Tehranian on The Subject Strikes Back: Intellectual Property, Visual Pleasure & Resistance in the Arts @johntehranian @SouthwesternLaw @AmULRev

John Tehranian, Southwestern Law School, is publishing The Subject Strikes Back: Intellectual Property, Visual Pleasure & Resistance in the Arts in volume 71 of the American University Law Review. Here is the abstract.

The metaphor of the hunt pervades photography, exhorting those behind the camera to load, aim and shoot. But having long served as the proverbial prey whose ‘captured’ images form the subject matter of so many works, subjects have begun to strike back. From Jay-Z and Emily Ratajkowski to Taylor Swift and Naruto the crested macaque, subjects are pushing for greater control over the exploitation of their personae and representation of their bodies. The Subject Strikes Back identifies this significant moment and critically assesses the legal landscape related to subject rights, with a particular emphasis on the copyright, trademark and right-of-publicity issues at play. Bookended with two case studies from the world of modern art—the legal controversies surrounding Richard Prince’s New Portraits series and Andy Warhol’s iconic serigraphs of pop star Prince—the Article surveys the limited protection afforded to subjects under current copyright, trademark and right-of-publicity law, ascertains the key issues (including those related to race, gender and socioeconomic status) at stake in any potential expansion of subject rights, highlights obstacles presented by the extant jurisprudence, and analyzes the prospects for change. Although sympathetic to the plight of subjects, the Article raises significant concerns about attempts to vindicate their interests through right-of-publicity and trademark law. Specifically, the Article posits that the protection of subject rights through publicity rights presents underappreciated problems related to copyright pre-emption, the blurry line between actionable advertising/merchandising uses of a likeness and non-actionable artistic uses (a distinction that carries significant implications for expressive freedoms) and gamesmanship and forum shopping in exploiting the patchwork nature of publicity rights protected at the state level. Meanwhile, although subjects have enjoyed some limited success wresting control over the use of their images through the Lanham Act and related unfair competition laws, the public policy concerns animating federal trademark doctrine make such reliance problematic, especially in light of incongruity and unpredictability of the relevant jurisprudence governing threshold issues of trademarkability and likelihood of confusion and the serious interference that subject-friendly holdings in trademark law can pose to the exercise of exclusive rights reserved for copyright holders. In the end, the prospects for vindication of subject rights may be best served if copyright law expressly recognized the potential for authorial interests for subjects—an outcome currently precluded by copyright’s authorship-as-fixation doctrine. The Subject Strikes Back therefore highlights the significant work our intellectual property laws still have to do to properly align creative contributions with the reward of rights, recognize the economic value and dignitary interests of subjects and balance the rights of fixers and users with the rights of subjects.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Launch of Visible Justice: The Exhibition

An announcement from Max Houghton regarding the launch of Visible Justice, the Exhibition:

David Birkin and I have been working since January with LCC post grad students, ngos Reprieve, PlanB and Refugee Journalism, artists Poulomi Basu and David Blandy & Larry Achiampong … to create Visible Justice, the exhibition. The students have responded to briefs and created self initiated work on such themes as the death penalty, torture and rendition, climate change, knife crime, surveillance and the experience of migration. Their work forms the public programme for LCC’s School of Media 2019.

The show also features work by aforementioned artists plus LCC’s Syrian Artist Protection Fund Fellow in Residence Abd Doumany, Corinne Silva, Edmund Clark and Nathaniel White, who have each supported the collaborations, and whose work resonates with the themes.

It would be wonderful to see you at our associated events. See links for info on brilliant speakers.

Visible Justice launch 16 April - with performance, music and poetry readings:

https://www.arts.ac.uk/whats-on/visible-justice-launch-night

30 April: Young Blood: A Round Table Discussion on Knife Crime and Restorative Justice:

https://www.arts.ac.uk/whats-on/young-blood-knife-crime-and-restorative-justice-discussion-and-film-screening

03 May: the second symposium of our research collective, also called Visible Justice - looking at the injured body - Visible Justice: Embodied Activism

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/visible-justice-embodied-activism-symposium-tickets-59523729076

It’s all free, but booking is essential via the links above.

