Proceedings of a Conference on Law and Popular Culture Available

If you missed it: proceedings from a conference on Law and Popular Culture held at Tilburg University are available from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Here's a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Commentators have noted the extraordinary impact of popular culture on legal practice, courtroom proceedings, police departments, and government as a whole, and it is no exaggeration to say that most people derive their basic understanding of law from cultural products. Movies, television programs, fiction, children’s literature, online games, and the mass media typically influence attitudes and impressions regarding law and legal institutions more than law and legal institutions themselves. Law and Popular Culture: International Perspectives enhances the appreciation of the interaction between popular culture and law by underscoring this interaction’s multinational and international features. Two dozen authors from nine countries invite readers to consider the role of law-related popular culture in a broad range of nations, socio-political contexts, and educational environments. Even more importantly, selected contributors explore the global transmission and reception of law-related cultural products and, in particular, the influence of assorted works and media across national borders and cultural boundaries. The circulation and consumption of law-related popular culture are increasing as channels of mass media become more complex and as globalization runs its uncertain course. Law and Popular Culture: International Perspectives adds to the critical understanding of the worldwide interaction of popular culture and law and encourages reflection on the wider implications of this mutual influence across both time and geography.

More here from the website. The book is a little pricey (about 55 pounds) but the contributors are leaders in the field and include folks such as David Papke of Marquette University, Michael Asimow of UCLA, Jeanne Gaakeer of Eramus University, Jennifer Schulz of the University of Manitoba, Peter Robson of the University of Strathclyde, Richard H. Weisberg of Cardozo Law School, and John Denvir of the University of San Francisco. 

Re-Examining Blackstone's "Commentaries"

Jessie Allen, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, has published Law and Artifice in Blackstone's Commentaries in volume 4, issue 3, Chapter One, of Journal of Law: A Periodical Laboratory of Legal Scholarship (Summer 2014). Here is the abstract.

William Blackstone is often identified as a natural law thinker for whom property rights were preeminent, but reading the Commentaries complicates that description. I propose that Blackstone’s concept of law is more concerned with human invention and artifice than with human nature. At the start of his treatise, Blackstone identifies security, liberty and property as “absolute” rights that form the foundation of English law. But while security and liberty are “inherent by nature in every individual” and “strictly natural,” Blackstone is only willing to say that “private property is probably founded in nature.” Moreover, Blackstone is clear that there is nothing natural about the right of inheritance, “a wise and effectual, but clearly a political, establishment.” Indeed, he critiques the assumption that a legal right as central and longstanding as inheritance must be somehow “natural,” observing that “we often mistake for nature what we find established by long and inveterate custom.” At the same time, Blackstone celebrates the many features of common law that have simply been made up. Blackstone’s unflinching formal, fictional, “as if” approach invests property law with a certain materiality. The only way to actualize a make-believe vision is to act it out, to embody it in formal doctrines and practices. In comparison, the modern realist approach to law as an instrument for policy is quite abstract. This leaves realist critics of Blackstonian formalism in the ironic position of arguing for a more transparent approach to law that winds up obscuring the constructive and constructed quality of the legal system that comes through loud and clear in the Commentaries. By openly celebrating legal fictions, Blackstone reveals the truth that law is a great fabrication, not some necessary reflection of the way things are, or should be.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Graduate Student Workshop at ASLCH, March 5, 2015

From James R. Martel, San Francisco State University, on behalf of ASLCH:

All graduate students who are considering coming to the ASLCH conference, March 6-7th 2014, at Georgetown School of Law are invited to apply for the graduate student workshop that will occur one day earlier on March 5th (see http://law2.syr.edu/academics/centers/lch/graduate_student_workshop.html for application details)
 The workshop will consist of panels on the logistics of graduate student life, working on your dissertation, finding academic jobs and getting published as well as sessions where grad students will meet in small groups with mentors to talk about their own work and any challenges that they are facing.
 Applicants whose proposals are accepted may be funded for the extra night's accommodation by ASLCH and, if funds permit, it may also be able to contribute to airfare costs to and from Washington.
 For inquiries and to apply please write to George Pavlich at <gpavlich@ualberta.ca>
  

Brazilian Law and Literature

Greta Olson, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, has published Towards a Comparative and Localized Study of Brazilian Law and Literature in Direito e Literatura na Virada do Milênio/Law and Literature at the Turn of the Millennium 15-38 (Sonja Arnold and Michael Korfmann eds., Porto Alegre: Editora Dublinense, 2014).  Here is the abstract.

