ICYMI: Contreras on Science Fiction and the Law: A New Wigmorian Bibliography @contreraslegals @sjquinney

ICYMI: Jorge L. Contreras, University of Utah College of Law, has published Science Fiction and the Law: A New Wigmorian Bibliography at 13 Harvard J. Sports & Ent. L. 63 (2022).

In 1908, Dean John Henry Wigmore compiled a list of novels that no lawyer could afford to ignore. Wigmore’s list, taken up by Professor Richard Weisberg in the 1970s, catalogs one hundred literary works from Antigone to Native Son, each of which offers insight into the legal system or the practice of law. This article undertakes a similar bibliographic exercise with respect to law and the literature of science fiction. While science fiction, as a literary genre, has its detractors, it cannot be denied that science fiction stories – whether in books, short stories, films or television shows – reach a vast audience and, for better or worse, influence popular perceptions and understanding of science and technology issues. This has been the case since the days of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, but is especially true today. When we talk about genetic engineering, Brave New World, Gattaca and Jurassic Park are invariably mentioned. When we think about artificial intelligence, HAL, Skynet and other fictional depictions immediately come to mind. The surveillance society? Nineteen Eighty-Four, of course. These speculative fiction accounts inform the background intuition of judges, legislators and citizens when confronting novel legal issues that arise due to technological change. As such, it is important to understand the body of literature that forms these background intuitions. Accordingly, this article offers the first curated and categorized list of legal science fiction literature, following the model of Wigmore and Weisberg. It is classified according to doctrinal themes, and also includes a compilation of academic literature addressing issues of law in science fiction. It is hoped that the materials compiled here will serve as a useful resource for legal practitioners, policy makers and educators as they grapple with ever increasing legal challenges brought about by the rapid evolution of science and technology. [This is a draft - suggestions, comments and corrections are welcome]

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Stern on Law and Narrative: An Updated Bibliography, 2017-21 @ArsScripta

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published Law and Narrative: An Updated Bibliography, 2017-21. Here is the abstract.

This bibliography collects work focused specifically on law and narrative, published between 2017 and 2021.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

ICYMI: Gemmette on Law and Literature

ICYMI: Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette has published four very useful reference books and collections on law and literature, great additions to the law and literature scholar's bookshelf.

Law and Literature: Legal Themes in Short Stories (Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette, ed., Praeger, 1992).
Law in Literature: An Annotated Bibliography of Law-Related Works (Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette, ed., Whitston Publishing, 1998).

Law in Literature: Legal Themes in American Stories: 1842-1917 (Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette, ed., The Buckingham Group, 2015).

Law in Literature: Legal Themes in Novellas (Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette, ed., The Buckingham Group, 2017).

 She is also the author of Law and Literature: An Unnecessarily Suspect Class in the Liberal Arts Component of the Law School Curriculum, 28 Val. U. L. Rev. 267 (1989), Law and Literature: Joining the Class Action, 29 Val. U. L. Rev.665 (1994/1995), and Filling in the Silence: Domestic Violence, Literature, and Law, 32 Loy. Chi. U. L. J. 91 (2000).

Behrens on the Life and Work of Thomas M. McDade @DukeLawLibrary

Jennifer L. Behrens, J. Michael Goodson Law Library, Duke University School of Law, has published Beyond 'The Annals of Murder': The Life and Works of Thomas M. McDade. Here is the abstract.

Thomas M. McDade is best known (if not well-known enough) for his seminal 1961 reference bibliography, The Annals of Murder: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on American Murders from Colonial Times to 1900. Beyond that singular text on early American murder trial accounts, though, lies more than 70 additional publications on American legal history, law enforcement, and literature, gathered together for the first time in an annotated bibliography of McDade’s lesser-known writings. The article also examines McDade’s fascinating life and varied career as an early FBI agent, World War II veteran, corporate executive, and true crime chronicler.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A New Issue of Amerikastudies/American Studies Devoted to Law and Poetry

Newly published:

Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2017, issue 2. This issue is devoted to Legal Poetics.

