Vasconcelos Vilaça on Files, Dust, Law

Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) Law School, has published Files, Dust, Law. Here is the abstract.

The promise of modern law stems from the fact that all necessary data – both about law’s operations and the world – can be retrieved, a fact that in turn crucially did and does things in the world, namely shaping our existence as subjects, our expectations of justice, and the actions available to us. It is a model of both reality and our powers of agency. In turn, these features imply that law, law’s files, law’s dust, and law’s archive, trigger affects both privately and socially. Seeing law as a miniature archive room in which actors live and play according to certain rules then is a metaphor of law’s complex workings in social life. One can come to the realization that law is archive in a multitude of ways and experiences, but the bottom line of the chapter is that this leads to a serious interrogation of law’s place and existence in the world. Herein, I offer an account of my own encounter with the law, files, dust triad by means of an aesthetic examination of “disappearance”, a horrific widespread phenomenon that became a sprawling cultural category and form. I focus on disappearance seen from the legal system itself, that is, as a “lost file” and the performative and constitutive effects that files, and especially “lost files”, trigger for subjects and systems alike. I work through these themes by means of an intertextual analysis of Cristina Rivera Garza’s book “Liliana’s Invincible Summer” and one of Rafael Cauduro’s murals located in the Mexican Supreme Court building entitled Procesos Viciados. Contrasting these works brings to the fore the feeling that files are there to be chased after, picked up, deployed, stored, and sometimes forgotten and lost, constituting at the same time the terrain for and the subject of the performativity of the search. Uniting them, there is the physical element of “dust”, an atmospheric particle that, for files (but also very real physical searches), links past, present and future forcing us to confront our existence in disparate registers. Through this interaction, files, ultimately, force legal systems to witness the affective nature of disappearance and search alike and the potential of law’s archive and counter-archive to channel alternative politics of affects. Finally, I consider some potential consequences of the coming loss of the “dusty file” image and rise of digital archives in which our relationship to files, folders, archives starts to be mediated by our dust conduit in a new nature and texture. To put differently, what will it mean to search for law’s documents, for law’s authoritative narrative of the time that matters, and the historical expectations we attached to law, when this search will take place fully in the virtual world? How will we feel if the chain between folders, file numbers, and files works without any primary link to the “real” archive, one that by definition has to exist in a different medium?

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Vasconcelos Vilaça on On Being Human in Samanta Schweblin's "Kentukis/Little Eyes: A Novel"

Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça, Professor ITAM Law, has published On Being Human in Samanta Schweblin's "Kentukis/Little Eyes: A Novel," 2 Public Humanities 13 (2026). Here is the abstract. 

What counts as a human and as a proper human life has been a lifelong preoccupation of our species. Today it is digitalism, technology, and AI triggering renewed nightmares and hopeful dreams around being human. Through an examination of Samanta Schweblin’s novel “Little Eyes” (Kentukis in the original), I show how humanities are crucial to (i) keep track of what is new and old in these shifts and (ii) maintain a vigorous public sphere that is qualitatively different from gamified individual and social relations. The result is the defense of an idea of public life that stands beyond our individual private desires, marking a stark contrast with a vision of society in which we relate to others and the public as we would to toys we play with. 

Download the article from the Public Humanities website here.

Call For Papers: Touro Law Review--Special Issue on Legal Humor

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

TOURO LAW REVIEW – SPECIAL ISSUE ON LEGAL HUMOR

 

 

            Are you funny? Were you the life of the party in law school? Do you make your faculty colleagues or law firm partners laugh out loud? The Touro Law Review is planning a special issue on “Legal Humor” and seeks your work.

 

            GUIDELINES

 

            ● We are looking for short pieces (maximum of 10 pages double-spaced) that take a humorous look at any aspect of the law, including law schools, the practice of law, or the courts.

 

            ● Pieces can take any form, including descriptive, expository, narrative, or technical. Poetry, screen writing, song writing, and other forms of creative writing are welcome as well.

 

            ● Law professors, lawyers, judges, and current law students are eligible to participate. Non-lawyers also are welcome to submit their work.

