Call For Panelists: 23rd International Conference of Europeanists

From James R. Martel:

23^rd International Conference of Europeanists

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

April 14-16, 2016

Call for Panelists

Despite having lost their public significance in the contemporary moment, trials have played a vital role in the (re)construction of European nation-states and national identity at various historical turning points. One may suspect, however, that trials are no longer an important part of European identity making in the current moment, especially with the institutionalization of legal matters through the mediation of the European Union (EU). The official cadres of the EU, while holding the rule of law as one of the primary tenets of the Union, seem to almost take for granted the existence of the rule of law in EU-member states. One can argue that such legal processes (and work on the rule of law) have perhaps been assigned to nations that are not quite yet fully “European,” supported by special EU funds for judicial reforms and regulations developed for candidate nations to “catch up with” member states. Yet, there is something amiss in this assumption in that it presumes that law ceases to require attention once an institutional threshold has been reached. This panel argues otherwise, and aims to open to discussion trials in Europe, focusing on both historical and contemporary legal cases. The panel is open to analyzing a variety of trials, which could range from trials of extraordinary nature like war crimes, human rights violations, or terrorism charges (recently sparked by ISIS members returning to their home countries in Europe) to the more “ordinary” prosecutions like corruption, murder, or domestic violence cases. Ultimately, we aim to open to discussion such notions as political trials, show trials, and the various understandings of the notion of the rule of law. 

We currently have a paper on the show trials of communist dissidents in the Spanish Civil War and a paper on the treason trials of military officers in contemporary Turkey. We are seeking to expand the breadth of the presentations with work from a variety of time periods and places, helping us to achieve the comparative focus we are seeking for this panel. We are open to papers that employ a broad range of methods (archival, ethnographic etc.) while we also espouse a broad understanding of the boundaries of Europe.

More information about the conference is available at this link: http://councilforeuropeanstudies.org/conferences/2016-ces-conference

If you are interested in presenting on this panel, please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to skaptan@rutgers.edu by September 28, 2015. 

U. S. Lawyers and Their Ideologies

Adam Bonica, Stanford Univesrity Department of Political Science, Adam S. Chilton, University of Chicago Law School, and Maya Sen, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, are publishing The Political Ideologies of American Lawyers in the Journal of Legal Analysis. Here is the abstract.

The ideology of American lawyers has been a persistent source of discussion and debate. Two obstacles, however, have prevented this topic from being systematically studied: the sheer number of attorneys in the United States and the need for a methodology that makes comparing the ideology of specific individuals possible. In this paper, we present a comprehensive mapping of lawyers’ ideologies that has overcome these hurdles. We use a new dataset that links the largest database of political ideology with the largest database of lawyers’ identities to complete the most extensive analysis of the political ideology of American lawyers ever conducted.

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

The Prince of Denmark Could Be Retried For Murder of Polonius

Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin presided over the Crown's appeal in Hamlet's trial for the murder of Polonius in a performance at the Stratford Festival, performed September 12, 2015. The Prince of Denmark was originally found not guilty due to his mental state. See some of the proceedings here, available on Youtube. Counsel are Brian Greenspan and Marie Henein. Expert witness is Dr. David Goldbloom. Hilarity ensues.

Of the three justices hearing the appeal, 2 voted to retry Hamlet for the murder.  More about the appeal here.

Call for Papers, 2016 Law & Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop

From Susan S. Heinzelman, University of Texas, Austin:

CALL FOR PAPERS – 2016 Law & Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop

Columbia Law School, the University of Southern California Center for Law, History & Culture, UCLA School of Law, and Georgetown University Law School invite submissions for the twelfth meeting of the Law & Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop, to be held at UCLA School of Law in Los Angeles, California, on June 6 and 7, 2016. 