It includes an introduction by Birte Christ and Stephanie Mueller, Peter Schneck, Savage Properties and Violent Forms, Brook Thomas, Sidney Lanier, the Language of Paradox, and Staging Contradictory Political Ideals in the Battle for Civil Rights and the War against Terrorism during the Era of Reconstruction, Christa Buschendorf, Poet and Reader in the Witness Box: Society on Trial in Murial Rukeyser's Early Poetry, Michael Stanford, Poetry, Negative Capability, and the Law: James Wright's "A Poem About George Doty in the Death House" and "At the Executed Murder's Grave,"  Birte Christ, State Killing and the Poetic Series: George Elliott Clarke's "Execution Poems" and Jill McDonough's "Habeas Corpus," Stefanie Mueller, Exceeding Determinacy in the Language of Personhood: "Citizen United," Corporations, and the Poetry of Timothy Donnelly and Thomas Sayers Ellis, Lawrence Joseph, Three Poems, book reviews, and bibliography (publications in American studies from German-speaking countries, 2016).

ICYMI: A Survey of the Legal Thriller From Lars Ole Sauerberg @Palgrave_

Lars Ole Sauerberg, University of Southern Denmark, has published The Legal Thriller From Gardner to Grisham (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

This book offers a critically informed yet relaxed historical overview of the legal thriller, a unique contribution to crime fiction where most of the titles have been written by professionals such as lawyers and judges. The legal thriller typically uses court trials as the suspense-creating background for presenting legal issues reflecting a wide range of concerns, from corporate conflicts to private concerns, all in a dramatic but highly informed manner. With authors primarily from the USA and the UK, the genre is one which nonetheless enjoys a global reading audience. As well as providing a survey of the legal thriller, this book takes a gender–focused approach to analyzing recently published titles within the field. It also argues for the fascination of the legal thriller both in the way its narrative pattern parallels that of an actual court trial, and by the way it reflects, frequently quite critically, the concerns of contemporary society.

"More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine": Star Wars and the Academy @PacificStand

Max Ufberg notes (in an article dated December 17, 2015) that more than a thousand (more or less) academic articles have come out on the subject of Star Wars. He gives a few examples, but a quick Google Scholar search turns up many more intriguing titles. Scholars (and publishers) show no sign of abandoning their interest in the franchise, or the ideas the films pose. After all, it's reboot time.

Here are some.

Jeanne Cavelos, The Science of Star Wars (St. Martin's Press, 1999).

Andrew Gordon, "Star Wars": A Myth For Our Time, 6 Literature/Film Quarterly 314 (Fall 1978).

Mary S. Henderson, Star Wars: The Magic of Myth (Bantam Books, 1997) (Exhibition catalog).

Nick Jamilla, Sword Fighting in the Star Wars Universe (McFarland, 2008).

Martin Miller and Robert Sprich, The Appeals of "Star Wars": An Archetypal-Psychoanalytic View, 38 American Imago 203 (Summer 1981).

Elana Shefrin, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom: Mapping New Congruencies Between the Internet and Media Entertainment Culture, 21 Critical Studies in Media Communications 261 (2004).

Star Wars and Philosophy: More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine (Kevin S. Decker and Jason T. Eberl, eds., Open Court Publishing, 2005).

Sean Cunningham on Researching Tudor Government

Sean Cunningham, National Archives, UK,  is publishing Researching Tudor Government (Manchester University Press, 2016)(IHR Research Guides). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Examines broadly the types of records that survive from Tudor England and shows researchers the context for their creation Reveals how documents highlight the points of contact between all subjects and the crown or its local governing processes. DS key to understanding how documents are used in archival research. Combines practical skills such as palaeography and dating with discussion of how documents relate to Tudor institutions, society. Offers a unique focus on practical research skills, exploration of document types, and explanation of the context and purpose which created the original records.

Assessing Feminist Legal Studies (The Journal) After Two Years of a New Board

Ruth Fletcher, Queen Mary University of London, has published Responding to Submissions and Introducing Issue 23(1), in volume 23 of Feminist Legal Studies (2015). Here is the abstract.

Feminist Legal Studies (FLS) has been working with its new Board for 2 years now and we thought it timely to share some further reflections on developments (Lamble 2014). This editorial itself is an experiment as we consider ways of using FLS spaces to encourage distribution of and engagement with feminist insights. From this issue on, we plan to publish open access editorials to introduce readers to new FLS content and to encourage interaction with the journal. Some editorials will highlight Board practices, decisions or ideas that may be of interest to scholars and practitioners in feminist legal studies. Other editorials will provide an opportunity to discuss some topic or approach in feminist legal studies more generally. In this regard we would like to announce that FLS will host an international and interdisciplinary seminar in London, UK, on 30 June and 1 July 2016 to consider the relationship between feminism, legality and knowledge. We hope that the journal, alongside related projects and publications, will go on to address some of the insights that emerge from that seminar. In the meantime, here we provide an updated account of how the FLS Board responds to submissions of various kinds, and introduce the content of this first issue of 2015.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A New Journal On Law and Literature Debuts

A new law and literature journal begins publication.