I am grateful to the editors of this volume for allowing me to contribute in the atypical form of a comment on the subject of the volume rather than with a scholarly essay. Composing an essay that might have made manifest in print what the title of my talk at the conference Literatura e Direito na virada do milênio/Law and Literature at the Turn of the Millennium had promised turned out to be an impossibility. In entitling my talk “Law and Literature in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany (and Brazil): Comparing Legal Systems, Literatures, and Cultural Preoccupations,” I discovered that I had promised too much. As an expatriate US American living in Germany and teaching British and American studies, I could not match the knowing I have of German, British, and American legal systems, literatures,and social issues with enough information about Brazil in a short time and without facility in Brazilian Portuguese. Thus the following has the character of a programmatic sketch rather than an analytic description.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

The Representation of Canadian Law In Art and Architecture

David DesBaillets, University of Quebec, Montreal (UQAM), Faculty of Law; University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, has published Representations of Canadian Justice: The Iconography and Symbolism of the Supreme Court of Canada. Here is the abstract.

The goal of this paper would be to bridge the world of artistic and architectural representations of the law, primarily in the form of the constitutional court house, and the legal cultures and values that inspire their design. I will proceed by undertaking a comprehensive research of the Supreme Court of Canada, including its history, esthetics, architectural and design innovations, personal input of the architects, social and historical contexts, as well as some of the legal and constitutional concepts that they embody. The assumption of my hypothesis being constitutional court houses, with their often impressive artistic details and inscribed legal maxims, seem to possess a quasi-spiritual significance, being an extension of what has become in many societies, especially developed liberal democracies with strong rule-of-law traditions, the secular approximation of a religious institution and, thus, transform the courts into a kind of temple of law. However, the challenge of creating a courthouse, especially the Supreme Court, that reflects the legal traditions and social norms (the former often being in conflict with the latter) as well as the ever evolving aspirations of a dynamic and highly diverse, pluralistic society such as Canada’s is ,in many respects, an impossible one, and it remains an open question whether the image that the court conveys to the visitor, be they layperson or legal official, is ,as Gournay & Vanlaethem state in their essay found in The Supreme Court of Canada and Its Justices 1875-2000: A Commemorative Book , the most “eloquent three dimensional representation of the role the Supreme Court has assumed in the life of the nation.”

The full text is not available from SSRN. 

Law and Ritual in China

Mary Szto, Hamline University School of Law, has published Chinese Ritual and the Practice of Law in volume 30 of the Touro Law Review (2014). Here is the abstract.

While there is much literature about the contemporary practice of law in China, almost no articles discuss the rituals involved. This article describes five common Chinese rituals in the contemporary practice of law: drinking tea, banqueting, drinking alcohol, napping, and karaoke. These rituals are traced to their ancient origins in ancestor worship, traditional Chinese medicine, and Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist thought. Then they are explicated for their contemporary meaning. Properly observed, these rituals promote just governance, harmony, balance, and physical and spiritual wholeness. They should be celebrated and practiced without excess.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Lawyers, Love, and Money

Eli Wald, University of Denver College of Law, and Russell G. Pearce, Fordham University School of Law, have published What's Love Got to Do with Lawyers? Thoughts on Relationality, Love, and Lawyers’ Work in volume 17 of Legal Ethics (2014). Here is the abstract. 

