Ruipérez on Monuments As Signals: The Political Effect of Confederate Commemorations

Ana Ruipérez, European University Institute, has published Monuments As Signals: The Political Effect of Confederate Commemorations. Here is the abstract.

What information do observers infer from contested symbolic heritage and how does that information change their political attitudes? Using a survey experiment, I explore the case of Confederate commemorations. After visualizing a video of the same town with and without Confederate commemorations, subjects report their beliefs and attitudes about the locality and its citizens. I find that Confederate commemorations signal a conflictive history, Southern pride and secessionist and Republican leanings. Importantly, they signal less support for Black Lives Matter and less care about racial equality. Respondents exposed to Confederate commemorations report more negative emotions and external political efficacy, trust the citizens in the town less, and think they would be less valued in the community with such symbols. They are less willing to make donations to schools in the town and, overall, find it a worse place to live. I find greater effects for Democrats and Black respondents.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

CFP: Handbook of Heritage Law and Discourse

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR AN EDITED VOLUME

Handbook of Heritage Law and Discourse 

A Triadic Dimension: Protection, Regulation and Identity 

Editors: Le Cheng and Anne Wagner

The past four decades has witnessed the remarkable extension of enthusiasm in cultural heritage or property from the perspective of international laws, or international legal framework as the multilevel legal instruments for safeguarding, protection and maintenance of cultural heritage, property, or rights. In our project, the identification of “Heritage” employs specific discourses, codes, transcending values, and images that conceal assumption about members of a people comprising a people within a nation. Heritage narrates constructions of belongings that become tethered to negotiations for power and resistance over time and throughout a people’s history leading to powerful discursive narratives. While such likeness may be preserved, conserved or even perpetuated, the idea of “Heritage” may be socially, politically, culturally, and historically contested to reveal competing pasts, presents, and futures, esp. with innovation in arts leading to new social norms and identities.

Besides, the visual decoding of heritage is evocative and ideologically representative with meanings that prescribe a story of Protection, Regulation and Identity, since these meanings are subject to multiple interpretations and reinterpretations related to Rights, among the integrity of heritage right and human rights, and the integrated framework of right in rem and right in personae. Yet, through semiotic accumulation, evolution and confrontation, there may be different interdisciplinary paths leading to different truths, to tensions (contestation and/or negotiation), and applications of significance. We should then investigate these transmitted values, discourses over time and space. 

We should therefore investigate these transmitted values under various perspectives (amongst others but not limited):

- How to transmit Heritage and which values are being transmitted?

- How are the narratives created?

- Is there a social stratification in transmitting, preserving and conserving Heritage?

- What are the cognitive and symbolic aspects of Heritage through different temporal parameters? Is there a shift in cultural and/or collective meaning from one space to another? 

- What are the sources?

- What is the relationship between law and “heritage” (tangible or intangible elements) in visual representations?

- What is the shared collective and/or cultural memory beyond this visual representation?

- How Heritage is connected to the preservation and conservation of a people’s memory?

- How Heritage is interpreted within legal settings or international legal framework from temporality and spatiality?

- What are the interactions between cultural heritage and human rights within the diversity and tolerance within socio-legal contexts?

Considering the complexity and diversity in the building of a common memory or discourse community through tangible and intangible cultural heritage, we would suggest our contributors interrogate the complex sign system of a particular country or region and their meanings attentive to a complex configuration of historical, social and cultural conditions that shift over time and space.

Keywords: Heritage, Sign System, Law, Discourse Narratives, Conservation, Preservation.

Editors: Le Cheng & Anne Wagner 

Please send abstracts to both Anne Wagner (valwagnerfr@yahoo.com) and Le Cheng (chengle163@hotmail.com) by 28 Feburary 2019 at the latest.

Owley and Phelps on Understanding the Complicated Landscape of Civil War Monuments @JessicaOwley

Jessica Owley, University at Buffalo Law School, and Jess R. Phelps, Dinse, Knapp, & McAndrew, have published Understanding the Complicated Landscape of Civil War Monuments at 93 Indiana Law Journal Supp. 15 (2018). Here is the abstract.