We are working on the build this week and it’s all looking very exciting indeed.

Best wishes

Max

visible-justice.org

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!

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. 

 

Adamson on The "Blurred Lines" of Marvin Gaye's "Here, My Dear": Music As a Tortious Act, Divorce Narrative, and First Amendment Totem @seattleulaw

Bryan L. Adamson, Seattle University School of Law, is publishing The 'Blurred Lines' of Marvin Gaye's 'Here, My Dear': Music as a Tortious Act, Divorce Narrative and First Amendment Totem in volume 36 of the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal (2018). Here is the abstract.

In 1977, singer Marvin Gaye did an audacious thing: Anna Gordy-Gaye was divorcing him, and asking for $1 million dollars. Despite having a wildly successful career up to that point, Marvin was near financial ruin. His attorney, Curtis Shaw, hit upon an idea: Motown, Marvin’s record label, had given him $305,000 as an advance for his upcoming-but-undeveloped album. Marvin would give Anna the $305,000, and pledge the first $295,000 of the royalties yielded from that recording. Instead of $1 million, Anna agreed to the $600,000, as did Motown’s CEO Berry Gordy, Anna’s brother. The judge wrote up an Order to that effect. Composed, written (with a few exceptions), and vocalized by Marvin alone, he first thought to do “nothing heavy, nothing even good.” Then he changed his mind. The album that resulted? A brilliantly unsettling poison pen to and about Anna, sardonically titled Here, My Dear. Released in December 1978, Here, My Dear laid bare to the world a marriage gone terribly, terribly wrong. From the double album’s jacket illustrations and lyrics, down to the vocal colors and tones Marvin deploys — Anna is portrayed as greedy, vengeful and manipulative. The work was so upsetting to her that Anna publicly threatened to sue Marvin. This Article explores that threat. Here, My Dear is a rich legal document from which to mine the myriad torts Marvin commits against Anna over the course of its seventy three minutes and 10 seconds length. Moreover, given Marvin’s persona as one of the most preeminent celebrity male sex symbols from the 1960s until his death in 1984, Here, My Dear can also be read as a beguiling take on the ways in which masculine perspectives on divorce are constructed and articulated. Here, My Dear is a fascinating artifact also because its analysis impels application of some of the Supreme Court’s seminal constitutional jurisprudence such as New York Times v. Sullivan, Gertz v. Welch and Time v. Firestone. Each, in some form or to some extent, is relevant to the Gaye divorce saga as it raises issues of free speech and artistic expression, who can be considered “media” or a “public figure,” and rights of privacy versus newsworthiness of divorce. Consequently, Here, My Dear serves to illustrate foundational communication and distress torts principles as shaped by First Amendment doctrine.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

CFP For Late Abstracts and Registration Now Open: International Roundtable For the Semiotics of Law (IRSL 2018), May 25th, 2018 @thomgiddens

Law and Arts in Crime Settings The 19th International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law (IRSL 2018) 23rd – 25th May, 2018 Hosted by Örebro University / Sweden

Website: The 19th International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law (IRSL 2018) - School of Law, Psychology and Social work - Örebro University The 19th International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law (IRSL 2018) ... Interdisciplinary conference ISRL 2018.

The theme "Law and Arts in Crime Settings" is interdisciplinary and cove... YOU CAN NOW START REGISTERING ONLINE FOR IRSL 2019

This roundtable aims at exploring, analysing, debating the very close semiotic connections between real and fictitious societies, and exploring the mimicking between human and non-human people in order to express the social order in which individual liberties, rights and duties are major concerns.

