Reid on London's Burning: The Gordon Riots of 1780, Conspiracy Theory, Elite Connivance, Law Reform, and Official Bigotry

Charles J. Reid, University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minnesota), has published London's Burning: The Gordon Riots of 1780, Conspiracy Theory, Elite Connivance, Law Reform, and Official Bigotry as U of St. Thomas (Minnesota) Legal Studies Research Paper No. 25-06. Here is the abstract.

It is 1780 and the City of London is on fire. The Gordon Riots of June, 1780, was the largest and most destructive act of civil disobedience in the history of the United Kingdom. The Houses of Parliament were attacked. Prisons were burnt to the ground and all the captives freed. Only the British army succeeded in restoring order, and then only after the passage of several days. Hundreds of persons died. This Article tells the story of the Gordon Riots. It is a story that involves the English Crown's two-century effort to instill a deep anti-Catholic bigotry in the British people. When the Crown decided to relax that narrative out of the desire to recruit Irish Catholic troops to fight in the American Revolution, a large part of the populace of London responded with outrage. That outrage was fanned by conspiracy theory and elite connivance. Lord George Gordon, a Scottish nobleman and member of Parliament, was responsible for stirring popular anger. And that anger burst furth in early June, 1780, when large masses of people, led by Lord Gordon, marched on Parliament. The crowds that stormed Parliament and set fire to the City were largely drawn from the poorer segments of the population, who feared being left behind as the United Kingdom opened the door to a policy of religious toleration. Were the mobs populist? Can they be explained by Marxist thought? And what about the person of Lord George Gordon? The Article, in short, is a story of how abrupt reversals in public policy and law reform can go badly off the rails when faced with opposition grounded in bigotry and conspiracy theory.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Bray and Keane on James Ussher (1581-1656)

Samuel L. Bray, Notre Dame Law School, and D. N. Keane, Georgia Southern University, are publishing James Ussher (1581-1656) in Christianity and the Making of Irish Law: Violence, Virtue, and Reason (David McIlroy ed., forthcoming 2025). Here is the abstract.

In the seventeenth century, James Ussher was the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of the Church of Ireland. Now remembered for his risible dating of creation, in his lifetime he was widely regarded as one of the most learned persons in the British Isles if not in Europe. This chapter explores Archbishop Ussher's ideas that have significance for law. In particular, it considers his commitment to absolute monarchy, even as the tide was flowing toward a more assertive Parliament; his proposal for "reduced episcopacy," a form of conciliar ecclesiastical government; and his insistence that each national church have its own canon law. This chapter takes the measure of these contributions and also of their contributor. Ussher was a Janus-like figure of contradictions—staggering in how much he knew, and now remembered mostly for what he did not know; widely renowned in his time for his moderation, yet repressive to Irish Catholics; a royalist bishop who was deeply admired by both King Charles I and the rebels who beheaded him.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Brophy on The Jurisprudence of Antebellum Phi Beta Kappa Addresses

Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina School of Law, has published The Jurisprudence of Antebellum Phi Beta Kappa Addresses. Here is the abstract.

Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke at Harvard University in 1837 in a Phi Beta Kappa address. That address known as American Scholar reaches for individual expression, not history and social hierarchy. There are many Phi Beta Kappa addresses, both before and after him. Many Transcendentalists orators at Harvard and a few anti-Transcendentalists orators as well. And many others who are optimists, technology, and utilitarians at many colleges. After the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, three speakers of Harvard, Brown, and Yale advocated law, rather than conscience. All three of them were lawyers. There was a rich diversity of opinion: Transcendental oratory, anti-Transcendentalists, and optimist, technological, and utilitarian thought.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Hummel on Music of the Law: A Wigmorian Playlist for a Modern Era @josephhummel.bsky.social

Joseph Hummel, UNT Dallas College of Law, has published Music of the Law: A Wigmorian Playlist for a Modern Era at 59 Tulsa Law Review 301 (2024). Here is the abstract.