This essay examines the controversy regarding confederate monuments and attempts to contextualize this debate within the current preservation framework. While much attention has been paid to this topic over the past year, particularly with regard to “public” monuments, such discussion has generally failed to recognize the varied and complicated property law layers involved—which can fundamentally change the legal requirements for modification or removal. We propose a spectrum or framework for assessing these resources ranging from public to private, and we explore the messy space in-between these poles where most monuments actually fall. By highlighting these categories, we provide an initial introduction of a typology for evaluating confederate monuments, serving as a foundation for an exploration into the nature of property law and monument protection.

Download the Essay from SSRN at the link.

Religious Symbols and Constitutional Meaning

Frederick Mark Gedicks, Brigham Young University Law School, and Pasquale Annicchino, European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS), have published Cross, Crucifix, Culture: An Approach to the Constitutional Meaning of Religious Symbols. Here is the abstract.

In the United States and Europe the constitutionality of government displays of confessional symbols depends on whether the symbols also have nonconfessional secular meaning or whether, at least, the confessional meaning is somehow absent. Yet both the United States Supreme Court (USSCt) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) lack a workable approach to determining whether secular meaning is present or confessional meaning absent.
The problem is that the government can nearly always articulate a possible secular meaning for the confessional symbols that it uses, or argue that the confessional meaning is passive and ineffective. What matters, however, is not the possibility that secular meaning is present or confessional meaning absent, but whether whether this presence or absence is historically and culturally authentic. Courts largely ignore this, routinely appealing to history and culture to justify government use of confessional symbols without undertaking a serious investigation of either history or culture.
Drawing on the work of C.S. Peirce, we propose that courts ask three successive questions in religious symbol cases: (1) Is the ordinary meaning of the symbol confessional or otherwise religious? (2) Does the immediate context in which the symbol is displayed suggest a possible historical, cultural, or other secular meaning? (3) Is this alternate secular meaning authentically present and genuinely recognized in the history and culture of the place where the symbol is displayed?
We illustrate this approach with Salazar v. Buono, in which the USSCt upheld government display of a Christian cross, and Lautsi & Others v. Italy, in which the ECtHR deferred to Italian court decisions upholding government display of a Catholic crucifix. While the USSCt in Buono and the Italian courts in Lautsi imagine conceivable nonconfessional meanings for the confessional symbol at issue, neither meaning can be found in American or Italian history or culture. In Lautsi, thjerefore, the ECtHR ends up deferring to a nonexistent Italian “tradition.”
Judical denial of obvious confessional meaning and invention of substitute secular meanings for confessional symbols betrays a cultural schizophrenia: Majoritarian religions rail against the secularization of culture and its subversion of belief, yet they insist that their confessional symbols remain at home in this culture. But confessional symbols no longer fit in mainstream culture as confessional — hence their redefinition as secular, even and especially by the majoritarian religions that use them. Ironically, judicial secularization of these symbols to validate their use by government is likely to accelerate and entrench the very secularization that such religions deplore.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. Via Legal Theory Blog.

The Building of the Peace Palace

Randall Lesaffer, Tilburg Law Faculty; KU Leuven Faculty of Law; Tilburg University, International Victimology Institute Tilburg (INTERVICT), has published The Temple of Peace. The Hague Peace Conferences, Andrew Carnegie and the Building of the Peace Palace (1898-1913) at 140 Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Nederlandse Vereniging voor Internationaal Recht, Preadviezen 1 (2013).

The 19th-century international peace movement sprang from the reaction against the devastation and horror the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812 had wrought. It had its roots in Anglo-American nonconformist protestant circles, but quickly spread over the globe and became more pluralist and then secular. All through the century and beyond, British and American peace activists dominated the movement and set its agenda. During the later quarter of the century, the peace movement gained more political influence thanks to its alliance with the emerging discipline of international law. This was, again, particularly true for Britain, and most of all, the United States. Two major points stood out on the agenda of the ‘peace through law’ movement: disarmament and arbitration.
Whereas the movement could attain very little to nothing in relation to disarmament in the years before the Great War, the movement found allies in political circles to foster the cause of arbitration. In the United States, Britain and the Latin-American Republics, arbitration moved up the agenda of foreign policy makers and diplomats after the successful Alabama Award in 1872. The Alabama Case had shown arbitration to be an appropriate instrument to manage tactical disputes among States which wanted to avoid strategic clashes.

