Banu on The Butterfly Effect in Law: How One Legal Decision Shapes Societal Psyche

Zareen Banu has published The Butterfly Effect in Law: How One Legal Decision Shapes Societal Psyche. Here is the abstract.

Legal decisions like the butterfly effect in chaos theory, possess the power to create far-reaching and often unpredictable societal changes in the society. A single ruling can set precedents that can alter the course of legal interpretations, influence public perception, and reshape societal norms. This paper explores how judicial pronouncements, legislative reforms, and landmark cases contribute to the evolution of legal systems and social consciousness of the society. By analyzing historical and contemporary legal decisions, this study examines the psychological and behavioral impact these rulings have on individuals and communities. It delves into how legal certainty, or its absence, can create ripple effects across different sectors among the people, including business, governance, and civil rights. Ultimately, This paper aims to highlight the profound and often unintended consequences of judicial actions, emphasizing the need for a forward-thinking approach in legal decision-making.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Ari Z. Bryen, The Judgment of the Provinces: The Roman Empire and the Origins of Law and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2026)

Newly published: Ari Z. Bryen, Vanderbilt University, has published The Judgment of the Provinces: The Roman Empire and the Origins of Law and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2026) (Studies in Legal History. Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Roman law is justly famous, but what was its relationship to governing an empire? In this book, Ari Z. Bryen argues that law, as the learned practice that we know today, emerged from the challenge of governing a diverse and fractious set of imperial subjects. Through analysis of these subjects' political and legal ideologies, Bryen reveals how law became the central topic of political contest in the Roman Empire. Law offered a means of testing legitimacy and evaluating government, as well as a language for asking fundamental political questions. But these political claims did not go unchallenged. Elites resisted them, and jurists, in collaboration with emperors, reimagined law as a system that excluded the voices of the governed. The result was to separate, for the first time, 'law' from 'society' more broadly, and to define law as a primarily literate and learned practice, rather than the stuff of everyday life.

• Brings together fresh and wide-ranging evidence, across different media and languages, to account for the full experience of Roman governance
• Shows readers how elite and non-elite perspectives interacted and challenged one another, and how those debates impacted governance
• Provides a genealogy of the law/society distinction, arguing that it emerged as a response to governing a diverse empire

 

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Newly Published: Paul Kléber Monod, Think of England: Nation, People and Race in the English Imagination (Cambridge, 2026)

Newly published: Paul Kléber Monod, Middlebury College, has published Think of England: Nation, People, and Race im the English Imagination (Cambridge University Press). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

What is the basis of English national identity? How has this changed over time, and what is its future? Tracing the history of English identity over more than 2,000 years, Think of England explores how being English has been understood as belonging to a nation, a people, or a race. Paul Kléber Monod examines the ancient and medieval inventions of a British and ethnic Anglo-Saxon identity, before documenting the violent creation of an English ethnic state within Britain, and the later extension of that imperial power into the wider world. Monod analyses the persistence of a specifically English language of cultural identity after 1707 and the revival of English racial identity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, highlighting the crucial role of imperial expansion and the recurring myth of “little England” pitted against larger enemies. Turning to the revival of English identity in the twenty-first century, this study raises probing questions about the resurgence and future of a divisive concept.

• Offers a wide-ranging approach to ideas of English identity, covering more than 15 centuries and a diverse set of sources
• Provides a longue durée view of the development of English national, ethnic, and racial ideas within the context of imperial expansion
• Raises important questions about the future of English national identity

 

Casini on Who Owns the Past? Politics and Law in the Restitution of Cultural Property

Lorenzo Casini, The Institute for Advanced Studies, has published Who Owns the Past? Politics and Law in the Restitution of Cultural Property. Here is the abstract.

The article examines the issue of cultural property restitution as a boundary field between law, politics, and ethics, exploring the legal and symbolic significance of returning works of art to their places, States, or communities of origin. Through a broad survey of historical and contemporary cases—from wartime spoliations to illicit trafficking, from post-colonial restitutions to those linked to Nazi-Fascist persecutions—the Author highlights the different causes, modalities, and rationales of restitution, emphasizing the plurality of actors and instruments involved. The contribution reconstructs the role of both international and domestic law, underscoring their structural limits, in particular non-retroactivity and the inalienability of public cultural property, and shows how restitutions are often grounded in negotiated agreements and forms of soft law rather than in judicial decisions. In conclusion, the article argues that a new ethic of cultural responsibility and an emerging international custom are taking shape, pointing toward the possible affirmation of a “right to restitution,” also understood as a response to a fundamental question in cultural heritage studies: who owns the past?

Download the artcle from SSRN at the link.

