Zareifard, Hosseini, and Zarei on The Investigation of the Grammatical Metaphors of Iranian Legal Texts

Raha Zareifard, Jahrom University, Zahra Hosseini, and Tayyebe Zarei, Jahrom University, Department of Linguistics, are publishing The Investigation of the Grammatical Metaphors of Iranian Legal Texts in volume 2020 of the International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation. Here is the abstract.

Nowadays, scientific analysis of language has a special place in the sciences, since the scientific methods give a better understanding of the texts. The emergence of forensic linguistics in recent years in Iran and the presentation of various approaches in this field has greatly accepted. This article analyzes a number of advisory theories of Iranian Justice Department based on the systemic functional grammar. One of the concepts in the systemic functional grammar is grammatical metaphor. Grammatical metaphor is one of the hallmarks of the language of science, and according to Holliday (2004) grammatical metaphor is of great importance in the development of scientific discourse and the advancement of reasoning in texts. Holliday has introduced and distinguished three types of grammatical metaphor, i.e. ideational, interpersonal and textual. The purpose of this research is to study the application of these types of metaphors in legal texts, to gain a better understanding of them. For this purpose, we examine the use of ideational, interpersonal and textual metaphors by examining about 20 advisory theories of Iranian Legal Department of Justice randomly. The results of this study suggest that legal texts have their own unique style and that the reason for applying such metaphors is to make these texts distinctive. Therefore, a better and more accurate understanding of these texts can be achieved with a closer look at the analytical tools presented.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Dembroff, Kohler-Hausmann, and Sugarman on What Taylor Swift and Beyonce Teach Us About Sex and Causes @taylorswift13 @Beyonce

Robin Dembroff, Issa Kohler-Hausmann, and Elise Sugarman, all of Yale University, are publishing What Taylor Swift and Beyonce Teach Us About Sex and Causes in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Here is the abstract.

In the consolidated cases Altitude Express v. Zarda, Bostock v. Clayton County, and R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC, the Supreme Court will decide whether or not Title VII prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Although the parties disagree as to the appropriate formulation of a but-for test to determine whether or not there was a discriminatory outcome, all parties do agree to the use of such a test, which asks “whether the evidence shows ‘treatment of a person in a manner which but for that person’s sex would be different.’” City of Los Angeles, Dep’t. of Water and Power v. Manhart, 435 U.S. 702, 711 (1978). However, but-for tests confuse more than they clarify the inquiry; a discriminatory outcome cannot be explained by appeal to just a discrete characteristic of a particular person. Individuals are not discriminated against because of these characteristics per se. Rather, they are discriminated against because of the social meanings and expectations that attach to these characteristics. Beyoncé and Taylor Swift illustrate the difference between individual-level causation and social explanation in two separate songs, “If I Were a Boy” and “The Man.” The explanation for why the counterfactual ‘male’ Beyoncé and Swift are evaluated differently than their current ‘female’ versions does not lie in individual-level features considered apart from the social world, but in social-level roles and expectations associated with those features. For this reason, a social explanation test—one that asks whether the social meanings of sex characteristics, rather than the characteristics per se, explain the outcome in question—is more suitable for determining whether or not Title VII has been violated.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call for Papers: Law, Technology and Humans Volume 2, Issue 2 @CrimeJusticeQUT

Law, Technology and Humans (ISSN 2652-4074) is an innovative open access, double blind reviewed journal that encourages research and scholarship on the human and humanity of law and technology. Sponsored by the Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, Law, Technology and Humans is advised by a leading International Editorial Board. More about the journal, submission and accessing published articles is available at https://lthj.qut.edu.au/

Papers for consideration in volume 2(2) are invited. Volume 2(2) will be published in November 2020. Preference will be given to research and scholarship that:

· Challenges and critically examines the promises and perils of emergent technologies;

· Engages with the futures (and pasts) of law, technology and humans;

· Involves critical, philosophical or theoretically informed work on law and technology;

Uses humanities, social science or other approaches to study law and technology;

· Examines law and technology from non-Western locations and perspectives; or

· Locates law and technology in wider concerns about the Anthropocene, pandemics, climate change or relations with non-humans.

Interested contributors may discuss their research and scholarship with the General Editor, Professor Kieran Tranter: lawtechhum@qut.edu.au

Deadline for submissions for Volume 2, Issue 2: Monday 15 June 2020.  Submissions: https://lthj.qut.edu.au/about/submissions

Call For Papers: Special Issue--Law and the Janus-Faced Morality of Political Correctness @AnneWag26082949

CALL FOR A SPECIAL ISSUE 

Title of the Special Issue: Law and the Janus-faced Morality of Political Correctness

Concerning the possibility of juridically relevant responses, is the culture of the so-called political correctness a significant challenge? Although the affirmative answer seems obvious, the relevance to be taken in account is not, however, as linear as an approach in terms of public policies and their legisla- tive prescriptions apparently justifies. The problem at stake has not only to do with the (more or less extensively grasped) opportunity to sustain a new branch of Politics of Law, the distinctive feature of which would be an explicit progressive sensitivity and responsiveness to the pluralism of margin- alised identities and their narrative intersections (involving gender, race, sexual orientation, practical-cultural and geo- political provenience, health, mental and physical disability, as well as the relation to the colonial past and the status of victim). The problem concerns also the difficulties which this plurality (whilst favoring the fragmentation of perspectives, meanings and semantic values) effectively creates, when we consider Law’s claim for an integrating context — and with this, the vocation for comparability related to the status or dig- nity of sui juris. Last but not least, the problem concerns also some institutionalizing procedures and social effects which the culture of political correctness has indisputably imposed: the hypertrophy of duties and their concentration in apparently trivial strongholds (justifying unresolved tensions be- tween universal and parochial claims), the legitimation of a limitless responsibility (with public devastating pre-juridical judgements, destroying lives and careers), the unconditional celebration of differences as a (paradoxically) ethical homo- genizing reference (if not as an effective intolerance factor, generating new and subtle forms of censorship).

We can say that the discussion of this cluster of themes, in their juridical (dogmatic and meta-dogmatic) systematic implications, is still fundamentally to be done. Favoring a context open to multiple perspectives, without excluding (ra- ther expecting!) the intertwining of juridical and non-juridical approaches, the volume which we now propose - as a first number of the journal Undecidabilities and Law -- aims to be part of this indispensable reflexive path.

This first issue will be coordinated by José Manuel Aroso Linhares, Full Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Coimbra and Coordinator at the University of Coimbra Institute for Legal Research.

The articles on the proposed theme, to be published in the first issue, in 2020/2021, must be submitted until September 15th, to ulcj@ij.uc.pt.

