Rizzo: Towards a Dramaturgical Theory of Constitutional Interpretation @JessicaRizzo19 @SULawRev

Jessica Rizzo, University of Pennsylvania Law School, is publishing Towards a Dramaturgical Theory of Constitutional Interpretation in volume 45 of the Seattle University Law Review (2023). Here is the abstract.

Like legal texts, dramatic texts have a public function and public responsibilities not shared by texts written to be appreciated in solitude. For this reason, the interpretation of dramatic texts offers a variety of useful templates for the interpretation of legal texts. In this Article, I elaborate on Jack Balkin and Sanford Levinson’s neglected account of law as performance. I begin with Balkin and Levinson’s observation that both legal and dramatic interpreters are charged with persuading audiences that their readings of texts are “authoritative,” analyzing the relationship between legal or theatrical authority and tradition. I then offer my own theory of constitutional interpretation organized around realizing the potential of the text. I test this theory against provisions of the U.S. Constitution written at varying levels of abstraction, using dramaturgical analogies to identify an appropriate interpretive framework for each type of provision. In doing so, I discover parts of the Constitution where merely applying the text “as written” in an originalist sense would be impossible. I argue that a dramaturgical approach to constitutional interpretation has advantages over previously proposed literary criticism-inflected approaches because dramaturgy answers to the demands of the present where these other approaches mainly look backward.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: Ian Ward, The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) @EdinburghUP @UniofNewcastle

ICYMI: Ian Ward, Newcastle University, has published The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

The first book to investigate the place of law in modern and contemporary drama Illustrates the role of contemporary theatre in articulating legal and political issues to a modern audience Analyses a range of different genres in contemporary drama, including historical, poetic, realist, documentary and ‘in-yer-face’ Each chapter focuses on a particular area of law alongside the work of a particular contemporary playwright Shows how modern playwrights engage with issues such as pornography, murder, terrorism, the function of Parliament, and the role of the monarchy Theatre, according to the prominent British playwright David Hare, is our most effective ‘court of justice’. This book assesses the credibility of this arresting claim in the immediate context of contemporary British theatre by investigating the place and purpose of law in a range of modern dramatic settings and writings. Each chapter focuses on a particular area of law and the work of a particular contemporary playwright, and in doing so illustrates the important role of contemporary theatre in articulating legal and political issues to a modern audience. Exploring a range of different genres in contemporary drama, including the historical, the poetic, realist, documentary and ‘in-yer-face’, this volume explores the capacity of modern playwrights to engage with issues such as pornography, murder, the contemporary experience of terrorism, the function of Parliament and the role of the monarchy.

Twenty Minutes with the Devil at The Street, Canberra, June 17-25, 2022 @luisenantipoda

From Thom Giddens, University of Dundee, via the Law and CUlture mailing list, on behalf of Desmond Manderson:

Yes, after no less than three lockdown delays over the past two years, Twenty Minutes with the Devil is finally on. Fri 17 – Sat 25 June, at The Street, Canberra’s home of professional theatre.  Book now if you haven’t already done so – and pass the word on to your students, your colleagues, and your friends!

 

Des

 

 

Twenty Minutes with the Devil is a black comedy, a high-octane thriller, and non-stop entertainment. It is based on real life events surrounding the capture of Mexico’s most notorious narco in 2016. But beneath the headlines, the play probes deeper questions. It brings together the life work of its two authors, well-known legal scholars and teachers Luis Gómez Romero and Desmond Manderson. What does law and justice matter when they seem so very far apart?

 

Two lowly cops and a narco think they have all the answers. Angela believes that if you follow the law, justice will look after itself. Romulo knows better, but the hide of a cynic often conceals a revolutionary heart. El Ticho doesn’t care about justice but he treats the law as a plaything he can twist to his own advantage. Now they’re trapped in a love hotel in the middle of the desert. The army and the cartels are descending and no one knows who will live to tell the tale. The pressure of the ticking clock and the impending storm of violence forces all three to confront what they think matters in the world and what they are prepared to do – to survive.

