The Building of the Peace Palace

Randall Lesaffer, Tilburg Law Faculty; KU Leuven Faculty of Law; Tilburg University, International Victimology Institute Tilburg (INTERVICT), has published The Temple of Peace. The Hague Peace Conferences, Andrew Carnegie and the Building of the Peace Palace (1898-1913) at 140 Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Nederlandse Vereniging voor Internationaal Recht, Preadviezen 1 (2013).

The 19th-century international peace movement sprang from the reaction against the devastation and horror the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812 had wrought. It had its roots in Anglo-American nonconformist protestant circles, but quickly spread over the globe and became more pluralist and then secular. All through the century and beyond, British and American peace activists dominated the movement and set its agenda. During the later quarter of the century, the peace movement gained more political influence thanks to its alliance with the emerging discipline of international law. This was, again, particularly true for Britain, and most of all, the United States. Two major points stood out on the agenda of the ‘peace through law’ movement: disarmament and arbitration.
Whereas the movement could attain very little to nothing in relation to disarmament in the years before the Great War, the movement found allies in political circles to foster the cause of arbitration. In the United States, Britain and the Latin-American Republics, arbitration moved up the agenda of foreign policy makers and diplomats after the successful Alabama Award in 1872. The Alabama Case had shown arbitration to be an appropriate instrument to manage tactical disputes among States which wanted to avoid strategic clashes.

In 1899, the cause of ‘peace through law’ scored an unexpected success. The Hague Conference, which first had been called by the Russian government for reasons of high power politics, had – to a large extent thanks to the endeavours of the Russian international lawyer Fyodor Martens – been highjacked for the ‘peace through law’ agenda when these reasons dissipated. One of the main outcomes was the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. In 1903, the American industrialist turned philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie, made a lavish gift to build a ‘Temple of Peace’ for the Court at The Hague. It can be said, with the benefit of hindsight, that this set the destiny of The Hague as legal capital of the world in stone.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Middle Eastern Law

Chihbli Mallat, University of Utah College of Law & Université Saint-Joseph, and Mara Revkin, Yale Law School, have published Middle Eastern Law at 9 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 405 (2013). Here is the abstract.

This article maps Middle Eastern law in some of the thousand plateaus where it operates/operated: Mesopotamian law, Roman provincial law, Islamic law, and post-colonial law, with layers within each, such as Elephantine law in Egypt and Jewish and Christian law in Islam's classical age, as well as new worlds of law, such as Byzantine and Ethiopian law, in which scholarship about interaction with other layers of Middle Eastern law is either inexistent or just starting. The focus is directed as much as possible to the extant documentation in the legal record that most affects people's lives: court decisions. For the modern period, we survey, from the point of view of the legal practitioner, lawyer, or judge, the various bodies of case law and codes in the everyday practice of the Middle East lawyer. A legal family analogous to the common or civil law traditions, Middle Eastern law has emerged as a coherent and active discipline that is increasingly a subject of inquiry for historians, social scientists, and others outside of the legal profession. This article presents the field for more sustained attention from lawyers, judges, and law professors.

The full text is not available from SSRN. 

Digital Legal History

Ryan Rowberry, Georgia State University College of Law, has published Legal History Through Digital Sources in volume 53 of the American Journal of Legal History (2013).

Anglo-American Legal History can be a very difficult subject to teach because of its scope. This article is a pedagogical piece discussing how I structure my Anglo-American Legal History seminar around the various digitized primary sources available to law students. During this seminar we examine the history of lawyers and judges from the late Anglo-Saxon period (tenth century) through the twentieth century, generally at the clip of one century per week. We do spend extra time, however, on the English Inns of Court and the rise of the American law school. The final two weeks of the semester are devoted to a series of student term paper presentations with accompanying feedback sessions. Term papers may deal with any topic, but the argument must be largely based on primary sources.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

And the Pursuit of Happiness

Lloyd England, Monash University Faculty of Law, has published Law and the Art of Happiness. Here is the abstract.

Happiness as an abstract concept is interesting to briefly ponder; do we have a right to be happy? If so, what, all the time? Is this a realistic expectation? Tears of happiness are not the only anatomical reason we have tear ducts, so a degree of non-happiness or unhappiness is to be expected, right? The Yin to the Yang? What goes up…?
Happiness is big business, literally. It is the endeavor of serious academic inquiry; there are Happiness Conferences! I bet they’d be fun (come on - you’d hope so). ‘Sex sells’ and so does happiness; when did you last see a Crabby Coke drinker on a billboard? Or a Moody Motorist in his new car on a TV ad? Modern society seems to shun the very thought of ‘non-elatedness’ if advertising is to be believed, but times of occasionally having ‘The Blues’ or down-time from brimming with happiness are, perhaps, part of the natural rhythm of life and only to be expected at some points along our respective journeys. Obviously, persistent and unshakable melancholy is worth seeking advice over from a registered medical practitioner, as it may be symptomatic of an underlying issue and is best to get checked out, if just for peace of mind, but this is a separate thing to what I wish to discuss. I wish to discuss being unhappy if not because of, then during the study of, Law.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Originality, Copyright, Law, and Judging

Erlend Lavik, University of Bergen, and Stef Van Gompel, University of Amsterdam, Institute for Information Law, have published On the Prospects of Raising the Originality Requirement in Copyright Law: Perspectives from the Humanities at 60 Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA 387 (Spring 2013). Here is the abstract.

In 1903, in Bleistein v Donaldson Lithographing, Justice Holmes famously concluded that judges are ill-suited to make merit judgments when determining the eligibility for protection of works. Subsequent courts and commentators have generally followed his caution. Yet, no one has thought through how the copyright system would work were Justice Holmes not heeded. What if courts were called upon to determine the aesthetic merit of a work? How would they go about it? And would they be able to separate the gold from the dross by drawing upon an aesthetic evaluation of such kind?
These questions inevitably arise upon reading some recent proposals to raise the originality threshold. Though it is rarely explicitly recognized, the reconfiguration that these proposals entails would effectively bring originality’s meaning in copyright law more into line with how the term is used in aesthetics, where it is considered a function of the work’s level of creativity, measured by its degree of departure from conventional expression.
Drawing on the concept of domain from sociocultural studies of creativity, we explain just why it would be so enormously problematic for courts to identify and to apply a stricter originality criterion that would require them to make decisions on the basis of merit. By comparing the domain of copyright law to the domain of patent law, we argue that it is the latter’s relative coherence and orderliness that enables patent examiners to get traction when assessing an invention’s degree of non-obviousness. The cultural domain, by contrast, is less rule-bound, and therefore non-obviousness is much harder to establish and validate. Aesthetics – both as a set of cultural practices and products and as an academic discipline – are simply too heterogeneous to provide adequate toehold for the legal analysis of higher degrees of originality.
Exploring the reasons and reasoning behind the ban on aesthetic merit in copyright law from a humanities perspective, this article offers a more detailed and nuanced account of Justice Holmes’ conclusion. Contrary to conventional wisdom we argue that the inherent subjectivity of aesthetic preferences does not in itself make it any harder to pinpoint an objective standard of aesthetic merit, though it does make it harder to provide justification for any such standard. Furthermore, the article questions the premise on which the proposal to raise the originality threshold rests, namely that it will cause the undeserving bottom of works to fall out, leaving only aesthetically worthy and socially valuable works protected. Before introducing a stricter originality criterion we need a more careful and empirically based analysis of just what the problems are, what areas of copyright law are affected, and exactly how and why a higher threshold would improve the situation.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Telling Stories

Kenneth D. Chestek, University of Wyoming College of Law, is publishing The Life of the Law Has Not Been Logic: It Has Been Story in volume 1of the Savannah Law Review. Here is the abstract.