In a new and provocative book, Rob Vischer has challenged the neutral partisan conception of the lawyer and the legal profession’s reductive presumption that all clients wish to pursue atomistic self-interest irrespective of the consequences to others. Vischer’s use of the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and of Christian theology as a foundation for an alternative, and richly relational, account of law practice is both inspiring and effective.
To debunk the presumption that clients seek narrow self-interest, which the book argues is a powerful component of the neutral partisan conception, Vischer compellingly asserts that clients are relational beings often interested in pursuing objectives that take into account the impact of their conduct on other parties and the community. The book’s main contribution is its development of a practical relational account of law practice pursuant to which lawyers can both represent clients loyally and follow a relational ethic. Based on Dr. King’s teachings regarding human dignity, agape, personalism, justice and Christian realism, Vischer puts forward a vision of law practice that calls upon lawyers to treat clients and themselves as subjects in a partnership and to offer counseling to clients that does not shy away from engaging the hard moral dimensions of the clients’ conduct.
The book’s relational framework could gain even greater traction if it offered reasons for practicing relationally not embedded in Christian theology. For example, Vischer’s anthroreligious belief that we are all created as relational human beings leads him to indicate that if institutional, competitive and ideological barriers to relational practice were removed, lawyers and clients would inevitably act more relationally. The cultural dominance of atomistic individualism, however, suggests that even with barriers removed, lawyers and clients will need some additional persuasion before adopting relational perspectives. Similarly, the book’s grounding of relationality in agapic love neglects the potential application of more open-textured concepts, such as mutual benefit, that might conceivably appeal more broadly to lawyers who do not share Vischer’s theological convictions.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Defining Truth

Giorgio Resta, Università degli Studi di Bari, Law Faculty, and Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich, Roma Tre University, Department of Law, have published Judicial 'Truth' and Historical 'Truth': The Case of the Ardeatine Caves Massacre at 31 Law & History Review 843 (2013).

This paper looks at the relationship between “judicial truth” and “historical truth” from a legal realist perspective. It starts from analysis of a specific case, which is used to highlight the problems arising from the “judicialization” of contemporary history. The case is taken from the Italian post-war experience and consists of a complicated set of controversies which all ensued from the same chain of events: the partisan attack on via Rasella and the Nazi massacre of the Ardeatine Caves (Rome, March 23, 1944). The judgments rendered in these cases are particularly interesting, not only because they extend over a long period of time and span the entire legal system (involving criminal and civil trials), but also because they delineate various judicial “truths” which interact with the interpretation of the same events given by historians. The paper shows how these judicial “truths” were created, how much they varied, and what is their relationship with the projects of identity-building politics. Finally, starting from the analysis of defamation cases against historians, the authors argue that courts should exercise self-restraint in reviewing the results of historical researches and should not be considered as a forum of last resort for the resolution of academic controversies.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

The Act of Killing

Richard K. Sherwin, New York Law School, has published Law in the Flesh: Tracing Legitimation's Origin to 'The Act of Killing', in No Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice (June 2014). Here is the abstract.

The founding moment of political and legal investiture haunts the baroque and neo-baroque mind, from Shakespeare’s 'Hamlet' to Joshua Oppenheimer’s highly unsettling film, 'The Act of Killing' (2012). In the former, Hamlet finds the resources to act in the face of injustice; in so doing he precipitates a transformative political event that renews the rightful basis for state legitimacy. In 'The Act of Killing', by contrast, restless stasis remains unaltered from beginning to end. It is a state of affairs well suited to contemporary neo-baroque conditions – a time of distracted paralysis, when the availability of the cultural and psychological resources needed to go beyond terror and its purgatorial aftermath remains uncertain.
The exploration of post-secular possibilities requires new experiential sources, new interpretive and critical methods, and new interdisciplinary alliances. Phenomenology, psycho-theology, political theology, and visual jurisprudence are just some of the emerging categories (or perhaps re-emergent fields) that present themselves to us for further consideration.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Columbia and the Charles Beard Thesis

Ajay K. Mehrotra, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, has published Charles A. Beard & The Columbia School of Political Economy: Revisiting the Intellectual Roots of the Beardian Thesis at 29 Constitutional Commentary 475 (2014). Here is the abstract.

A century after it was first published, Charles A. Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution remains a significant and controversial part of constitutional scholarship and history. Just as Beard sought to historicize the Founders as they drafted and adopted the Constitution, this article attempts to historicize Beard as he researched and wrote his classic text on the Constitution. Because Beard was both a graduate student and professor at Columbia University before and while he researched and wrote his book, this article explores the particular influence that Columbia University’s institutional and intellectual climate may have had on Beard and the writing of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution.