 

The play is set against the terrible drug wars which have led to the brutal deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Mexico alone, and destroyed its legal system, its police, its society. But drugs are just a symptom. All over the world, the gap between law and justice seems to yawn wider than ever.

 

Rómulo: Drug’s just the excuse, man, ‘coz the real drug is money. I never met anyone who had enough of it – and millions’d kill for it in a heartbeat. Money buys you violence — violence gets you money. It don’t come cheap. It costs. Know what? Reckon it’ll cost more and more and more and to hell with the rest of us.

 

Climate change, inequality, politics failing and governments giving up. These emergencies effect all of us. Mostly, we look the other way and try to get on with their lives. But our three characters do not have that luxury. It’s now or never. They are in lockdown. And as we all know, there’s nothing like a lockdown to concentrate the mind. Is justice part of the solution? Is law part of the problem? These are urgent questions, and time is running out.

 

El Ticho: Any minute, my men are going to come storming through that door. They’re not going to knock – room service. You think you can stop them? You and that flightless hairy-winged angel of the lord?

 

 

Forthcoming: Julie Stone Peters, Law As Performance (Oxford University Press, 2022) @OxUniPress

Forthcoming: Julie Stone Peters, Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2022). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Tirades against legal theatrics are nearly as old as law itself, and yet so is the age-old claim that law must not merely be done: it must be "seen to be done." Law as Performance traces the history of legal performance and spectatorship through the early modern period. Viewing law as the product not merely of edicts or doctrines but of expressive action, it investigates the performances that literally created law: in civic arenas, courtrooms, judges' chambers, marketplaces, scaffolds, and streets. It examines the legal codes, learned treatises, trial reports, lawyers' manuals, execution narratives, rhetoric books, images (and more) that confronted these performances, praising their virtues or denouncing their evils. In so doing, it recovers a long, rich, and largely overlooked tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a performance practice. This tradition not only generated an elaborate poetics and politics of legal performance. It provided western jurisprudence with a set of constitutive norms that, in working to distinguish law from theatrics, defined the very nature of law. In the crucial opposition between law and theatre, law stood for cool deliberation, by-the-book rules, and sovereign discipline. Theatre stood for deceptive artifice, entertainment, histrionics, melodrama. And yet legal performance, even at its most theatrical, also appeared fundamental to law's realization: a central mechanism for shaping legal subjects, key to persuasion, essential to deterrence, indispensable to law's power, —as it still does today.

Hamilton on The Contractual and Tax Implications of The Phantom of the Opera

Charles Edward Andrew Hamilton, IV, University of Groningen Faculty of Law, has published The Contractual and Tax Implications of The Phantom of the Opera at The Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law Blog.

The substantive story of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fantôme de l’Opéra) is largely about contract analysis and whether the managers and “the phantom” have had a “meeting of the minds”—consensus ad idem. The question is whether the Phantom and the Managers reached a “meeting of the minds” or manifested mutual assent in their contractual remedies. In short, the plot surrounds new managerial team—Armand Moncharmin and Firmin Richard—at the Palais Garnier have refused to abide by the former managerial team’s contract with the Phantom as successors in kind. The relevant legal facts are that Armand Moncharmin and Firmin Richard have assumed the roles of managers of the Palais Garnier. Gaston Leroux and the Phantom himself often point out that the managers have a lack of experience. Indeed, the Phantom appears to have similar access to private information that was at issue in the Supreme Court case Laidlaw v. Organ (1817) and which would be allowed to .be used in a negotiation over the mangers.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Osler on Theaters of Pardoning (Review Essay) @Oslerguy @CornellPress

Mark William Osler, University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minnesota), is publishing Review Essay: Theaters of Pardoning in Criminal Justice Ethics. Here is the abstract.