 

            ● Pieces are due by Tuesday, September 1, 2026, and should be e-mailed as a Word attachment to all three of the issue’s Faculty Coordinators:

 

            Associate Dean Rodger D. Citron (Touro University):  rcitron@touro.edu

            Professor Rena C. Seplowitz (Touro University):  rseplowi@touro.edu

            Professor Robert M. Jarvis (Nova Southeastern University):  jarvisb@nova.edu

 

            ● The Faculty Coordinators will review all pieces that are submitted by the deadline. Acceptance decisions will be sent out on or before December 1, 2026.

 

            ● It is expected that the accepted works will appear in Volume 41, Issue 5 of the Touro Law Review, which currently is set to be released by July 1, 2027.

 

            ● Please keep in mind: All pieces will be judged on their originality, novelty, and general appeal to a legal audience. Previously published pieces will not be accepted. Pieces that seriously examine the use of humor in legal matters or proceedings also will not be accepted. Only legal humor pieces will be considered.

 

            ● Questions? Please e-mail the Faculty Coordinators at the e-mail addresses listed above.

 

We look forward to laughing at your work!

 

Piano and Piano on The Medieval Origins of Spousal Consent

Clara Piano, University of Mississippi Department of Economics, and Enio Piano have published The Medieval Origins of Spousal Consent. Here is the abstract.

This paper examines the medieval origins of spousal consent, the norm requiring that marriages be contracted willingly and free from pressure from third parties. We argue that this norm resulted from the Catholic Church’s consolidation of legal authority over marriage in Western Europe in the 11th-12th centuries. Committed doctrinally to the belief that marriages could not be dissolved and that remarriage was therefore impermissible (i.e., marriage indissolubility), the Church was compelled to enforce high consent requirements to the formation of new unions. Using a simple theoretical model, we show that the Church’s optimal level of spousal consent is higher when remarriage is not allowed. Higher consent requirements mitigate the negative effect of indissolubility on the number of marriages contracted. The development of a theory of spousal consent marked a sharp break from pre-Christian practice, which gave parents substantial control over the choice of spouse. It also contrasted with Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism, both of which permitted remarriage after divorce. Our analysis suggests that the Church’s insistence on free consent was a necessary institutional complement to its unique stance on indissolubility, shaping marriage law and family structure in ways that reverberated throughout European history.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Chaevitch on Faust: Goethe's Guide to Legal Progress

Anton Chaevitch, Harvard University Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures; Creighton University School of Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, has published Faust: Goethe’s Guide to Legal Progress.

Goethe’s Faust can be read as a story of legal progress, from a legal order in which something as perverse as a written pact for Faust’s soul is enforceable to an order in which it is not. This raises the question of how such progress was achieved—especially because Goethe was a lawyer and a statesman. The keys to the answer lie in three significant omissions in Faust that have gone largely unnoticed: first, the absence of real evidence that Margarete (Gretchen) killed her infant child; second, the absence of even a basic trial before Faust concludes that Lynceus (his watchman) shall be put to death; third, the absence of the text of the pact between Faust and Mephistopheles. This contribution posits that understanding the reasons behind these omissions and assumptions is the key to understanding legal progress in Goethe’s Faust. These reasons are twofold: the dangers of a sole narrative that explains an event (such as infanticide) and the bordered nature of legal systems. Goethe’s Faust shows that the road to legal progress lies in the existence of multiple narratives that explain the same event and in a legal order that is gränzunbewußt (to borrow a word from Faust, meaning “unconscious of borders”). Suggested Citation:

The full text is not available for download from SSRN.

New Publication: Performing Law (Cambridge University Press, 2026)

From Peter Goodrich, Director of the Program in Law and Humanities, Cardozo School of Law:

Intrepid Team, Tireless Textual Troubadours, Tanquam Tessellations, Timbrels and Tympani,

 

That incomparable syntagm, scintillating excursus, and coruscating communal and collective cerebration Performing Law is now published online, extant virtually, as vibrant and vivid in virbiusses as a vaudeville Velasquez. Time, then, for action. To advance, promote, circulate, promulgate, disseminate this cornucopia of geniuses requires, indeed, promotion and reviews. These, in currently restricted publishing economies, lie in our hands. Please circulate the link and corral students, former students, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, or as circumstances dictate, medical team, bouncers, resort staff, inmates, dance partners, crèche, Asylum warders, private security, to the task of reviewing and distributing this magnum and magnificent volume, this jeroboam of bonifacted spectres. And thus, once more to the page, once more unto the books, once more or fill the sibylline leaves with our English dead letters!