ANAMORPHOSIS: Revista Internacional de Direito e Literatura issued volume 1, issue 1 on June 15, 2015.  Check out the journal's website here.

Table of Contents here.

Our friend José Calvo González has published O COMPASSO E O PRUMO: POÉTICA ESPACIAL E METÁFORA LIITERÁRIA EM DIREITO E ARQUITETURA at pp. 37-68 in that issue. Here's the abstract (in Portuguese).

O texto organiza as relações entre Direito e Literatura em duas vertentes: indaga sobre o jurídico no arquitetônico e analisa o arquitetônico no jurídico. Para a primeira delas recupera antecedentes históricos da evolução que conduzirá à atual configuração dos edifícios judiciais, destacando um processo de transformação que vai desde a existência de construções para multiuso (Basilicae romanas, Taverns inglesas, Townhouses estadunidenses e suecas) a uma funcionalidade específica e exclusiva (Courthouses, Palais de Justice). O ponto de inflexão se situa no aumento da importância econômica dos processos, na solenidade do rito processual e no crescente aumento do prestígio profissional do advogado. O texto sublinha também a inovação arquitetônica dos Tribunais apoiada, como suporte, em uma arquitetura do castigo. Os novos edifícios judiciais se repousam sobre antigas prisões. Proporcionam-se sugestivas referências literárias e de história da arte. Examinam-se ainda a disposição e a decoração dos interiores em relação às garantias processuais, ao direito de defesa e à publicidade. A segunda trajetória apresenta as metáforas arquitetônicas utilizadas na filosofia jurídica estatal, na teoria do direito, no direito constitucional e na teoria da argumentação.

Attention, Future Lawyers

The Guardian has published a reader-selected list of the books those aspiring to a legal career should read. Choices include tomes on what the law is (Tom Bingham's The Rule of Law) how to become a lawyer (Nicholas McBride's Letters to a Law Student), critiques of the legal system (Helena Kennedy's Eve Was Framed) and what the law means, viewed through literature's prism (Charles Dickens' Bleak House).

A New Issue of "Law and Humanities" (Hart Publishing) Is Available

Volume 8, issue 2 (2014) of Law and Humanities has been published. The Table of Contents is available here at the publisher's website. The issue includes a number of interesting articles such as Andra le Roux-Kemp's Struggle Music: South African Politics in Song and Maria Mendes' Hamlet's Ordeals.

A Website For New Book Reviews From Rutgers School of Law-Newark and Rutgers School of Criminal Justice

The Rutgers School of Law-Newark and Rutgers School of Criminal Justice regularly review new books in the fields of criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminal justice at the website Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books. You can sign up to be notified when the site publishes new alerts, or just visit often to scan for interesting reviews in your area of interest.

New Issue of Law and Humanities Now Available

The June 2014 issue (volume 8, no. 1) of Law and Humanities is now available. Here is the table of contents.

Gary Watt, Editorial  at iii.

Ronnie Lippens, The Light of High Modern Discipline: Viewing the Birth, Life and Death of the Disciplinary Society in William Hogarth, Joseph wright of Derby and Edward Hopper  at 1-18.

Barbara J. Shapiro, 'Beyond Reasonable Doubt': The Neglected Eighteenth-Century Context  at 19-52.

Paul Raffield, The Trials of Shakespeare: Courtroom Drama and Early Modern English Law, at 53-76

Desmond Manderson, AD 2014: A Review of Eve Darian-Smith: Laws and Societies in Global Contexts--Contemporary Approaches, at 77-87. 

Leslie J. Moran, Visual Law: A Review of Lief Dahlberg, ed.: Visualising Law and Authority: Essays on Legal Aesthetics, at 88-95.

Ian Ward, Impressions of Bagehot: A Review of Frank Prochaska: The Memoirs of Walter Bagehot (Yale University Press, 2013), at 96-103

Gary Watt, Creative Voices--Student Writing in Law and Literature at 104-110

Sean Mulcahy, Can a Literary Approach to Matters of Legal Concern Offer a Fairer Hearing than that Typically Offered by the Law? at 111-135.