I loved reading Bernadette Meyler’s Theaters of Pardoning, largely because of the way she feasts at the well-laden table of 17th century British theater as she discerns themes of mercy by the powerful. It is also exactly the right time to revisit clemency’s trajectory through Western civilization, as we rebound from a practitioner, Donald Trump, who used it as an extension of his own ego. In the end, though, the book was a great meal that still left me hungry, in that it never really tried to connect clemency’s historical path to the very real challenges we face today.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Kathleen Kim and Yxta Maya Murray, Advice & Consent: A Play in One Act (2019) @murrayyxta

Kathleen Kim, and Yxta Maya Murray, both of the Loyola (Los Angeles) Law School, have published Advice & Consent: A Play in One Act as Loyola Law School, Los Angeles Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2020-19. Here is the abstract.

On September 27, 2018, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings concerning Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in the mid-1980s. Advice and Consent is a play by award-winning writer and law professor Yxta Maya Murray, formed of interviews, found text, and transcripts, re-arranged, selected, and edited for poetic and provocative effect. Law professor Kathleen Kim authored the Introduction and composed the play's Musical Score. The drama is designed as a thought experiment about power, pathos, tragedy, politics, gender, race, and truth. Professors Murray and Kim have presented and performed Advice and Consent in various academic and art forums.

Download the play from SSRN at the link.

Millemann, Rauh, and Bowle on Teaching Professional Responsibility Through Theater @MikeMillemann @robertbowiejr

Michael A. Millemann, University of Maryland School of Law, Elliott Rauh, and Robert Bowle, Jr., are publishing Teaching Professional Responsibility Through Theater in the Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal (2020). Here is the abstract.

This article is about ethics-focused law school courses, co-taught with a theater director, in which students wrote, produced and performed in plays. The plays were about four men who, separately, were wrongfully convicted, spent decades in prison, and finally were released and exonerated, formally (two) or informally (two). The common themes in these miscarriages of justice were that 1) unethical conduct of prosecutors (especially failures to disclose exculpatory evidence) and of defense counsel (especially incompetent representation) undermined the Rule of Law and produced wrongful convictions, and 2) conversely, that the ethical conduct of post-conviction lawyers and law students helped to partially vindicate the rights of those wrongfully convicted, but could not provide any real remedy for decades of wrongfully deprived freedom. In sharp contrast, the worst and best of the legal profession were on display. We argue that reproducing these extraordinary stories as plays, with students playing the roles of prosecutors, defense counsel, defendants (with not only wrongful convictions but also decades of wrongful incarceration), family members, crime victims, and people in the affected communities, is a powerful way to teach both law students and public audiences about the direct connections between legal ethics rules and the Rule of Law. It teaches as well the ripple effects on many people and communities, not just the parties, of unethical lawyer behavior. The students learned about legal ethics through in depth analysis of the actual case records, from pretrial motions through trial transcripts and appellate briefs (in the nature of ethics autopsies), and from the personal presentations in class by the exonerated men and their families. As important, the students learned about professional responsibility and irresponsibilities, from their immersion in the roles of the lawyers and “secondary” characters, like the affected families of the four men and the crime victims and their communities. The students also learned about competence, including how to work collaboratively to develop and to tell stories, to appreciate cultural differences, to examine witnesses, and to deal with performance anxiety. Because the men, all African Americans, were tried in 1968 (two), 1975, and 1983, the plays served as important points of comparison of criminal justice — criminal law and procedure — then and now. In this respect, the courses also were virtual laboratories in which to explore legal realism and critical legal theory, especially race theory; the true stories were powerful critiques of the romanticized, theoretical model of due process that underlies the formal criminal justice curricula.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Recently Published: Marett Leiboff, Towards a Theatrical Jurisprudence (Routledge, 2019) @legalintersect @routledgebooks

ICYMI:

Marett Leiboff, Towards a Theatrical Jurisprudence (Routledge, 2019).