This article contends that Charles Beard was the product of a unique Columbia tradition of inductive, proto-institutionalist research in political economy – a tradition that at its core sought to meld serious political and historical scholarship with progressive social activism. Yet, in many ways, Columbia’s influence on Beard was more reinforcing than it was revolutionary. Columbia, in other words, facilitated an evolution rather than a dramatic transformation in Beard’s thinking. His time at Columbia provided him with new scholarly perspectives and research methods, but ultimately these new views heightened his innate tension between scholarly objectivity and political advocacy, between his belief in social scientific research and his desires for social democratic reform. In short, Beard’s time at Columbia, as both a student and junior scholar, refined his personal predilections and his early upbringing and education, rather than radically converting him into a new thinker and writer.

This article was part of a special symposium on the 100th Anniversary of Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, hosted by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and law school.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Judge Humorous, Are You Pulling My Leg?

Mary B. Trevor, Hamline University School of Law, has published From Ostriches To Sci-Fi: A Social Science Analysis of the Impact of Humor in Judicial Opinions at 45 University of Toledo Law Review 291 (2014). Here is the abstract from SSRN.

In the legal profession, understanding — or at least, formal analysis — of humor and its impact is in its infancy. Lawyers and judges are not trained to use or understand humor, although all would acknowledge that humor, cringe worthy or otherwise, is by no means unknown in the practice of law. But for most intents and purposes, we pretend that humor is not part of legal culture. When humor is addressed in the law school or professional advocacy context, for example, it typically gets short shrift: don’t try to be funny. Resources on judicial opinion writing, in particular, generally advise that humor is inappropriate, and commentators on judicial humor have offered similar, mostly negative, assessments.
Despite this advice, humor, while not widespread, is an ever-present aspect of the body of judicial opinions, an aspect that periodically attracts attention. One of the best-known recent examples is Gonzalez-Servin v. Ford Motor Co., an opinion by Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit. Multiple counsel in the case had, in Judge Posner’s view, ignored “apparently dispositive precedent” when presenting arguments. Unsatisfied with a mere holding, however, Judge Posner not only verbally compared the tactic to an ostrich burying its head in the sand, but also inserted two photographs into the opinion: one of an ostrich burying its head in the sand, and immediately following, one of a man dressed in traditional “attorney” attire burying his head in the sand. Legal newsletters and blogs picked up on Judge Posner’s opinion, but they were not the only sources to do so. The general press (the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune) did as well. And such treatment was for an opinion addressing an issue that was not a matter of public interest-forum non conveniens.
Judge Posner does not stand alone in his use of humor. There are even some indications that judicial use of humor in opinions is increasing. And in our era of rapid and widespread electronic communication, public awareness of this humor also appears to be increasing. In light of the evidence of continued use of humor in the face of advice and commentary largely counseling against its use, a reassessment of judicial humor seems warranted.
An additional reason for reassessment at this time comes to us from recent developments in the field of social science, which offers sophisticated tools for the job. In the last few decades, social scientists have greatly expanded the study of humor’s role in our society. Their theories offer new tools to assess judicial humor, to bring together the perspectives of earlier commentators on judicial humor, and to offer more comprehensive guidelines for judicial humor than have previously been offered.
The intent of this article is not to suggest that humor is always, or even often, appropriate in judicial opinions. But social science tells us that, despite the bad name humor has justly acquired based on its use in certain opinions, it may be possible for humor to be used appropriately, and even helpfully, in certain instances.

Download the text from SSRN at the link.

A Reading of Kafka's "The Trial"

Robert P. Burns, Northwestern University School of Law, has published Preface for: Kafka's Law: 'The Trial' and American Criminal Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Here is the abstract.

Justice Kennedy famously claimed that Kafka's great work, "The Trial," expressed the reality of the American criminal justice system, at least from the defendant's point of view. This essay, the first sections a book just released by the University of Chicago Press, first summarizes the book's argument that the Justice got it just right, and then provides a close reading of "The Trial." This reading agrees with Hannah Arendt's view that the novel is centrally about institutional issues of justice and that it provides an "organizational gothic" vision of contemporary bureaucratic governance in criminal procedure.

