Conference on Legal Fictions in Early Cultures, UCI

From Robin S. Stewart, Department of English, University of California, Irvine, Information on the Webcast of the UCI Graduate Student Conference "Legal Fictions in Early Cultures"

Here's the link to the online version of the conference:

http://www.humanities.uci.edu/earlycultures/news/Legal_Fictions.phpAnd for those who like to do podcasts on their I-pods, here's a link to the mp3 files of all the panels (just scroll down to files posted on November 13 & 14 to find them):

http://replay.nacs.uci.edu/public/fall2009/?P=*.mp3



Information on the Panels and Presenters:

The Group for the Study of Early Cultures at the University of California, Irvine presents its Second Annual Graduate Student Conference:

"Legal Fictions in Early Cultures"
With a key-note address by Laurie Shannon, Associate Professor of English and the Wender Lewis Teaching and Research Professor, Northwestern University

Co-sponsored by the Humanities Center, the Center in Law, Society and Culture, the Department of English, and the UCI Chancellor's Fellows Program.

“…fictions are to law what fraud is to trade.” –Jeremy Bentham

This conference explores the intersection between the practice of law and other forms of extra-legal thought (including literary, theological, artistic or social) and the figural extension of both to cultural expression. Graduate students from various departments (including Classics, Comparative Literature, Drama, English, German, History, Spanish, and Rhetoric) at UCI and from across the country presented papers exploring the concept of "legal fiction" in historical periods ranging from antiquity to the early 19th century.

Organized by Robin S. Stewart (UCI Department of English), C.J. Gordon (UCI Department of Comparative Literature), and Alex Perkins (UCI Department of Classics)

November 13, 2009

Panel 1: Illegal Fictions

CJ Gordon, UC Irvine (Comparative Literature), “Bread God, Blood God:
Mandatory Fictions in Late Medieval Eucharistic Piety”

Nicolette Bruner, University of Michigan (English), “False Prophets:
Justice, Law, and Prescience in Njáls Saga"

Jennifer Nelson, Yale University (Art History), “Salvation History on
Trial: Visual and Legal Representation in Bellaert’s Belial of 1484”


Panel 2: Writing Jurisdictions

K-Sue Park, UC Berkeley (Rhetoric), “On Law, the Legal Document and
Legitimacy: Revisiting the Requerimiento”

Paul Johnson, UC Irvine (Spanish), "The Legal and Literary Status (es) of the Early Modern Spanish Captive”

Macy Todd, NYU (English), "Verdicts North and South: Irish Law in Spenser and Carleton"


Keynote Address

Laurie Shannon, Northwestern University, "In the Beginning: Genesis, Animal Entitlement, and the Legal Fiction of Human Authority in Early Modernity"


Panel 3: Fictiones Legales

Éloïse Lemay, University of Western Ontario (Classics), “Quantum interrx nobis!”

Michael W. Heil, Columbia University (History), "The Uses of the Placitum in the Late Tenth Century: the Example of Cremona"

Alex Perkins, UC Irvine (Classics), “Citizens of God: Early Christian Identity and the Ethereal Boundaries of Augustine’s Civitas Dei”


Panel 4: Women, Men, and the Law in Early Modern England

Laura Nowocin, Miami University (English), "My will shall be to me instead of law”: Silence, Excess, and the Female Petitioner in the Seventeenth-Century Court Masque

Josh Pearson, Kansas State University (English), “The Husband’s Office”:
The Doubling of Domestic and Civil Power in A Comedy of Errors

Lisa M. Barksdale-Shaw, Michigan State University (English), “But now her price is fall’n”: Devalued Brides, Disappearing Dowries, and the Legal Economies of Marriage in Shakespeare’s Lear

Daniel Bergen, Marquette University (English), "The Female Ungoverned: The Case of Thomas Crowther vs. Elizabeth Moorfoote"


November 14, 2009

Panel 5: Narrative and Adjudication

Nicole Wright, Yale University (English), “The consciousness of being half-caught in the act”: Self-awareness, culpability and “legal dignity”
in Walter Scott’s later novel

Jeff Wilson, UC Irvine (English), “Straightening Out the Tudor Myth:
Politics, Law, and the Modern Audience of the Shakespearean History Play”


Panel 6: Legal Alchemy

Jenny Liou, UC Irvine (English), "Not Betraying but Translating: Treason and the Legal Fictions of Restoration Science"

Jackie Way, UC Irvine (English), "The Magical Nature of the Law in Eliza Haywood’s Adventures of Eovaai"

Dan Keegan, UC Irvine (Drama), “Of A Montebank: The Poison Effect in Hamlet"

Anannya Dasgupta, Rutgers University (English), “I’ll bring thee rogue within the statute of sorcery”: Vagrancy, Witchcraft and Secular Law in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist


Panel 7: The Medieval Legal Character

Patrick Blong, UC Irvine (English), “The Word: Providence and Law in the Towneley Cycle”

Jonathan Fine, UC Irvine (German), “Judge as Figure/Judge as Function: The Role of Judgment in Late Medieval German Literature”

Elizabeth Strakhov, University of Pennsylvania (Comparative Literature), "Historical Fiction and the Practice of Rhetoric: Chaucer's Man of Law"