This book brings the insights of theatre theory to law, legal interpretation and the jurisprudential to reshape law as a practice of response and responsibility. Confronting a Baconian antitheatrical legality embedded in its jurisprudences and interpretative practices, Marett Leiboff turns to theatre theory and practice to ground a theatrical jurisprudence, taking its cues from Han-Thies Lehmann’s conception of the post-dramatic theatre and the early work of theatre visionary Jerzy Grotowski. She asks law to move beyond an imagined ideal grounded in Aristotelian drama and tragedy, and turns to the formation of the legal interpreter ・ lawyer, judge, jurisprudent ・ as fundamental to understanding what’s “noticed” or not noticed in law. We “notice” most easily through that which is written into the body of the legal interpreter, in a way that can’t be replicated through law’s standard practices of thinking and reasoning. Without more, thinking and reasoning are the epitome of antitheatricality legality; a set of theatrical antonyms, including transgression and instinct, offer instead a set of possibilities through which to reconceive assumptions and foundational concepts etched into the legal imaginary. And by turning to critical dramaturgy, the book reveals that the liveliness that sits behind theatrical jurisprudence isn’t a new concept in law at all, but has a long pedigree and lineage that had been lost and hidden. Theatrical jurisprudence, which demands an awareness of self and beyond self, grounds a responsiveness that can’t be found within doctrine, principle, or the technocratic, but also challenges us to notice what it is we think we know as well as what we know of lives in law that aren’t our own. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of jurisprudence, legal theory, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies and philosophy.

 

Shakespeare and the Law 2019: An Event Sponsored by the Federalist Society, McCarter & English, and the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company

On February 12, 2019 at

New England Conservatory Black Box Theater
225 St. Botolph Street
Boston, MA 02115

The Federalist Society, McCarter & English, and Commonwealth Shakespeare Company 

present

Shakespeare and the Law 2019 
Belief and the Burden of Proof through the Lens of Six of the Bard's Plays

The Boston Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society, McCarter & English, and Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (CSC), present the 16th Annual Shakespeare and the Law Program. This year's program takes on the themes of belief and the burden of proof  through the lens of six of Shakespeare’s plays, Cymbeline, Hamlet, Henry IV, Part 1, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure and Othello.  Following a staged reading of brief scenes from each of the plays, judges, prosecutors, attorneys, activists and commentators will discuss and debate how allegations of impropriety should be measured and judged in the courtroom, the workplace, the college campus, and the Congressional hearing room. The panel discussion will be moderated by Jennifer Braceras and Judge Nancy Gertner.

More information here.

Newly Published: Yann Robert, Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)

Yann Robert, University of Illinois, Chicago, has published Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, classical dogma and royal censorship worked together to prevent French plays from commenting on, or even worse, reenacting current political and judicial affairs. Criminal trials, meanwhile, were designed to be as untheatrical as possible, excluding from the courtroom live debates, trained orators, and spectators. According to Yann Robert, circumstances changed between 1750 and 1800 as parallel evolutions in theater and justice brought them closer together, causing lasting transformations in both. Robert contends that the gradual merging of theatrical and legal modes in eighteenth-century France has been largely overlooked because it challenges two widely accepted narratives: first, that French theater drifted toward entertainment and illusionism during this period and, second, that the French justice system abandoned any performative foundation it previously had in favor of a textual one. In Dramatic Justice, he demonstrates that the inverse of each was true. Robert traces the rise of a "judicial theater" in which plays denounced criminals by name, even forcing them, in some cases, to perform their transgressions anew before a jeering public. Likewise, he shows how legal reformers intentionally modeled trial proceedings on dramatic representations and went so far as to recommend that judges mimic the sentimental judgment of spectators and that lawyers seek private lessons from actors. This conflation of theatrical and legal performances provoked debates and anxieties in the eighteenth century that, according to Robert, continue to resonate with present concerns over lawsuit culture and judicial entertainment. Dramatic Justice offers an alternate history of French theater and judicial practice, one that advances new explanations for several pivotal moments in the French Revolution, including the trial of Louis XVI and the Terror, by showing the extent to which they were shaped by the period's conflicted relationship to theatrical justice.

