A blog about law, the humanities, and popular culture
From the Law and Society Association:
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2027 Globa2027 Glo20bal Meeting on Law and Society: Submissions Now Open!l Meeting on Law and Society: Submissions Now Open!
2027 Global Meeting on Law and Society: Submissions Now Open!
2027 Global Meeting on Law and Society: Submissions Now Open!
This Article examines the constitutional evolution of 14th Amendment citizenship and due process protections through the historical lens spanning from Plessy v. Ferguson to the contemporary case of Noem v. Abrego Garcia. While separated by more than a century, these cases illuminate persistent tensions between individual constitutional rights and executive power, revealing how citizenship status and due process protections remain contested terrain in American constitutional law. This Article argues the modern challenges to citizenship and due process rights echo the same fundamental questions that plagued the Reconstruction Era: Who deserves constitutional protections, and what limits exist on government power to deny such protections? By tracing this constitutional arc, this Article demonstrates that contemporary immigration and citizenship disputes represent not aberrations but continuations of America’s ongoing struggle to fulfill the 14th Amendment’s egalitarian promise.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
A few U. S. labor law themed films and tv for Labor Day, 2026.
American Dream (1990).
At the River I Stand (1993).
Boxcar Bertha (1972).
Bread and Roses (2000).
F.I.S.T. (1978).
Harlan County, USA (1976).
Hoffa (1992).
Made in Dageham (2010).
Matewan (1987).
The Molly Maguires (1970).
Native Land (1942). Narrated by Paul Robeson, lawyer and actor.
Newsies (1992).
9 to 5 (1980).
Norma Rae (1979).
North Country (2005).
On the Waterfront (1954).
The Pajama Game (1957).
Salt of the Earth (1954).
Silkwood (1983).
10,000 Black Men Named George (2002).
The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal (1979).
With Babies and Banners (1979).
Television shows and episodes
The Office (2005-2014). This series is centered on the workplace. Many labor/employment law issues.
Roseanne, "Let's Call It Quits" (1989). Fred Thompson (lawyer and Senator from Kentucky) plays the condescending and overbearing manager. Many of Roseanne's first season episodes had to do with working conditions at the Wellman plant.
The Simpsons, "Last Exit to Springfield" (1993).
The Sopranos, "Do Not Resuscitate " (2000).
There are so, so many more! Search for "labor films" and "tv shows labor law episodes" (without the quotation marks) in your preferred search engine.
This article details how the rule-of-law themed games "DOGE vs. ICE" and "Let's Kill All the Lawyers" were created, and how the games were specifically designed to provoke thought about the operation of the rule of law in an accessible way.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
Publication soon:
World Literature and Law (Marco Wan, ed., Routledge, 2027).
From the publisher's website:
The study of law and literature has become global, and now encompasses legal traditions and literary histories from across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. Paradigms such as international law and literature, postcolonialism, and the Global South have further added to the richness of the field. As law and literature takes root in different regions, and as its intellectual and geographical terrain expands, there is a need to re-examine its foundational assumptions, theoretical paradigms, and interpretative praxes. What can we learn from established practices, and what new conceptual frameworks should we develop, to engage with the world’s increasingly diverse jurisprudences, literatures, and cultures? What, in short, might the study of world literature and law look like?
This collection maps the global turn in law and literature, foregrounds under-represented regions, and charts new directions for the twenty-first century. Featuring case studies from Argentina, China, India, Nigeria, and South Africa among others, contributors revisit jurisprudence and aesthetics; trace colonial genealogies of policing and borders; interrogate sexuality, gender and reproduction; and stage conversations between legal reasoning, narrative form and visual culture. Synthesising comparative, postcolonial and international perspectives, the volume surfaces fresh conceptual tools and agendas for research and teaching.
This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of law, literature, comparative literature, legal theory, socio-legal studies and postcolonial studies. The essays in this collection were first published in various issues of Law & Literature.
This Article recovers a case that has not been examined in the scholarly literature since the tribunal that decided it closed its doors in 1904: Samuel C. Caldwell, et al. v. Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, No. 44. Drawing on a previously unexamined 186-page case file held in the Melven Cornish Collection at the University of Oklahoma, the Article follows Samuel Caldwell’s Choctaw citizenship claim through all four of its lives — before the Dawes Commission in 1896, before the United States Court for the Central District of the Indian Territory in 1897 (first on a special master’s favorable report, then on a wholly reversed record after the Choctaw Nation alleged the suppression of a key witness’s testimony), and finally before the Choctaw and Chickasaw Citizenship Court in 1903–1904, a short-lived federal tribunal created by the Supplemental Agreement of 1902 to adjudicate exactly this kind of dispute. The case file offers an unusually granular look at how citizenship was actually litigated during the allotment era: competing and shifting ancestry claims within a single family, testimony estimating blood quantum by appearance alone, and a disputed marriage certificate with an allegedly forged notarial seal. Caldwell himself filed for Choctaw citizenship in 1896 and Mississippi Choctaw citizenship in 1901, even as testimony elsewhere in the record described him asserting Cherokee ancestry and a rival branch of his wife’s family pursuing a separate, never-completed Cherokee claim of its own. The Article situates Caldwell’s case within the broader institutional history of the Citizenship Court’s unusual two-track jurisdiction — original jurisdiction over the tribes’ own representative suits, and appellate jurisdiction over individual claimants’ appeals — and within the vocabulary the Nations themselves used for claimants like Caldwell: not citizens, but “court citizens,” people whose standing rested on a tribunal’s say-so rather than the Nation’s own recognition.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
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