For Your Consideration: Some Documentaries About Murder

From inverse.com, a list of five disturbing documentaries about murder, all available on Netflix. 

Cooper on Culpability for Curses in Jewish Law and Mystical Lore

Levi Cooper, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, has published Culpability for Curses in Jewish Law and Mystical Lore, in Wizards vs. Muggles: Essays on Identity and the Harry Potter Universe 168(Christopher E. Bell, ed., Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016).

Would a court judging according to Jewish Law find Voldemort guilty for the murders of James and Lily Potter? Voldemort had the intention to kill, yet the legal question is: Would Jewish Law consider the Killing Curse to be an act of murder? This study explores legal aspects of three magical phenomena – incantations that kill, automatic writing like Tom Riddle’s Diary, and food with different possible tastes like Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans – as they are discussed in Jewish Law. In Jewish esoteric lore, magical phenomena have conventionally been the province of the mystically adept. Though laypeople may not have been proficient in magic, the mystical tradition dictated conduct. A by-product of this situation was that jurists considered legal implications of magic. Legal opinions on magical phenomena can therefore be found in Jewish legal literature, making this corpus fertile ground for analysis. Drawing on the fields of Comparative Law, Law and Literature, and Legal History, this article analyzes three phenomena and concludes with four contentions: First, the analysis speaks to the possibility of cross-fertilization in Comparative Law. Second, the study provides a unique window into the world of Jewish Law jurists, and thus is of interest to legal historians and judicial biographers. Third, the material presented here contributes to our understanding of the reaches of the Jewish legal system. Fourth, the present discussion may be significant for the contemporary challenge of charting a course in legal education.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

A Social History of Murder From Linda Stratmann

Linda Stratmann has published The Secret Poisoner A Century of Murder (Yale University Press, 2016). Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

Murder by poison alarmed, enthralled, and in many ways encapsulated the Victorian age. Linda Stratmann's dark and splendid social history reveals the nineteenth century as a gruesome battleground where poisoners went head-to-head with authorities who strove to detect poisons, control their availability, and bring the guilty to justice. She corrects many misconceptions about particular poisons and documents how the evolution of issues such as marital rights and the legal protection of children impacted poisonings. Combining archival research with a novelist's eye, Stratmann charts the era's inexorable rise of poison cases both shocking and sad.

 

The Act of Killing

Richard K. Sherwin, New York Law School, has published Law in the Flesh: Tracing Legitimation's Origin to 'The Act of Killing', in No Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice (June 2014). Here is the abstract.

The founding moment of political and legal investiture haunts the baroque and neo-baroque mind, from Shakespeare’s 'Hamlet' to Joshua Oppenheimer’s highly unsettling film, 'The Act of Killing' (2012). In the former, Hamlet finds the resources to act in the face of injustice; in so doing he precipitates a transformative political event that renews the rightful basis for state legitimacy. In 'The Act of Killing', by contrast, restless stasis remains unaltered from beginning to end. It is a state of affairs well suited to contemporary neo-baroque conditions – a time of distracted paralysis, when the availability of the cultural and psychological resources needed to go beyond terror and its purgatorial aftermath remains uncertain.
The exploration of post-secular possibilities requires new experiential sources, new interpretive and critical methods, and new interdisciplinary alliances. Phenomenology, psycho-theology, political theology, and visual jurisprudence are just some of the emerging categories (or perhaps re-emergent fields) that present themselves to us for further consideration.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.