How Right (Or Wrong) Does Television Get It?

From MSNBC.com, two stories about how television reflects the real world; a piece on the progress women have made in breaking through the glass ceiling since the 1970s,and a story on those interesting older woman/younger man relationships. Along the way: do anti-discrimination laws help or hurt, or have no effect? Do women flooding into the workplace eventually have the effect of flooding into the boardroom, or not?

Madeleine Albright has some interesting things to say about the power of a woman's word, even if it's expressed symbolically. In her new book, Read My Pins: Stories From a Diplomat's Jewel Box (HarperCollins, 2009) the first female U.S. Secretary of State discusses how Saddam Hussein inspired her use of jeweled pins to make subtle pronouncements on behalf of the government. "It would never have happened if not for Saddam Hussein. When U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright criticized the dictator, his poet in residence responded by calling her "an unparalleled serpent." Shortly thereafter, while preparing to meet with Iraqi officials, Albright pondered: What to wear? She decided to make a diplomatic statement by choosing a snake pin. Although her method of communication was new, her message was as old as the American Revolution—Don't Tread on Me." (From the B&N website). The pins are part of a special exhibit at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York, and then will travel to several cities in the country including Little Rock and Indianapolis.

Law and Art

Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Law, has published "Property and Progress: Antebellum Landscape Art and Property Law." Here is the abstract.

Landscape art in the antebellum era (the period before the American Civil War, 1861-1865), often depicts the role of humans on the landscape. Humans appear as hunters, settlers, and travelers and human structures appear as well, from rude paths, cabins, mills, bridges, and canals to railroads and telegraph wires. Those images parallel cases, treatises, orations, essays, and fictional literature that discuss property's role in fostering economic and moral development. The images also parallel developments in property doctrine, particularly related to adverse possession, mistaken improvers, nuisance, and eminent domain.

Some of the conflicts in property rights that gripped antebellum thought also appear in paintings, including ambivalence about progress, concern over development of land, and fear of the excesses of commerce. The concerns about wealth, as well as the concerns about the lack of control through law, appear at various points. Other paintings celebrate intellectual, moral, technological, and economic progress. The paintings thus remind us of how antebellum Americans understood property, as they struggled with the changes in the role of property from protection of individual autonomy of the eighteenth century to the promotion of economic growth in the nineteenth century.

Download the paper from SSRN here.
Here's a related post by Professor Brophy.

Capers on Race and Justitia, the Symbol of Justice

Professor I. Bennett Capers has posted on SSRN an article, On Jusitita, Race, Gender, and Blindness, 12 Michigan J. of Race & Law 203 (2006):

If there is one image we associate with justice, it is of Justitia herself, blindfolded, balancing a scale in one hand, brandishing an unsheathed sword in the other. The image is so ubiquitous that we are often beyond noticing it. Late for court, late for class, or simply indifferent, we walk past it, barely glancing up.

This Essay – Justitia, Race, Gender, and Blindness – is about seeing Justitia and questioning how the image functions, both aesthetically and morally. Drawing upon law, literature, art history, and cultural studies, this Essay also problematizes Justitia. After all, what does it mean, connotatively and denotatively, for Justitia to be blind in a racialized society where color is so determinative? And conversely, what does it mean to fix a black gaze upon an image of justice that has been figured as white and female? The Essay contends that answering these questions is imperative for those of us who care about making our criminal justice system fairer, both in the way justice is meted out, and in our perception of justice.