 

I remain your fondest Gromboolian hapax legomenon,

 

Peter

Davies on A Wig Without a Home: The Comedic Wisdom of Sir Frederick Pollock

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School; The Green Bag; has published A Wig Without a Home: The Comedic Wisdom of Sir Frederick Pollock in volume 29 of the Green Bag 2d (2026). Here is the abstract.

Frederick Pollock (1845-1937) was the Green Bag’s kind of scholar. The first half of this paper consists of a sketch of his career and character, followed by a closer look at his sense of humor and the roles it played in his work. The second half of the paper is in two sections. First, there is a full republication of the text of a tiny book — a short story by Pollock titled “Queen Titania’s Chancellor”— that for nearly a century sat unnoticed on a bookshelf in the library of the Queen’s Dolls’ at Windsor Castle, until Elizabeth Clark Ashby (Curator of Books and Manuscripts in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle) gave Pollock’s miniature masterpiece some long-overdue and well-deserved attention in her 2024 book (full-sized), “The Miniature Library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House.” Second, there is a close (but incomplete) reading and analysis of that tiny text. If there are any lessons to be drawn from this paper, perhaps they are that greatness need not always be cloaked in dignity, and that Jack Point was not the only wit who could “teach you with a quip, if I’ve a mind” or “trick you into learning with a laugh.”

Download the abstract from SSRN at the link.

Call For Applications, Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, 2026

From Steven Howe, Associate Director for Institute for Interdisciplinary Disciplinary Legal Studies, Lucernaiuris.

• 
  

Call for Applications: Critical Times 2026 – Bodies

 

“Why all the fuss about the body?” Caroline Bynum first posed this provocation in the mid-1990s, prompted by a “proliferation” of new writings and theorizations, including then-recent and now-classic works by Judith Butler, bell hooks and Susan Bordo. Looking back some three decades on, we see that the ‘fuss’ was no temporary flare-up or mere passing fad. Rather, it was symptomatic of an emergent ‘bodily turn’ that has, in the years since, moved the terminology of bodies – real, imagined and metaphorical – to the foreground of critical thinking across law and the humanities.

 

The fruits of this turn need no special elaboration. Interventions in critical theory, performance studies, affect theory, Black studies, feminist and queer theory, posthumanism and new materialist studies have given us an array of new vocabularies and insights to bring to bear on our thinking about bodies, their meanings, entanglements and limits. The body, in Rizvana Bradley’s phrase, has become a “discursive meeting ground” for an “unwieldy multitude of concepts and debates, affects and afflictions, conflicts and contestations”, the distinctive expressions of which span multiple fields, disciplines and cultures. While not always clear whether these numerous articulations work in tandem or at cross-purposes, they have, in their very plurality, fostered a deeper engagement with, and problematization of, the “matter of bodies” (Butler). Our present moment – marked by demographic convulsions, war, enhanced practices of surveillance, ubiquitous mobile media, posthuman subjectivities, and new forms of political protest and social movements – urges us, meanwhile, to ‘fuss’ further: to give continued and renewed care to re/thinking the significance of bodies in various contexts, situations and relations. Or to ask more pointedly: do bodies still matter? And if so, why, when and how? 

 

In this spirit, the 2026 Critical Times summer school invites emerging scholars in law and the humanities to gather anew around the theme of ‘Bodies’. Together, we will think about bodies that assemble and disassemble, that appear and disappear, that are protected, punished, cared for, and ignored. From the vulnerable to the resistant, the human to the more-than-human, we ask how legal and cultural frameworks make some bodies visible and others invisible – and how embodiment, performance and affect shape and unsettle our legal imaginaries. 

 

Open to postdocs, PhDs and advanced graduate students from different disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds, the aim is to create a live and lively space of inquiry and creativity – a temporary assembly of thinking, feeling, and embodied scholarship. 

 

Deadline: 20 March 2026. Further details here.