Paul Raffield, Student Lawyer-Playwrights and the Theatre of Law, at 136-145.

Asssessing Law and Religion Scholarship Over the Past Quarter Century

Marie A. Failinger, Hamline University School of Law, has published Twenty-Five Years of Law and Religion Scholarship: Some Reflections at 30 Touro Law Review 9 (2014). Here is the abstract.

In this address, the author describes some of the significant movements in law and religion scholarship over the past twenty-five years, including the dialogue between traditional church-state and international human rights scholars and outside scholars, including those writing from within American minority faith traditions.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

How Mystery-Novel Savvy Are You?

Take this Buzzfeed quiz to see your Classic Mystery Novel Lovers quotient. Mine is Rookie Detective (my score was 59 novels of 99, and no, I'm not revealing which novels I've read).

Most of the choices are fairly modern publications, by U.S. and U.K. authors, with some obvious exceptions (Umberto Eco, Stieg Larsson, Dostoyevsky). If you had to make up your own, international, list of classic mystery novels, which ones would be on your list? Edgar Allan Poe's collection Tales of Mystery and Imagination?  (which is on the Buzzfeed list)? Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (which is also on the list)? A Simenon novel? Voltaire's Zadig? A Judge Dee novel by Robert van Gulik? Something by Qiu Xiaolong?

Check out other lists here provided by LibraryThing, including the UK Crime Writers' Association Top 100, H.R.F. Keating's Top 100 picks, and Julian Symons' choices. 

Free Books From the University Press of Kentucky!

Great news from the University Press of Kentucky. It has started up its free book giveaways again. Once a month, the Press offers a special book of interest to readers. This month the title is In Peace and Freedom: My Journey In Selma, by Bernard LaFayette Jr. and Kathryn Lee Johnson.

Check out this link for news from the Press, and sign up here for free ebooks (in EPUB or MOBI formats). Such a wonderful idea, and if you like what you see, you should look over UPK's other offerings--you are certain to find other interesting publications for purchase in political science, history, philosophy, regional studies, and other subjects.

New Books On Law and the Humanities From DeGruyter

New books available from DeGruyter:

Karen-Margrethe Simonsen has edited Law and Justice in Literature, Film and Theatre: Nordic Perspectives (Law & Literature; 5). 

Aims and Scope

This volume is a Nordic contribution to research on law and humanities. It treats the legal culture of the Nordic countries through intensive analyses of canonical Nordic artworks. Law and justice have always been important issues in Nordic literature, film and theater from the Icelandic sagas through Ludvig Holberg and Henrik Ibsen to Lars Noréns theatre and Lars von Trier's Dogme films of today. This book strives to answer two fundamental questions: Is there a special Nordic justice? And what does the legal and literary/aesthetic culture of the North mean for the concept of law and justice and for the understanding of the interdisciplinary exchange of law and humanities? The concept of law and literature as a research area was originally developed in countries of common law. This book investigates law and humanities from a different legal tradition, and contributes thus both to the discussion of the general and the comparative studies of law and humanities.

Table of Contents

Karen-Margrethe Simonsen

Preface 1

Ian Ward

Crossing Borders 5

Ditlev Tamm

Law and Literature in a Nordic Legal Perspective 11

Hans Hauge

Nordic Sameness and Difference 25

Peter Garde

“With Laws Shall Our Land Be Built Up”.

The Law in the Sagas – Ideal and Failure 45

Toomas Kotkas

Two Conceptions of Justice in the Kalevala: A Nietzschean Reading 63

Arild Linneberg

From Natural Law To The Nature Of Laws: Ludvig Holberg 77

Karen-Margrethe Simonsen

The Confession of a Judge.

On Narrative Desire and Law in Steen Steensen Blicher’s Early Crime Story

“the Pastor of Vejlbye” 85

Bjarne Markussen

Contesting Narratives: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Trygve Allister

Diesen’s Hold My Heart 103

Ari Hirvonen

The Subject of the Law 119

Helle Porsdam

From ‘Law and Literature’ to ‘Law and Humanities’: Transatlantic Dialogues

on Film – the Case of Lars von Trier 149

vi Contents

List of contributors 167

Daniela Carpi and Jeanne Gaakeer have edited Liminal Discourses: Subliminal Tensions in Law and Literature (Law & Literature; 6).

