and which contributes to disintermediation and the loss of the interpretive monopolies of professional elites.
What is the role of the legal historian in this new world?

Download the full text from SSRN at the link. 

Ideas For Summer Reading

Abebooks.com, the used books search service, offers two interesting collections to examine. Guile and Mischief: Tricksters in Literature is a provocative look at deceivers in fiction and includes titles from folklore, the classics, and novels. 39 Books for a John Buchan Collection pays homage to the lawyer, adventurer, and diplomat who wrote so many thrillers. Buchan's famous The Thirty Nine Steps was recently remade for tv, and stars Rupert Penry-Jones and Lydia Leonard. The Hitchcock adaptation starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll appeared in 1935.

Great reading ideas for the summer.

Conference On Law and Psychoanalysis

An announcement of a conference on law and psychoanalysis, to be held from May 16 to May 18, at the Universidade Federal do Parana (Brazil). Information from our colleague Dr. José Calvo González.

Rhyme Time

An Atlanta attorney may be in trouble after a rhyming email he sent to the special referee in charge of his client's divorce got opposing counsel's dander up. A, Todd Merolla sent a "'60 line poem in a Dec. 23 e-mail that began, "Twas the week before Christmas, in the Matrimonial Part,/ All the creatures were stirring, putting their horse in front of the cart./The fee applications were pending, bills demanding to be paid,/In hopes that Drew's resolve, soon would fade.'" The referee, Frank Schellace, has indicated that the poem didn't annoy him, but he has forwarded it to the grievance committee in charge of lawyer discipline to decide if Mr. Merolla's, um, unorthodox document, crossed a line. More coverage here at the ABA Journal.

Italian Society for Law and Literature Holds Its Fourth Annual Conference

The Italian Society for Law and Literature (ISLL) announces its Fourth National Conference, to be held May31 and June 1st. Here are the flyer and description of the conference. Thanks to José Calvo González, Professor at the University of Malaga, for the information.

The Third International Conference On Law, Translation, and Culture

From Le Cheng, City University of Hong Kong, an announcement concerning the Third International Conference on Law, Translation, and Culture The Third International Conference on Law, Translation and Culture (LTC3) invites researchers of divergent cultural and language backgrounds from different disciplines and across jurisdictions. The themes include but are not limited to the following strands: Strand I: Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) Language for legal purposes Language for sci-tech purposes Language for business purposes Corpus linguistics and LSP Discourse analysis and LSP Strand II: Translation/Interpreting for Specific Purposes (T/ISP) Trainings on legal translators and court interpreters Ethics of legal translators and court interpreters Fundamentals on legal translation and court interpreters Corpus and T/ISP Machine-based specialized translation Strand III: Multiculturalism Legal cultures Business cultures Individual proposals should be submitted to Changmi WANG (wade@zstu.edu.cn) before 30 Nov 2012. Panel proposals should be submitted to Xingcan MENG (xincanmeng87@163.com) and Le Cheng (chengle163@hotmail.com) before 15 Dec 2012. All selected papers (6 pages) will be included in the Proceedings of LTC 2013 to be indexed by CPCI-SSH. Full-length papers based on the presentation are invited to the Special Issues with International Journal of Law, Language & Discourse, andInternational Journal of Legal Translation and Court Interpreting. Important Dates Individual abstract submission: 30 Nov 2012 (300-500 words) Panel proposal submission: 15 Dec 2012 (800-1000 words) Notification of acceptance: 31 Dec 2012 Early-bird registration: 1 -31 Jan 2013 (RMB1,500 /Sterling Pound 150) Full paper submission (6 pages; optional): 31 Mar, 2013 Acceptance of full paper: 30 Apr, 2013 Conference ChairXingcan MENG (Zhejiang Sci-Tech University) ConvenersLe CHENG (City University of Hong Kong)Changmi WANG (Zhejiang Sci-Tech University) OrganizerSchool of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University Co-organizers Multicultural Association of Law and Language RCPCE, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University CTL, City University of Hong Kong   School of Foreign Languages, China University of Political Science and Law Venue Zhejiang Sci-Tech University

Copyright © 2012 Zhejiang Sci-Tech University School of Foreign Languages. All rights reserved.