This roundtable will focus on how to narrate real or fictitious national crimes, war crimes, crimes against humanity, manslaughter, etc. We will not only focus on legal analyses and literature but also on how artists, political cartoonists and/or official court artists sketch court settings, crimes, and alleged offenders. We invite contributors to reflect on how these ideas have been examined over the years. Papers which examine the way artists, storytellers, writers, novelists, singers, movie producers have provoked public discourse to confront Law and Arts in Crime Settings are particularly welcome.

A special attention will be paid on how storytellers narrate a crime to a very young public and raise its awareness.

The 19th International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law invites further discussion into these and related questions and welcomes a plurality of approaches, including those of legal studies, philosophy, social science, linguistics, history, cultural studies, and the humanities. Abstracts of 300 words (max.) can be submitted by April 25, 2018 to Laura Ervo (Organizer) (laura.ervo@oru.se) and Anne Wagner (valwagnerfr@yahoo.com) with participation decisions made by April 30, 2018.

Selected papers will be invited for publication in a special issue of International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. (Springer: http://www.springer.com/lawjournal11196) or edited volume. Anne Wagner, Ph. D., Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches - Qualifiée Associate Professor, Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale (France) https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6362-9023 Centre Droit et Perspectives du Droit, Equipe René Demogue - Université de Lille II (France) Research Professor, China University of Political Science and Law (Beijing - China) http://fr.linkedin.com/in/annewagner

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-90-481-9322-6/page/1

Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - http://www.springer.com/law/journal/11196

Series Editor, Law, Language and Communication - Routledge ( https://www.routledge.com/Law-Language-and-Communication/book-series/LAWLANGCOMM)

President of the International Roundtables for the Semiotics of Law - https://www.linkedin.com/groups/2427318

A Series on Law and the Arts at the University of Malaga Faculty of Law @jcalvo11

Beginning March 9, the University of Malaga School of Law is hosting a series of seminars on Art and Law. The March 9th lecture features Professors Jose Calvo Gonzalez and Maria Pina Fersini discussing law and architecture. On April 12, Professor Felipe Navarro Martinez will discuss law and literature, Professor Jose Manuel Cabra Apalategui will discuss law and music, and Professor Cristina Monereo Atienza will discuss law and photography. On May 3, Professor Jose Francisco Alenza Garcia will discuss law in Game of Thrones.

More here.

Call For Papers: 19th International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law (IRSL, 2018, 23rd-25th May, 2018)

From the mailbox:

 
The 19th International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law (IRSL 2018)23rd – 25th May, 2018 Hosted by Örebro University / Sweden   This roundtable aims at exploring, analysing, debating the very close semiotic connections between real and fictitious societies, and exploring the mimicking between human and non-human people in order to express the social order in which individual liberties, rights and duties are major concerns. This roundtable will focus on how to narrate real or fictitious national crimes, war crimes, crimes against humanity, manslaughter, etc. We will not only focus on legal analyses and literature but also on how artists, political cartoonists and/or official court artists sketch court settings, crimes, and alleged offenders.  We invite contributors to reflect on how these ideas have been examined over the years. Papers which examine the way artists, storytellers, writers, novelists, singers, movie producers have provoked public discourse to confront Law and Arts in Crime Settings are particularly welcome. A special attention will be paid on how storytellers narrate a crime to a very young public and raise its awareness. The 19th International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law invites further discussion into these and related questions and welcomes a plurality of approaches, including those of legal studies, philosophy, social science, linguistics, history, cultural studies, and the humanities. Abstracts of 300 words (max.) can be submitted by December 1, 2017 to Laura Ervo (Organizer) (laura.ervo@oru.se) and Anne Wagner (valwagnerfr@yahoo.com) with participation decisions made by January 15, 2018.  Selected papers will be invited for publication in a special issue of International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. (Springer: http://www.springer.com/lawjournal11196) or edited volume.  http://www.springer.com/law/journal/11196/PSE?detailsPage=societies

 

Call for Applications: First Amendment and the Arts, Spangenberg Center, CWRU @CWRU_Law

My (law school) alma mater, Case Western Reserve School of Law, has posted a call for applications for a fellowship in the First Amendment and the arts, to begin immediately. Looks like a great opportunity for someone interested in the intersection of the FA and IP. More information here.