Conference: Law and Poetics in Early Modern England and Beyond, July 2-4, 2018, University of Cambridge @CRASSHlive @Rachel_E_Holmes

From the emailbox:


Law and Poetics in Early Modern England and Beyond, 2–4 July 2018, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge

Law and Literature has come of age, evolving from the vexations of the early 1990s into a thriving field across periods, with the English Renaissance still a major locus. With the authority and intellectual security this progress gives us, however, come new responsibilities. What can we now see about this interdiscipline, and its historically specific interrelations, that we could not have had clarity about at the movement’s inception? What are the disciplinary anxieties it is time to shake off? Have new ones emerged which we need to examine? And what does work on interactions between the legal and literary imagination in other periods or cultures put in perspective for anglophone early modernists? Our 3-day conference on Law and Poetics will address the trends and urgencies in the field now, with a view to teasing out their implications for the methods and motives of knowing, and considerations of knowability. It will, in the process, raise new questions about the remit of legal, poetic or artistic knowledge.

Our speakers are: Kevin Curran (University of Lausanne), Maksymilian Del Mar (Queen Mary, University of London), Kathy H. Eden (Columbia University), Alex Feldman (Haifa University), Peter Goodrich (Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law), Rachel E. Holmes (University of Cambridge), Lorna Hutson (Merton College, University of Oxford), Torrance Kirby (McGill University), Doyeeta Majumder (Jadavpur University), Charles McNamara (Columbia University), Bernadette Meyler (Stanford University), Subha Mukherji (University of Cambridge), George Oppitz-Trotman (University of Cambridge), Jan-Melissa Schramm (University of Cambridge), Richard K. Sherwin (New York Law School), Regina Schwartz (Northwestern University), Sebastian Sobecki (University of Groningen), Christopher N. Warren (Carnegie Mellon University), Gary Watt (University of Warwick), Carey Young (Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London), and Andrew Zurcher (Queen's College, University of Cambridge).

This conference also features Law and the Arts: Staging Law, Performing Trials, an integrated three-part public event. This event, involving actors, visual artists and legal professionals comprises:

• a professional performance event directed by Adele Thomas and Caroline Williams, whose previous credits include: Shakespeare's Globe/Sam Wanamaker Theatre, The Oresteia (2015) and The Knight of the Burning Pestle (2014).
• a talk and screening by visual artist Carey Young (The Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London; creator of law-based artistic works including Before the Law, Legal Fictions, and Palais du Justice)
• a widely interdisciplinary, inter-professional Round Table on Law and the Arts featuring: Subha Mukherji (University of Cambridge), Nicola Padfield, QC (Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge), Richard K. Sherwin (New York Law School), Adele Thomas (Freelance Director), Caroline Williams (Freelance Director), and others t.b.a.

More details about the conference including a provisional schedule and speakers' abstracts can all be found here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/27722.

Registration is required and accessible here: https://webservices.admin.cam.ac.uk/cbk/vmwy/index.cgi. Fees are £40 (full price) or £25 (student/unwaged). Fees include lunches and refreshments. Those registering for this conference will automatically be registered for the integrated public event, Law and the Arts: Staging Law, Performing Trials on the 3rd of July. Registration will close on Monday 25th June. 

This conference is part of the research project Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England: the Place of Literature, a five-year project funded by the European Research Council, based at the Faculty of English and CRASSH, University of Cambridge.  

Via @Rachel_E_Holmes

This conference looks absolutely wonderful!

ICYMI: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance, Edited by Dennis Kezar (published by University of Notre Dame Press, 2007)

ICYMI:

Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance (Dennis Kezar, ed., University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

This volume contains contributions by literary critics and historians who demonstrate that theater and law were not simply relevant to each other in the early modern period; they explore the physical spaces in which early modern law and drama were performed, the social and imaginative practices that energized such spaces, and the rhetorical patterns that make the two institutions far less discrete and far more collaborative than has previously been recognized.

 

Staging Law, Performing Trials: An Event at Cambridge @seanamulcahy @CRASSHlive

Via @Sean Mulcahy, news of an interesting law and humanities event taking place on July 3, 2018 st St. John's College: Staging Law, Performing Trials. 