Errol Morris On Naming

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris discusses "What's In a Name" for the New York Times here, here, and here.

UT's Law and Lawyers In Popular Culture

The University of Texas Law School's Tarlton Law Library staff have reorganized the Law and Lawyers in Popular Culture collection, available here. In addition to links to the library's print and media collection, the materials available include bibliographies of writings on law and literature, film, and popular culture, Marlyn Robinson's "A Brief History of the Legal Thriller," and a section called "Mason and Associates," a bibliography on lawyers on television.

"Scottsboro Boys" Gets Its West Coast Premiere

Coverage here of a San Diego production of the musical Scottsboro Boys, an interpretation of the trial of nine black teenagers accused (and eventually convicted) of the rape of two white women in 1930s Alabama. The production, at the Old Globe in Balboa Park, is the West Coast premiere of Kander and Ebb's musical; it premiered world-wide in 2010 in New York.

Scottsboro Boys is not the first interpretation of the real life story of these nine young men's trial and condemnation. In 1976, NBC broadcast a docudrama, Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys, which starred Arthur Hill as Judge Horton, who set aside the verdict against the defendants. The film generated a famous defamation case by one of the complaining witnesses, Victoria Street.

More on the Scottsboro case from Douglas Linder of UMKC Law here and here.

BBC Plans New Versions of Shakespeare's History Plays

The BBC is broadcasting new versions of four of Shakespeare's plays over the summer: Richard II, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. These versions will feature some of the best (and biggest) names in UK acting, from Jeremy Irons to Patrick Stewart. Mr. Irons will be featured as Henry IV and Mr. Stewart as John of Gaunt. Other big names involved in the productions are John Hurt, David Suchet, and Michelle Dockery. Said Pippa Harris of Neal Street Productions, which is producing the films, "There are so many themes in these four plays which seem fitting to be showcased in this particular year – themes about monarchy, England and politics."

More here from The Guardian.

More On Thucydides, Law, and History

Darien Shanske, University of California, Hastings College of the Law, has published Thucydides and Law: A Response to Leiter. Here is the abstract.

Thucydides is the author of the most harrowing account of societal breakdown in antiquity. Brian Leiter has recently made the provocative claim that Thucydides’s analysis of such breakdowns indicates that morality is of little import in guiding behavior, including legal behavior. Yet Thucydides also narrates events, particularly in Athens, which indicate that something resembling morality can continue to guide action, including legal action, even at the worst of times. Thucydides provides tantalizing clues as to why he narrates events that only sometimes follow the path predicted by Leiter. In particular, Thucydides (accurately) portrays the law that suffuses Athenian life and saves Athens itself as, for the most part, informal and infused with moral concerns. Leiter’s reading of Thucydides is therefore not only limited, but misses implicit arguments that challenge Leiter’s larger realist project.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Thucydides and Law

Darien Shanske, University of California Hastings College of the Law, has published Thucydides and Lawfulness, in Thucydides--A Violent Teacher? History and Its Representations (Georg Rechenauer & Vassiliki Pothou eds; 2011). Here is the abstract.