By Any Other's Name: A Conference on Law, Authorship, and Appropriation, October 28-29, 2016

Coming soon:

By Any Other's Name: A Conference on Law, Authorship, and Appropriation, October 28-29, 2016, on the campus of Louisiana State University.

The Louisiana State University School of Theatre, College of Music and Dramatic Arts and LSU Law Center in conjunction with the LSU Office of Research and Economic Development and the Law and Humanities Institute present “By Any Other Name: A Conference on Law, Authorship and Appropriation” October 28 and 29 on the campus of LSU.

The conference will bring together scholars, performers, and students to discuss law and authorship in the face of challenges issued by artists who engage in appropriation—the practice of taking the works of others to rethink or recreate new works.

Kreitner, Rosenberg, and Tomlins on Arts and the Aesthetic in Legal History

Roy Kreitner, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Anat Rosenberg, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliyah-Radzyner School of Law, and Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, have published Arts and the Aesthetic in Legal History at 2 Critical Analysis of Law 314 (2015). Here is the abstract.

This special issue of Critical Analysis of Law brings together a rich array of articles at the intersections of arts and legal history. In this introduction we reflect on some of the benefits and implications of this interdisciplinary juncture, which contemporary legal historians have been slow to engage. We highlight the significance of engaging with the arts for theoretical conundrums central to legal history: art as source, the philosophy of time, methodological scripts, and the relation of the descriptive to the normative. The arts, we argue, prove vital in tackling and breaching the limits of imagination imposed by our time and place — disciplinary place included.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

The Islamic Tradition, the Arts, and Freedom of Expression

Eleni Polymenopoulou, Brunel University London, is publishing A Thousand Ways to Kiss the Earth: Artistic Freedom, Cultural Heritage and Islamic Extremism in volume 17 of the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion (Fall 2015). Here is the abstract.

The paper discusses controversies on freedom of expression and the arts, focusing on Islam and Muslim sensibilities. Drawing from historical examples and the perception of visual arts and music in the Islamic tradition, it attempts to shed light upon incidents such as the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the intentional destruction of cultural heritage by extremists in Mali, Syria and Iraq in the case of global-scale controversies. After examining the concepts of blasphemy (sabb), apostasy (ridda) and idolatry (shirk) in Islamic law, it considers the legitimacy of legal claims related to blasphemous expressions from an international law perspective. The paper distinguishes between violent and non-violent claims and argues that freedom of expression should prevail in all cases involving blasphemy and offences to sensibilities. It also takes the view, however, that this solution is not necessarily a sustainable one. Empowering cultural rights as a whole, rather than seeking to resolve a fictitious conflict between rights, seems to be a more effective pathway to address complex issues involving religious extremism and hate speech.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

It All Started With the Greeks

Harry Mount discusses the origins of the courtroom drama, tracing it to The Oresteia of Aeschylus. Read his article for the Telegraph here.

Images and Imagination in Theorizing About Law: A Workshop at Wolfson College, Oxford

From Maksymilian Del Mar, Queen Mary College, University of London, news of a workshop on images in legal scholarship, to take place at Wolfson College, Oxford, on May 20, 2015. Here's a description. If you are interested, sign up soon: only a few spots are left.

Images and Imagination in Theorizing about Law Workshop

20 May 2015

Time: 10:30am - 7:00pm 
Venue: Haldane Room, Wolfson College, Linton Road, Oxford, OX2 6UD

This one-day workshop will examine the role of images in legal scholarship, both theoretically and historically. By bringing together legal and art history academics, it will establish a new network of scholars from a variety of disciplines—art, history, law, anthropology—interested in the intersection of images and law.

The last decade has seen much research into the intersection of the visual and the legal, yet the impact on the practice of contemporary legal scholarship has been limited, and there is little methodological reflection on the roles that images and imagery have played in scholarship about law.