It probably comes as no surprise that principles of cognitive psychology are pretty important in persuasive writing. After all, the whole point of persuasive writing is to influence the thinking of the audience (the court). Judges are humans, so understanding how the human brain works is exceedingly useful to brief writers. And since cognitive psychology tells us that stories are central to human thinking, understanding how to present an effective story is essential to persuasive writing.
But that is not to say that the doctrine of legal writing is limited to the course in persuasive writing. Storytelling pervades the law. Not just in the game changer cases like Brown v. Board of Education or Lawrence v. Texas (just two examples of cases where narrative reasoning was essential in order to effect major changes in the law). Storytelling is also embedded in many of what we sometimes think of as the logos rules.

Take the law of negligence, for example. It looks like a logos-based, four-element test that is pretty straightforward and easy to apply (duty, breach of duty, proximate cause, damages). Law students are even encouraged to think of it in these simplistic terms. But in practice, how does one prove what the duty is without telling stories about what other human beings typically do in similar circumstances? Or whether an individual’s conduct measures up to, or falls short of, that standard? These applications of the rule involve judgment calls that can be resolved by the factfinder only through narrative reasoning. Similar examples can be found in every “doctrinal” course.
The law does not live by logos alone. Pathos-based narrative reasoning is essential not only in applying the law to individual cases, but also to how judges craft the actual rules to be applied. Many, and probably most, “doctrinal” professors understand this, at least subconsciously. Every time they engage students in policy discussions about why the court changed a rule, they are actually (but maybe not explicitly) discussing how a client’s story was so powerful that it convinced the court of the need for change. Since the first-year course in legal writing is as much about legal analysis as it is writing, that course is a perfect opportunity to teach this process explicitly.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Kaiser As a War Criminal

Kirsten Sellers, National University of Singapore, Faculty of Law, Centre for Asian Legal Studies, is publishing German Aggression and the Stillbirth of International Criminal Law at the Paris Peace Conference in The Crime of Aggression--A Commentary (Claus Kress and Stefan Barriga eds.; Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2015). Here is the abstract.

At the end of the First World War, David Lloyd George, campaigning on behalf of his coalition government, declared: ‘The Kaiser must be prosecuted. The war was a crime. Who doubts that?’ This was a radical departure from the traditional approach to war, containing within it two innovative ideas: that embarking upon an aggressive war was a crime, and that a head of state could be held personally responsible for it. This would soon become an important theme in discussions between the entente nations at the Paris Peace Conference about the viability of trying Wilhelm II for war-related crimes. Now, nearly a century later, with the idea of charging leaders for the ‘crime of aggression’ on the International Criminal Court’s agenda, the issues first raised by Lloyd George and others continue to resonate.

The full text is not available from SSRN.  

Media Images of Minorities

Dana D. Dyson and John R. Arnold, and Sasha Drummond-Lewis, University of Michigan, Flint, have published Lights, Camera, Action: Repressive Policies and Minority Images in Media.  Here is the abstract.

This ethnography specifically looks at images depicted in media of minorities, using the 1971 Kerner Commission, which charged media to create a more balanced picture of minorities with more realistic and positive representations. Positive images can challenge notions of inferiority and systems of inequality. This research is an overview of stereotypical images of minorities permeating news media today, reflecting how far we have come in eliminating ignorance and discomforting messages. We are especially interested in reviewing the effects of minority images on recently developed and implemented policing policies, such as Stop and Frisk and Stand Your Ground. The improper portrayal of African-Americans in the media may contribute to the use of ungrounded force and mistreatment on innocent bystanders. We believe that W.E.B. DuBois’s maxim about the problems of the color line still resonates within the American ethos in spite of the election of our nation’s first African-American President. It is our hope that this examination adds to our understanding of race and media in the 21st Century.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Transgender Identity and Popular Culture: Images From Film

Sharon Cowan, University of Edinburgh School of Law, has published 'We Walk Among You': Trans Identity Politics Goes to the Movies as Edinburgh School of Law Research Paper No. 2013/39. Here is the abstract.

Recent legal and social acknowledgement of (some) trans citizenship claims demonstrates the continuing evolution of trans politics and identity, and the relationship between socio-political identities and popular culture. This article examines current debates over trans citizenship and identity, and argues that certain kinds of identity and citizenship claims have cultural currency in contemporary representations of sex/gender. In order to address these issues, this article highlights key disputes and tensions in contemporary debates about transgender identity, citizenship and claims to legal rights, by examining the ways in which sex/gender identity is portrayed in three films -- Cabaret, Transamerica and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Each film demonstrates various ways of interpreting and reworking the constraints of heteronormative binary notions of sex/gender, and these struggles over meaning are also reflected in the ways in which different articulations of trans identity and citizenship claims have been legally and culturally recognized. The article explores the ways in which particular accounts of trans identity are given primacy within law, and how film can help us to reflect upon questions about which sexed/gendered people get to count as legal citizens. The paper concludes by reminding us that despite discourses of recognition, it is important to remember the exclusionary as well as inclusionary tendencies of law.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Michael Burger Wins First Penny Pether Award

News from Amy Dillard on behalf of the Penny Pether Law and Language Scholarship Award Committee:

Michael Burger of Roger Williams University School of Law is the winner of the first annual Penny Pether Award for Law and Language Scholarship for his article Environmental Law/Environmental Literature.  40 Ecology L.Q. 1 (2013).  The award will be officially presented this Friday at the West Coast Rhetoric Scholarship Workshop at UNLV’s Boyd School of Law. Dozens of terrific articles and essays were nominated for the award.  In partial recognition of the strength and tremendous diversity of the works we were so lucky to read, we are also pleased to give honorable mention to Kevin Curran for his article, Hospitable Justice: Law and Selfhood in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 9 Law, Culture, & Humanities 295 (2013), and to Ruthann Robson for her essay, 27 Words, 13 Memoir 85 (2013).

The committee wishes to thank everyone who nominated authors for the award and to the authors themselves for their great work.  It looks forward to making this award an annual tradition.    

[NB: Committee announcement edited slightly].

The Law of Obligations In Scotland

Hector Lewis MacQueen, University of Edinburgh School of Law, has published The Law of Obligations in Scots Law in The Law of Obligations in Europe: A New Wave of Codifications 213 (Reiner Schulze and Fryderyk Zoll eds; Munich, 2013). Here is the abstract.