More about this event below (description taken from the website:

Registration for this event is now open. The event is free to attend but registration is required. Those registering for the associated conference Law and Poetics in Early Modern England and Beyond will automatically be registered for this event. Registration will close on Monday 25th June.A three-part public event embedded in the conference, Law and Poetics in Early Modern England and Beyond (2-4 July, 2018). This event, involving actors, visual artists and legal professionals comprises:

• a professional performance event directed by Adele Thomas. Her previous credits include: Shakespeare's Globe/Sam Wanamaker Theatre, The Oresteia (2015) and The Knight of the Burning Pestle (2014).

• a talk and screening by visual artist Carey Young (The Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London; creator of law-based artistic works including Before the Law, Legal Fictions, and Palais du Justice)

• a widely interdisciplinary, inter-professional Round Table on Law and the Arts featuring: Farah Karim-Cooper (Shakespeare's Globe), Subha Mukherji (University of Cambridge), Nicola Padfield, QC (Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge), Richard K. Sherwin (New York Law School), Adele Thomas (Freelance Director)

This event is part of the research project Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England: the Place of Literature, a five-year project funded by the European Research Council, based at the Faculty of English and CRASSH, University of Cambridge.
For enquiries regarding this event, please contact the project administrator, Rachael Taylor here. 

 

ICYMI: Trials, Edited by Martha M. Umphrey (Taylor and Francis, 2017) @tandfonline

ICYMI: Trials (Martha Merrill Umphrey, ed., Taylor and Francis, 2017).

This volume gathers a collection of the most seminal essays written by leading experts in the fields of law, and cultural studies, which address the cultural dimension of trials. Taken together, these essays conceive of trials as sites of legal performance and as critical public spaces in which the law both encounters and interacts dialogically with the culture in which it is embedded. Inquiring into the contours of that dialogic relation, these essays trace the paths of cultural stories as they circulate in and through trial settings, examine how trials emerge out of particular social and historical contexts, and suggest ways in which trials themselves, as both singular events and generic forms, circulate and signify in culture.

Here's a link to the contents page.  Essays include Milner S. Ball, The Play's the Thing: An Unscientific Reflection on Courts Under the Rubric of Theater, Robert P. Burns, The Lawfulness of  the American Trial, Randy Hertz and Anthony G. Amsterdam, An Analysis of Closing Arguments to a Jury, Richard K. Sherwin, Law Frames: Historical Truth and Narrative Necessity in a Criminal Case, Austin Sara, Speaking of Death: Narratives of Violence in Capital Trials, Kim Lane Scheppele, Just the Facts, Ma'am: Sexualized Violence, Evidentiary Habits, and the Revision of Truth, Nancy West and Jennifer L. Mnookin, Theaters of Proof: Visual Evidence and the Law in Call Northside 777, Lawrence Douglas, Film as Witness: Screening Nazi Concentration Camps Before the Nuremberg Tribunal, William Finnegan, A Reporter at Large, Robert A. Ferguson, Story and Transcription in the Trial of John Brown, Paul Schiff Berman, Rats, Pigs, and Statues on Trial: The Creation of Cultural Narratives in the Prosecution of Animals and Inanimate Objects, Stephane Leman-Langlois, Constructing a Common Language: The Function of Nuremberg in the Problematization of Postapartheid Justice, David Lipset, "The Trial": 1 A Parody of the Law Amid the Mockery of Men in Post-Colonial Papua New Guinea, Shoshana Felman, Forms of Judicial Blindness, or the Evidence of What Cannot Be Seen: Traumatic Narratives and Legal Repetitions in the O. J. Simpson Case and in Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata. 

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Just Rawling Along: A Theory of Justice: The Musical! @JusticeMusical

Proving that one can set anything to music, John Rawls is coming to the London stage. Well, sort of. (It has already played at the Edinburgh Fringe). On February 19, A Theory of Justice: The Musical! debuts at the Arts Theatre. Josh Seymour directs. More here.  Edinburgh Fringe trailer here.