Madison on The Republic of Letters and the Origins of Scientific Knowledge Commons @profmadison @pittlawfaculty

Michael J. Madison, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, is publishing The Republic of Letters and the Origins of Scientific Knowledge Commons in Governing Privacy as Commons (M. Sanfilippo, K.J. Strandburg, and B. M. Frischmann, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2020). Here is the abstract.

The knowledge commons framework, deployed here in a review of the early network of scientific communication known as the Republic of Letters, combines a historical sensibility regarding the character of scientific research and communications with a modern approach to analyzing institutions for knowledge governance. Distinctions and intersections between public purposes and privacy interests are highlighted. Lessons from revisiting the Republic of Letters as knowledge commons may be useful in advancing contemporary discussions of Open Science.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Fletcher on Textualism's Gaze @MSULaw

Matthew L. M. Fletcher, Michigan State University College of Law, is publishing Textualism's Gaze in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law. Here is the abstract.

In recent years, perhaps because of the influence of Justice Scalia, the Supreme Court appears to place greater emphasis on texts than ever before. “We’re all textualists now,” Justice Kagan declared in 2015. But it is one thing to say a court will prioritize the text. It is another thing to choose which text is to be prioritized. Follow the textualism of constitutional interpretation and one sees judges prioritize the public understanding of the privileged white men in power at the time of the framing of the constitutional text. Follow the textualism of federal statutory interpretation and one sees judges prioritize the text exclusively, and if the judges engage with the legislative history of the statute they will engage with the public understanding of the legislators who enacted the law, again, largely privileged white men. The victory of textualism is not necessarily in the outcomes, but in significantly narrowing the scope of evidence available to interpret the text, in some cases to almost nothing but the bare words of the statute. Women, persons of color, and other marginalized persons and entities are almost never relevant to the textualist’s gaze. The narrow focus of the textualist’s gaze also warps how Indian law matters are decided. The judiciary rarely considers how the governments and people most affected by the text — Indian tribes and individual Indians — understand the meaning of the text. The judiciary, whether it intends to or not, considers Indians and tribes as extraneous to the interpretive process.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Avi-Yonah on Studying Tax History (Book Review of Studies in the History of Tax Law, vol. 9)) @UMichLaw

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, University of Michigan Law School, has published Why Study Tax History? Here is the abstract.

This book review addresses the question why studying tax history is helpful to tax policy makers and practitioners.

Download the book review from SSRN at the link.

Asimow on American Vigilantism: Popular Justice and Popular Culture

Michael Asimow, Santa Clara Law School, is publishing American Vigilantism — Popular Justice and Popular Culture in Vigilante Justice in Society and Popular Culture: A Global Perspective. Here is the abstract.

This essay on American vigilantism is a chapter in the forthcoming book Vigilante Justice in Society and Popular Culture: A Global Perspective (Peter Robson & Ferdinando Spina, eds). It summarizes the rich history of American vigilantism, meaning that people administer popular justice by taking the law into their own hands. It focusses particularly on the San Francisco Vigilance Committees of 1851 and 1856 when large numbers of people who were frustrated by crime and corruption took over criminal law enforcement and hanged a number of desperados. The chapter also discusses San Francisco’s Chinatown Squad of 1879-1920, a group of police assigned the job of law enforcement in Chinatown by any means necessary. The chapter then turns to vigilantism in American movies. Given the centrality of vigilantism in American history and the hearty public approval it usually enjoys, it’s not surprising that a vast number of films concern this subject. The chapter concentrates on police vigilantism, exemplified by Dirty Harry and its sequels. Almost all of the Dirty Harry films were set in San Francisco (which connects the two halves of this chapter). These very successful movies transmitted a strong message of political conservatism. They depicted San Francisco as a pit of depravity and sexual permissiveness. Police vigilantism offends the criminal law compromise that gives government a monopoly on the use of force, but subject to a series of constraints that vigilantes ignore.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Haack on The Art of Scientific Metaphors @MiamiLawSchool

Susan Haack, University of Miami School of Law, University of Miami Department of Philosophy, has published The Art of Scientific Metaphors at 75 Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 2049 (2019). Here is the abstract.

Metaphor has no place in science, some claim; no, others argue, metaphor is crucial to science. Science is a rational enterprise with its own distinctive logical structure; no, it isn’t essentially different from literature, equally a kind of world-making. There is a distinctive metaphorical kind of meaning; no, metaphorical utterances have only their literal meanings, in which they are just plain false. Conspicuous by its absence is the reasonable middle ground Haack will be mapping here. Metaphor is useful, but not essential, to scientific work; metaphors don’t have a special kind of meaning, but they do have a special pragmatic role; scientific work and the writing of fiction do have important things in common, but there are also significant differences between the two enterprises. Once we understand how science works (§1), and then how metaphors work (§2), we can articulate the similarities, and differences, between scientific metaphors and literary ones (§3).

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Buchanan and Dorf on A Tale of Two Formalisms: How Law and Economics Mirrors Originalism and Textualisms @NeilHBuchanan @dorfonlaw

Neil H. Buchanan, University of Florida College of Law, and Michael C. Dorf, Cornell Law School, are publishing A Tale of Two Formalisms: How Law and Economics Mirrors Originalism and Textualism in volume 106 of the Cornell Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Two leading schools of thought among U.S. conservative legal elites — Law and Economics (L&E) and Originalism and Textualism (O&T) — both purport to use their formalist structures to guide analysis in ways that are objective, substantially determinate, and apolitical. Because they rest on very different theoretical underpinnings, L&E and O&T should only randomly reach similar policy or legal conclusions. After all, L&E implements neoclassical economics, a theory of utility maximization, whereas O&T is a theory of semantics. Yet as practiced, L&E and O&T rarely result in conflict. What explains the missing intra-conservative clash? Despite their respective pretenses to objectivity, determinacy, and political neutrality, neither theory delivers on its promises. Economic efficiency, the lynchpin of L&E, is incoherent because it relies on typically hidden but ultimately normative assumptions about preferences that would exist in an impossible world without law. O&T as it has been refined in response to devastating criticisms of earlier versions is indistinguishable from ostensibly less determinate rivals like Living Constitutionalism and purposivism. Accordingly, conservatives use L&E and O&T to obscure the role of normative priors, perhaps even from themselves. Liberals could use the same techniques for different results but heretofore generally have not, instead mostly settling for counterpunching against charges of result-orientation.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Northwestern University: Position Available in Legal Studies and American Studies Program

Northwestern University is hiring an Assistant Professor of Instruction to be appointed jointly in the Legal Studies program and the American Studies program. This is a full-time, benefits eligible position with a path to promotion. The initial contract is for two years.