For the first time in the UK, this workshop will explore these issues with legal scholars, art historians, art theorists, visual epistemologists, anthropologists, and explore future avenues of research.

This workshop is co-organised by Professor Sionaidh Douglas-Scott (Oxford) and Dr Maks Del Mar (Queen Mary).

Participants

o    Dr Carolin Berhmann (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz)

o    Professor Sionaidh Douglas-Scott (Oxford)

o    Professor Denis Galligan (Oxford)

o    ​Professor Adam Gearey (Birkbeck)

o    Professor Peter Goodrich (Cardozo)

o    Dr Maks Del Mar (Queen Mary)

o    Professor Marie Laure Mathieu (Montpellier)

o    Professor Fernanda Pirie (Oxford)

o    Professor Geoffrey Samuel (Kent)

o    Dr Clare Sandford-Couch (Northumbria)

o    Professor Mathias Siems (Durham)

o    Professor Amanda Perry-Kessaris (Kent)

o    Dr Patricia Cain

o    Ms Sophie Arkette (Artist in residence, Cambridge)

o    Dr Thomas Giddens (St Mary’s)

Programme

10:30–11:00 Tea and Coffee

11:00–12:00 Keynote speaker
Dr Carolin Berhmann, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenze
Title: ‘Nomos of Images’

12:05–1:05 Keynote speaker
Dr Clare Sandford-Couch, Northumbria University
Title: ‘Images and Legal Authority in Fourteenth Century Florence’

1:05–2:00 Lunch

2:00–4:30 Short presentations with breaks

Panel 1
Dr Patricia Cain, Artist
Title: ‘Practices of Thinking: Law and Art’

Ms Sophie Arkette, Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence, Centre for Intellectual Property & Information Law, University of Cambridge
Title: ‘Appearance v Materiality: On the Nature of Fixation in UK & Dutch Copyright Law’

Professor Amanda Perry-Kessaris, Kent Law School
Title: ‘Graphic Legal Interdisciplinarity’

Panel 2
Professor Fernanda Pirie, Oxford University
Title: ‘Visual Regularity in Tibetan Legal Documents’

Professor Geoffrey Samuel, University of Kent
Title: ‘The Use of Images in Legal Reasoning’

Dr Thomas Giddens, St Mary’s University, Twickenham
Title: ‘Comics and Legal Aesthetics: Navigating the Limits of Rational Text with Graphic Fiction’

Panel 3
Professor Denis Galligan, Oxford University
Title: ‘On Trial for Treason: The Unlikely Alliance of John Lilburne and Edward Coke’

Professor Adam Gearey, Birkbeck, University of London
Title: ‘Once Poor Always Poor: Images of Law and Poverty in George Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier”’

Professor Mathias Siems, Durham University
Title: ‘Mapping Law Visually’

Panel 4
Professor Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Oxford University
Title: TBA

Dr Maks Del Mar, Queen Mary University of London
Title: ‘Visualising the Common Law Tradition’

4:30–5:00 Tea and Coffee

5:00–6:00 Keynote speaker
Professor Marie-Laure Mathieu, University of Montpellier
Title: ‘Images in Legal Reasoning’

6:00–7:00 Keynote speaker
Professor Peter Goodrich, Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law
Title: ‘Imago Decidendi- Pictures as Precedents’

7:00 Closing remarks

How to book

To reserve your place, please visit The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society website.

Here is a registration link: www.fjls.org/images-and-law

____________________________________

Dr. Maksymilian Del Mar

Senior Lecturer in Law and Philosophy

Director, Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context

Academic Fellow (2013-16), The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple

Department of Law, Queen Mary, University of London

Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, United Kingdom

Tel: +44 20 7882 3962; Fax: +44 20 7882 7042

Email: m.delmar@qmul.ac.uk

Come and Knock On His Door (Now)--He's Been Waiting For You

A U.S. District Court judge has ruled that a young playwright did not infringe the copyright of DLT Entertainment in his work, 3C, which resembles the popular 1970s sitcom Three's Company. Judge Loretta Preska found that in spite of numerous similarities pointed out by DLT,  David Adjmi's play is a parody and a "drastic departure" from the original. It is also not a competitor in the same market as the original.  All sweet vindication for Mr. Adjmi, who has been waiting for three years (since he received a cease-and-desist letter from DLT's attorneys), to be able to pursue marketing opportunities for his work.