Fruehwald on Theory-Induced Blindness in Legal Scholarship: A Critical Thinking Solution

Scott Fruehwald, Independent Scholar, has published Theory-Induced Blindness in Legal Scholarship: A Critical Thinking Solution. The truth matters, and, consequently, how scholars seek the truth matters. Scholars often use theory as a framework to help them attain the truth. Accordingly, a scholar’s theoretical approach must be accurate; it must not be tainted in any way. “Theory-induced blindness” taints truth-seeking. Theory-induced blindness has contaminated legal scholarship in many ways. This article will examine theory-induced blindness in legal scholarship and demonstrate how it has affected the truth of that scholarship on both ends of the ideological spectrum. Part II will introduce the basics of theory-induced blindness. Parts III-VII will present examples of theory-induced blindness in Classical Legal Thought, writing legal history, traditional law and economics, post-modern legal scholars’ social constructionist arguments, and two professors’ defense of learning style theory. Finally, the conclusion will discuss the best solution for avoiding theory-induced blindness–evaluating theories with critical thinkin

10th International Osnabrueck Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law, July 18-26, 2026: Extended Deadline for Applications

 

Extended deadline: The final deadline for applications has been extended to May 10th!

"Law in Transit - Moving Subjects, Universal Rights, and the Contingencies of Recognition"

July 18-26, 2026

10th International Osnabrueck Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

http://www.osi.uni-osnabrueck.de/

The tenth International Osnabrueck Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law will be held from July 18 to 26, 2026 at Osnabrueck University, Germany. It aims to encourage and further promote the interdisciplinary study and research of the interrelations between law and culture, based on the idea that the extended cultural study of the law will foster profitable scholarly exchange and dialogue between legal studies and the humanities.
The Institute will offer a combination of thematic workshop sessions, small group seminars and a final symposium for 20 international participants (doctoral, post-doctoral and advanced M.A. – see below for eligibility). The introductory workshop will address the range and potential of interdisciplinary studies and approaches in the field of law and the humanities. The remaining thematic sessions and small group seminars will focus on key issues and debates in current cultural legal studies, for example:

* The reconfiguration of legal personhood and citizenship in response to global migration, statelessness, and refugeehood, and the increasing denial of full rights to non-citizens.
* The shifting semantics of democracy and legality in political and social discourse, most obviously about migration and diversity, particularly where rights are claimed, but also where they are suspended or selectively applied.
* Cultural representations and mediations of rights and belonging, including visual arts, and digital media that depict the struggles of mobile or excluded subjects, but also insist on and reaffirm their agencies and capabilities.
* Critical and creative practices of reclaiming legal subjectivity - through activism, art, or narrative - that contest exclusion and imagine alternative communities / subjects of rights.

The main objective of the OSI is to encourage scholarly exchange across disciplines and the critical debate of current research projects, as well as work in progress. Participants will have the opportunity to present and discuss their own work both within the larger group and in individual sessions with members of the OSI faculty. 

Confirmed faculty for the 2026 OSI include:

Jeannine DeLombard (English and History, UC Santa Barbara)
Cassandra Falke (English, Arctic U of Norway)
Leti Volpp (Law, UC Berkeley)
Marco Wan (Law, University of Hong Kong)
Arthur Rose (English, University of Exeter)
Devin Zuber (American Studies, GTU Berkeley)
Angela Naimou (English, Clemson University)
Ted Laros (Technology, Media and Culture / Open U of the Netherlands)

Participant Eligibility

The Summer Institute invites doctoral and postdoctoral students from various academic fields whose research interests and projects are situated at the interface between law and the humanities and who are concerned with a better understanding of the interdependence of law and culture. Doctoral candidates in the humanities, law, the arts, literature, and related social sciences are encouraged to apply, as are advanced students pursuing a J.D. or its equivalent (such as an L.L.B). Young scholars or junior faculty members who have received a Ph.D. or a corresponding degree in the last five years are also eligible.
While applications by doctoral/post-doctoral students are prioritized, the Summer Institute will also consider strong applications from advanced Master students about to conclude their studies and with a strong interest in interdisciplinary research.
There are openings for up to 20 students to participate in the Summer Institute. The Institute will be conducted entirely in English.

Application Process

Students interested in taking part in the Summer Institute should submit their applications on our website no later than May 10, 2026. The complete program, and further detailed and updated information about the Institute, the sessions, international faculty, admission and fees can be found at: http://www.osi.uni-osnabrueck.de/

Please direct all inquiries and questions to the OSI coordinator at lawandculture@uos.de

Thanks and kind regards,

Peter Schneck

Director OSI
Chair of American Studies

Tarar and Tarar on Constitutional Ghosts: Myth, Metaphysics, and the Afterlife of the Framers

Jalal Tarar, Independent Scholar, and Shahbaz Tara, University of London, have published Constitutional Ghosts: Myth, Metaphysics, and the Afterlife of the Framers. Here is the abstract.