A historical study of the structure of the law of obligations in Scots law, with especial reference to the law of contract.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Something To Laugh About

Ozan O. Varol, Lewis & Clark Law School, is publishing Revolutionary Humor in the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

The study of mass social movements, and their influence on legal, constitutional, and political reform, has long preoccupied legal scholars. Bottom-up social revolutions, ranging from the Civil Rights Movement in the United States to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, are studied extensively in the literature. The traditional conceptions of social movements largely portray them as somber occasions that reflect the gravity of the moment and the seriousness of their objectives. This Article identifies and studies a novel pattern emerging from the social movements of the 21st century, providing a unique contribution to the burgeoning legal literature on the role of non-state actors in shaping legal and constitutional change.

These new social movements — including the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the mass protests that took place in Summer 2013 in Turkey and Brazil — bear a counterintuitive ingredient in their conception and design: the ubiquitous use of humor. Although humor might appear to be antithetical to the somber nature of social movements, this Article argues, drawing on behavioral research and social movement theory, that humor can be an effective strategic tool to influence legal, constitutional, and political reforms. Humor can pierce the culture of fear prevalent in tyrannical regimes, serve as an effective coping mechanism against repressive government practices, and provoke government officials into reactionary conduct that furthers the social movement’s objectives. The use of humor can reframe and supplant the negative regime narratives of the movement and build solidarity among heterogeneous members of a movement with pre-existing sociopolitical differences. Humor can also support political mobilization by providing a low cost point of entry into a social movement, obtaining domestic and global resonance for the movement, and persuading others to join the movement by depicting an alternate, more appealing, reality. Finally, humor can provide an effective avenue for expressing popular discontent and undermine traditional methods for suppression employed by repressive leaders, including laws that criminalize and censor dissent and social mobilization.

Download the text of the article from SSRN at the link. 

International Law and Science Fiction

Orna Ben-Naftali, College of Management Academic Studies; The Emile Zola Chair for Human Rights; and Zvi H. Triger, College of Management Academic Studies; Striks School of Law, are publishing The Human Conditioning: International Law and Science-Fiction in the 2013 volume for Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Here is the abstract.

This article introduces the subject-matter of a symposium on international law and science fiction. The impact of new technologies on human rights, humanitarian issues and indeed on what it means to be human in a technological age, suffers from a paucity of international legal attention. The latter has been attributed to various factors ranging from technophobia and technological illiteracy, inclusive of an instrumentalist view of technology, to the sense that such attention is the domain of science-fiction, not of international law. The article extends an invitation to pay attention to the attention science-fiction has given to the man-machine interaction and its impact on the human condition. Placing this invitation in the context of the 'Law and Literature' movement, the article exemplifies its value with respect to two technologies, one directed at creating life or saving it (cloning and organ donation) and the other at ending life (lethal autonomous robots).

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Yale Law Schools Professors Win Order of the Coif Award For Their Work, "Representing Justice"

Yale Law School professors Judith Resnik and Denny Curtis have won the Order of the Coif Book Award for their magnum opus, Representing Justice.  This award is given only once every two years.  The list of previous winners includes such classics as John Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law; Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law; John Hart Ely, Democracy and Distrust; Guido Calabresi, A Common Law for the Age of Statutes; and Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire, to name only a few.

Previously this book won the award from the Association of American Publishers for the outstanding book of the year in the entire social sciences, as well as the Scribes Book Award, and the New York Times wrote a large article about it when it was published.  It is a special book for the Yale Law Library, since it was the third book published in the Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference (Yale University Press) and the library provided an enormous amount of help to Judith and Denny.  In particular, Camilla Tubbs, Mike Widener, and Jason Eiseman all contributed greatly.

Here is a link to the Yale Law School website posting on the award:

http://www.law.yale.edu/news/17621.htm

Thanks for Fred Shapiro for this information.

Here's a link to the Representing Justice website at the Yale Law School Law Library.

Extended Deadline: Call For Papers, Law and Magic Conference, June 5-6, 2014

We have extended the date for the call for papers for this conference to January 6, 2014. We encourage interested persons to submit proposals, particularly in the areas of law and magic where they intersect other disciplines such as history, literature, film, freedom of expression, religion, architecture or anthropology. 

Revealing the Links Between Law and Magic

A Conference Sponsored by the Law and Humanities Law Institute and

Thomas Jefferson School of Law

June 5-6, 2014

Thomas Jefferson School of Law

1155 Island Avenue, San Diego CA 92101

Call For Papers

On June 5 and 6, 2014, the Law and Humanities Institute, New York, New York (USA) and Thomas Jefferson School of Law, San Diego, CA (USA) will sponsor a Conference on Law and Magic.

Law and magic interact in many ways. Not only can the law influence the practice of magic, such as in the areas of freedom of speech and religion and intellectual property; but also magic can influence the law, such as in trial tactics and evidence. In addition, magic illuminates the crossroads of other law and humanities fields, such as the emerging area of law and neuroscience, rhetoric, and law and popular culture. Papers discussing or developing these or any aspect of the relationship between law and magic are welcome, especially those that further an understanding of the theory, underpinnings, and/or philosophy of the field. 

Materials and presentations will be in English. The organizers of the conference are Christine Corcos, Louisiana State University Law Center (christine.corcos@law.lsu.edu) and Julie Cromer Young, Thomas Jefferson School of Law (jcromer@tjsl.edu).

We invite you to submit an abstract of a 20-minute paper that you would like to deliver at the conference. Abstracts should be between 250 and 500 words and sent to Christine Corcos at the email address above accompanied by the author’s brief biographical statement. Please put “Law and Magic Conference June 2014” in the email subject line and submit the abstract and biographical statement no later than January 6, 2014.  We will send notifications regarding acceptance of presentations by February 1, 2014.

If you would like us to consider your paper for publication,  please indicate that in the body of your email.  Conference papers accepted for publication will appear in the Spring 2015 issue of the Thomas Jefferson Law Review.

Please address questions to Christine Corcos at the email address above.

The Impact of JFK's Death On Our Culture

The Guardian examines depictions of JFK's assassination in popular culture.

Narrative, Constitutional Interpretation, and the Second Amendment

Ruthann Robson, CUNY School of Law, has published 27 Words at 13 MEMOIR: The Guns Issue 85 (2013). Here is the abstract.

The 27 words of the Second Amendment formed the basis of the United States Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), in which the 5-4 majority relied upon a wealth of interpretations of an "individual right" that accelerated after the assassination of President JFK. This blend of intellectual and "popular" constitutionalism has continued after Heller, despite mass shootings with assault weapons, with continued support for a particular construction of the text of the Second Amendment. This piece interweaves constitutional histories, theories, cases, text, and scholarship of the Second Amendment with popular culture and personal narrative to query whether the interpretation of an individual right inherent in the "27 words" should continue to prevail.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Present at the Digital Creation...of Mary Shelley's Monster

If you're anywhere in or around New York City, tag October 31st on your calendar and head for the New York Public Library. You can check out (literally and digitally) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein notebooks and associated materials. More here from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Rhetoric and Justice at Guantanamo

Brian Christopher Jones, Academia Sinica, Institutum Iurisprudentiae (IIAS), has published A Triumph of Ill Conceived Language: The Linguistic Origins of Guantanamo's 'Rough Justice' at 1 Hastings Law Journal Voir Dire 1 (2013). Here is the abstract.

