Upcoming CLE Event at DePaul College of Law: Arts Law Colloquium: Art and Its Image: Perspective From Copyright, Trademark, and Cultural Property Law, October 9, 2024 @DePaulLaw

 Upcoming event: CLE - Arts Law Colloquium: Art and its Image: Perspectives from Copyright, Trademark, and Cultural Property Law, October 9, 2024, at Depaul College of Law:

Join CAMCHL and CIPLIT for “Arts Law Colloquium: Art and its Image: Perspectives from Copyright, Trademark, and Cultural Property Law” with Dr. Felicia Caponigri, Visiting Scholar, Chicago-Kent College of Law; Guest Scholar, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. This event will be hybrid, both in person and online. Lunch will be provided for in-person guests. 1.0 hour CLE available for IL attendees.

More information available here.

Capers on Afrofuturism and the Law: A Manifesto @BennettCapers @FordhamLawNYC @GeorgetownLaw

I. Bennett Capers, Fordham University School of Law, is publishing Afrofuturism and the Law: A Manifesto in volume 112 of the Georgetown Law Journal (2024). Here is the abstract.

Afrofuturism seems to be everywhere these days. In music, film, dance, literature. And in this special symposium issue of the Georgetown Law Journal, “Afrofuturism and the Law.” This prompts a foundational question. What is “Afrofuturism and the Law”? More specifically, as a practice, as a discipline, and a legal movement, what should Afrofuturism and the Law be. Indeed, given Afrofuturism’s seeming staying power, and its incursion into law, is it time for a manifesto to set parameters? Hence, this proposed manifesto. To be sure, I am troubled by the word manifesto, especially given its connection to the word manifest, which conjures the journey of my ancestors, captured and sold into slavery, becoming cargo, part of a ship’s manifest. But perhaps I can use the latter term to think of the inventory or cargo for another journey. A journey into the future. Perhaps on Parliament Funkadelic’s Mothership. Or Octavia Butler’s Earthseed ship. Or Sun Ra’s jazz spaceship. And maybe that’s the connection between manifest and manifesto. It’s not just the things we should carry. It’s also the things we should hold true. So, a manifesto then.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Craddock on Civic Friendship in the Postmodern Polis: Law as Mediator in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice @joshjcraddock @Harvard_Law

Joshua J. Craddock, Harvard University Law School, James Wilson Institute for Natural Rights and the American Founding, is publishing Civic Friendship in the Postmodern Polis: Law as Mediator in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in the Texas A&M Journal of Law & Civil Governance. Here is the abstract.

In Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare explores whether commercial republicanism can alone sustain civic virtue. Putting Shakespeare into conversation with pillars of American political thought, Merchant of Venice seems to support John Adams’ contention that a republican constitution is “made only for a moral and religious people” and “is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Economic liberty as an end unto itself cannot form the basis of a coherent political order and must ultimately erode public-spiritedness. By examining the character of the Venetian regime and the irreconcilable differences between its citizens regarding the nature of the Good, the attentive reader can identify barriers to civic friendship and evaluate whether law can serve as a mediating influence against what Publius calls “faction” in The Federalist. Shakespeare suggests that law’s mediating influence on faction is at best tenuous and follows the Aristotelean belief that civic friendship depends in large part on substantial agreement about first principles. These themes find their echoes in American political thought and remain deeply relevant to the legal and political challenges facing re-publican self-government today.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Vaale and Borge on The Intended Pariahs: Norway's Legal Settlement with Passive Nasjonal Samling Members after 1945 @Vaale1975

Lars-Erik Vaale, USN School of Business, Department of Business, History and Social Sciences, and Baard Herman Borge, University of Tromsø - The Arctic University of Norway - School of Business and Economics, have published The Intended Pariahs: Norway's Legal Settlement with Passive Nasjonal Samling Members after 1945 as Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory Research Paper Series No. 2024-09. Here is the abstract.

In the wake of World War II, all previously German-occupied countries in Western Europe carried out legal settlements with those citizens suspected of treasonous collaboration with the occupier. Of these, Norway's treason trials were the most extensive, having as their basis a lower threshold for criminalisation than other countries. According to two legal decrees adopted by the Norwegian Government-in-Exile in 1942 and 1944 espectively, joining or remaining a member of Vidkun Quisling's (1887–1945) collaborationist party Nasjonal Samling (National Unity, NS) after the German invasion 9 April 1940 was punishable as treason. The purpose was to impose a collective punishment on all members, including those who were completely passive. From the outset, however, it was unclear how the decrees related to the Norwegian Penal Code of 1902. The main question was whether party membership alone could automatically lead to punishment when the Penal Code requires a careful assessment of the defendant's criminal intent. During the post-war trials of some 30 000 passive NS-members, this legal ambiguity led to considerable variation in the assessment of their guilt. In most cases, however, suspects were punished for treason based on a summary assessment of intent, even though this practice did not fulfil the requirements of the Penal Code. The end result was the most comprehensive legal reckoning ever carried out against a defeated authoritarian regime.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Katz on All Roads Leading to the White House: Building Our Presidential Regime of Statutes in Early Modern America (1868-1921) @WashULaw @ascoseriakatz @WUSTL

Andrea Scoseria Katz, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, has published All Roads Lead to the White House: Building Our Presidential Regime of Statutes in Early Modern America (1868-1921). Here is the abstract.

At the very moment that the Roberts Court places the Chevron doctrine within its sights, it is worth remembering that behind Chevron's rule of judicial deference toward agency discretion lies an institutional settlement that has structured American governance for approximately one hundred and thirty years. Its roots lie in the period from 1868-1921, and its defining values are presidential lawmaking, administrative expertise, and interbranch problem-solving. This Article proposes to tell its story. A century and a half ago, America was just healing from its Civil War wounds when a host of new problems descended: financial crisis, unemployment, the rise of monopolies, political corruption, and waves of urban migration and immigration. Something had to be done, and so the nation revamped its hundred-year-old institutions to make them quicker, responsive, and more powerful. American government became modern. It became, in sum, a presidential democracy. This process began with executives, as early Gilded Age governors and presidents wielded the veto and the bully pulpit to build reputations as popular heroes. Soon, Congress followed with a host of statutes that gave the President unprecedented new authority: to, among other things, set aside lands for conservation; prescribe tariffs and railroad shipping rates; break up monopolies; and set down national priorities in the federal budget. They built an executive able to set policy on its own-a modern president, in other words. Crucially, the Supreme Court gave this regime its blessing in a series of cases upholding the constitutionality of these interbranch compromises. This presidential regime of statutes brought Congress, the President and powerful independent agencies closer together in a negotiated policymaking process involving multiple stakeholders. By trading formal separations and congressional primacy for interbranch cooperation, it proved a success in freeing up government power to solve the nation's problems, especially during two world wars and the Great Depression. Beginning in the late '70s and recently accelerating under the tenure of Chief Justice John Roberts, a formalist Supreme Court has turned on this settlement, rolling back statutory arrangements that gave Congress a role in overseeing administration or that mandated agency independence. The present assault on Chevron is typical. However, separation-of-powers formalism raises several dangers. Not only does it threaten to leave the government without power to meet new challenges and crises, it also risks weakening Congress further, freezing in place the President's powerful agencies with no countervailing mode of legislative oversight or administrative counterweight. Behind modern American government lies a "regime of statutes," a finely wrought settlement designed not only to release power, but also to contain it. We upset this balance at our peril.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.