What's In Theaters; What's Up With "Zero Dark Thirty"

Two reviews of newly released law-related films from The Hollywood Reporter: Gangster Squad and Promised Land.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, some Senators are questioning CIA involvement in the writing of the script for the Kathryn Bigelow hit Zero Dark Thirty. According to THR,

[I]n a Dec. 19 letter to acting CIA director Michael Morell, the lawmakers expressed a concern that “given the CIA’s cooperation with the filmmakers and the narrative’s consistency with past public misstatements by former senior CIA officials, filmmakers could have been misled by information they were provided by the CIA.”

The senators went on to demand that the intelligence agency turn over to them  "'all information and documents provided to the filmmakers by CIA officials." In a second letter sent Dec. 31, Feinstein, Levin and McCain responded to an unusual message Morrell sent to all CIA employees on Dec. 21. In that message, which was posted to the agency's website, the acting director stated that “some [intelligence related to bin Laden’s location] came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques, but there were many other sources as well.”

More here. More coverage here from the Los Angeles Times.

Western Water Law and United States Legal History

David Schorr, Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law, has published The Colorado Doctrine: Water Rights, Corporations, and Distributive Justice on the American Frontier (Yale University Press, 2012). Here is the introduction.

The water-law doctrine of prior appropriation is today widely misunderstood, largely due to ignorance of the social and legal context in which it arose. It has become associated with a set of values -- the preference for private over common property, the privatization of the public domain, the facilitation of markets in natural resources -- that have little to do with the ideology behind the decision or how contemporaries saw it. Analysis of the available historical evidence makes it quite clear not only that the doctrine of appropriation as developed in nineteenth-century Colorado was viewed at the time as striking a blow at private property in order to advance distributive justice, but also that it had that very effect as its central goal.
While the primary purpose of this book is to challenge the received wisdom regarding the ideology of western water law, relying primarily on an examination of contemporary sources, the significance of the argument goes beyond revision of the historical record for its own sake. Historians and theoreticians of property rights have tended to agree that the primary concern driving the rejection of riparian doctrine in favor of appropriation in the western United States was economic growth, part of that nineteenth-century “release of individual creative energy” by American law, to use Willard Hurst’s phrase or the common law’s characteristic tendency toward efficiency, as some economic analysts of the law would have it. The claims advanced in this book, stressing considerations of widespread distribution of property as the primary motivating factor in the adoption of appropriation law, challenge these consensus views regarding property law and American legal history in general. In doing so, they raise the question as to whether considerations of distributive justice have been given their due in study of these fields. Given the value American legal culture places on arguments from past practice and precedent, they also challenge current paradigms of natural-resource law.

Download the introduction from SSRN at the link.

Coal Mining, Up Close

The Harvard University Press Blog notes that Spike TV premiered a new reality series, Coal, March 30 at 9 p.m. (8 Central time). The first fourteen minutes of the first episode is available for online viewing. It offers a look at the work involved in drilling for and removing the resource from the earth, and the dangers that miners face every day. The miners who appear on Coal apparently do so without pay from the documentarians.

The TNT television series Leverage addressed the dangers of coal mining and problems with regulation in one episode, "The Underground Job," last year (commentary here). Steven Fesenmaier of WV Film lists movies about coal mining and miners here. Some films, like Matewan (1987), have a definite political/legal message.