Throughout the years, the Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay has witnessed an abundance of intriguing linguistic words and phrases. Yet the language that has had the most significant impact throughout the years has been the words and phrases used in the administration of justice regarding the detainees being held on terrorism charges. Wall St. Journal Supreme Court reporter Jess Bravin’s book, 'The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay,' thoroughly chronicles how the use of military commissions came about for the first time since the Second World War, and pointedly demonstrates the abundance of problems they faced once established. In addition to telling the story of Marine Corps lieutenant colonel Stuart Couch, an earnest military prosecutor who later becomes exhaustively disenchanted with the commissions, the book chronicles the new linguistic frontiers in the American legal community. This piece analyzes how particular language used throughout the establishment and execution of the commissions significantly differed from American legal traditions. In particular, the essay focuses on four linguistic changes that had considerable influence: (1) From Due Process to “Full and Fair”; (2) From Classified to “Protected”; (3) From Custodial Interrogation to “Enhanced Interrogation”; and (4) From Acts of Terrorism to “Material Support for Terrorism.”

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

AIDEL's International Conference 2013 Set for November 14-16 In Verona

The Associazione Italiana Diritto e Letteratura (AIDEL) announces its International Conference 2013: "Pwers of Voices/Voices of Power" will be held in Verona from November 14 through November 16. Here is a link to the final program. The conference will include talks by Jeanne Gaakeer, Melanie Williams, Heinz Antor, Patrizia Nerozzi, Desiree Fondaroli, Cristina Costantini--and discussions of Shakespeare, Apuleius, Laurence Sterne, Supreme Courts and labor rights. It looks like it will be quite an interesting event.

A New Book On Artists' Moral and Human Rights

A new book announcement from Hart Publishing:

NOW PUBLISHED 

Freedom of Artistic Expression
Essays on Culture and Legal Censure
Paul Kearns
This book presents a unique and comprehensive examination of the human and moral rights of artists. In what is arguably the first exhaustive book-length account of artists' rights, Paul Kearns explores the problems associated with censorship, both from philosophical and legal perspectives, and focuses on the various ways in which the morality of art is legally regulated in different jurisdictions. In relation to human rights, English, French and American law, the law of the European Convention on Human Rights, European Union law and public international law are all closely scrutinised to discover the extent to which they offer protection for artistic freedom. The author also examines domestic and international law in respect of artists' moral rights, the law of copyright and related laws. In short, the book provides an original, and sometimes controversial, analysis of persistent concerns regarding the legal regulation of the arts universally, doctrinally and theoretically, and seeks to offer an holistic treatment which will appeal to art lawyers, artists and those interested in the future of the arts.

The Author

Paul Kearns is a Senior Lecturer in Law in the University of Manchester, where he teaches Public International Law, Human Rights Law and, as a specialist yet popular topic, Law, Literature and Art. 

Book Details Oct 2013     260pp     Hbk     9781841130804     RSP: £50 / €65

DISCOUNT PRICE: £40 / €52  

HOW TO ORDER ONLINE

To receive the 20% discount online please write ref: INLL in the voucher code field and click apply:

http://www.hartpub.co.uk/BookDetails.aspx?ISBN=9781841130804 

Or, please contact Hart Publishing by telephone or e-mail and quote reference INLL when placing your order

Hart Publishing Ltd, 16C Worcester Place, Oxford, OX1 2JW, UK
Telephone Number: 01865 517530; Fax Number: 01865 510710
 

From Inside Bars To Sitting for the Bar

From The Hollywood Reporter: NBC has ordered up a script of Shon Hopwood's memoir Law Man from Carol Mendelsohn and the result may be headed for the small screen. In his colorful youth, Mr. Hopwood was a bank robber. After jail time, and redemption, he finished up law school and will be clerking for a judge on the D.C. Circuit.

Listen to an interview with Mr. Hopwood here on NPR. More here from the Huffington Post.

The Establishment Clause, Religious Symbols, Endorsement, and Coercion

Claudia E. Haupt, Columbia University Law School, is publishing Active Symbols in 55 Boston College Law Review (2014). Here is the abstract.

Visual representations of religious symbols continue to puzzle judges. Lacking empirical data on how images communicate, courts routinely dismiss visual religious symbols as “passive.” This Article challenges the notion that symbols are passive, introducing insights from cognitive neuroscience research to Establishment Clause theory and doctrine. It argues that visual symbolic messages can be at least as active as textual messages. Therefore, religious messages should be assessed in a medium-neutral manner in terms of their communicative impact, that is, irrespective of their textual or visual form.
Providing a new conceptual framework for assessing religious symbolic messages, this Article reconceptualizes coercion and endorsement — the dominant competing approaches to symbolic messages in Establishment Clause theory — as matters of degree on a spectrum of communicative impact. This focus on communicative impact reconciles the approaches to symbolic speech in the Free Speech and Establishment Clause contexts and allows Establishment Clause theory to more accurately account for underlying normative concerns.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A New Book On Law, Literature, and Narrative

Jose Calvo Gonzalez of the University of Malaga has published an interesting new book, Direito Curvo (Porto Alegre: Editora Livraria do Advogado, 2013). The title translates as Curvable Law. More information here. See the table of contents here.

"Suits" Returns For a Fourth Season

Suits, the USA legal drama, will be back on the USA network for a fourth season. More here from The Hollywood Reporter. The show, starring Gabriel Macht and Patrick J. Adams, features ethically challenged attorneys at a high profile firm who take on interesting cases.

Where The Girls Aren't

Ryan A. Malphurs, Courtroom Sciences Inc., Jaime Bochantin, DePaul University, L. Hailey Drescher, University of Kansas, and Melissa Wallace Framer, Arizona State University, Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, have published Too Much Frivolity, Not Enough Femininity: A Study of Gender and Humor at the U.S. Supreme Court. Here is the abstract.

The four authors in this study took on the exhilarating task of listening to 79 oral arguments in the Supreme Court’s 2011-2012 term. After two years spent recovering from oral argument overload, the authors have prepared a study that ingeniously tricks readers into reading a study on humor that is really about gender inequality at the Supreme Court and in the field of Law. Initially tallying instances of un-transcribed laughter, the authors — prompted by Hillary Clinton’s urging — began noticing gender and humor discrepancies between the justices and the advocates; what started as a simple humor tabulation devolved into important research. In the following study, the authors lull readers into complacency by offering data related to humor, but then shock their audience with serious data about gender inequality — ruining any fun that readers might have had. It’s true the authors show that the Supreme Court is far funnier than previously thought, and that Justice Scalia enjoys bullying Justice Breyer; however, potential readers should turn back now, because what follows is mind numbing boredom and “PC” discussions about gender veiled within a “humor” study.

The authors would like readers to know that the following study, if you haven’t been able to tell already, does not follow traditional scholarly conventions. “Why?” you may ask, because it would be boring and no one would read it, duh. The authors have endeavored to make this study both interesting in the data and entertaining to read — a truly ground-breaking feat in scholarly studies. Great risk comes with great rewards, and we’re just hoping someone other than ourselves will read this study.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Another TV Lawyer Drama

The tv series Betrayal, based on the Dutch series Overspel, debuted on ABC on September 29, 2013 in a lineup that includes lead-ins of Once Upon a Time and Revenge. The show features Hannah Ware as Sara Hanley, a photographer married to prosecutor Drew Stafford (Chris Johnson), who begins a torrid affair with attorney Jack McAllister (Stuart Townsend), in-house counsel for a powerful businessman. Fairly soon, there's guilt, then murder, then conflict as Sara's husband and her lover clash in the courtroom.