The Assistant Professor of Instruction will offer six courses per year (generally two per quarter) on topics pertaining to Legal Studies and American Studies. The successful candidate will teach the American Studies thesis seminar and the Legal Studies thesis seminar in rotation and will teach an introductory course in Law & Society. Other courses offered would be a mix of seminars and lectures in the area of the successful candidate’s interests.

We are seeking a scholar whose work is rooted in both Legal Studies and American Studies; we encourage candidates with a PhD in Legal Studies, American Studies, or a related humanities or social science discipline to apply. A J.D. is preferred but not required. We are particularly interested in candidates whose work addresses racial and/or gender inequality and engages crime, policing, and/or incarceration, but will consider other areas of focus as well.

This is a nine-month faculty appointment, and applicant must have a Ph.D. in hand by September 1, 2020. Applicants should submit a cover letter describing their research interests and teaching experience, a current CV, and the names of two references. (Short-listed candidates will be asked to provide teaching evaluations. References of short-listed candidates will be contacted to provide letters of recommendation.) Applications received by April 24, 2020 will receive full consideration; interviews with finalists will be conducted remotely. The successful applicant will begin Fall 2020.

For further information about this position please contact Ann Kelchner at a-kelchner@northwestern.edu or 847-467-2207. An application link can be found here: https://www.legalstudies.northwestern.edu/people/apoi2020.html

Northwestern University is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer and does not discriminate against qualified individuals on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, parental status, marital status, age, disability, citizenship status, veteran status, genetic information, or any other protected class. Individuals from all diverse backgrounds are encouraged to apply. Hiring is contingent upon eligibility to work in the United States. For more information, please see the University’s Policy on Discrimination and Harassment at https://www.northwestern.edu/equity/policies-procedures/policies/policy-discrimination-harassment.html.

Wolitz on Alexander Bickel and the Demise of Legal Process Jurisprudence @UTKLaw

David Wolitz, University of Tennessee College of Law, is publishing Alexander Bickel and the Demise of Legal Process Jurisprudence in the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Here is the abstract.

This article provides an intellectual history of the displacement of Legal Process theory as the predominant jurisprudential approach in American law. The Legal Process approach to law embedded a strict norm of principled adjudication within a larger pragmatic theory of law. Alexander Bickel understood that the Legal Process theory of adjudication clashed with its commitment to pragmatic governance. The country, Bickel believed, could tolerate only so much principled decisionmaking — “No good society can be unprincipled, and no viable society can be principle-ridden.” Bickel convinced himself that the judiciary could promote pragmatic governance while maintaining its own integrity as an institution of principle through the implementation of various justiciability and abstention doctrines, the so-called “passive virtues.” Prudent invocation of the passive virtues, Bickel argued, would keep the core judicial function — rendering decisions on the merits — free from merely expedient considerations while granting the political branches the space and time they need to work out pragmatic compromises. But once Bickel starkly drew out the tension between principled decisionmaking and pragmatic governance, the Legal Process consensus began to fracture. Why allow for unprincipled judicial decisionmaking with respect to certain justiciability and abstention questions, but not in other areas of doctrine? As Gerald Gunther put it, Bickel was effectively advocating “100% principle, 80% of the time.” Bickel’s passive virtues solution found no favor among his Legal Process peers and drew even greater criticism from Warren Court-defending legal liberals. Bickel’s penetrating insights into the tensions between principled decisionmaking and pragmatic governance had exposed an always latent divide in Legal Process thought, one Bickel himself could not successfully reconcile. After Bickel, normative jurisprudence has become ever more polarized between consequentialist-pragmatic approaches on the one hand and principled-rationalist approaches on the other.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Millemann, Rauh, and Bowle on Teaching Professional Responsibility Through Theater @MikeMillemann @robertbowiejr

Michael A. Millemann, University of Maryland School of Law, Elliott Rauh, and Robert Bowle, Jr., are publishing Teaching Professional Responsibility Through Theater in the Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal (2020). Here is the abstract.

This article is about ethics-focused law school courses, co-taught with a theater director, in which students wrote, produced and performed in plays. The plays were about four men who, separately, were wrongfully convicted, spent decades in prison, and finally were released and exonerated, formally (two) or informally (two). The common themes in these miscarriages of justice were that 1) unethical conduct of prosecutors (especially failures to disclose exculpatory evidence) and of defense counsel (especially incompetent representation) undermined the Rule of Law and produced wrongful convictions, and 2) conversely, that the ethical conduct of post-conviction lawyers and law students helped to partially vindicate the rights of those wrongfully convicted, but could not provide any real remedy for decades of wrongfully deprived freedom. In sharp contrast, the worst and best of the legal profession were on display. We argue that reproducing these extraordinary stories as plays, with students playing the roles of prosecutors, defense counsel, defendants (with not only wrongful convictions but also decades of wrongful incarceration), family members, crime victims, and people in the affected communities, is a powerful way to teach both law students and public audiences about the direct connections between legal ethics rules and the Rule of Law. It teaches as well the ripple effects on many people and communities, not just the parties, of unethical lawyer behavior. The students learned about legal ethics through in depth analysis of the actual case records, from pretrial motions through trial transcripts and appellate briefs (in the nature of ethics autopsies), and from the personal presentations in class by the exonerated men and their families. As important, the students learned about professional responsibility and irresponsibilities, from their immersion in the roles of the lawyers and “secondary” characters, like the affected families of the four men and the crime victims and their communities. The students also learned about competence, including how to work collaboratively to develop and to tell stories, to appreciate cultural differences, to examine witnesses, and to deal with performance anxiety. Because the men, all African Americans, were tried in 1968 (two), 1975, and 1983, the plays served as important points of comparison of criminal justice — criminal law and procedure — then and now. In this respect, the courses also were virtual laboratories in which to explore legal realism and critical legal theory, especially race theory; the true stories were powerful critiques of the romanticized, theoretical model of due process that underlies the formal criminal justice curricula.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Voigt on Minding the Gap: Analyzing the Divergence Between Constitutional Text and Constitutional Reality @CESifo @ILEHamburg

Stefan Voigt, University of Hamburg, Institute of Law & Economics; CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute), has published Mind the Gap – Analyzing the Divergence Between Constitutional Text and Constitutional Reality Here is the abstract.