In 1899, the cause of ‘peace through law’ scored an unexpected success. The Hague Conference, which first had been called by the Russian government for reasons of high power politics, had – to a large extent thanks to the endeavours of the Russian international lawyer Fyodor Martens – been highjacked for the ‘peace through law’ agenda when these reasons dissipated. One of the main outcomes was the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. In 1903, the American industrialist turned philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie, made a lavish gift to build a ‘Temple of Peace’ for the Court at The Hague. It can be said, with the benefit of hindsight, that this set the destiny of The Hague as legal capital of the world in stone.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Yale Law Schools Professors Win Order of the Coif Award For Their Work, "Representing Justice"

Yale Law School professors Judith Resnik and Denny Curtis have won the Order of the Coif Book Award for their magnum opus, Representing Justice.  This award is given only once every two years.  The list of previous winners includes such classics as John Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law; Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law; John Hart Ely, Democracy and Distrust; Guido Calabresi, A Common Law for the Age of Statutes; and Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire, to name only a few.

Previously this book won the award from the Association of American Publishers for the outstanding book of the year in the entire social sciences, as well as the Scribes Book Award, and the New York Times wrote a large article about it when it was published.  It is a special book for the Yale Law Library, since it was the third book published in the Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference (Yale University Press) and the library provided an enormous amount of help to Judith and Denny.  In particular, Camilla Tubbs, Mike Widener, and Jason Eiseman all contributed greatly.

Here is a link to the Yale Law School website posting on the award:

http://www.law.yale.edu/news/17621.htm

Thanks for Fred Shapiro for this information.

Here's a link to the Representing Justice website at the Yale Law School Law Library.

Public Constitutionalism In the Ante-Bellum Cemetery

Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Law School, has published 'These Great and Beautiful Republics of the Dead': Public Constitutionalism and the Antebellum Cemetery as UNC Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2304305. Here is the abstract.

“Public Constitutionalism and the Antebellum Cemetery” joins the growing literature on public constitutionalism by focusing on the seventy addresses given at cemetery dedications from Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story’s address at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1831, through the addresses of Edward Everett and Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg in November 1863. The addresses were part of a vibrant public discussion of constitutional principles, which spanned such diverse occasions as July Fourth celebrations, arguments in great constitutional cases (like Daniel Webster’s Dartmouth College argument), dedication of public monuments (like Daniel Webster’s speech at the placement of the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument in 1824), lyceum addresses, and college literary society lectures. For Americans, especially those of the Whig Party, the Constitution was a key component of culture and a key unifier of the nation.
Rural cemeteries provided support for such constitutional values. They brought beauty and order to the landscape; they served to mediate an impersonal, commercial world and brought uplift through the lessons of morality and patriotism that people learned when they visited the cemeteries. The cemetery supported constitutional values of Union, respect for property, and obedience to the rule of law. For visitors to the cemetery learned about the importance of each of those values at the cemetery. It was an instructor of values; its ordered lanes and graves also served as a sign of the health of the Christian republic. For the cemetery fulfilled duties owed the past. The cemetery inspired sentiments of love of family and country. People would leave the cemetery inspired to preserve the United States as a Christian republic. Finally, these abstract ideas were promoted through private charitable corporations. Those private organizations brought the community together to promote the republic.
The cemeteries were, thus, one important institution – along with the schools, churches, civic associations, and businesses – that helped create and preserve the Union. The cemetery dedication addresses, like other addresses designed to promulgate constitutional ideas, mixed appeals to economics, morality, religion, and political theory with legal and constitutional ideas. Rural cemeteries promoted Whig constitutional ideals about order, patriotism, and Union. Those values were at the center of the debate over the response to secession and they were put into practice by soldiers along Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg in 1863. Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg, thus, reflects the appeals to sentiment and Constitution that were so frequently invoked in the thirty years before the War.
This article reveals an important and neglected role of oratory in disseminating constitutional ideas, as well as the significance of rural cemeteries to public constitutional thought. This hidden history reveals how those ideas mobilized support for Union and, thus, how public constitutional thought affects the actions of voters, jurists, and politicians. 

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Law, Culture, and Housing Law and Policy

Lisa T. Alexander, University of Wisconsin Law School, has published Hip-Hop and Housing: Revisiting Culture, Urban Space, Power, and Law, at 63 Hastings Law Journal 803 (2012).