Henry Thomas (remember him as the adorable Elliott in E.T.?) is all grown up as the son of businessman Thatcher Karsten, who's played by the wonderful James Cromwell (Farmer Hoggett in Babe). Others in this show include Wendy Moniz as Elaine McAllister, Jack's wife and Thatcher Karsten's daughter, Elizabeth McLaughlin as Valerie McAllister, Jack and Elaine's daughter, and Braeden Lemasters as Victor McAllister, Jack and Elaine's son.

Franklin & Bash Will Return For Another Season

TNT has renewed the legal series Franklin & Bash for a new season (its fourth). The show, which stars Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Breckin Meyer, features two lawyers who delight in breaking the rules in order to win their cases.

The Influence of Robert M. Cover

Roy Andrew Partain, Soongsil College of Law, has published Ecologies of Paideic Law: Environmental Law and Robert M. Coverʼs Jurisprudence of 'Nomos and Narratives' , at 24 Hanyang Law Review 423 (2013). Here is the abstract.

This article provides an extensive introduction to the legal philosophy of Robert M. Cover and begins a discussion on how his principles of jurisgenesis could be applied in environmental law. This article suggests that a deeper appreciation of Cover’s jurisprudence could better assist in the development of climate change legislation.
Robert M. Cover was a legal scholar at Yale Law School who died in 1986, tragically early in his career, leaving many aspects of his innovative jurisprudence incomplete. Despite those circumstances, he has become one of the top-most cited legal scholars in American jurisprudence. In particular, he is best known for his “Nomos and Narratives” theory of law. Cover’s legal philosophy holds that the laws and narrative traditions of a culture cannot be critically separated, that they must be understood to operate intertwined. Further, he argued certain aspects of the narrative cultures must be included in the concept of law, in the corpus juris, alongside more explicit forms such as constitutions, legislations, and judicial decisions. Thus, Cover argued, legal scholars have been overly focused on one type of law to the neglect of other types of law.

Cover introduced the concept of paideic jurisgenesis and of jurispathic judges to counter the legal theories of H.L.A. Hart, Hans Kelsen, and Ronald Dworkin. Cover’s theory provides a more complete framework to answer Dworkin’s question of how judges resolve ‘hard’ legal cases. A ‘hard’ case exists when both sides of an adversarial courtroom can provide sound legal support for their arguments; Dworkin posited that jurisprudence is simply the investigation of how judges resolve that conflict. Whereas Hart, Kelsen and Dworkin saw a shortage of law, of a need to explain how law was created by judges, Cover concluded to the contrary that law actually existed in over-supply and that judges act to eliminate surplus laws to resolve ‘hard’ problems.

Cover balanced the development of paideic laws, i.e. narratively evolved laws, with the controls of imperial, i.e. governmental, legislation and jurispathic judges. Cover named this universe of legal meaning and context-rich interpretations ‘nomos’, borrowing from the Greek language for ‘law’. Cover proposed that social groups created laws via social cohesive narratives of obligations, coercion, and socially-endorsed enforcement. But this organic process of legislation could create too many overlapping legal systems as each society contains multiple social groups. Legislatures were seen by Cover as providing a democratic process to select Kelsenian Grundnormen to better align the diverse legal narratives of multiple social groups. Cover then saw the key role of judges as jurispathic, to eliminate legal chaos when too much law exists.

A legal scholar, in Cover’s world, has two roles. First, to observe and appreciate the organic and paideic narratives that create the laws in the legal scholar’s nomos-verse. Second, to provide the legal scientific understandings necessary to support the judiciary’s jurispathic duties. In both cases, a legal scholar has the opportunity to engage and interact in the development of law. A legal scholar can become engaged in the development of the paideic narratives and social dialogs that create paideic law. A scholar can assist in the development of the imperial legal structures that provide stability and unity to the social group. Cover was particularly interested in the development of Human Rights and Civil Rights laws, but his theories and techniques have found applications in many other areas of law.

This article provides a preliminary example of Cover’s theories in regards to the development of climate change legislation. The article takes notice of the historical problems to develop and enforce climate change legislation. The article examines Cover’s theories to uncover the practical legal and policy tools suggested by his theories of jurisprudence. The article suggests a list of methods wherein Cover’s theories could be applied to climate change legislation.

Donwload the article from SSRN at the link. 

The History of European Legal Culture

Helge Dedek, Mc Gill University Faculty of Law, Institute of Comparative Law, is publishing When Law Became Cultivated: ‘European Legal Culture’ between Kultur and Civilization in Towards a European Legal Culture (G. Helleringer & K. Purnhagen eds.; C. H. Beck/Hart: Munich-Oxford, 2014) (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

In this contribution, I invite the reader to approach the concept of ‘European legal culture’ from a historical perspective. Such an approach is helpful in two ways: first, it helps to attune one’s ear to the shades of meaning of ‘culture’ and to enhance awareness of the fact that ‘legal culture’ may have a different ring in different legal traditions. Second, as we shall see, it is the discourse on ‘legal culture’ itself, and especially the discourse on ‘European legal culture’, that seeks historical legitimacy by cultivating foundational narratives, invoking, in particular, the writings of the German Historical School and its most well-known proponent, Friedrich Carl von Savigny. I will present ‘snapshots’ of some of the foundational moments in the career of the concept of ‘legal culture’, and then, after a short comparison with contemporary English usage, set out to inquire which role ‘legal culture’ may be said to play in Savigny’s famous manifesto, Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (Of the Vocation of our Age for Legislation and Legal Science, written in 1814). I want to suggest that re-reading Savigny’s text with the historical semantics of ‘culture’ between the French ‘civilisation’ and the German ‘Kultur’ in mind will help us to see more clearly some aspects of the text that are at times obscured in its ‘culturist’ readings that are too eager to find a romantic conception ‘Volksgeistlehre’ in Savigny’s work. These often neglected aspects might hint to an openness toward the possibility of thinking a legal culture beyond the nation state, and might give us, perhaps counterintuitively, some useful cues for a reflection on possible theoretical approaches to a ‘European legal culture’.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Ada Lovelace Day

Even though we missed it by a day...a slight detour for a tribute to Ada Lovelace, unfortunately less well known as the mother of computer programming than as the daughter of George Gordon, Lord Byron and Anna Isabella Milbanke. More about remembering Ada and her work here at the Wellcome Trust's blog. A mini bio here by Agnes Scott College's Dr. Betty Toole.

Twelve Inquiring Jurors

Steven Lubet, Northwestern University School of Law, and Kevin Chang have published Stupid Juror Questions? as Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No. 13-32. Here is the abstract.