Constitutional Economics – the analysis of constitutions drawing on the economic approach – has made important progress over the last two decades. The factors determining whether a constitution is complied with, however, have received only little attention. This is surprising, as a huge gap between constitutional text and constitutional reality seems to exist in many countries. In this paper, this gap is referred as the de jure/de facto gap. The paper discusses ways in which the gap can be researched systematically and surveys the scant available literature that has tried to do so thus far.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Lemley on Chief Justice Webster @marklemley

Mark A. Lemley, Stanford Law School, has published Chief Justice Webster. Here is the abstract.

The Supreme Court has a love affair with the dictionary. Half of its decisions in the 2018 term cited a dictionary, often as the primary or exclusive means of defining a term in the statute. The Solicitor General may long have been the “tenth Justice,” but in the 21st century the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court may as well be, not John Roberts, but Noah Webster. The Court’s obsession with dictionaries as the arbiter of statutory meaning is a recent phenomenon. A review of cases from 50 or 100 years ago reveals no such focus. The Court’s increased use of dictionaries may stem from the idea – very much in vogue today in some quarters – that courts are not to make law but simply “call balls and strikes.” Looking up a term in the dictionary can seem like the height of judicial restraint. A court that does so isn’t consciously or subconsciously imposing its own ideology on a statute; it’s just turning to a trusted neutral source. That impression is misleading. Dictionaries are not the neutral, commonly-accepted panacea the Court seems to suppose. In this Article, I discuss a historical test case for the use of dictionaries to interpret legal documents. In the early 2000s, patent law flirted with the use of dictionaries to define the terms of patent claims, a process akin to statutory interpretation. The Federal Circuit (the national patent court) unanimously abandoned that experiment after only three years, for a simple reason: it was a disaster. The lessons of patent law’s brief flirtation with dictionary primacy in claim construction suggest that it’s a bad idea to turn to dictionaries to interpret statutes. That’s true for several reasons. Dictionaries aren’t designed to give what courts want: a single definitive meaning (or complex of considerations) that define what the law is. Dictionaries deliberately define terms expansively and in self-contradictory ways, seeking to capture all possible meanings of a term, not to pick among them. They don’t take legal nuance into account, and they can’t incorporate a background pattern of behavior or centuries of precedent against which Congress may have adopted a term. The use of legislative history is often attacked as a cover for judicial activism, but in fact it is the dictionary that provides the easiest cover for activist decisions that depart from Congressional intent and precedent. Dictionaries can literally justify any plausible meaning of a term. Courts that turn to them are doing exactly what they purport to disdain: picking the meaning of a statute based on their own personal preferences.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Nicoletti on The Rise and Fall of Transcendent Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era @UVALaw

Cynthia Nicoletti, University of Virginia School of Law, is publishing The Rise and Fall of Transcendent Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era in volume 106 of the West Virginia Law Review (2020). Here is the abstract.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, American intellectuals saw the war itself as a force of transcendent lawmaking. They viewed it as a historical catalyst that had forged the United States into a nation. In writing the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress sought to translate the war’s nationalistic spirit into text. But in the eyes of many contemporary thinkers, the war’s centripetal energy was a double-edged sword. It could create a nation out of disparate parts, but it was also potentially uncontainable, divorced from the regular lawmaking process and beyond the control of human actors. As a result, many American jurists feared that the war could result in the complete destruction of American federalism and the erection of a system based on unitary sovereignty. After the Civil War, the Supreme Court significantly narrowed the revolutionary potential of the Fourteenth Amendment, as generations of legal scholars have noted. What scholars have failed to appreciate, however, is exactly what the Court meant to do in its controversial opinion in the Slaughterhouse Cases. In Slaughterhouse and other post-war cases, the Court sought to provide a counterforce against the forces of transcendent lawmaking, intending to preserve the fundamental distinction between state and federal authority in the United States, which the justices feared might be entirely elided otherwise. To many Americans living in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Supreme Court’s decision to quash the radical potential of transcendent constitutionalism represented a welcome return to the ordinary operation of law in the United States.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Dane on Law Clerks: A Jurisprudential Lens @perrydane

Perry Dane, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Rutgers Law School, is publishing Law Clerks: A Jurisprudential Lens in the George Washington Law Review Arguendo, Forthcoming. Here is the abstract.

American law clerks often draft opinions for their judges. Yet American legal culture is remarkably diffident about that simple fact. The role that law clerks play in drafting opinions is not a secret. Far from it. But it might qualify to be somewhere in the outer vicinity of being an “open secret.” And it continues to be controversial. This essay explores a set of questions about opinion-writing by law clerks. The first major question is meta-normative. The goal is not to decide whether the practice of law clerks drafting opinions is proper or improper, but why it is occluded and controversial in the first place. Specifically, why is there so much more diffidence and doubt about the role of law clerks than about the work of aides in the other branches of government such as Presidential speechwriters and Congressional staff? The second question is hermeneutic. Should the fact that judges might not always draft their own opinions lead us to read and interpret those opinions differently, especially when we draw conclusions about the “jurisprudence” of this or that judge or Justice or the way that legal doctrines often seem to be shaped by longstanding, dialectical, debates among judges or Justices? The discussion of both questions tries to shed some light on broader constitutional and jurisprudential questions, including the distinctly metonymic relationship between the “President” and the rest of the Executive Branch and the complicated connections between judicial reasoning, the exercise of judicial authority, and the identity of the individual judge. This essay was written as part of symposium marking the hundredth anniversary of the formal institution of Supreme Court law clerks.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Lindgren on The Religious Beliefs, Practices, and Experiences of Law Professors @NorthwesternLaw

James Lindgren, Northwestern University School of Law, has published The Religious Beliefs, Practices, and Experiences of Law Professors at 15 University of St. Thomas Law Journal 342 (2019). Here is the abstract.

In the 1990s I surveyed law faculties at the top one hundred law schools, collecting data on professors’ religious affiliations. [Measuring Diversity: Law Faculties in 1997 and 2013, 39 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 89 (2016), https://ssrn.com/abstract=2581675] I found that Christians were represented at only about half their percentages in the larger population, while Jewish and nonreligious law professors were substantially overrepresented. Yet knowing whether a professor is, for example, Christian or Jewish only scratches the surface. For the general public, the General Social Survey and the American National Election Studies have long asked about belief in God and church attendance, but these questions had never before been asked of law professors. This article reports the results of a 2017 survey of about 500 law professors. The study first updates the 1997 study on religious preference and then moves on to explore the issues of belief in God, church attendance, and religiously motivated discrimination. Law faculties are substantially less devout than mere reports of religious preferences would indicate. Though religious belief in the general population tends to fall with increased education, that phenomenon does not explain or account for the observed magnitude of the differences. For example, while 24 percent of law professors say that they “don’t believe in God” and another 18 percent “don’t know whether God exists,” among those in the general population who have graduate and professional degrees, only 5.4 percent do not believe in God and 10.4 percent do not know whether God exists. While in this study higher percentages of Christians report religious discrimination than the non-religious, so do higher percentages of Jews and those who embrace “other religions.” As for their schools preferring non-Christians over Christians, Christians are much more likely to report this behavior than Jews or the non-religious, but the percentages reporting having witnessed this discriminatory preference are still relatively small.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Bandes on Remorse and Judging @BandesSusan

Susan A. Bandes, DePaul University College of Law, is publishing Remorse and Judging in Remorse and Judging, in Remorse in Criminal Justice: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives (Routledge, 2020). Here is the abstract.