Download the text from SSRN at the link. 

Fellowships Available at Princeton University

Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) invites outstanding faculty members, independent scholars, lawyers, and judges to apply for appointments as resident Fellows for the academic year 2015-2016. We anticipate naming up to six fellows who are engaged in substantial research on topics broadly related to law and public affairs or law and normative inquiry, including one early career scholar working at the intersection of law and humanistic inquiry. Successful candidates will devote an academic year in residence at Princeton to research, discussion, and scholarly collaboration. Applicants must have a doctorate, J.D. or an equivalent professional postgraduate degree.

Further information and the electronic application can be found at http://lapa.princeton.edu/content/lapa-fellowships

APPLICATION DEADLINE IS 5:00 PM (EST) MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2014.

Some New Publications of Interest

William S. Hein & Co. has published Mark Twain vs. Lawyers, Lawmakers and Lawbreakers: Humorous Observations, edited by attorney and author Ken Bresler. The book includes numerous quotations, fully verified, from Twain's writings. Because Twain is one of my favorite writers, I'm looking forward to checking out this new publication. (Full disclosure: Hein is also one of my publishers).

Mr. Bresler is also the author of an article, A Lawyer Looks at Catch-22: The Best Catch There Is Is Not Much of a Catch. While the phrase "Catch-22" has entered the vocabulary, there's not much in the legal literature about the intersection between Heller's novel and the law, so Mr. Bresler's piece is a welcome addition to the scholarship. Here's a link to the work.

A Female Prosecutor at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal

Shana Tabak, American University Washington College of Law, has published Grace Kanode Llewellyn: Local Portia at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in The George Washington University Law School International and Comparative Law Perspectives at p. 7 (2013). 

Believed to be the first woman ever to figure in the proceedings of an international military tribunal, Grace Kanode Llewellyn served as a Assistant Prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo (IMFTE) in 1945-46. This short historical piece explores what is known of Kanode's professional life and her contributions to the then-nascent field of international criminal law.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Looking at the Law of Slavery and the Nat Turner Rebellion, 1829-1832

Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, has published Revulsions of Capital: The Political Law of Slavery in the Epoch of the Turner Rebellion, Virginia 1829-1832, as UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper No. 2477048. Here is the abstract.

This paper continues the pattern of work I have been pursuing on the Turner Rebellion, a slave rebellion that took place in Virginia in August 1831. During the past two years I have been engaged in preliminary explorations of different aspects of the rebellion that have resulted in a series of working papers, written to teach myself what I don’t know, and what I should. This paper was written for the same purpose; it differs from prior papers in stepping back from the rebellion itself in order to situate it in Virginia’s constitutional history, and in regard to the debate over gradual emancipation that broke out in its aftermath. Essentially, Virginia in the epoch of the Turner Rebellion is a state divided largely on east-west lines. Slavery dominates east of the Blue Ridge in the long-settled Tidewater and Piedmont; the west (particularly the Trans-Allegheny region that would eventually become the state of West Virginia) is much more recently settled and largely slave-free. This division, together with less marked local slaveholder/non-slaveholder and freeholder/non-freeholder distinctions in the east of the state, largely determines the substance and structure of Virginia’s politics. I consider two “phases” of Virginia’s politics: (1) the Constitutional Convention of 1829-1830, in which Eastern and Western delegates fought over the replacement of county-based apportionment and suffrage that privileged freehold in land by white basis apportionment and white manhood suffrage, and (2) the emancipation debate that took place in 1831-32 during the first session of the state legislature to meet following the Turner Rebellion. I also consider the analysis of the emancipation debate written in 1832 by the William & Mary professor of “political law” Thomas Roderick Dew, Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832. I argue that out of the deep divisions exposed by the constitutional and legislative debates there emerged a new political and economic equilibrium, confirmed in Dew’s analysis, and centered not, as before, upon propertied hierarchy but upon property’s commodification, notably commodified labor. In the case of self-possessed white labor, commodification meant increased circulation. The same was true of enslaved labor, with the important qualification that slaves had no control over how far they were circulated. Slavery became transactional – the price of subsistence. Their commodification meant slaves were no longer harnessed to custom (in the shape of common law property claims), or to positive municipal law, or to paternal stewardship, but instead represented a capital investment on which the master-creditor might realize returns either through work, or, just as rationally, sale into the interstate slave trade. The paper concludes with a short analysis of Virginia’s contribution to that trade before and after the Turner Rebellion.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Translations of the United States Constitution