 

Contact: steven.howe@unilu.ch

 

 

Call for Applications: Critical Times 2026 – Bodies

 

“Why all the fuss about the body?” Caroline Bynum first posed this provocation in the mid-1990s, prompted by a “proliferation” of new writings and theorizations, including then-recent and now-classic works by Judith Butler, bell hooks and Susan Bordo. Looking back some three decades on, we see that the ‘fuss’ was no temporary flare-up or mere passing fad. Rather, it was symptomatic of an emergent ‘bodily turn’ that has, in the years since, moved the terminology of bodies – real, imagined and metaphorical – to the foreground of critical thinking across law and the humanities.

 

The fruits of this turn need no special elaboration. Interventions in critical theory, performance studies, affect theory, Black studies, feminist and queer theory, posthumanism and new materialist studies have given us an array of new vocabularies and insights to bring to bear on our thinking about bodies, their meanings, entanglements and limits. The body, in Rizvana Bradley’s phrase, has become a “discursive meeting ground” for an “unwieldy multitude of concepts and debates, affects and afflictions, conflicts and contestations”, the distinctive expressions of which span multiple fields, disciplines and cultures. While not always clear whether these numerous articulations work in tandem or at cross-purposes, they have, in their very plurality, fostered a deeper engagement with, and problematization of, the “matter of bodies” (Butler). Our present moment – marked by demographic convulsions, war, enhanced practices of surveillance, ubiquitous mobile media, posthuman subjectivities, and new forms of political protest and social movements – urges us, meanwhile, to ‘fuss’ further: to give continued and renewed care to re/thinking the significance of bodies in various contexts, situations and relations. Or to ask more pointedly: do bodies still matter? And if so, why, when and how? 

 

In this spirit, the 2026 Critical Times summer school invites emerging scholars in law and the humanities to gather anew around the theme of ‘Bodies’. Together, we will think about bodies that assemble and disassemble, that appear and disappear, that are protected, punished, cared for, and ignored. From the vulnerable to the resistant, the human to the more-than-human, we ask how legal and cultural frameworks make some bodies visible and others invisible – and how embodiment, performance and affect shape and unsettle our legal imaginaries. 

 

Open to postdocs, PhDs and advanced graduate students from different disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds, the aim is to create a live and lively space of inquiry and creativity – a temporary assembly of thinking, feeling, and embodied scholarship. 

 

Deadline: 20 March 2026. Further details here.

 

Contact: steven.howe@unilu.ch

 

 

Forthcoming: Daniel Newman, Law and Justice in Song (Routledge Publishing, 2026)

Forthcoming:

Daniel Newman, Law and Justice in Song: Murder Ballads and Popular Music (Routledge Publishing, 2026)(Transforming Legal Histories).

Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

This book examines the murder ballad form, songs about death and killing, from a legal history perspective. It is held that taking on the long history of the murder ballad is a way that we can understand how death and killing in song has a function in dealing with the world around us. The book integrates law and humanities scholarship with diverse musical case studies to construct a typology of murder ballads and thus conceptualise the central messages of how murder ballads have treated death and killing. Drawing on a cultural form in which assessment and consideration of death and killing are so vigorously and richly enacted gives lawyers a guide to how those who do not see these matters through a primarily legal lens might understand this part of their world. The study will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the areas of Criminal Law, Legal History, Socio-Legal Studies, Criminology, and Musicology.

 

Here's a short bibliography of secondary sources on murder ballads (there are so many!)

Burt, Olive Woolley, Murder Ballads of Mormondom, 18 Western Folklore 151 (1959).

Kane, Stuart A., Wives With Knives: Early Modern Murder Ballads and the Transgressive Commodity, 38 Criticism 219 (1996).

Mulligan, Roark, Dreiser's Murder Ballad, 3 Studies in American Naturalism 22 (Summer 2008).

Daniel Newman, Murder Ballads and Death in Song, 46 Australian Feminist Law Journal 17 (2020). 

O'Brien, Ellen, "The Most Beautiful Murder": The Transgressive Aesthetics of Murder in Victorian Street Ballads, 28 Victorian Literature and Culture 15 (March 2000).

Pettitt, Thomas, Journalism vs. Tradition in the English Ballads of the Murdered Sweetheart, in Ballads and Broadsides in Britain (Routledge, 2010).