More here from the New York Times. Recap of the court's analysis here from Rebecca Tushnet at 43(B)log.

The Civil War In Photographs: At NOMA Beginning January 31st

A new photography exhibit opens at the New Orleans Museum of Art January 31 and runs through May 4: Photography and the American Civil War.

Starring Fnu Lnu

When the criminal justice system uses an acronym to refer to a defendant, sometimes not everyone gets the memo. The New York Times' Benjamin Weiser explains further, noting that at least one playwright used one acronym (Fnu Lnu for "first name unknown, last name unknown) as the inspiration for a work).

Original Interpretation

Jack M. Balkin, Yale University Law School, is publishing Verdi's High C in the Texas Law Review (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

This article continues the discussion that Sanford Levinson and I began over twenty years ago about the relationships between law, music, and other performing arts. It uses as its central example an actual controversy that occurred at the La Scala Opera house in December 2000, when a tenor failed to sing a high C in Verdi's Il Trovatore and the audience erupted in boos, blaming the conductor for a failure of interpretation. Maestro Riccardo Muti defended his choice on the ground that the C does not appear in Verdi's original score; however there is a long tradition of Italian tenors displaying their abilities by signing the high C, and audiences have come to expect it. In fact, one Italian music critic argued that even if Verdi had not written the high C, "it was a gift that the people had given to Verdi" -- an assertion that sounds remarkably like democratic constitutionalism.
The article proceeds through the many arguments that have been offered for and against Maestro Muti's interpretive position. They turn out to be virtually the same as the arguments that lawyers make about constitutional interpretation. This similarity is not accidental. Like (certain genres of) music and drama, law involves a text that has to be put into action by interpreters before an audience. And all three practices involve a "triangle of performance" -- an intricate set of relationships and duties between the creators of texts, the interpreters of texts, and the audiences before whom the texts are performed.
As a result, in law, music, and drama alike, there are a familiar set of styles (or modalities) of argument that participants generally use to justify their choices about how to bring a text to life, or, in the words of the American Legal Realists, to put law into action.
Not only are the styles of argument similar, but performances in law, music, and drama are also constrained by traditions and genres of performance. Just as in law, there are certain interpretations in music and drama that are "off the wall" and "on the wall" at any point in time. And, just as in law, these conventions can change over time through determined action by movements and groups.
The differences between law and the performing arts, however, are just as important as the similarities. Legal performances are usually canonical in a way that musical and dramatic performances are not. It is mandatory to interpret and apply laws in a sense in which it is not mandatory to interpret and perform artistic works like Il Trovatore. Second, at least in the United States, interpretation is hierarchically organized. If a lower court disobeys the interpretation of a higher court, a higher court has the right to reverse it. On the other hand, when Riccardo Muti decides that he is going to perform the G in the Verdi's original printed score instead of the traditional high C, his decision does not have the same effect. Nothing prevents another opera conductor from performing the high C that very same night in another opera house somewhere in the world. And if another conductor does so, there is very little that Muti can do other than criticize. In short, both the similarities and the differences between law, music and drama concern (1) how conventions of performance are organized, defended and enforced, (2) how they are embedded in institutions, and (3) how they change over time.

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

An Enemy of the People

November 2: Science Friday features a discussion of a new production of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, starring Richard Thomas. More here.

Death Upon the Wicked Stage

The New York Times' Charles Isherwood reviews "A Gentleman's Guide To Love and Murder," now playing at the Hartford Stage.