Aims and Scope

The past few decades in legal and literary studies have challenged the boundaries raised by the different concepts of law and literature espoused by a great variety of theorists. Law's traditionally assumed disciplinary autonomy has been challenged by those who have pursued interdisciplinary methods of research. In particular, the concept of the sublime has moved out of the strictly philosophical and literary fields and crossed the borders between disciplines, finding an application also in the juridical field. On one hand, this volume proposes that the ethical aspect involved in the legal sublime is to contain the arrogance of the law. On the other hand, the volume draws attention to the "and" of interdisciplinary literary-legal studies and offers new daring comparisons between philosophical fields and between apparently distant historical periods.

Table of Contents

Daniela Carpi

Introduction 1: The Sublime of Law fi 1

Jeanne Gaakeer

Introduction 2: On the Threshold and Beyond:

An Introductory Observation fi 15

Cristina Costantini

Representing Law: Narrative Practices, Poetic Devices, Visual Signs and the

Aesthetics of the Common Law Mind fi 27

Maria Aristodemou

Bare Law Between Two Lives: José Saramago and Cornelia Vismann on Naming,

Filing and Cancelling fi 37

Melanie Williams

Liminal Tensions in Public to Private Conceptions of Justice: Nussbaum, Woolf

and the Struggle for Identity fi 53

Julián Jiménez Heffernan

“Under the Force of the Law”: Communal Imagination and the Constitutional

Sublime in Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor fi 73

Jeanne Clegg

Moll Flanders,Ordinary’s Accounts and Old Bailey Proceedings fi 95

Sidia Fiorato

Ariel and Caliban as Law-conscious Servants Longing for Legal

Personhood fi 113

Laura Apostoli

Altered Bodies, Fragmented Selves: Reconstructing the Subject in Fay Weldon’s

The Cloning of Joanna May fi 129

Jeanne Gaakeer

The Business of Law and Literature: to Compose an Order, to Imagine

Man fi 149

Daniela Carpi

Renaissance into Postmodernism: Anticipations of Legal Unrest fi 177

Busman's Holiday

Mary Whisner, University of Washington School of Law, has published Bitten by the Reading Bug, at 105 Law Library Journal 113. Here is the abstract.

I read a lot in my spare time; sometimes my reading includes books about law. This essay discusses a number of recent books and explores how such reading can be helpful for a reference librarian. I begin with James E. Clapp et al., Lawtalk (2011), a wide-ranging book that uses colorful legal terms as springboards for discussions of legal history or policy. And then I have briefer discussions of books related to some of the topics in Lawtalk:

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010)

Alexandra Natapoff, Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice (2009)

David E. Stannard, Honor Killing: How the Infamous "Massie Affair" Transformed Hawai'i (2005)

Three memoirs about death penalty work:

• Andrea D. Lyon, Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer (2010)

• David R. Dow, Autobiography of an Execution (2010)

• Ian Graham, Unbillable Hours (2010)

Mark Prothero, Defending Gary (2006)

Death Penalty Stories (John H. Blume & Jordan M. Streiker eds., 2009) and Legal Ethics Stories (Deborah L. Rhode & David Luban eds., 2006)

Shon Hopwood, Law Man

Download the full text of the article from SSRN at the link.

Indigenous Sovereignty: A Literature Review

Jennifer L. Archer, Archer Law Corporation, has published Sovereignty as a Social Construct: A Literature Review of Indigenous Peoples’ Perspectives.

The concept of sovereignty is both culturally and historically dependent. Sovereignty evolved within the Western legal tradition as a tool to legitimize imperial conquest over Indigenous peoples, territories and resources. Indigenous peoples, as non-state actors in the international community of sovereigns, have found themselves defined by this narrow and often-violent conception of power, which, at its heart, is contrary to Indigenous peoples’ values and epistemology. This has made it difficult for Indigenous peoples to engage or assert Western sovereignty without also experiencing a form of cultural and epistemological assimilation. An understanding and respect for the values that form the basis of Indigenous sovereignty can ultimately allow for the possibility of genuine social and legal reconciliation within the international legal system.

This literature review allows current narratives regarding Indigenous sovereignty to provide an emerging counterpoint to the dominant legal discourse in order to demonstrate that sovereignty is ultimately a man-made construct. Once we acknowledge sovereignty as a social construct, we can undertake to (re)construct new laws in a manner that no longer legitimizes the domination of imperialist values over Indigenous values.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.