For the classical Athenians, legitimate law is public and yet usually arises from no person in particular, with the rule-proving exception being the laws that emerge from famous (and often mythical) lawgivers such as Solon. This notion of law that is public, yet indeterminately grounded, though commonly encountered in classical literature (e.g., in the Antigone), is hard to grasp. If the laws of Athens are public and controlled by the demos, both ideas that are central elements of Athenian democratic ideology, then how can it be sensible that the laws often, and often in particularly importance instances, are discussed as having an indistinct provenance? Such a paradoxical notion of law would seem to encourage lawlessness, though in fact what we know about Athens indicates the reverse. The Athenian historian Thucydides provides an exemplary demonstration of the nature of the Athenians’ paradoxical approach to the law. This is surprising. For one thing, Thucydides’ account, like that of other elite authors (like Plato or Aristophanes), seems to emphasize the lawlessness of Athens. Furthermore, at various points Thucydides’ narrative suggests that it is a simple thing to predict when laws will hold and when they will not; in particular, they will not hold in moments of extreme distress. It does not matter if they are ancient or unwritten or public. And yet a close reading of Thucydides demonstrates that lawfulness sometimes obtains even under the worst of circumstances, even and especially in Athens. It may have been surprising to Thucydides, as it seemed to have been to other Athenians and Greeks generally, but in a concrete way the Athenian polis was more resilient and more lawful than perhaps any other (and perhaps precisely because of the intensity of the Athenian attachment to its paradoxical notion of law). This point is easily missed, as there is a lack of an explicit explanation or theoretization of this phenomenon in Thucydides or elsewhere. Moreover, the nature of this insight is not such as to give much comfort or guidance to the would-be political reformer, but the strangeness of this approach only makes it more important.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Leo Tolstoy, Ernest H. Crosby, and Shakespeare

José Calvo González, University of Malaga, has published Lev N. Tolstói & E. H. Crosby:Sobre la geografía de la recepcíon literaria y jurídico-social Tolstiana, con apunte acerca del reformista social norteamericano Ernest Howard Crosby (1856-1907). at 2 Revista Europea de Historia de las Ideas Políticas y de las Instituciones Públicas 87 (February 2012). Here is the abstract.

Geography of the receipt of the work and thought of Tolstoy, presenting his map in Europe, Asia and USA. Interspersed references to the reception among jurists. Particular care in the U.S. figure of Ernest Howard Crosby and his contribution to the spread of tolstoism, and about his criticism and social reform. Recovery and analysis, in line Law and Literature, of one of the texts of Crosby (Shakespeare's attitude toward the working classes, 1903).

The full text is available at the link.

"Crime and Punishment" and False Confessions

Rinat Kitai-Sangero, Academic Center of Law & Buriness, Ramat Gan, Israel, has published Can Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment Help Us Distinguish between True and False Confessions? at 9 Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 231 (2011). Here is the abstract.

Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment is also a story about confessions. Raskolnikov, who committed a double murder, and Nikolay, an innocent suspect, each confesses to the same crime. An analysis of Raskolnikov’s and Nikolay's confession demonstrates the complexity of motives that drive the guilty and the innocent alike to confess and points to the distinction between true and false confessions. Finally this novel supports the conclusion that the accused should be required to provide significant details of the crime as a requirement for relying on his or her confession.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

The Public Uses of Poetry

Tom Clark, Victoria University, has published Public Poeisis: Theorising Contemporary Civic Uses of Poetry in Australia and the United States. Here is the abstract.

Uses of poems and extracts from poems for ceremonial or ritual purposes within civic discourse reveal the inherently aesthetic nature of all political language. We can read in these civil and stately appropriations of poetry a desire for validation or embodiment of the aesthetic qualities of the events they embellish, and of the public and political agendas those events carry. This paper argues that poetry as public language reveals how public language is poetry. It illustrates that proposition by a critical comparison of excerpts from Australia’s annual ANZAC Day dawn service and from the oath of office ceremony for USA President Barack Obama in 2008.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

National Poetry Month

The Gallagher Law Library notes that April is National Poetry Month and devotes a post on its blog to law and poetry here.

Very Assisted Insemination

Kara W. Swanson, Northeastern University School of Law, has published Adultery by Doctor: Artificial Insemination, 1890–1945, at 87 Chicago-Kent Law Review 591 (2012). Here is the abstract.