Within the field of law and literature, the academic study of legal songs—those being songs about lawyers, trials, the law, legal procedure, and broader issues of justice—remains relatively underdeveloped when compared with the study of legal novels, plays, and films. Given the value legal songs can provide to lawyers, this need not and should not be the case. For the lawyer, the benefits of listening to and studying legal songs are many. Legal songs can help lawyers understand the public’s perception of lawyers and the law. Listening to legal songs can also help lawyers improve their linguistic and interpretative skills. Legal songs also offer the lawyer a portal to understanding their clients and those “others” situated outside of or on the periphery of society. Lastly, legal songs can help lawyers re-engage with their “humanistic roots” and ethics. Using Dean John Henry Wigmore’s and Professor Richard Weisberg’s “lists of legal novels” as foundational and structural tools, this article endeavors to create a “Wigmorian playlist” of forty curated legal songs that, to borrow a phrase from Wigmore, no lawyer can “afford to ignore.” Using overarching criteria similar to those set out by Wigmore and Weisberg, this article catalogues and examines songs that centrally and significantly depict: (1) lawyers or other members of the legal profession; (2) trials or other legal proceedings; (3) issues of civil or criminal procedure; (4) laws and legal instruments; and (5) crimes or broader issues of law and justice that also implicate criteria (1), (2), (3), or (4). The article contains five sections. Part I is the Introduction. Part II discusses the evolution of the law and literature movement and explores its expansion through the twentieth century to include non-literary mediums, including music. Part III explores music’s connection to the law and argues that legal songs hold professional and personal value for lawyers and warrant from them engagement and analysis commensurate with the degree that lawyers might expend on legal novels, plays, and films. Part IV discusses the selection criteria for the “playlist.” Part V contains the “Wigmorian playlist.”

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Boden on Myra Bradwell and the Chicago Legal News: Speech and the March for All Civil Rights

Anastasia Boden, George Mason University, has published Myra Bradwell and the Chicago Legal News: Speech and the March for All Civil Rights. Here is the abstract.

To the extent that people know the name Myra Bradwell, they likely know her only for her defeat. In Bradwell v. Illinois, the Supreme Court famously denied that Myra had a constitutional right to earn a living as an attorney. 2 According to eight justices, the "paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother," not to enter a profession. 3 Myra may have lost in court, but she was wildly triumphant in the long run and became a successful advocate even without government permission. Though the Court denied her the right to pursue a livelihood, she retained her right to free speech-and she used it to start and manage the most successful legal periodical of her time, to draft and help pass various reforms that advanced equality before the law, and even to free Mary Todd Lincoln from unjust imprisonment in a sanitarium in Illinois. Myra's successful civil rights campaign underscores a perverse distinction in constitutional law: the purported distinction between the right to free speech and other, "unenumerated" constitutional rights like the right to earn a living. The First Amendment is given privileged treatment, with judges subjecting laws that infringe speech to strict judicial scrutiny. 4 Most unenumerated rights, by contrast, are relegated to rational basis scrutiny.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Perez on A Critical Analysis of Rap Shield Laws

Alexa Perez, Drake University Law School, is publishing A Critical Analysis of Rap Shield Laws in volume 110 of the Cornell Law Review. Here is the abstract.

For years, scholars have been sounding the alarm on "rap on trial," or the use of rap as evidence in criminal proceedings, pointing out that the fundamental characteristics of rap music make it uniquely susceptible to misinterpretation and prejudice. Scholars have also cautioned that rap on trial has the potential to chill artistic expression in violation of the First Amendment. The heavy reliance on rap lyrics in the recent RICO prosecution against rapper Young Thug has shed a renewed spotlight on the rap on trial concerns. In response to these growing concerns and a perceived gap in evidence law, state and federal legislators have proposed, and in some states enacted, statutes that seek to limit the use of rap lyrics as evidence-what this Article refers to as "rap shields." This Article provides the first critical analysis of rap shield proposals. More specifically, this Article demonstrates that rap shield laws are largely duplicative and, therefore, unnecessary from both an evidentiary and constitutional standpoint. Nevertheless, from a social justice standpoint rap shields serve important functions that may justify their enactment, such as offering guidance that increases judicial scrutiny and decreases judicial discretion. Those benefits, however, come with unintended costs-costs that may outweigh the important functions rap shields serve-including impeding defendants' right to present a defense. This Article concludes that the administration of justice may be better served and the concerns with rap on trial better addressed when the firmly rooted canons of evidence law are stringently applied rather than amended.