Underwood, Richard H., and Carol J. Parris, CrimeSong: Some Murder Ballads and Poems Revisited, 12 Journal of Southern Legal History History 5 (2004).

Website: Murder by Gaslight.

Eisenberg and Lamoreaux on Separation of Powers or Division of Labor? Patent Interference Disputes, the Grand Narrative, and the History of the Administrative State, 1790-1940

Rebecca Eisenberg, University of Michigan Law School, and Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Yale University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Michigan Law School, have published Separation of Powers or Division of Labor? Patent Interference Disputes, the Grand Narrative, and the History of the Administrative State, 1790-1940. Here is the abstract. NB: There are 2 versions of this paper

We use the history of the Patent Office to challenge the Grand Narrative of separation of powers that the current Supreme Court is using to invalidate congressional designs for administrative agencies. Focusing on the adjudication of patent interference disputes—cases in which two or more inventors applied for patents for essentially the same technology—we find that the division of labor between the Patent Office and the courts shifted repeatedly and dramatically over the century and a half preceding the Administrative Procedure Act. Rather than worries about separation of powers, the main drivers of change were (1) the Patent Office’s efforts to curb inventors’ exploitation of interference procedures to delay the award of patents to rivals and (2) the need to manage the workload that interference appeals imposed on the overburdened Patent Office and courts. Innovations in Patent Office procedures led to dramatic improvements in the efficiency of its frontline adjudication of interferences, but officials found it much more difficult to prevent losing parties from abusing appeals opportunistically. At the behest of the Patent Office, Congress repeatedly revised the appeals process for interferences, trying out direct review by ad hoc arbitration panels, individual judges, and variously constituted courts. It even eliminated direct appeals of interference decisions from 1870 until 1893, while continuing to provide for appeals from rejections of patent applications (where opportunistic delays posed less serious problems). Although interference parties sometimes raised legal challenges to these review structures, they reached a dead end in the Supreme Court, which throughout the nineteenth century deferred to Congress’s authority to design the system. Finally, in 1939, after a century of trial and error, the Patent Office convinced Congress to eliminate all internal appeals in interference cases within the Patent Office, to authorize the Patent Office to issue patents based on its frontline adjudications of priority, and to shift review of interference decisions entirely to the courts. Again, this change did not apply to rejections of patent applications, which were still reviewed internally before they could be appealed to the courts. Both the great variety of appeal structures enacted over the years and the repeated divergence in the treatment of appeals of interferences and rejections support our emphasis on the primary role that pragmatic concerns played in the evolving division of labor between the Patent Office and the courts. This history reveals flexible adaptation over time rather than conformity to a standard model of separation of powers traceable to the framers.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Forthcoming from Princeton University Press: Carla Hesse, The People's Justice: Revolutionary Law and the Founding of the French Republic (June 2026)

Forthcoming from Princeton University Press: Carla Hesse, The People’s Justice: Revolutionary Law and the Founding of the French Republic (June, 2026). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

In The People’s Justice, Carla Hesse offers a sweeping reappraisal of political violence in the French Revolution. From Charles Dickens to Hannah Arendt, the Revolution of 1789–1799 in France has been depicted as the bloodiest of the eighteenth-century democratic revolutions. Through extensive new archival research, Hesse shows that, to the contrary, what set the French Revolution apart was neither the scale nor the intensity of its violence but rather the ubiquity of its political tribunals and the use of novel forms of criminal law and procedure as a means of adjudicating political conflict. More than 5,000 political trials were prosecuted by the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris alone, and, with an acquittal rate of more than 50 percent, these were neither perfunctory nor foregone in their outcomes. They had a repressive function, to be sure, but more importantly, they played a critical role in founding a republic in France and in shaping its social and political norms. Through jury deliberation, public witnessing, and media coverage, these political trials legitimated a republic and the revolutionary struggle that brought it into being. They were animated less by class warfare, factional hatreds, or utopian ideology than by a patriotic, albeit tragic, effort to hold fellow citizens accountable. Over the course of the last two centuries, France, of course, has successfully established itself as a constitutional regime, but this constitutional tradition is still rooted in and haunted by its revolutionary past. Since 1793, the French Republic has, to some extent or another, kept itself alive by keeping itself perpetually on trial.