Law and Cartoons: A Thematic Issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Volume 28 (December 2015) of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law has been published. The theme is Cartoons and Law. Here's a link to the publisher's website for this issue.

1. Law and Cartoons: La Sémiotique de Production et de Diffusion en Droit comme Stratégie de Communication

   Anne Wagner Pages 715-717

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2. 
   

   Intersemiotic Complementarity in Legal Cartoons: An Ideational Multimodal Analysis

   Terry D. Royce Pages 719-744

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3. 
   

   “The Call to do Justice”: Superheroes, Sovereigns and the State During Wartime

   Jason Bainbridge Pages 745-763

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4. 
   

   Natural Law and Vengeance: Jurisprudence on the Streets of Gotham

   Thomas Giddens Pages 765-785

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5. 
   

   We’re All Infected: Legal Personhood, Bare Life and The Walking Dead

   Mitchell Travis Pages 787-800

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6. 
   

   On the Cultural Meaning of The New Yorker ‘Lawyer Cartoon:’ An Experiment in Ethnography of Communication

   Alexander V. Kozin Pages 801-823

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7. 
   

   Code, Nintendo’s Super Mario and Digital Legality

   Ashley Pearson, Kieran Tranter Pages 825-842

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8. 
   

   The Jurisprudence of Ratatouille: The Rat in the Machine, or, the Equivocal Taste of Égaliberté

   Luis Gómez Romero Pages 843-866

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9. Book Review

   Roshan de Silva Wijeyeratne: Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka

   Fabio Rambelli Pages 867-869

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10. Book Review

    Guillermo Cabanellas: The Legal Environment of Translation

    Karen McAuliffe Pages 871-873

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11. Book Review

    Joanna Kopaczyk: The Legal Language of Scottish Burghs: Standardization and Lexical Bundles 1380-1560, 2013

    Hector MacQueen Pages 875-878

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12. Book Review

    Eros Roberto Grau: Pourquoi j’ai peur des juges. L’interprétation du droit et les principes juridiques

    Jérémy Mercier Pages 879-885

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13. Book Review

    Recension de Benisty (Samuel), La norme sociale de conduite saisie par le droit

    Antoine Basset Pages 887-890

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14. Announcement

    Recent Publications Issue 28-4

    Janny H. C. Leung Pages 891-892

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Why the Road Runner Always Said "Beep-Beep" and the Coyote Always Shopped at Acme

Poor Coyote. He never had a chance. The Hollywood Reporter explains why here. (Coyote really needed a good lawyer--maybe Harvey Birdman).

ABA Journal Cartoon Caption Contest Open

The ABA Journal is running its September cartoon captioning contest. Submit your caption by September 14, 2014 and receive the title of Champion (for a month at least). See last month's winner here.

Call For Papers: International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

From Anne Wagner, Editor in Chief, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

CALL FOR PAPERS

THEMATIC ISSUE

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW

Visualizing Law in Comics and Cartoons

OFFICIAL WORKING LANGUAGES : ENGLISH AND FRENCH

Deadline to submit papers: 31 AUGUST 2014

Papers should not exceed 10,000 words (references included)
Instructions for authors are available at: http://www.springer.com/law/journal/11196

Only papers submitted online will be evaluated:

Submit online at https://www.editorialmanager.com/sela/

Papers submitted to the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law should evaluate how legal meanings are produced, distributed and construed. Legal culture is being transmitted through another medium of analysis.

The International Journal for the Semiotics of Law welcomes innovative papers in French or in English to document the diverse historical, cultural and communicative links that bind together Law and Comics/Cartoons under a comprehensive research analysis on legal visual semiotics.

Thomas Nast's Cartoons

Renee Lettow Lerner, George Washington University Law School, has published Thomas Nast's Crusading Legal Cartoons, at 2011 Green Bag Almanac 59-78 (2011). Here is the abstract.

The cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902) was in his heyday a political institution, with each of his pictures helping to form public opinion. His influence reached its height in the late 1860s and early 1870s with his relentless caricatures of Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall Ring in New York City. One part of Nast’s work not often highlighted but as brilliant as the rest is his legal cartoons. Nast’s best work was done with high moral zeal, and his satire of lawyers and the legal system was no exception. His attacks grew out of frustration with the ineffectiveness of legal remedies against the Ring. He was especially incensed that prominent lawyers such as David Dudley Field not only were willing to represent members of the Ring, but could cleverly exploit legal technicalities of their own making to win advantage. Nast excoriated the corruption and bribery of the bench by the Ring, and also, more generally, the adversarial system as it was developing in America.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Funny Politicians

From the Dirksen Congressional Center: Serious Consequences of Congress as a Target For Humorists.

Graphically Stated

More on cartoon and comic law today, this time via Findlaw. Bob Kohn of RoyaltyShare was allowed to file an amicus brief in the Justice Department's antitrust ebooks pricing case against Apple and other defendants. But the judge told Mr. Kohn to keep his brief short (no pun intended)--to five pages, in fact. So Mr. Kohn went with an extremely graphic style, He reduced his argument to cartoons. The case settled a day after he filed his brief. Oh, well. Perhaps not an approach that would work for every argument, but, in this case, points for style. Graphic style. 

Charles Addams

The Google Doodle today, January 7, 2012, honors "graveyard guru" Charles Addams, father of the Addams family, who came into living rooms first through print in the New Yorker and then via television--John Astin as Gomez Addams, Carolyn Jones as Morticia, Jackie Coogan as Uncle Fester (Frump), and Ted Cassidy as Lurch, the butler. The wonderfully scary but ultimately well-intentioned family lives off some kind of stash--a lucky thing, because Gomez, who is after all an attorney, doesn't seem to have any clients. In the 1990s, Raul Julia and Angelica Huston starred in a couple of Addams Family films. More here from PC Magazine and here from the Washington Post. Check out Morticia's Morgue here.