U.S. housing law is finally receiving its due attention. Scholars and practitioners are focused primarily on the subprime mortgage and foreclosure crises. Yet the current recession has also resurrected the debate about the efficacy of place-based lawmaking. Place-based laws direct economic resources to low-income neighborhoods to help existing residents remain in place and to improve those areas. Law-and-economists and staunch integrationists attack place-based lawmaking on economic and social grounds. This Article examines the efficacy of place-based lawmaking through the underutilized prism of culture. Using a sociolegal approach, it develops a theory of cultural collective efficacy as a justification for place-based lawmaking. Cultural collective efficacy describes positive social networks that inner-city residents develop through participation in musical, artistic, and other neighborhood-based cultural endeavors. This Article analyzes two examples of cultural collective efficacy: the early development of hip-hop in the Bronx and community murals developed by Mexican immigrants in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. These examples show that cultural collective efficacy can help inner-city residents mitigate the negative effects of living in a poor and segregated community and obtain more concrete benefits from urban revitalization in their communities. Cultural collective efficacy also provides a framework to examine important microdynamics in the inner-city that scholars and policymakers have ignored. Lastly, this Article devises new combinations of place-based laws that might protect cultural collective efficacy, such as: (1) historic districts with affordable housing protections secured through transferable development rights, (2) foreclosure prevention strategies, (3) techniques to mitigate eminent domain abuse, and (4) reinterpretations of the Fair Housing Act's "affirmatively furthering" fair housing mandate. These examples of place-based lawmaking may more effectively promote equitable development and advance distributive justice in U.S. housing law and policy.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Conference on the Iconography of Justice

The Warburg Institute is sponsoring a conference on the Iconography of Justice on May 7, 2012. Speakers include Dennis Curtis, Dame Hazel Genn, Martin Loughlin, Judith Resnik, Peter Mack, and Avrom Sherr. More here from the Institute's website.

[Information provided by Melissa Murray, Professor of Law, UC, Berkeley]

The Development of National Identities

Hannibal Travis, Florida International University College of Law, has published On the Existence of National Identity Before ‘Imagined Communities’: The Example of the Assyrians of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Persia. Here is the abstract.

Studies on nationalism and the emergence of modern ethnic identities rarely examine sources dating from the period 0 CE (A.D.) and 1453 CE, or the period between the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the mid-first millennium CE and the Age of Discovery in the mid-second millennium CE. Testing generally accepted theories of national and ethnic distinctiveness against these sources reveals that a similar case exists for the existence of an Assyrian identity and/or nation as for a Greek, Kurdish, Jewish, or Persian identity or nation. Assyrian populations, religions, and political formations survived in present-day Iraq, Iran, and Turkey from 0 CE well into the 1800s CE.



Commentators on modern nationalism in relation to Assyrian identity have assumed, with little evidence, that the non-Arab, non-Jewish peoples of the East lacked the agency or the intellect to maintain a consistent identity, and that these peoples relied in their ignorance and indolence concerning their own identities on the theories of Western missionaries and colonial officials. After a long tradition of historical and cultural work assumed nations and peoples as subjects of analysis without critically examining the linguistic, cultural, or religious foundation of these groups of individuals or families, a new generation of scholars emerged who questioned this approach by positing that nations and peoples emerged in conjunction with modern capitalistic cultural forms and secular nationalistic liberalism. This theory, however, has the risk of degenerating into a vulgar instrumentalism, which assumes that identity entrepreneurs can manufacture ethnic, racial, or religious identity for their own purposes and little objective foundation. Thus, more recent studies point out the flaws in grounding national and ethnic distinctions in modern nationalism by compiling evidence that nations and peoples perceived themselves and were perceived by other collectivities as such long before the rise of European humanism or the Enlightenment.



This study attempts to show that the longevity and diversity of national and ethnic distinctions undermines a one-size-fits-all explanation such distinctions in the manner of Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities.” The evidence from the Assyrian case suggests that the undifferentiated hordes of Asia did not coalesce and order themselves in modern times and under Western influence into nations created and sustained by advanced technology. This “Imagines Communities” narrative suffers from hindsight bias and an exaggerated Eurocentrism. It also insults and infantilizes the peoples and nations of premodern eras and non-Western regions by assuming they lacked the intelligence with which modern Europeans constructed national cultures, laws, literatures, schools, and economies. Historians have long since disproved such ideas.