This paper examines the paradoxical role of the constitutional framer in judicial reasoning. While courts invoke the figure of the framer to legitimise constitutional interpretation, they systematically exclude actual framers from interpretive authority. The framer is constructed as a mythic origin, sacralised but silenced, a legitimating figure whose historical presence is evoked to anchor doctrine, yet whose interpretive claims are denied to preserve judicial autonomy. Drawing on hermeneutics, political theology, and semiotics, the paper argues that this exclusion is not a contradiction but a structural necessity of constitutional democracy. Through case studies from the United States, Pakistan, India, Iraq, and South Africa, the paper illustrates how figures such as James Madison, Abdul Hafeez Pirzada, and Albie Sachs are invoked as symbols but denied operative authority. The analysis critiques originalism by demonstrating that framers often disagreed with each other, evolved ideologically, or repudiated their own positions, rendering authorial intent an unstable foundation for legal meaning. The judiciary's refusal to yield interpretive control is shown to be essential for the law's adaptability and coherence over time. Constitutional meaning is not inherited but constructed; the framer functions as a judicial artefact, invoked rhetorically but displaced institutionally. This performative logic reveals that constitutional law sustains itself not by preserving the framer's voice but by ritualising his absence. The framer, in this sense, is a constitutional ghost, essential to the mythos of legitimacy, yet exiled from the terrain of interpretation.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Blumenfeld on Splitting the Atom of Sovereignty: Ancient Greece and the Origins of American Federalism

Brian Blumenfeld, Independent Scholar, has published Splitting the Atom of Sovereignty: Ancient Greece and the Origins of American Federalism. Here is the abstract.

In an era when history and tradition increasingly inform the legal reasoning of judges, jurists and advocates from across the ideological spectrum, one historical theme engrained in our constitutional origins remains undeservedly obscure. Appearing throughout the original debates over the U.S. Constitution are investigations into and arguments about the federal governments (or “leagues”) of ancient Greece. A mere browse through the primary records of the founding reveals the esteem with which that era drew lessons and heeded warnings from these classical federal precedents. In laboring over how to form a more perfect union, Americans in the 1780s looked not only to their contemporaneous political conditions for viable answers, but also looked to history for how federal unions were formed, how they functioned, and why they succeeded and failed. The greatest lesson learned from Greek federalism, repeated throughout the founding era, was how the three principal federal governments of ancient Greece—the Amphictyonic Council, the Achaean League, and the Lycian League—all ultimately collapsed because their central governments were insufficiently empowered to withstand the coactive forces of domestic centrifugalism and foreign intervention. This failure, and the solutions for preventing its recurrence in America, figured prominently in the policies and polemics of the founding. Notwithstanding the prevalence of these classical references, there is no single source in the legal or historical literature that provides an adequate account of the Greek federal leagues and their role in the founding. The net outcome is that the scholar, student, jurist or advocate examining our constitutional origins is often confronted with references to Greek federalism, and yet is regrettably left without a source for adequately understanding the subject. As a corrective, this article catalogues and contextualizes the references to Greek federalism found throughout the records of the Constitutional Convention, the ratification debates, and the Federalist Papers; and then reviews the constitutions and histories of the three main Greek federal leagues that appeared throughout the founding. The end result will remove the bewilderment too often evoked by the subject, and will allow the reader to effectively engage with the themes of Greek federalism when conducting constitutional and historical analysis.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call for Papers: Repositioning Criminal Justice; Critical Reimaginings

 From Anne Wagner, University of Lille:

Call for Papers:

Repositioning Criminal Justice: Critical Reimaginings.

 

This collection explores how criminal justice systems construct and respond to gender—particularly the ways women are othered, criminalised, and shaped by legal and institutional frameworks. We welcome contributions that engage critically with gendered issues in criminal justice from a range of theoretical perspectives, including (but not limited to) Marxist, post/decolonial, socio-legal, critical race, psychoanalytic, and critical legal studies approaches .

 

Submission details:

 

*              Abstract (150–200 words) due: 15 May 2026

*              Full chapter (8,000–9,000 words) due: 26 February 2027

 

If you are interested in contributing, please send a draft title, abstract, and affiliation to m.beatrice@deakin.edu.au 

Kaufman on The First Criminal Procedure Revolution

Emma Kaufman, New York University School of Law, has published The First Criminal Procedure Revolution. Here is the abstract.