Everyone knows there is no such thing as a stupid question. Well, at least every parent, teacher, counselor, advisor, librarian and boss is evidently aware of the truth of that simple maxim. Nonetheless, the obvious utility of asking questions – seeking wisdom; requesting clarification; locating information – appears to have eluded certain high officials in the justice system of the United Kingdom, not to mention a raft of journalists, a clutch of parliamentarians, and a good swath of the British public, all of whom expressed consternation at a series of written questions posed by the jurors in a high profile, though relatively low stakes, criminal case. “Do we need IQ tests for juries?” wondered one pundit, who fumed that the jury’s questions had “exposed a breathtaking level of ignorance and stupidity.” Another echoed the thought, asking whether the jury was “stupid or just confused?” This article analyzes the ten infamous questions posed by the jury in the British trial of Vicki Pryce, who was accused of “perverting the course of justice” in an attempt to advance the political career of her now-former husband. Drawing upon legal history, criminal procedure, and cognition science, we conclude that the jury’s questions were far more perceptive than the court and the British pundits realized.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Taking Ally Seriously

John Denvir, University of San Francisco School of Law, has published Romancing the Law: Ally McBeal and the Art of Subversive Comedy as a University of San Francisco Research Paper. Here is the abstract.

The television sitcom Ally McBeal drew large audiences and won many awards, but the series also had detractors who felt that it demeaned both women lawyers and the legal profession. People loved and hated the show, but no one has thought it a serious commentary on the American legal system.

I think it is time to take Ally McBeal seriously. I believe that its creator David E. Kelley has used the narrative devices of romantic comedy to make a subtle but powerful critique of the American legal system and to suggest a new future for law. It is an excellent example of what I call subversive comedy.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Call For Papers

From Bob Jarvis, Nova Southeastern Law Center, news of a publication opportunity in the area of U.S. legal history (pedagogy):

The October 2013 issue of the American Journal of Legal History (www.ajlh.org) contains a symposium on teaching legal history in U.S. law schools.  As a follow-up, the symposium’s essays are going to be republished in a book entitled “Teaching Legal History:  Comparative Perspectives.”  The book’s publisher is the esteemed London firm of Wildy, Simmonds & Hill.
 Because the space available in the book is greater than what was available in the Journal, we are seeking additional contributions that follow the style of the existing essays.  Accordingly, we would be pleased to receive your submission.  The operational details are as follows:
 1)      Completed essays are due by February 15, 2014 and should be e-mailed, preferably in Word, to Professor Bob Jarvis, Nova Southeastern University, at jarvisb@nova.edu.  This deadline is firm and extensions will not be possible.  Acceptance/declination decisions will be made as soon after the deadline as possible.
 2)      Essays cannot exceed 1,500 words and should describe how you teach the course and why you teach it as you do.  The word length will be strictly enforced and footnotes, if any, should be kept to a minimum.
 3)      While we’re open to a wide variety of styles and approaches, we really want practical (as opposed to theoretical) pieces.   In other words, we want to know what people are really doing in their classrooms when they teach legal history.
 4)      Although we appreciate that many folks include a lot of legal history in their non-legal history courses (particularly if they teach, for example, constitutional law), this book, like the symposium, is limited to actual legal history courses taught in U.S. law schools.
 5)      Lastly, if you do not have access to a copy of the Journal, please e-mail Bob Jarvis for a sample essay.

New Books In Law and the Humanities

Some new publications of interest:

Julen Etxabe, The Experience of Tragic Judgment (Routledge, 2012). 

Richard Dawson, Justice As Attunement: Transforming Constitutions in Law, Literature, and the Rest of Life (Routledge, 2014).

Peter Goodrich, Legal Emblems and the Art of Law: Obiter Depicta as the Vision of Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Thanks for Daniela Carpi for alerting me to these publications.

Fox Ramps Up a New Legal Drama

Experienced showrunner Howard Gordon (24, Homeland) is putting together a new legal drama with 24 executive producer Evan Katz for Fox. The show, Trial of the Century, which will feature Richard Shepard as director, will star a Latina attorney "working on a unique high profile case." But who will play the "young Latina attorney"? Stay tuned.

More here from The Hollywood Reporter.

The Blood Libel Legend

John Obi Ifediora, University of Wisconsin, has published The Blood Libel Legend: Its Longevity and Popularity. Here is the abstract.

Jewish ritual murder accusations, in their common apprehension, refer to alleged killing of Christians by Jews in furtherance of religious rites, or specifically Jewish practice. The blood libel, however, is a special variant, and a subset of the broader ritual murder accusation, and came much later into the panoply of accusations leveled at the Jews in the Middle Ages. This essay seeks to address the explanations given by scholars for the popularity and longevity of the blood libel as it touches on the following aspects of the legend: what gave rise to the blood accusations in the Middle Ages when the consequences were so horrific and brutal? Who “first” made the accusations against the Jews in medieval times, and who stood to benefit from such charges, or were they occasioned by economic, social, and religious circumstances that defined medieval Europe? But most importantly, what sustained and popularized it from the twelfth to the twentieth century?

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Love As a Contract

Martha M. Ertman, University of Maryland School of Law, has published Love and Contracts in Don Quixote in Don Quixote: Interdisciplinary Connections 251 (Matthew D. Warshawsky and James A. Parr, eds.; Newark, NJ: Juan de la Cuesta, 2013). Here is the abstract.

Viewing love as a contract seems, initially, like mistaking windmills for giants, or a peasant girl for a grand lady. This chapter seeks, like Don Quixote, to convince readers to suspend their practiced views of everyday relationships in order to see them in a new light. What seems crazy at first glance may come to look as good, and sometimes better, than the more conventional view. As a law professor, I usually write about love and contracts by focusing on legal opinions and statutes, and recently I have added real-life stories from books and newspapers, as well as my friends, family, colleagues, and students. But if I am right that love and contracts often complement instead of oppose each other, then my argument that contracts shape the beginning, middle, and demise of love relationships ought to hold true in fiction as well, especially for the jump-off-the-page characters and situations in Don Quixote. Applying this analysis to Don Quixote invites new readings, and may even bring yet more readers to this brilliant text.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

More On the LHI/Cardozo Blood Libel Conference

More on the Blood Libel Conference, sponsored by the Law and Humanities Institute and Cardozo Law School, here. The Conference takes place at Cardozo, November 14-15.

More On Law and Poetry

Joseph P. Tomain, University of Cincinnati College of Law, is publishing Reading Poets in St. John's Law Review (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Lawrence Joseph, the poet, has been the subject of a symposium published by the University of Cincinnati Law Review. Lawrence Joseph, the nonfiction novelist, has been similarly honored by the Columbia Law Review. With the publication of The Game Changed, his work should be so recognized and he should be given scholarly attention as a critic/essayist. Joseph the lawyer/poet/scholar has developed a jurisprudence of his own. Joseph’s jurisprudence, however (and to the good), cannot be reduced to a single word like originalism, or even a label like liberal democratic (though he may be in fact). Rather, the resultant jurisprudence refracts off a multitude of ideas and attitudes contained within the book’s various prose pieces. In this Essay, I will first describe the mechanics of The Game Changed, and will then identify and briefly comment upon several of those ideas and attitudes that comprise Joseph’s jurisprudence that go Into It.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Lawyers and Poetry

Pleasure Boat Studio has published a new anthology of poems inspired by the practice of law. Lawyer Poets and That World We Call Law: An Anthology of Poems About the Practice of Law is edited by James R. Elkins, of West Virginia University College of Law, who also edits the Legal Studies Forum. Here's a description of the volume, provided by the publisher.