Download the article from SSRN at the link

Sherwin on The Challenge of Legal Chorology: Rethinking Political Theology

Richard K. Sherwin, New York Law School, has published The Challenge of Legal Chorology: Rethinking Political Theology as NYLS Legal Studies Research Paper No. 4960463. Here is the abstract.

Liberal democracy has historically been associated with an assumption of neutrality concerning religious or moral feelings and beliefs. Illiberal critics like Carl Schmitt have seized on this assumption to argue that moral neutrality deprives liberal democracy of any claim to legitimation or, for that matter, political coherence. But liberal democracy’s core commitment to a creed of freedom among equals belies this critique. As illiberal forms of governance gain strength worldwide, it is incumbent on allies of freedom to articulate a compelling and comprehensive narrative in its defense. To this end, legal chorology brings to light the historical, cultural, emotional, and spiritual conditions under which ‘constitutive power’ founds, transforms, or sweeps away political and legal states. This originary, generative force exceeds, even as it courses through, the names we assign it throughout history. That unbearable excess (“the sacred”) is the defining feature of constitutional over-beliefs. Constitutional over-beliefs embody different clusters of ideas, beliefs, and affective states around which polities arise and cohere. By tracing the rise and fall of discrete, historically privileged, constitutional over-beliefs, legal chorology holds out the prospect of identifying potent cross- cultural and interreligious resources for political belief and commitment. At the same time, reconceiving political theology as a genealogy of the sacred releases the field from Schmitt’s narrow illiberal vision. Liberal democracy, chorologically construed, rests upon an ethical metaphysic that conceives freedom among equals as an offshoot of each other’s infinite worth. As it turns out, liberal democracy’s ethos of epistemological modesty and experiential openness amidst abundance also emulates the very nature and dynamics of khôra herself.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Sevel on The Rule of Law: A Thought Pattern @michaelsevel.bsky.social

Michael Sevel, The University of Sydney Faculty of Law, is publishing The Rule of Law: A Thought Pattern in The Rule of Law in Ancient Rome (Eleanor Cowan, Kit Morrell, Andrew Pettinger, and Michael Sevel, eds., Oxford University Press, eds, 2025). Here is the abstract.

The interdisciplinary revival in rule of law studies over the last quarter century has produced an impressive diversity of views about the ideal's content, priority, and value. That diversity has sometimes encouraged the skeptical view that it has no conceptual core or nature, and is either 'essentially contested' or else only empty political rhetoric. I argue that amongst the various views about the rule of law developed over the centuries, there is a discernible, recurring thought pattern upon which the many variations have been proliferated. Whatever else it is, the rule of law is realized when a political community has an efficacious legal system with certain enabling and pervasive characteristics, which protects its members from something presumed in that community to be undesirable, often identified as the arbitrary exercise of power. I explain and illustrate each aspect of this pattern, and draw a few lessons about how it guides, or fails to guide, current rule-of-law debates.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Call for Applications: Critical Times Summer School, University of Lucerne, 30 June to 4 July 2025

From Steven Howe, University of Lucerne: Call For Applications, Disruptions: Summer School, University of Lucerne

Critical Times 2025

Disruptions

Summer School

University of Lucerne, 30 June to 4 July 2025

 

Ours is a time of disruption; a “disruptive age” as Bernard Stiegler terms it. Rapid technological change, the accelerating scarcity of biospheric resources, heightened political and economic volatility, social unrest and discontent – these are just some of the pressures that are radically (re-)shaping the modern condition, and which are making the experience of disruptiveness an “epochal signature” (Erich Hörl) of the twenty-first century.

