Simonson and Ahmed on Legal Satire in an Age of Political Repression

Jocelyn Simonson, Brooklyn Law School, and Zohra Ahmed, Boston University School of Law, are publishing Legal Satire in an Age of Political Repression in volume 74 of the Buffalo Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Central to the political repression of left social movements is the use of the criminal law to target movement work. One of the blueprints for the Trump Administration's current campaign of collective criminalization is a RICO conspiracy case brought by the Georgia Attorney General against 61 organizers and activists in the movement to Stop Cop City in Atlanta in 2023. In this Article, we tell the story of a creative tactic through which the movement to Stop Cop City resisted the conspiracy and RICO charges against them, charges which were dismissed in December 2025. In doing so, this Article also recounts a longer history stretching back to the first Red Scare of how left social movements have devised creative, strategic, and galvanizing ways to combat repressive criminalization. This Article’s analysis centers on the “People’s RICO,” a 2023 parody crafted by lawyers, organizers, and artists in response to the real RICO prosecution brought by the state that same month. In the short film, the People’s RICO issues its own RICO indictment, condemning a counter-conspiracy between state and private actors. This Article presents a reading of the People’s RICO that connects it to the history of social movements responding to conspiracy prosecutions with their own accusations of counter-conspiracies on the part of those in power. The Article reads the People’s RICO parody on three levels: satire, structural analysis, and legal imaginary. First, the film ridicules the genre of theatrical law enforcement press conferences to expose it for what it really is: the state silencing its opponents. Second, the People’s RICO uses the legal concepts of conspiracy and RICO to identify and indict the law and political economy of the carceral state, found within the tangle of public and private actors advancing their plans for a police training facility for their collective material enrichment. Third, the film imagines another world in which a group of lawyers representing the “People,” can reclaim legal forms and political power to condemn state and corporate actors that have deployed their prosecutorial power for political gain. But that hope for accountability is partial and qualified. The conspiracy and counter-conspiracy accusations between the State’s RICO and the People’s RICO help underscore contemporary anti-carceral movements’ ambivalent relationship to the legal form, and the legal form’s imperfect fit for a nuanced abolitionist praxis. Taken all together, the innovative approach of the People’s RICO should provide inspiration to movement actors, lawyers, and their allies in figuring out how to respond creatively to politically motivated prosecutions: by using the law without capitulating to its narrow horizons.

Libel and Lampoon: Andrew Bricker in Conversation with Marissa Nicosia, April 12th at 12 (noon) Eastern Time @rarebookschool @Nicosia_Marissa

 

From Holly Borham, Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School. She is Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and European Art at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin.

Join author Andrew Bricker and interviewer Marissa Nicosia for a conversation about Bricker’s book Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670–1792 (Oxford University Press, 2022). Following this conversation, the audience will have the opportunity to participate in a Q&A session moderated by Holly Borham. This event is part of a series celebrating new books in critical bibliography, and is sponsored by Rare Book School’s Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (SoFCB).  

Event link: https://rarebookschool.org/all-programs/events/libel-and-lampoon-author-andrew-bricker-in-conversation-with-marissa-nicosia-on-satire-in-the-english-courts-1670-1792/

Everyone is welcome to attend this free event. Advance registration is required; to register, click here. Registration closes at 10 a.m. ET the day of the event. We will send you the Zoom URL and password after 10 a.m. ET on the day of the event. Please direct any questions to the SoFCB Administrative Director at rbs-mellon@virginia.edu. This event will be recorded and shared to the RBS YouTube channel. 

Andrew Bricker is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University and a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to satire, the law, laughter, and humor. His first book, Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670–1792 (Oxford University Press, 2022), focuses on the development of defamation law in relation to written and visual satire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain.

Marissa Nicosia is Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at The Pennsylvania State University–Abington College and a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School. She has published articles on early modern English literature, book history, and manuscripts in Modern Philology, Milton Studies, and The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. Marissa edited the collection Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives (Oxford University Press, 2021). She runs the public food history website Cooking in the Archives.

Alexander on Publishing Peter Pindar: Production, Profits, and Piracy in Georgian Satire

James R. Alexander, University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown, has published Publishing Peter Pindar: Production, Profits and Piracy in Georgian Satire at 112 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 149 (2018).

As the scurrilous poet ‘Peter Pindar,’ John Wolcot was the most provocative English political satirist in the late 18th century. His smirkingly disrespectful lampooning of the King and his ministers brought widespread popularity and profits, but perilously close to prosecution for seditious libel in the mid-1790s in a period of patriotic zeal when the Pitt government was pressing indictments against dissenting and reformist writers. So Wolcot’s claim of copyright infringement against his own publisher seemed both miscalculated, as it raised the common law assumption that prospectively libelous and therefore criminal works were a threat to public order and therefore ineligible for court protection under copyright. While at the time perhaps an inconsequential procedural ruling, Walcot v. Walker (1802) would inadvertently become a benchmark in copyright law doctrine. In an effort to provide some contextual perspective to the ruling and its interpretation, this essay examines the scale and trend lines of Wolcot’s canon of works to that point, focusing on his production costs, wholesale and retail price structures, and the degree to which his profits were threatened by literary piracy and might have reasonably sought copyright protection. It finds that the same production strategy that had carried him to the apex of political notoriety and commercial success by 1790 also made it imperative for him sell his copyrights to his publisher and eventually sue over disagreements on conditions of their sale.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Bricker on After the Golden Age: Libel, Caricature, and the Deverbalization of Satire

Andrew Bricker, Ghent University of Belgium, has published After the Golden Age: Libel, Caricature, and the Deverbalization of Satire, at 51 Eighteenth-Century Studies 305 (2018). Here is the abstract.

It is a commonplace of literary history that satire vanishes in the middle of the eighteenth century. It is clear, however, that written and especially visual satire witnessed massive growth in the final decades of the century and throughout the Romantic era. My goal is to explain this simultaneous contraction and expansion of the satiric marketplace. Rather than dying, I argue, satire began to migrate to visual media, and especially caricature, after mid-century. The reason for this migration was the shifting procedural norms of libel law itself. Over the first half of the century, the courts developed procedures for delimiting verbal ambiguity in trials for libel that made the publication of written satire perilous. These same procedures were largely useless, however, in the prosecution of visual materials, which made at best sparing use of words—they were, as I put it, "deverbalized"—and were therefore not subject to the same rulings and interpretive procedures.

You may be able to download the text from Project Muse at the link.

"What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us?" Monty Python and the Brexit Debate

Sarah Lyall of the New York Times unearths a funny and prescient  parallel to the Brexit debate from, of all places, Monty Python's Life of Brian. But of course, we should have known that the Pythons would have been there first.

Funny Politicians

From the Dirksen Congressional Center: Serious Consequences of Congress as a Target For Humorists.