This chapter focuses on the judicial evaluation of remorse. It is an article of faith that judges can and should evaluate remorse when determining sentence. Although the dynamics of this evaluation are understudied, the existing literature helps illuminate the assumptions judges employ and the dangers and limitations of those assumptions. Judges rely on evaluation of demeanor and body language and on allocution, and their interpretations are rife with implicit assumptions and unstated rules about what counts as remorse. Many of these assumptions (for example the link between remorse and decreased recidivism and the possibility of assessing remorse from demeanor) lack evidentiary support. These assumptions and implicit rules vary widely from judge to judge. They often fail to account for the influence of race, ethnicity, gender and social class on the expression and evaluation of remorse. Moreover, they put a premium on the willingness to plead guilty, and to do so at the earliest possible opportunity. The chapter draws upon the few existing empirical studies on the topic and identifies areas that require further study.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Colella on Looking Back at the Allen Ginsberg Obscenity Trial 62 Years Later @HaubLawatPace

Frank G. Colella, Pace University, has published Looking Back at the Allen Ginsberg Obscenity Trial 62 Years Later at 262 N.Y.L.J. no. 6 (Aug. 29, 2019). It is also forthcoming as a Pace University Research Paper. Here is the abstract.

Sixty-two years ago this month, a decade before 1967's Summer of Love, San Francisco hosted the obscenity trial of Allen Ginsberg's epic poem, Howl, during the summer of 1957. The 1950s, and well into the 1960s, witnessed no shortage of censorship battles over the arts-even comic books. This particular battle focused on a small chapbook of obscure poetry, Howl and Other Poems, has reached quasi-mythological status in the history of the Beat Generation. The nationwide publicity generated by the trial single-handedly dragged Ginsberg and Howl into the public consciousness. Today's global recognition and critical acclaim for Howl aside, that the trial itself still resonates in the legal community is no small accomplishment because the decision was never officially published. Moreover, it is unusual in and of itself for a municipal court trial judge to author a written opinion, which would be binding only upon those individuals within that municipality. As a consequence, People v. Ferlinghetti was never cited as precedent, or otherwise, in any subsequent legal proceeding.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Tillman on the 1792 Madison-to-Pendleton Letter: A Time for Reconsideration, Reflection, and Response? @SethBTillman

Seth Barrett Tillman, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Faculty of Law, has published The 1792 Madison-to-Pendleton Letter: A Time for Reconsideration, Reflection, and Response? Here is the abstract.

In a 1995 Stanford Law Review article, Professors Akhil Reed and Vikram David Amar argued that the U.S. Constitution’s Succession Clause and its “officer”-language does not permit legislative officer succession. They concluded that the nation’s first succession act—passed by the Second Congress—which put the Senate’s and House’s presiding officers in the line of presidential succession—was unconstitutional. The modern presidential succession statute also puts legislative officers in the line of succession, and so the Amars concluded that it too was unconstitutional. In reaching their conclusion, they opined on the Succession Clause’s history, text, purpose, etc. The largest part of their argument was of a more intuitive variety: i.e., argument based on so-called “constitutional structural.” The Amars supported their intuition, in substantial part, by claiming James Madison shared their intuition. Or, to put it more precisely, they renewed an argument which, according to the Amars, was first put forward by James Madison in a letter to Edmund Pendleton (hereinafter the “Madison-to-Pendleton Letter”), and then they claimed Madison as high authority for the position they put forward. My object in this short paper is limited: it is to show why the Amars were wrong to rely on James Madison. The argument they put forward is their intuition, and not Madison’s. The Amars’ argument may be right on the merits (i.e., legislative officer is unconstitutional) and it may be wrong (i.e., the first succession act and its modern successor are both constitutional)—but the Amars’ claiming the mantle of Madison in support of their position is and always was largely historical error. The intellectual stakes here are not only reasonably high, but also peculiarly timely. The meaning of the Constitution’s Succession Clause and its “officer”-language is always two heartbeats away from contemporary relevance. That issue is always of at least some concern, even absent hype and the more idiosyncratic concerns of cloistered academics. Today, the presidential succession issue is relevant not merely because we are two heartbeats away, but also because we are one impeachment and one heartbeat away from applying the 1947 Presidential Succession Act—which puts the two presiding legislative officers, i.e., the Speaker of the House and the Senate President Pro Tempore (“SPPT”), in the line of succession. Finally, the Amars’ article and the Madison-to-Pendleton Letter are the key (modern) article and the key (premodern) historical evidence discussed in the academic debate over the Constitution’s “office”-language. That debate no longer resides exclusively in the halls of the academy—it has moved into the federal courts which are now litigating civil claims brought against the President under the Foreign Emoluments Clause. That latter clause applies to “Person[s] holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States].” How we resolve or should resolve the issue of whether the President holds an office of profit or trust under the United States will depend, in part, on the rightness (or wrongness) of the Amars’ analysis, the meaning of the Succession Clause and its “officer”-language, and the meaning of the Madison-to-Pendleton Letter. Finally, I add that over ten years ago, I hypothesized that: “There is some reason to believe that [in the Madison-to-Pendleton Letter] all Madison was doing [was] reporting prior debate. Viz., each of ‘Madison’s’ four arguments in his letter to Pendleton had already been expressed on the floor of the House by speakers other than Madison in prior debate.” Today, I intend to make that claim good.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

IUPUI Law: Visiting Assistant Professor of Law Position in Legal Communication and Analysis @IUMcKinney

Job Announcement

Visiting Assistant Professor in Legal Communication and Analysis

Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law

Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law invites entry-level and experienced applicants for a visiting professorship in the school’s nationally ranked Legal Communication and Analysis Program.

The visitor position is a full-time position. The visitor is expected to teach up to 40 first-year students in Legal Communication and Analysis, which is a year-long course. The course is a graded, two-credit course each semester. Responsibilities include creating course materials, teaching in the classroom and in one-on-one student conferences, reviewing outlines and drafts, assessing papers, and providing detailed feedback to students.