By examining translations of and academic commentary on Aramaic, Greek, Roman, and Persian literature and inscriptions, among other sources, this Essay demonstrates that the British Empire invented neither the modern Assyrians as a people, nor the territory of modern Assyria that was considered for statehood by the League of Nations after World War I. Rather, the identification of present-day northern Iraq, northwestern Persia, and southeastern Turkey as “Assyria” draws support from the Middle Assyrian and Neo-Assyrian usage of the second and third millennia BCE, and the Greek, Roman, Persian, and Aramaic usage in the first millennium CE. Finally, the contribution of ancient Assyria to the cultures, languages, and religions of the non-Muslim populations of contemporary Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, especially Assyrian Christians, Mandaeans, and Yezidis, may no longer be doubted. This contribution is present in these peoples' daily vocabularies, place-names, and indigenous beliefs.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Law in the Wilderness

Shaun Fluker, University of Calgary Faculty of Law, has published "Wilderness Narrative in Law: The View from Canada’s National Parks." Here is the abstract.

In this conference paper presented at the 2009 Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment held in Victoria, BC, I briefly examine the relationship between law and the concept of wilderness. I hope to demonstrate this relationship in two ways. First, that law provides us with a source of wilderness narrative. Although much less prosaic than other forms of literature, legal decisions tell stories about what wilderness is. Second, that ideas of wilderness can influence the enactment and application of legal rules.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

The Masons (Collectively, Not Perry)

And on the Freemasons, suddenly hip, with the publication of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol.

Law and Cultural Heritage

From the Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation (LCCHP):
Three Important Announcements

LCCHP 2009 Student Writing Competition in Cultural Heritage Preservation Law
Database of Internship/Externship/Job Opportunities in Cultural Heritage Law
Students & New Professionals Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation being formed

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Student Writing Competition in Cultural Heritage Preservation Law

The Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation announces the 2009 LCCHP Annual Student Writing Competition in Cultural Heritage Preservation Law. Due to the generosity of our competition sponsor - the law firm Andrews Kurth LLP - the awards for the 2009 competition are $1000 for first place and $500 for second place. The deadline for submissions is June 12, 2009, but papers may be submitted at any time before that date. We encourage those of you teaching seminars or with other student papers this semester to ask your students to submit papers now. Only current law students are eligible to enter the competition. Instructions for submission of papers and of faculty supporting nominations may be found at:

www.culturalheritagelaw.org/education/competition2009

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Database of Internship / Externship / Job Opportunities in Cultural Heritage Law

LCCHP is pleased to announce that its database of internship and externship opportunities in cultural heritage law is now available on our website at:

www.culturalheritagelaw.org/members-only

We know that this listing will be in great demand by law students and other students studying cultural heritage. If you know of any opportunities in this field that you think should be listed, we invite you to send us a short description with a web link. Please forward this request to government agencies and nonprofit organizations that may be interested in posting an announcement, and feel free to post this message to other relevant listserves and blogs. The listing is available only to LCCHP members, but we offer an attractive student rate.


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Students & New Professionals Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation is being formed

LCCHP is creating a special Student and New Professional Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation. This Committee will give students and recent graduates an opportunity to network and share information, while they also participate in several LCCHP activities, such as overseeing our soon-to-be launched blog in cultural heritage law and planning cultural heritage related events on their school campuses. You may want to bring this group to the attention of your students. For more information, contact Board Member Donald Craib at:

http://www.culturalheritagelaw.org/members-only


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About LCCHP

The Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation is an organization of lawyers, professors, law students, and like-minded friends who have joined together to promote the preservation and protection of cultural heritage resources in the United States and internationally through education and advocacy. Cultural heritage law is a growing legal field, as our society comes to appreciate the important symbolic, historical, and emotional role that cultural heritage plays in our lives. Cultural heritage law encompasses several disparate areas, including the protection of archaeological sites, preservation of historic structures and the built environment, preservation of and respect for both tangible and intangible indigenous cultures, international market in art works and antiquities, and recovery of stolen art works.


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Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation (LCCHP)
428 Hume Ave, 2nd floor, Alexandria, VA 22301
tel: 703-549-1110 | fax: 703-995-4890
web: www.culturalheritagelaw.org | email: info@culturalheritagelaw.org