Christina Mulligan, Brooklyn Law School, Michael Douma, James Madison University, Hans Lind, Yale University, and Brian Patrick Quinn, Independent Scholar, have published Founding-Era Translations of the United States Constitution. 

Before its ratification, the United States Constitution was translated into German and Dutch for the German- and Dutch-speaking populations of Pennsylvania and New York. Although copies of both the German- and Dutch-language translations have been preserved, they have largely escaped analysis — and public awareness — until now. This paper provides historical context for these translations and analyzes how they might aid our interpretation of the U.S. Constitution in the present day.
Supplemental to this article is an appendix containing the German and Dutch translations, as well as extensive commentary on the translations, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2486282.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Special Law and Humanities/Film Events At AALS, January 2015

I'd like to alert those of you planning to attend the AALS Annual Meeting in January 2015 to three interesting events taking place during that time. The AALS Film Committee is sponsoring two law and film nights during the meeting. The first, on January 2, at 7:30 p.m. (the first night of the conference), will be a screening of the classic Judgment at Nuremberg, directed by Stanley Kramer, written by Abby Mann, and starring a whole host of great actors, including Spencer Tracy as the thoughtful Chief Judge Dan Haywood, Marlene Dietrich as widowed Mrs. Bertholt, lost in denial, a young William Shatner (in his pre Captain Kirk days), Richard Widmark as the passionate prosecutor Colonel Lawson, Burt Lancaster as Dr. Ernst Janning and Werner Klemperer, two of the German judges accused of war crimes, Judy Garland as Irene Hoffman, a witness nearly overcome by the story she has to tell, and Maximilian Schell as Hans Rolfe, the defense attorney for the judges, who challenges both the prosecutors and the system of justice at every turn. Rolfe poses the ultimate question: in such a high profile trial, in which the stakes include the future of a nation, can these defendants ever get justice? The film dramatizes some of the famous "Nuremberg Trials" held after World War II, in particular those in which judges rather than political and military figures were defendants.

To introduce our film, we are honored to have Professor Harold Koh, Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School. Professor Koh served as Legal Adviser for the Department of State from 2009 to 2013, service for which he received the Secretary of State's Distinguished Service Award. Professor Koh is an expert in the area of national security, international human rights, and foreign relations, areas in which he has written extensively. I will be moderating a discussion afterward of the film for those interested.

On Sunday, January 4th, at 8 p.m. the Committee will sponsor a showing of the 2011 film Hot Coffee, directed by Susan Saladoff. The film recounts the famous lawsuit Stella Liebeck brought against McDonald's when she accidentally spilled some of its excessively hot beverage on herself. Hot Coffee is not just a movie about the torts regime. It's also a film about public relations and the rhetoric that lawyers use in telling stories. Dennis Greene, Professor of Law, University of Dayton School of Law, will moderate the discussion about this provocative and interesting film.

Finally, on Monday, January 5th at 2 p.m. AALS will present a very special event, a Cross-Cutting program, due in great part to the efforts of members of the Law and Film Committee. Professor Michael Olivas, former President of AALS, and current Chair of the Committee, will moderate a panel on the topic Anita F. Hill,  Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings, and a Screening of the Film Anita. Speakers include Professors Taunya Lovell Banks of the University of Maryland School of Law, Jessica Silbey, Suffolk University Law School, and special guest Anita Hill, Senior Advisor to the Provost and Professor Social Policy, Law, and Women's Studies, Brandeis University Heller School for Social Policy and Management. This program also includes a special screening of the film Anita: Speaking Truth To Power (2014).

Professor Hill will also be a special guest at the Section on Minority Groups Luncheon, January 5, 2015, 12 p.m. to 1 p.m.

I will be posting more information about these events as it becomes available.