Today, it seems obvious that criminal defendants can waive constitutional rights. Plea bargains make up the vast majority of criminal convictions, and defendants routinely trade their rights — to indictment, to remain silent, to an attorney, to a jury — in exchange for a faster trial or a lesser charge. The modern criminal legal system is a regime of negotiated justice. Rights used to have more force. In the nineteenth century, the rules we now call criminal procedure rights were hard limits on judicial power. Defendants could not forfeit rights, and constitutional violations deprived courts of jurisdiction. But then, in an underappreciated and radical shift, courts changed their mind. One by one, rights became individual options, alienable upon consent. The rest is history: Grand juries declined, plea bargains soared, prosecutors became power brokers, and the system of mass processing was born. This Article recovers a lost chapter of American criminal procedure. It mines a trove of overlooked sources and traverses multiple disciplines to advance a simple claim: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal, courts transformed the rights of the accused. Long before the Warren Court revolutionized criminal procedure, there was a first revolution in constitutional criminal law. The story of that revolution reorients the field’s core assumptions, embarrasses modern doctrines, and expands the canon. It also advances our collective understanding of what it could mean to protect criminal procedure rights.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

DeLoach on Antigone, Autonomy, and Higher Lawlessness

Andrew R. DeLoach, Trinity Law School, has published Antigone, Autonomy, and Higher Lawlessness. Here is the abstract.

The first surviving references to unwritten law and to autonomy come from Sophocles' Antigone. Yet legal readings of the tragedy routinely focus on the conflict between natural law and legal positivism. These readings typically assume the truth of Antigone's claim that unwritten laws require her defiance of Creon's decree. Likewise, they rarely ask whether her final argument is consistent with that claim. Antigone first appeals to the unwritten law of the gods-a Higher Law superseding a human decree. But then she changes her normative approach. Accused of acting autonomously (by her own rules), she abandons the Higher Law and appeals instead to a law she has made for herself. And it appears her claim was always rooted in autonomy. Unexplored but implied by the tragedy is the danger that appeals to Higher Law in contemporary adjudication may encourage claims based in autonomy, amounting to "Higher Lawlessness.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Wieboldt on "Shall We Settle for Anything Less Than Complete Equality?" Catholic Power and the First National Fight for Parental Rights in Education, 1947-1962

Dennis J. Wieboldt, III, University of Notre Dame, is publishing "Shall We Settle for Anything Less Than Complete Equality?" Catholic Power and the First National Fight for Parental Rights in Education, 1947-1962 at 34 Rel. & Am. Cul.-- (2026). Here is the abstract.

After the Supreme Court incorporated the Establishment Clause against the states in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), raucous national debates broke out between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews about the constitutionality of government aid to parochial schools. This article offers the first account of how these interconfessional hostilities shaped the Catholic Church's parochial school litigation strategy after Everson. To undercut claims that government aid to parochial schools would perniciously enrich the (Roman) Catholic hierarchy, the Church's public spokesmen increasingly framed debates about parochial school aid after Everson as implicating the constitutional rights of American parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children. In so doing, these figures eschewed arguments made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the government has an obligation to fund institutional religion. Moreover, to prevent anti-Catholic prejudice from impacting the disposition of discrete church-state disputes, lawyers associated with the Catholic bishops' official episcopal organization sometimes refrained from publicly involving themselves in local litigation, all while privately supplying litigants with strategic counsel. In concluding, this article suggests that the Church's post-Everson approach to defending the constitutionality of parochial school aid was motivated by a consistent conviction that parents who sent their children to Catholic schools ought to be treated in the same manner as parents who sent their children to other nonpublic (but non-Catholic) schools. When the scope of government aid to nonpublic schools grew in later years, this argument could therefore be invoked to support parochial schools' equal inclusion in more robust aid programs.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Mittal, Rakove, and Weingast on The Constitutional Choices of 1787 and Their Consquences

Sonia Mittal, Yale University Law School, Jack N. Rakove, Stanford University, and Barry R. Weingast, Stanford University Department of Political Science, have published The Constitutional Choices of 1787 and their Consequences in Founding Choices: American Economic Policy in the 1790s, edited by Irwin Douglass and Richard Sylla, National Bureau of Economic Research (2011)

The choices made in the creation of a constitution have immediate political results and, often enough, lasting economic consequences. That, at least, is the overall thesis of this book, which examines the economic significance of the Federal Constitution drafted at Philadelphia in the late spring and summer of 1787. The Constitution occupies so large a place in our collective understanding of American history and politics, is so vital a symbol of national identity, that it is difficult to recall that the American federal republic might easily have evolved along alternative paths. Of course, it is well known that some matters were hotly contested in 1787, such as the disputes over representation that preoccupied the Convention for the first seven weeks of debate, and that others, notably the absence of a declaration of fundamental rights, became objects of public controversy as soon as the Constitution was submitted to a sovereign people for ratification. But to emphasize the big dramatic issues – the purported “great compromise” over representation, the assuaging of Anti-Federalist doubts with the proposal of a “bill of rights” – is still only to confirm what a heroic episode it all was. The other contingent choices that set the Convention on its course, or that gave the Constitution its essential character, remain obscure.

Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.