In 1945, American judges decided the first court cases involving assisted conception. The challenges posed by assisted reproductive technologies to law and society made national news then, and have continued to do so into the twenty-first century. This article considers the first technique of assisted conception, artificial insemination, from the late nineteenth century to 1945, the period in which doctors and their patients worked to transform it from a curiosity into an accepted medical technique, a transformation that also changed a largely clandestine medical practice into one of the most pressing medicolegal problems of the mid-twentieth century. Doctors and lawyers alike worried whether insemination using donor sperm was adultery by doctor, producing illegitimate offspring. Drawing upon the legal and scientific literatures, case law, popular sources and medical archives, I argue that insemination became identified in medicine and law as a pressing problem at mid-century after decades of quiet use because of the increasing success of the technique, increasing patient demand, and increasing use -- three interrelated trends that led to increasing numbers of babies whose origins were “in the test tube.” In examining the history of a medical procedure becoming a legal problem, I also trace the development of a medical practice in the face of legal uncertainty and the shifting control of the medical profession over assisted conception. I argue that doctors modified the way they treated patients in response to perceived social and legal condemnation of artificial insemination, keeping tight control over all aspects of the procedure, but that doctors’ persistence in meeting patient demand for fertility treatments despite such condemnation helped make artificial insemination into a medicolegal problem. Once it became identified as a medicolegal problem, artificial insemination became the subject of a broad social discussion, in which medical voices did not receive automatic deference, and medical control was challenged.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Theater of Justice

Law students are turning life into art at the University of Maryland School of Law.They are using the real life trial and subsequent appeal of Michael Austin as the basis for a play, (IN)JUSTICE for Michael Austin, and will perform it on April 23 at the law school. Mr. Austin, convicted and sentenced to life in prison for murder and armed robbery in 1975, but released in 2001 and pardoned in 2003, will appear in the play. More here in an article by Karen Sloan of the National Law Journal. More here and here about Mr. Austin's release and pardon.

Some Newly Published Books of Interest

Some newly published books of interest: 

Andrews, Lori, I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy (Free Press, 2012).

Cascardi, Anthony J., Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2012).

Chong, Sylvia, Sin Huey, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (Duke University Press, 2012).

Cohen, Lara Langer, The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

Feenstra, Pietsie, New Mythological Figures in Spanish Cinema: Dissident Bodies Under Franco (Amsterdam University Press, dist. University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Kahn, Abraham Iqbal, Curt Flood in the Media: Baseball, Race, and the Demise of the Activist Athlete (University Press of Mississippi, 2012).

Kaplan, Paul, Murder Stories: Ideological Narratives in Capital Punishment (Lexington Books, 2012).

Maurer, Sara L., The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

McDermott, Stacy Pratt, The Jury in Lincoln’s America (Ohio University Press, 2012).

Pamboukian, Sylvia A., Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery From Shelley To Doyle (Ohio University Press, 2012).

Pippin, Robert B., Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy (University of Virginia Press, 2012).

Starn, Orin, The Passion of Tiger Woods; An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal (Duke University Press, 2012).

Takacs, Stacy, Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America (University Press of Kansas, 2012).

Towns, W. Stuart, Enduring Legacy: Rhetoric and Ritual of the Lost Cause (University of Alabama Press, 2012). Discusses the emergence of the “lost cause” mythology of the Southern identity after the War between the States.

Women's Rights To Property Within Marriage In Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England

Allison Anna Tait, Yale Law School, has published Unhappy Marriages and Unpaid Creditors: Chancery’s Enforcement of a Wife’s Right to Property within Marriage in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England. Here is the abstract.