The book sells for $22.50, and is available through the publisher's website, which is offering a 20 percent discount (offer good until December 1st, 2013) or through bookstores or online through Amazon.com.

The Blues Brothers and the First Amendment

Julien Mailland, Indiana University Department of Telecommunications & University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication, has published The Blues Brothers and the American Constitutional Protection of Hate Speech: Teaching the Meaning of the First Amendment to Foreign Audiences, at 21 Michigan State International Law Review 451 (2013). Here is the abstract.

Skokie, Illinois, 1978. A retired black and white police car is stuck in traffic before a bridge where a political rally is being held by Nazis of the American Socialist White People’s Party. In the car, two men, wearing black suits, black hats, and black sunglasses, stand idle. The Nazis’ venomous leader delivers a racist and violence-mongering speech, which infuriates the onlookers. The Nazis are protected from the angry crowd of hecklers by a line of police. One of the men in black calmly states: “I hate Illinois Nazis,” as the other slams the gas pedal, charges the ranks of the brownshirts and stampedes them off the bridge into the water, to the cheers of the crowd. As they drive off, the soaked Nazi commander vows revenge. (THE BLUES BROTHERS (Universal Studios 1980). Long Synopsis).This scene from the 1980 blockbuster comedy The Blues Brothers is a popular cultural expression of a uniquely-American legal provision: the constitutional protection of hate speech by virtue of the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The legal regime for hate speech in the United States has no equivalent anywhere in the world and is baffling to non-Americans. Europeans, in particular, whose countries served as the locus of Nazism’s horrors, tend to hold the U.S. constitutional protection of hate speech in disbelief, before shaking their heads in contempt and concluding something along the lines of “those crazy Americans.” This protection of hate speech, however, makes a lot of sense in the American context. In this paper, I argue that the aforementioned scene from The Blues Brothers has great potential to elucidate the meaning of the constitutional protection of hate speech, and, more broadly, of the First Amendment, for a non-American audience. I propose that the scene be used by comparative jurists teaching the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. I focus the comparison between the United States and France, for “France and the United States start from such different assumptions regarding freedom of speech and the relationship between speech and other rights that it is virtually impossible to reconcile their competing approaches,” a situation that creates deep cultural misunderstandings, which in turn can be reconciled using this case study. France is also relevant because it is one of the countries that has taken the most aggressive stance against American companies in the context of Nazi speech distributed globally over the Internet, which has resulted, in particular, in Yahoo!, Inc. and its executives being criminally prosecuted in France for violation of anti-hate speech laws. Fostering mutual understanding between the U.S. and France is therefore particularly important in this age of global digital information distribution.In Part I, I first theoretically ground the argument that consumption of cultural artifacts is a prerequisite to understanding the law of a country, and beyond it, the country’s people and society themselves (I). Part II involves a detailed case study of the aforementioned scene from The Blues Brothers as such an artifact, in order to lift the veil on the cultural signified hidden beyond the legal signifier that is the First Amendment, and foster mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other peoples (II). I conclude that the Blues Brothers’ Nazi scene should be used by comparative jurists teaching the meaning of the First Amendment to foreign audiences, as an aid to shine a light on the cultural, social, and political principles that ground the constitutional protection of hate speech in the United States.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Law and Equity in Chinua Achebe's "Arrow of God"

Olubukola Olugasa, Babcock University School of Law and Security Studies, has published Interplay of Law and Equity in Chinua Achebe's 'Arrow of God'.

The late literary legend, Chinua Achebe, may have been celebrated in many ways for his immense contributions to humanity through profound literary works that will perpetually remain beneficial to the world. But hardly have we appreciated his works from legal perspective. Interestingly, in many less developed academic environments, scholars tend to limit their research and academic publications to stereotypes within frameworks of fragmented subjects; fragmented subjects of study for teaching convenience. Perhaps that disposition has restricted robust interdisciplinary research and approach to exploring the real essence of literary works of scholars like Chinua Achebe. It is not peculiar to Nigeria. This paper seeks to bring to life the legal issues deducible from the trilogy of Chinua Achebe, namely 'Things Fall Apart', 'No Longer at Ease' and 'Arrow of God'. The events in the trilogy show the dilemma of the protagonists in responding appropriately to the changing circumstances of the unwritten and unspoken customary laws of their times. The challenge of choice of appropriate discretion in the face of dynamics of change has foisted on every man the need to take deep consideration of the position of law and equity, even within the shortest possible time, before making a choice. The choice made ultimately determines the fate of man. That appears to be what in literary parlance is couched in the expression 'character is fate'. The approach here begins and goes beyond socio-legal perspective to doctrinal analyses of the story in the novel. The paper concludes by using the discourse to reflect the position of a Nigerian in the context of the interplay of law and equity against his customary law requirements, the challenges and the need for reforms and repositioning of customary law in Nigeria’s legal system.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Performing Law

Richard K. Sherwin, New York Law School, has published Law as Performance: Presence and Simulation in the Theater/Courtroom. Here is the abstract.

Contemporary theatrical performances and courtroom performances are increasingly grappling with the same challenge, namely: how to respond to world loss, the steadily advancing process of dematerialization. A growing number of cultural productions, including law, oscillate between virtual reality effects (the screen-based sensorium of heightened baroque sensation) and bodily presence. We are torn between reflexive meaning construction, on the one hand, and the material recuperation of reference and perception, on the other. In this essay, I ask what lessons multi-media theater may hold for the contemporary performance of law? I conclude that the current neo-baroque condition of world loss, and the familiar baroque strategy of proliferating form to distract us from metaphysical anxiety, poses serious political and legal challenges. Absent an appropriate response, unchecked growth in ongoing processes of de-realization, dis-ownership, and de-responsification may ultimately threaten the continued legitimation of law’s claim to power in the digital age.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Spanish Law and Religion

Rafael Palomino, Facultade de Derecho, Universidad Complutense, has published Manual Breve de Derecho Eclesiástico del Estado (Spanish Law and Religion in a Nutshell). Here is the abstract.

Manual breve de Derecho eclesiástico del Estado español. El manual comprende 10 capítulos sobre elementos fundamentales del Derecho estatal en materia religiosa.
Spanish Law and Religion in a Nutshell. Ten chapters of the fundamentals of Spanish Law and Religion.

Download the two hundred page document, which is in Spanish, at the link.

Repeat: Call for Papers and Registration: Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities

CALL FOR PAPERS: ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF LAW, CULTURE, AND THE HUMANITIES

Seventeenth Annual Conference

March 10-11, 2014, University of Virginia, School of Law

We are pleased to announce that the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities will be held at the University of Virginia School of Law, March 10-11, 2014. We invite your participation.  Please note, panel and paper proposals are due Tuesday, October 15^th, 2013

The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities is an organization of scholars engaged in interdisciplinary, humanistically-oriented legal scholarship. The Association brings together a wide range of people engaged in scholarship on legal history, legal theory and jurisprudence, law and cultural studies, law and literature, law and the performing arts, and legal hermeneutics. We want to encourage dialogue across and among these fields about issues of interpretation, identity, and values, about authority, obligation, and justice, and about law's place in culture.