The work is two hours, plus an intermission, so seems not a long piece, and not only not in pages. 

Jeff Daniels To Star in To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway Later This Year @Jeff_Daniels

Jeff Daniels (The Newsroom, The Martian, Godless) is starring as Atticus Finch in Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of Harper Lee's iconic To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway. His co-stars include Celia Keenan-Bolger (Scout), and Stark Sands (Horace Gilmer).Others attached to the project include LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Stephen McKinley Henderson. The director is Bartlett Sher.

The play opens December 13. More here from Variety. 

Mr. Daniels is brave; trying to get an audience to forget Gregory Peck in the Finch role is like trying persuade viewers to think about someone other than Laurence Olivier as Hamlet. (Don't think about elephants! Don't think about elephants!) Well, Kenneth Branagh does, I think, pull it off in the 1996 version. Are Richard Burton (1964), Benedict Cumberbatch (2015), and Nicol Williamson (1969) equally good? I can't decide.

Rose on Raisin, Race, and the Real Estate Revolution of the Early 20th Century @uarizonalaw

Carol M. Rose, University of Arizona College of Law, is publishing Raisin, Race, and the Real Estate Revolution of the Early 20th Century in Power, Prose, and Purse (2018). Here is the abstract.

Lorraine Hansberry’s hit play of 1957, A Raisin in the Sun, centered on the decision of an African American family in Chicago, the Youngers, to move to a house in a white neighborhood. The play is set in the post WWII era, but many of its scenes and actions relate back to real estate practices that began at the turn of the century and that continued to evolve into the mid-century and to some degree beyond. During those decades, housing development and finance increased dramatically in scale, professionalization and standardization. But in their concern for their predominantly white consumers’ preferences for segregation, real estate developers, brokers, financial institutions, and finally governmental agencies adopted standard practices that excluded African Americans from many housing opportunities, and that then reinforced white preferences for housing segregation. Many seemingly minor actions in the play reflect the way that African Americans had been sidelined in the earlier decades’ evolving real estate practices—not just the family’s overcrowded apartment, but also more subtle cues, such as the source of the initial funds for the new house, the methods for its finance, and the legal background to the white homeowners’ effort to discourage the purchase. This paper, a draft chapter for the forthcoming law-and-literature collection, Power, Prose and Purse, pinpoints these and other small clues, and describes how standardizing real estate practices dating from the turn of the century effectively crowded out African American consumers like the Youngers, with consequences that we continue to observe in modern patterns of urban segregation.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Soldiers On War and Death

From The New York Times, published May 26, 2017.

Bruce Headlam, Colin Archdeacon, and Mike Shum, Theater of War: A Warrior's Last Words. Veterans read the words of Ajax and his wife Tecmessa, and comment on the pain of war. 

Lauriat on Literary and Dramatic Disputes in Shakepeare's Time @KCL_Law

Barbara Lauriat, King's College London, Dickson Poon School of Law, is publishing Literary and Dramatic Disputes in Shakespeare's Time in the Journal of International Dispute Settlement. Here is the abstract.

Disputes over literary works and plays — between one authors and another, one publisher and another, and between authors and publishers — have arisen since the ancient world. This is to be expected, since publishing poems and plays and producing theatrical performances can have significant economic, political, and emotional implications all at the same time. The nature and legal frameworks governing these disputes have changed dramatically over the centuries, however, particularly with regard to the proprietary rights involved. Though modern copyright law did not exist at the time, the Elizabethan age saw a high degree of professionalism of theatrical performance, book publishing, and dramatic authorship. When audiences are clamoring for novel entertainments, authorship is becoming a professional activity, and profits are to be made, customs and traditions inevitably arise — as do violations of those customs and traditions. This article discusses the framework of authorship and publishing in Shakespeare’s time and examines some of the disputes that arose and how they were resolved in a context where the legal remedies were limited. Methods from patronage to private guild “courts” to theft to public denunciation to outright violence were employed in attempts to maintain profitable businesses in publishing and theatre.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.