New Museum on Crime and Punishment To Open Soon

Tony Mauro of Legal Times writes of a new museum which may soon be opening in Washington, D.C., devoted to "Crime and Punishment". The National Museum of Crime and Punishment, the brainchild of attorney John Morgan, will reside at 575 7th St. N.W. Mr. Morgan and his partner John Walsh, known to tv viewers as the host of "America's Most Wanted", will fill the venue with interesting exhibits and onsite broadcasts from the show. Read more here (registration required, free).

Law and Lit in International Law

Ed Morgan, University of Toronto Law School, has published The Aesthetics of International Law(University of Toronto Press). Here's a description of the contents.

International law is a fundamentally modern phenomenon. Tracing its roots to the skeletal nineteenth-century pronouncements of the ‘law of nations,’ the discipline took shape in the elaborate treaty structures of the post-First World War era and in the institutions and tribunals of the post-Second World War period. International law as scholars know and study it today is a product of modernism.

In The Aesthetics of International Law, Ed Morgan engages in a literary parsing of international legal texts. In order to demonstrate how modernist aesthetics are imbued in these types of legal narratives, Morgan makes a direct comparison between international legal documents and modern (as well as some immediately pre- and post-modern) literary texts. He demonstrates how the same intellectual currents that flow through the works of authors ranging from Edgar Allen Poe to James Joyce to Vladimir Nabokov, are also present in legal doctrines ranging from the law of war to international commercial disputes to human rights.

By providing a comparative, interdisciplinary account of the modern phenomenon, this work seeks to highlight the ways in which judges, lawyers, and state representatives artfully exploit the narratives of international law. It demonstrates that just as modernist literature developed complex narrative techniques as a way of dealing with the human condition, modern international law has developed parallel argumentative techniques as a way of dealing with international political conditions.

Cross posted to the Seamless Web.