The visitor position is ideal for one seeking entry into the legal academy. An entry-level visitor would have the opportunity to work with and learn from IU McKinney’s Legal Communication and Analysis faculty—Cynthia Adams, Brad Desnoyer, Jim Dimitri, Allison Martin, and Joel Schumm—who have decades of experience as nationally recognized teachers and scholars. The position would be a ten-month appointment for the 2020–21 academic year, with the possibility for reappointment for the 2021–22 academic year. The visitor would be given the opportunity to attend legal writing conferences and to write scholarship in the legal writing field. The visitor would not be required to serve on faculty committees or to teach during the summer.

The compensation package includes an entry-level salary of $70,000, a generous professional development fund that may be used to travel to conferences, a generous research assistant fund, and university benefits.

The law school is strongly committed to achieving excellence through intellectual diversity and strongly encourages applications from persons of color, women, persons with disabilities, the LGBT community, veterans, and members of other groups that are under-represented on university faculties. The law school is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Institution. For more information about the school, visit http://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/.

Applicants must demonstrate a strong academic record and strong writing skills. Ideal candidates will have teaching experience and experience as a judicial clerk or a practitioner.

To apply, please send a cover letter, a curriculum vitae, three references, a writing sample, and teaching evaluations (if available) to Professor Jim Dimitri, Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, 530 West New York Street, Indianapolis, Indiana 46202-3225; jddimitr@iupui.edu. Individuals who require a reasonable accommodation to participate in the application process must notify Professor Dimitri a reasonable time in advance.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis but must be received no later than March 25, 2020.

CFP: The Female Detective on TV: MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture @AnnaMisiakFal

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Female Detective on TV

MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture (maifeminism.com) invites academic authors with expertise in television studies and other related disciplines to contribute to our upcoming special issue on female detectives on TV. 

For decades now, the female detective has occupied space within a genre that has been all-too-often reserved for the celebratory storylines of self-sacrificial men. She has served to break down sexist barriers placed before women within professional and personal frameworks, acting as an on-screen surrogate and inspiration for (female) spectators. The popularity of female-led TV crime drama across the world points to her success in captivating widespread audience attention. 

The topic of women in TV crime drama has inspired a range of significant feminist scholarship (see for example, Pinedo 2019; Coulthard, Horeck, Klinger, McHugh 2018; Greer 2017; Buonanno 2017; Moorti and Cuklanz 2017; Steenberg 2017, 2012; Jermyn 2017; Weissman (2016; 2010; 2007); McCabe 2015; Turnbull 2014; Brunsdon 2013; D’Acci 1994). This work has examined female-led TV crime drama from a variety of angles, including transnational cultural exchanges and currencies, serial form and narrative, gender, class, sexual and racial politics, and postfeminist identities and logics. 

Certain series such as The Killing (Denmark 2007-2012, US 2011-2014), The Bridge (Sweden 2011-2018, US 2013-2014), The Fall (UK 2013-2016), and Top of the Lake (NZ/Australia 2013/2017), have been singled out for how their female protagonists (Sarah Lund/Sarah Linden; Saga Noren; Stella Gibson, and Robin Griffin) resonate with viewers across transnational borders. Meanwhile, on primetime episodic US TV crime drama, Mariska Hargitay’s 21-year stint as Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (US 1999-present) – the longest running live-action TV series in American history – has turned her into a ‘touchstone figure’ (Moorti and Cuklanz 2017). Hargitay’s real-life activism, and her dedication to fighting sexual violence against women, has attained important cultural recognition, as Law & Order: SVU itself has received renewed critical consideration in the wake of the #MeToo movement. 

Notably, though, the female detectives mentioned in the above paragraph are overwhelmingly white. What shifts occur in the genre when a non-white female actor helms the main role as detective? What new possibilities, for example, are opened up by the emergence of black female legal investigators and detectives on network series such as ABC’s How to Get Away with Murder (US 2014-2019) and online TV series such as Netflix’s Seven Seconds (US 2018)? And to what extent is TV crime drama able to meaningfully engage with issues of intersectionality and the precariousness of social justice in twenty-first century society? 

This special issue seeks to build on the existing body of feminist writing on women in TV crime drama, through a further investigation of the figure of the female detective at this critical juncture for feminist television studies.  What new feminist visions of the female detective have emerged with changes in industrial practices and the growth of online streaming and niche television? How does the female detective of streaming TV compare to the images of the female detective found in the middlebrow crime dramas of linear TV? In an era of networked media in which popular feminism and popular misogyny (Banet-Weiser 2018) are more intertwined than ever before, what notions of empowerment are articulated through the figure of the female detective? To what extent does the female detective enable an exploration of central issues regarding female subjectivity and political resistance against systemic forms of violence? 

We hope to open further debate on the subject of the female detective in all her guises. Staying true to MAI spirit, we are seeking papers written from intersectional and multivalent feminist perspectives. We hope this issue not only examines the figures and representations of women crime investigators on the screen, but also situates their work in related social, cultural and political contexts.  

Our definition of the female detective is broad and inclusive. She can, but doesn't have to be a private eye or a police professional, just as long as she pursues social justice or truth. 

While analyses of current and recent examples seem to be an obvious priority as far as contribution to the field knowledge of visual culture analysis, we also welcome papers on female detectives from the past. 

 In particular, we would like to encourage authors to consider submitting articles on the following titles: 

Seven Seconds How to Get Away with Murder Marcella Spiral Unbelievable  Killing Eve Safe  Top of the Lake  The Fall The Bridge  Veronica Mars Southland Fargo Prime Suspect  La Mante  Castle

The Killing Broadchurch Lucifer Elementary  The Wire The Closer  Happy Valley  Jessica Jones  Absentia Tatort  The Bletchley Circle Collateral Suspects Witnesses Loch Ness Cagney and Lacey

We recognise that there are many more titles of interests, and the list could run quite long. If you wish to propose a paper on any other TV title, please get in touch with the editors to discuss your suggestion: contact@maifeminism.com

We plan to publish this issue in the first half of 2021. 