This year’s conference theme is as follows:

The Politics of Law and the Humanities: Crisis, Austerity, Instrumentalism

How will law and the humanities scholarship fare against the pressure of the science and technology paradigm that has now permeated the institutional frameworks of academia? Will it mime the general humanities and, as suggested by the defeatist pomp of many national “crisis reports”, merely retreat to its traditional position as the well-mannered guardian of liberal values? Will law and the humanities scholarship be subsumed under the science paradigm’s instrumental ethos by either taking on aims and objectives sanctioned by government policies or by domesticating its own political potential to address those very same policies? Or can we imagine more salutary alternatives to defeatism and instrumental subsumption? 

The terrain is well known. The ongoing economic crisis has engendered a worldwide decline in funding for research in the humanities showing sharp decreases between 2009 and 2012 with funds almost cut in half each year. The global trend is also detectable at national levels, with growing gaps between public investment into STEM subjects and the humanities. But the changes do not merely concern the fiscal prioritization of diminishing resources. The social sciences, including law, are under constant political pressure as lawmakers question the value of curiosity-driven basic research. This pressure is then mirrored at the institutional level of individual law schools emphasizing their vocational remits at the expense of research and scholarship. And this research and scholarship is itself increasingly cast in reformist, practical, and “policy relevant” terms, and directed to issues of perceived topical and regulatory concern.

The implied allegation is simple enough: basic research in the humanities and social sciences is, if not obsolete, then at least a luxury we can’t afford in these times; because it cannot satisfy the more immediate needs of market-driven societies in the current economic climate, it is politically irrelevant.

But can we imagine new ways to claim – or, perhaps, to reclaim – our political relevance? Are we relevant in other, perhaps more radical ways? And if we are, how? Is there a politics that is specific to law and the humanities? Or can we articulate the limits to the conversation about “relevance” in a way accessible to minds focused on instrumentality? How might we respond to our critics, or do we ignore them? 

Participants are encouraged to reflect on this broad, but not exclusive, conference theme.

In addition to sessions that connect to the theme, examples of other types of sessions we expect to organize include: History, Memory and Law; Reading Race; Law and Literature; Human Rights and Cultural Pluralism; Speech, Silence, and the Language of Law; Judgment, Justice, and Law; Beyond Identity; The Idea of Practice in Legal Thought; Metaphor and Meaning; Representing Legality in Film and Mass Media; Anarchy, Liberty and Law; What is Excellence in Interpretation?; Ethics, Religion, and Law; Moral Obligation and Legal Life; The Post-Colonial in Literary and Legal Study; Processes and Possibilities in Interdisciplinary Law Teaching.

We urge those interested in attending to consider submitting complete panels, and we hope to encourage a variety of formats-roundtables, sessions at which everyone reads the papers in advance, sessions in which commentators respond to a single paper. We invite proposals for session in which the focus is on pedagogy or methodology, for author-meets-readers sessions organized around important books in the field, or for sessions in which participants focus on performance (theatrical, filmic, musical, poetic).

How to register:

ASLCH uses a two part registration system (this will all be explained in detail on the website). First you register your paper or panel and pay a $35 membership fee. Then after January 10th, 2014, assuming your paper or panel is accepted, you go back to the same website (an email will be sent on that day to remind you) and pay the conference fee. 

Here is the link to register:

https://www.regonline.com/17thannualmeetingLCH

Hotel information:

We have reserved rooms in three Charlottesville hotels.  The main conference hotel, where we have reserved 80 rooms, is Hyatt Place, a brand-new hotel.  It is a short drive from the Law School, and they have a shuttle service.  The rate we negotiated is $139/night plus tax.  To reserve, call +1 434 426 4428 and state that you are a part of the ASLCH. You must reserve a room in Hyatt Place by Sunday, February 9.

For those of you who would rather be walking distance from the law school, we have reserved 30 rooms at the Inn at Darden, a hotel owned and operated by UVA's Darden School of Business, about a 5-minute walk from the law school.  To reserve a room there, call +1 434 243 5000 or if in the US 434-243-5000 and state that you are a part of ASLCH.  The rate for the room is $135/night plus tax. You will need to reserve a room by Saturday, February 1.

In case both of these hotels fill, we have also reserved 30 rooms at the Courtyard Marriott University.  It is a short drive from the Law School, and if enough participants are staying there, we may be able to run a bus to the conference.  To reserve a room online, please go to www.marriott.com/chodt and use the booking code ASLASLA or ASLASLB. You can also call +1 434 977 1700 and state that you are a part of ASLCH. The room rate is $169/night plus tax. You will need to reserve a room by Sunday, February 9.

If you have any questions you can email the hotel managers directly at these addresses:

Hyatt Place: Sheleigha Early (sheleigha.early@hyatt.com)

Inn at Darden: Bridget Merker (reservations@darden.virginia.edu)

Courtyard Marriot: Alex Jobin (Alex.Jobin@crestlinehotels.com)

Prizes and nominations: 

 We have the following awards that we give out at our annual conference. If you would like to nominate someone for the awards, please email the people listed below who is associated with that prize. Please note unless otherwise noted, all prizes nomination deadlines are the same: November 15th, 2013.

Julien Mezey Award

The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities invites submissions for the 2014 Julien Mezey Award. This annual prize is awarded to the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture and the humanities. The award will be presented at the Assocations Annual Conference, hosted by the University of Virginia on March 10-11, 2014.

The Association seeks the submission of outstanding work from a wide variety of perspectives, including, but not limited to law and cultural studies, legal hermeneutics and rhetoric, law and literature, law and psychoanalysis, law and visual studies, legal history, legal theory and jurisprudence. Scholars completing humanities-oriented dissertations in SJD and related programs, as well as those earning PhDs, are encouraged to submit their work. Applicants eligible for the 2014 award must have defended their dissertation successfully between September 1, 2012 and August 31, 2013.

For your nominations and submissions, please email Imani Perry at iperry@princeton.edu. Applications and nominations are due by November 15, 2013

The Austin Sarat Award

We are pleased to announce the Austin Sarat Award, a prize to be offered to a graduate student for a paper presented at an ASLCH annual conference. We are looking for papers that represent excellence in interdisciplinary thought, research and writing in the field of law, culture and the humanities. Although presentation of the paper at the conference is required to be eligible, the award winner will be chosen based upon finished papers submitted after the annual conference.

The deadline for this prize already passed (it was at the end of May, 2013) because we have the nomination process active while papers are still fresh in people’s mind. But keep this prize in mind for shortly after the 2014 conference ends. Please email Catherine Kellogg at ckellogg@ualberta.ca with any questions.

Graduate Student workshop

The Annual Law Culture and Humanities conference is pleased to offer a graduate student workshop designed for graduate students who are undertaking research that cuts across law, cultural studies, literature, philosophy, legal studies, anthropology, political science, economics. The workshop is designed to provide mentoring, practical advice on publishing and applying for work, as well as have some fun. Applications to the workshop should include a statement of research, a current curriculum vitae, and a short statement of the paper that each student will be presenting at the conference. There is limited space for the workshop, and so we cannot admit all (although we will do our best!). Please forward your application to ckellogg@ualberta.ca by November 15.