In a modern era in which wives can own and manage their financial assets, the idea that a wife could not hold legal claim to her own property seems archaic. Measuring the distance of women’s progress, historical accounts of married women’s property usually begin with statutory enactments that gave married women baseline property rights starting in America in the 1830s and 1840s and in England in the 1870s. A form of married women’s property existed before these statutes were on the books, however, beginning in late sixteenth-century England with a special type of trust called the separate estate which was created for the benefit of a married woman before, during, or after marriage. This article is an attempt to recover the nature as well as the significance of the separate estate. A new and detailed reading of the main corpus of separate estate cases – a set of cases that has long been overlooked and deserves to be unearthed – reveals how the separate estate was the forerunner to more modern forms of married women’s property and a key component in the development of married women as juridical beings and economic actors. The goals of this article are to recalibrate the history of married women’s property and deepen our understanding of the opportunities as well as the obstacles that have stood – and still stand – in the way of women seeking to be rightsholders.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Language Usage In Revolutionary Russian Law

Tatiana Borisova, National Research University Higher School of Economics, has published The Legitimacy of the Bolshevik Order, 1917-1918: Language Usage in Revolutionary Russian Law as Higher School of Economics Research Paper No. 05/LAW/2012.

The article describes and analyzes the legislative politics of revolutionary regimes in Russia in 1917-1918. The author aims to demonstrate the political meaning of the form of early Soviet legislation and its legitimizing effect. The revolutionary legislators often used specific language in the new laws as a vehicle of legitimacy, i.e. to make the people comply. The two main types of legal language used by the Bolsheviks can be interpreted from the perspective of different types of legitimacy. The revolutionary strategy used propagandistic legislation, written in the language of lay people, which urged them to act according to the new law. It can be seen as a request for acts of the people to legitimize the soviets. On the contrary, the traditional strategy employed old bureaucratic means of writing and distributing legislation to the local soviets. The language used by this strategy was closed to the understanding of a lay audience and implied traditions of obeying the law written in familiar legal language, which in turn implied rational/legal legitimacy. The second strategy had already become dominant after the first months of the Bolshevik revolution. This observation demonstrates that from the very beginning of their rule, Soviet leaders approached legislative policy from a technocratic point of view, which determined the further development of Soviet legal theory and practice.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Bernie's Weekends

Joe Rhodes muses on Bernie, a new film based on the murder of his aunt, who lived and died in the small town of Carthage, Texas. Mr. Rhodes sees both humor and tragedy in the event, which touched both the members of his family and residents of the town. More here in today's New York Times. The film stars Shirley MacLaine as Aunt Marge, the wealthy victim, Matthew McConaughey as the district attorney, and Jack Black as Bernie Tiede, the funeral director who befriended and then killed Marge, and proceeded to spend a great deal of her fortune before Marge's son and some police officers found her body in her freezer. Yes, under the chicken pot pies. Here's coverage of the trial and verdict from the Amarillo Globe News.

The Tax Man Cometh (Refiled)

Poetry for the season, from the New York Times. What, no Ogden Nash? See here.

Here Be Monsters

From the TLS, Marina Warner reviews Wes Williams' new book Monsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture (Oxford University Press).

Naziism and the Geert Wilders Trial

Robert A. Kahn, University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minnesota), has published Who’s the Fascist? Uses of the Nazi Past at the Geert Wilders Trial as University of St. Thomas Legal Studies Research Paper No. 12-10. Here is the abstract.

This essay looks at how, during his trial, Geert Wilders and his opponents used references to the Nazi era – including but not limited to the Holocaust – to frame debates over Muslim immigration, Wilders himself, and the acceptability of hate speech trials. The Wilders trial is especially interesting because each side sought to call the other a “fascist.” For Wilders, the Quran was a fascist book, an Islamic Mein Kampf. To his opponents, Wilders was a “prototypical” fascist, one who spoke to the gut not the mind. But perhaps the strongest use of the Nazi past involved victims. If a well-established Jewish community faced the Nazis largely without the support of their fellow Dutch citizens and today faces continued anti-Semitism, what should Muslim newcomers expect? On a broader level the multiple references to World War II, fascism, and the Holocaust in the Wilders case show how nearly seventy years after the Allied forces declared victory the Nazi past continues to play a major role in European discourse over hate speech laws.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

2012 International Osnabrück Summer Institute for the Cultural Study of the Law

From Peter Schneck, Chair of American Studies, University of Osnabrück, Germany

*Culture, Rights, Identity: Interfaces between the Humanities and the Law*




International Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law



http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/lawandculture



*Invitation*



The fourth annual International Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law will be held from August 6 to 18, 2012 at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. Hosted by the Institute of English and American Studies (IfAA), the Summer Institute seeks to bring together advanced graduate, doctoral, and postdoctoral students of the humanities and/or the law from around the world to promote and examine the interdisciplinary study and research of law and culture.