The editorial team includes: 

Tanya Horeck (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)

Jessica Ford (University of Newcastle, Australia)

Anna Backman Rogers (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)

Anna Misiak (Falmouth University, UK)

300-word Abstracts due: 30 May 2020

4000-6000 word Full Papers due: 1 December 2020

Please consult the MAI submission guidelines before submitting: https://maifeminism.com/submissions/

Please send your abstracts and forward responses to this call to contact@maifeminism.com    

Dr Anna Misiak
MA Film & Television Course Leader

School of Film and TV
Falmouth University
United Kingdom
Tel: 0132637057
https://www.falmouth.ac.uk/content/dr-anna-misiak
http://womenundercommunism.com/author/
@AnnaMisiakFal
---
Founding Editor/Editor-in-Chief
MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture
https://maifeminism.com/
@MAI_JOURNAL

Mirow on Legal Iconography and Painting Constitutional Law @fiulaw

M. C. Mirow, Florida International University College of Law, is publishing Legal Iconography and Painting Constitutional Law in Painting Constitutional Law: Xavier Cortada's Images of Constitutional Rights (M.C. Mirow & Howard M. Wasserman, eds., Leiden: Brill, Forthcoming). Here is the abstract. Predominantly a European phenomenon, the study of legal iconography has expanded to the common law world and informed approaches to Anglo-American legal development. European painting, sculptures, and other artwork were used in forensic settings to channel behavior of judges, lawyers, and litigants. Such artwork often combined religious perspectives, such as depictions of the Last Judgement, but might also reflect more secular notions such as Justice. Cultural historians and theorists have supplemented these more traditional approaches by expanding the scope of the analysis of the relationship between image and law. This study illustrates the potential for legal iconography to offer deeper insights into law, legal institutions, justice, injustice, and legal change in modern society. Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Matoshi and Berisha on Social Norms and Legal Culture

Shyrete Matoshi, Independent Researcher, and Fejzulla Berisha, University of Kadri Zeka, Gjilan, have published Social Norms and Legal Culture. Here is the abstract.

Moral, as well as the right, in their implementation, are based in the consciousness of citizens, but the difference between the right and moral stands in the fact that unlike moral, the right is set and sanctioned by the state, while moral norms are set by the public opinion and can treat moral as an internal sanction in the context of psychological consciousness and with this people know the done and undone actions, respectively the purposes of action or inaction. It is understood that the norms issued and sanctioned by social organizations can’t be contrary to the legal order, with norms that have higher legal power. It is understood that the norms that are issued – adopted by social organizations can’t be contrary to the legal order – the positive right, with norms with higher legal power that in this context are issued – adopted by the state as a strong social organization. With the term ‘right’ we mean the norms that are created by the organized society and that are applied by that society which is called state, and the norms that are applied by the state are called the right. The state is an organization of organized violence based on legal norms is distinguished by other organizations, mostly thanks to its external element – physical force. In the state and right there might be slow changes that happen in the society, which we can call evolutionary changes, ongoing changes, for example the change of some legal clauses in the acts of some laws. Simply, only some clauses change. All these, in one way or another, change the state and law, (but partly) the essence remains the same. The state and right in essence remain unchangeable and within these changes of state and right are: changes called reforms, coup and conspiracy. The reform is also a promoter of changes of the function of state and right, by following and incorporating the results, contemporary achievements in general social relations. Coup – these kinds of changes are unacceptable for the society, don’t coincide with the principles of the democratic order, because they don’t bring important favors for the society in general, but only for a certain group of people. The difference between coup and state conspiracy stands in the fact that state coup is done by a certain group of people in the state hierarchy, while the conspiracy is done by people that are not part of this hierarchy, that are outside state structures, respectively persons that are not part of state hierarchy. But it is also a characteristic of the conspiracy to emphasize that it doesn’t change the state and right in essence, in this context it remains unchanged. The revolution entails two meanings, respectively two notions: the revolution exercised by violence, and the revolution exercised peacefully. The revolution exercised by violence, physical violence, means armed conflicts between the carriers of state power and the ones that depend from this power, when an organization goes after the old state organization until the seizure of power, the political and economic one. The economic revolution is also reflected in the state and right in general, because it also changes the system of property, which means that, the state and right also change. According to the new democratic principles, starting from the system of property with different revolutions different property holders appear.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Gerber on Law and Religion in Plymouth Colony

Scott D. Gerber, Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law, has published Law and Religion in Plymouth Colony at 8 British Journal of American Legal Studies 167 (2019). Here is the abstract.

2020 marks the 400th anniversary of the planting of Plymouth Colony. Although the literature about Plymouth is voluminous, the discussion about law and religion has been inappropriately superficial to date. This Article addresses the Pilgrims’ conception of law on matters of religion and the new insights into the Pilgrims’ story that can be ascertained by focusing on law. “Law” has been defined in many different ways by many different people throughout history. Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, and other proponents of natural law argued that law is the exercise of reason to deduce binding rules of moral behavior from nature’s or God’s creation. The renowned English positivist John Austin, in contrast, maintained that law is the command of the sovereign. To Friedrich Karl von Savigny and other proponents of the so-called historical school, law is the unconscious embodiment of the common will of the people. To the philosophical school, law is the expression of idealized ethical custom. The dominant contemporary view seems to be that law is the reflection of social, political, and economic interests. For the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, law was both the memorialization of their commitment to the Word of God and an instrument for exercising social control so as to effectuate that commitment. The Pilgrims, of course, used law to regulate the more mundane aspects of life as well. Indeed, quantitatively speaking, more laws were enacted by the Pilgrims that addressed the day-to-day activities of life in Plymouth Colony than memorialized the Pilgrims’ commitment to eternal glory in the afterlife, but the latter was unquestionably more important, qualitatively speaking, than the former. In the oft-quoted words of a young William Bradford, “to keep a good conscience, and walk in such a way as God has prescribed in his Word, is a thing which I must prefer before you all, and above life itself.”

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call for Proposals: European History and Politics in Contemporary Crime Narratives @DetectH2020

Call for Proposals:

Through a Glass Darkly:

European History and Politics in Contemporary Crime Narratives

Monica Dall’Asta, Jacques Migozzi, Federico Pagello, Andrew Pepper eds.

To talk about the crime genre—as opposed to detective or spy or noir fiction—is to recognise the comprehensiveness of a category that speaks to and contains multiple sub-genres and forms (Ascari, 2007). In this volume, we want to uncover the ways in which the crime genre, in all of its multiple guises, forms and media/transmedia developments, has investigated and interrogated the concealed histories and political underpinnings of national and supranational societies and institutions in Europe, particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

 

Two most popular expression of the crime genre, the detective novel and the spy novel, have long been identified as ‘sociological’ in their orientation (Boltanski, 2012). These forms often tackle enigmas or uncover conspiracies that are concealed by and within states, asking searching questions about the failures of democracy and the national and international criminal justice systems to deliver just societies. Similarly, following the example of U.S. hard-boiled fiction, the ‘noir’ variant of the genre has also established itself as a ‘literature of crisis’ (according to Jean-Patrick Manchette’s formula), where the shredding of official truths and of ‘reality’ itself ends up revealing dark political motives that elicit an even starker set of ethical and affective interrogations (Neveu, 2004). While the obvious links between the ‘noir’ and the ‘hard-boiled’ traditions of crime fiction (e.g. between Manchette and Hammett) suggest an American-French or trans-Atlantic connection, we are keen to stress that the sociological and political orientation of the European crime genre—especially since 1989 and the corresponding opening up of national borders and markets—requires examining both global/glocal and multi-national (and state-bound) issues and challenges. It is here that the European dimension of the proposed volume is best articulated because, to do justice to this context, we need to pay attention not just to discreet national traditions, but the ways in which contemporary iterations of the genre interrogate the workings of policing, law, criminality and justice across borders and nations (Pepper and Schmid, 2016).