 

The language of disruption is pervasive. At root, the term derives from the Latin disrumpere, meaning to break apart or to shatter; it refers to the action of “rending or bursting asunder”. But it also carries the sense of interrupting or jamming; of “breaking between” and “preventing something […] from continuing as usual or as expected”. To disrupt is to unsettle conventional frames and norms, flows and continuities – it is, in essence, a destructive act. And yet equally, it holds force as a generative move – one that not only calls into question what is entrenched and naturalized but which conjures the possibility of thinking and making things anew. 

 

For this year’s Critical Times summer school, we invite postdocs, ECRs and graduate students from across disciplines to join us for a week of intensive exchange on the meanings, forms and effects of disruption – as event, as process, as mode, as gesture. Our aim is to open a space for thinking – deeply, critically and creatively – about how disruptive forces upset existing notions of law and justice, tradition and community, and about the possibilities they open for transforming our legal, political and cultural imaginaries. Topics for consideration might include:

 

• How does the experience of disruptiveness impact the means and ways of ordering legal and political life?
• To what extent are rising “anti-democratic forces” engendering a “nihilistic disintegration of the social compact” (Wendy Brown)? What strategies are available to challenge these forces and to help re-knit the social and/or democratic fabric?
• How are shifting political dynamics – local, national and international – contributing to a dislocation of shared cultural values and dispositions? How might these effects be countered or mitigated? 
• What is the work of media forms and practices in cultivating or resisting disruptive energies? 
• How does the recent (re-)thinking of human and non-human agencies disrupt conventional notions of normativity and subjectivity – in law, politics and culture?
• What kinds of lawful relations are necessary to make our disrupted worlds newly livable and habitable?
• Which imaginative practices and resources have the power to disrupt entrenched narratives and deconstruct mythical understandings of the past?
• How might such practices and resources interrupt and transform our experience of time and space and with what artistic, political and legal implications?
• What aesthetic forms and representations might be enlisted to disrupt the “distribution of the sensible” (Jacques Rancière) and offer new ways of seeing and understanding? 
• How might contestatory aesthetic and political practices catalyze change and produce a shift in hegemonic articulations of the im/possible? 
  

Confirmed speakers: Shane Chalmers (University of Hong Kong), Başak Ertür (Goldsmiths), Julen Etxabe (University of British Columbia), Mónica López Lerma (Reed College), Desmond Manderson (The Australian National University), Greta Olson (University of Giessen).

 

Full programme details will be constantly updated here as more information becomes available.

 

Application details here. Deadline: 14 March 2025

 

Contact: steven.howe@unilu.ch

Wieboldt on The "Crusading Fanatics" of American Law: American Jesuits and the Origins of the Neo-Scholastic Legal Revival, 1870-1960 @notredame.bsky.social

Dennis J. Wieboldt, III, University of Notre Dame, is publishing The "Crusading Fanatics" of American Law: American Jesuits and the Origins of the Neo-Scholastic Legal Revival, 1870-1960 in the Journal of Law and Religion. Here is the abstract.

During the early twentieth century, Ivy League legal scholars developed a positivist jurisprudential method known as Legal Realism. Concerned with the law's relationship to social conditions, Realism methodologically triumphed in the elite legal academy and brought to a close what the legal historian Stuart Banner has recently described as the "decline of natural law" in American jurisprudence. Catholic legal scholars in the United States responded to this "decline" by invoking the natural law philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and his (Neo-)Scholastic disciples, arguing that Realism irredeemably divorced law and morality. In so doing, these scholars effectively inaugurated the (Neo-)Scholastic Legal Revival, a decades-long period of debate between Catholic natural lawyers and their positivist contemporaries about the American legal tradition's inextricability from natural law. To understand the history and significance of this debate, this article uncovers the origins of the (Neo-)Scholastic Legal Revival in particular features of nineteenth-century European Catholic intellectual culture that were transmitted to the United States through the Society of Jesus, the world's largest Catholic religious order. In concluding, this article examines the lives and legacies of two American Jesuits who became leaders of the (Neo-)Scholastic Legal Revival and who thereby illustrate how recovering the Revival's forgotten history can enrich scholars' understanding of this important period in American legal history.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.