During the two week program, students will partake in a unique experience of scholarly collaboration and exchange through workshops, public lectures, panel discussions, excursions and a final symposium.

Participating faculty in this year's Summer Institute include:



*Rosemary J. Coombe (York University, Toronto) *Helle Porsdam (University of Copenhagen) *Fiona Macmillan (Birkbeck School of Law, University of London) *Joseph Slaughter (Columbia University, New York)

* Kay Schaffer (University of Adelaide)



with more faculty to be announced in the upcoming weeks.



The Institute will offer a total of four workshops for 30-35 international participants (doctoral, post-doctoral and advanced M.A. - see below for

eligibility) over a two-week period. The first workshop will be concerned with basic theories, concepts and perspectives within the emerging field of cultural legal studies, focusing specifically on the range and potential of interdisciplinary studies and approaches. The remaining three workshops will focus on key areas of critical inquiry that have been central to the dynamic development of the field and are of particular importance within a European context:



* The relation between human rights and cultural rights

* Historical development and current debates about culture as heritage, property and as a resource and its legal definition and regulation (including concepts such as copyright, intellectual property and

authorship)

* The cultural presence and representation of the law and the role of culture in the representation and dissemination of the concept of rights (e.g. law and literature, life writing and human rights, visual culture and rights rhetoric)



*Participant Eligibility*

The Summer Institute aims at advanced graduate, doctoral, and postdoctoral students from various academic fields, whose research interests and projects are situated at the interface between law and the humanities and who are concerned with a better understanding of the interdependence of law and culture.

Even though the Institute strongly invites students from a broad variety of disciplines and academic backgrounds, it focuses almost exclusively on questions and issues related to research done in the humanities and legal studies.

Doctoral candidates in literature, the law, the arts, the humanities, and the related social sciences are invited to apply, as are advanced students pursuing a J.D. or its equivalent (such as the L.L.B). Young scholars or junior faculty members who have received a Ph.D. or corresponding degree in the last five years are also eligible. While applications by doctoral/post-doctoral students are prioritized, the Summer Institute also encourages applications from advanced Master students about to conclude their studies and with a strong interest in interdisciplinary research.

There are openings for 30-35 students to participate in the Summer Institute.

Due to its international audience, the Summer Institute will be completely conducted in English. It does not offer language instruction classes, either in German or in English.



*Application Process*



Applicants should complete:



* An application form:

http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/lawandculture/application-2012/

* A statement of purpose no more than two pages long, describing current scholarly interests, previous research, and plans for how the Summer Institute would specifically further these interests and plans.

* An up-to-date curriculum vitae.



Students interested in taking part in the Summer Institute should submit their applications no later than April 30, 2012. Detailed information about the Institute, the workshops, international faculty, admission and fees can be found at:



http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/lawandculture

*Questions*



Please direct all inquiries and questions to the main coordinator of the Institute at

lawandculture@uos.de

Interdisciplinary Summer Workshop for Junior Faculty, Stanford, California

From Maeva Marcus, Director, Institute for Constitutional History, New-York Historical Society and The George Washington University Law School

Interdisciplinary Summer Workshop for Junior Faculty


July 8-14, 2012

Stanford, California



ASSESSING THE US CONSTITUTION: TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY RESPONSES TO EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ASSUMPTIONS



Sponsored by the Institute for Constitutional History

with the Stanford Constitutional Law Center







DESCRIPTION:

It is an obvious truth that the drafters of the 1787 Constitution had a number of basic assumptions about the workings of what they called a “Republican Form of Government” and that the institutions established in Philadelphia reflected these assumptions. To be sure, some of them, such as equal voting power in the Senate or the basis of representation in the House (i.e., the 3/5 rule), were the result of compromises, in which the losers (like James Madison with regard to the Senate) viewed the result as a “lesser evil” (to the greater evil of no Constitution at all) rather than a positive good. Still, almost all of the institutions were defended by proponents of the Constitution, the most prominent, of course, being the collective Publius. To a remarkable degree, America in 2012 continues to be governed through the structures established in 1787.



The purpose of the seminar is quite simple: To look at the justifications offered, particularly at the Philadelphia Convention and ensuing ratification debates (including, of course, The Federalist) and to assess the degree to which we find them persuasive over two centuries later. The seminar is not about “constitutional interpretation” as that topic is usually defined. That is, we will not be looking at the parts of the Constitution that have been significantly litigated and, therefore, “interpreted,” over the years, such as the assignment of powers to Congress in Article One, Section Eight. Rather, we will be looking at examples of what in my forthcoming book I call “the Constitution of Settlement” (in contrast to the endlessly-litigated “Constitution of Conversation”)—bicameralism, the particular organization of power in the Senate, the presidential veto ,and the process of constitutional amendment, among others.



Readings will be taken from Professor Levinson’s book, Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (Oxford University Press, 2012); The Federalist; The Founders’ Constitution; Akhil Reed Amar,America’s Constitution: A Biography; and John Dinan, The American State Constitutional Tradition.



WORKSHOP LEADER

Sanford Levinson is the W. St. John Garwood Jr. Centennial Chair in Law, University of Texas Law School, and Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin. Among other books, he has written: Constitutional Faith(Princeton U. Press, 1988, 2nd ed. 2011), and Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It) (Oxford U. Press, 2006, pb. ed. 2008). He is also the co-editor of a widely used casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decision Making (5th ed. 2006). He has written over 350 articles in law reviews as well as more general venues. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.



STIPENDS AND SUPPORT: Participants will receive accommodation at the Munger Graduate Residence on the campus of Stanford Law School and a modest stipend for meals. Participants will also receive a travel reimbursement up to $250. Workshop participants are expected to attend all sessions and engage in all program activities.



ELIGIBILITY AND APPLICATION PROCEDURE: The summer workshop is designed for university instructors who now teach or plan to teach courses in constitutional studies, including constitutional history, constitutional law, and related subjects. Instructors who would like to devote a unit of a survey course to constitutional history are also welcome to apply. All university-level instructors are encouraged to apply, including adjuncts and part-time faculty members, and post-doctoral fellows from any academic discipline associated with constitutional studies (history, political science, law, anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, etc.).



To apply, please submit the following materials: a detailed résumé or curriculum vitae with contact information; syllabi from any undergraduate course(s) in constitutional studies you currently teach; a 500- word statement describing your interest in both constitutional studies and this workshop; and a letter of recommendation from your department chair or other professional reference (sent separately by e-mail or post). The application statement should address your professional background, any special perspectives or experiences you might bring to the workshop, and how the workshop will enhance your teaching in constitutional studies.



THE DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS IS MAY 1, 2012. Applications should be sent via electronic mail to MMarcus@nyhistory.org. Successful applicants will be notified soon thereafter.





FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:

Maeva Marcus

Director, Institute for Constitutional History

New-York Historical Society and

The George Washington University Law School

(202) 994-6562

MMarcus@nyhistory.org

www.nyhistory.org/ich

Acting In the World

A review of a biography, Love, Fiercely, of Edith and Isaac Newton Stokes, who gave generously and thought broadly, about life and the future. Edith championed the idea of the kindergarten, and Newton, an architect, helped bring about the passage of the (New York) Tenement House Act, 1901.