The transnational framework of the DETECt project (Detecting Transcultural Identities in Popular European Crime Narratives) is necessarily and acutely concerned with civic and ethical issues linked to the construction of new European new identities. The proposed volume aims to explore the ways in which these new identities are formulated and thematised in European crime novels, films or TV series, particularly in relation to the interrogations raised by the uncovering of hidden aspects of both the historical past and the contemporary political landscapes. Contributions are encouraged which look at particular case studies or identify larger national and/or transnational trends or synthesise the relationship between individual texts and these larger trends. It is envisaged that the volume will be organised into the three sections outlined below. Prospective contributors are invited to identify where their articles might sit within this structure as well as to outline the particular focus adopted by their essay in relation to the general topic. The list of topics in each section is to be regarded as indicative rather than exhaustive.

1. Crime Narratives and the History of Europe

European crime narratives from the last thirty years have frequently referred to collective traumas and conflicts that have torn European societies apart throughout the 20th century. Contributions are invited that look at the ways in which these fictional works have restaged and critically reinterpreted some of the most tragic pages in European recent history, including (but not limited to) the following iterations of violent rupture and social breakdown:

- The Civil War and Francoist dictatorship in Spanish crime narratives (e.g. Montalbán, La isla minima);

- Fascism, surveillance and the police-state (e.g. Lucarelli, Gori, De Giovanni) and the role of oppositional memory (e.g. Morchio, Dazieri) in Italian detective fiction;

- Fascistic/right-wing nationalist movements in interwar Scandinavia (e.g. Larsson, Mankell);

- The Third Reich as the historical biotope of crime fiction (e.g. Kerr, Gilbers);

- The constant presence of wars as a breeding ground for crime in French crime novels: World War I and II, collaboration, the Algerian War, colonisation, post-colonisation (e.g. Daeninckx, Férey);

- The heavy presence of Cold War images and axiology in spy novels and films, including those appeared after the fall of the Berlin Wall, both in Western and Eastern Europe (e.g. Kondor, Furst);

- The ‘Troubles’ in Irish and British crime fiction (e.g. Peace, McNamee).

2. Crime Narratives and the Present of Europe

Our present time is characterized by a number of social, political, financial/economic crises that threaten the construction of a cosmopolitan pan-European identity in line with the EU’s founding ideals. Crime narratives attempt to offer realistic representations of such contemporary crises by putting in place a number of ‘chronotopes’ that symbolise social divisions and peripheral and marginalized identities. We encourage essays that examine the ways in which post-1989 European crime narratives have represented the emergence of nationalisms, xenophobia, racism and other threats to the social cohesiveness of European democracies. We also invite contributions that use the trope of the crisis to explore how the links between crime, business and politics have polluted or corrupted the democratic imperatives of European social democracies and institutions from the outset. Topics might include:  

- The Kosovo War, and more broadly the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, as the first signs of a generalised geopolitical chaos (e.g. in French noir novels);

- The financial crisis of 2008 and its devastating consequences for individuals, communities and whole societies (e.g. Bruen and French in Ireland; Markaris in Greece; Dahl in Sweden; Lemaître in France);

- The migrant crisis (within and outside the EU) and the emergence of new anxieties about belonging and/or otherness (e.g. Mankell, Dolan, Rankin);

- Climate change, pollution, and environmental destruction (e.g. Tuomainen, Pulixi);

- The blurring of crime and capitalism and the depiction of crime as a form of social protest vis-à-vis the effects of global capitalism and neoliberal deregulation and privatisation (e.g. Manotti, Carlotto, Heinichen, the TV series Bron);

- Inquiries into the effects of contemporary forms of patriarchy, gendered violence and misogyny and their links to other forms of oppression and domination (e.g. Lemaître, Slimani, Macintosh, Gimenez-Bartlett Larsson, McDermid).

3. Crime Narratives and the Future of Europe

European crime narratives explore a broad range of social and cultural identities across different scales: from the more stable identities attached to local contexts through the new mobile, precarious and mutating identities fostered by the dynamics of globalization. This section will look into how these different identities and their complex interplay can suggest ways to frame the future of Europe. Contributions could address how crime narratives try to make sense of the complex, if yet perhaps contradictory, set of representations circulating across different European public spaces and collective imaginaries. On the one hand, we might ask whether something like a European crime genre even actually exists, given that these works typically demonstrate suspicions about ‘outsiders’ and only rarely offer positive representations of post-national transcultural identities. On the other hand, however, the genre does give us glimpses into what might be achieved through cross-border policing initiatives, organised under or by Interpol and Europol, in the face of organised crime gangs involved in transnational smuggling and trafficking networking. Contributions to this final section are encouraged to reflect upon how crime narratives produced by and in between the discreet nation-states frame the hopes and limits of European cohesiveness and the continent’s future or futures. Essays could focus on one or more of the following topics:

- The interplay between local, regional, national and transnational identities as represented through specific narrative tropes, such as in particular the local police station, the interrogation room, the frontier or border, and so on;

- The connection between social deprivation at the local end of the geopolitical scale and different global systems and networks at the other end;

- The role of borders, cities, violence, rebellion, policing and surveillance in producing new identities and subjectivities not wholly anchored in discreet nation-states. Attention could also be given to formal innovations insofar as these allow or enable the expression of new identities;

- The hope and consolation offered by the resilient community or village (Broadchurch, Shetland) or the extended family (Markaris’s Kostas Charistos series) in the face of the messy, brutal contingencies of a world ruled by criminal and business elites;

- Social banditry as a form of contestation directed against social inequalities produced by capitalism (Carlotto’s Alligator series; La casa de papel).

If you are interested in submitting a proposal to be considered for inclusion in this volume, please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short biography to info@detect-project.eu by May 31, 2020. We would encourage you to identify the section of the proposed volume where your essay would be best situated. We are looking to commission up to 14 essays in total of 7000 words each including footnotes and bibliographic references.