PAPER COMPETITION:

The paper competition is open to untenured professors, advanced graduate students, and post-doctoral scholars in law and the humanities; in addition to drawing from numerous humanistic fields, we welcome critical, qualitative work in the social sciences.  Based on anonymous evaluation by an interdisciplinary selection committee, between five and ten papers will be chosen for presentation at the June Workshop.  At the Workshop, two senior scholars will comment on each paper.  Commentators and other Workshop participants will be asked to focus specifically on the strengths and weaknesses of the selected scholarly projects, with respect to subject and methodology. The selected papers will then serve as the basis for a larger conversation among all the participants about the evolving standards by which we judge excellence and creativity in interdisciplinary scholarship, as well as about the nature of interdisciplinarity itself.

Papers must be works-in-progress that do not exceed 15,000 words in length (including footnotes/endnotes); most papers selected for inclusion in recent years have been at least 10,000 words long.  An abstract of no more than 200 words must also be included with the paper submission.  A dissertation chapter may be submitted, but we strongly suggest that it be edited so that it stands alone as a piece of work with its own integrity.  A paper that has been submitted for publication is eligible for selection so long as it will not be in galley proofs or in print at the time of the Workshop.  The selected papers will appear in a special issue of the Legal Scholarship Network; there is no other publication commitment.  The Workshop will pay the domestic travel and hotel expenses of authors whose papers are selected for presentation.  For authors requiring airline travel from outside the United States, the Workshop will cover such travel expenses up to a maximum of $1000.

Submissions (in Word, no pdf files) will be accepted until January 4, 2016, and should be sent by e-mail to:  Center for the Study of Law and Culture, culture@law.columbia.edu.  Please be sure to include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), telephone and e-mail contact information.  

For more information, please send an email inquiry to culture@law.columbia.edu, and, to see selected papers from previous years, go to: http://www.law.columbia.edu/center_program/law_culture/lh_workshop.

Katherine Franke

Sarah Barringer Gordon
Ariela Gross

Naomi Mezey


Paul Saint-Amour

Hilary Schor


Clyde Spillenger
Nomi Stolzenberg

Conveners

To All the Lawyer Poets (and Other Poets Out There)-- Call For Papers: American Poetry Imagines the Law

Via James R. Martel:

CFP for panel: American Poetry Imagines the Law Shelley’s pronouncement in his Defense of Poetry that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” has been cited frequently as an argument for the study of law and literature – either as the study of law’s uses of literary language (law asliterature) or of literature’s engagement of legal issues (law in literature). Studies of law in literature have predominantly focused on prose fiction and, more rarely, on drama. By comparison, poetry’s imaginations of the law have hardly been discussed, and indeed, Richard Posner summarily dismissed poetry as a field of inquiry when he claimed that “[r]elatively few short poems take law as their theme.” Yet when Shelley wrote of “poets,” he had in mind writers of verse.

Taking Shelley as our point of departure for this panel, we explore how American poetry imagines the law in two kinds of poems. We are interested, on the one hand, in poems that engage with and reflect on legal concepts and categories such as justice, punishment, property, or rights and, on the other hand, in poems that address historically specific issues and events, such as legal reform, spectacular trials, or institutions of the law from the law school student to the Supreme Court. The central question that we address in close readings concerns the relationship of the poems’ formal characteristics to the “legislating” power that Shelley attributes to them: Which specific formal strategies do poems employ to imagine and negotiate legal categories, processes and institutions? Which poetic traditions and modes do they engage? And, most importantly, what are the affordances of the poem in imagining the law that cannot be found in prose fiction, drama, or the essay? In particular we are interested in how specific poetic modes (such as satire, didacticism, pastoralism, or sentimentalism) and subgenres (haikus, sonnets, ballads, narrative poems, etc.) have been used to deal with the law.

We invite close readings of poems from the colonial to the contemporary period; authors may include but are not limited to Sherman Alexie, Maya Angelou, John Ashbury, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Cullen Bryant, Averill Curdy, Phoebe Cary, Emily Dickinson, Rita Dove, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Robert Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Marge Piercy, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Simic, Claudia Rankine, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Richard Wright.

Please send your abstract (300 words) and a short CV to Birte Christ and Stefanie Mueller: Birte.Christ@anglistik.uni-giessen.de; s.mueller@uni-frankfurt.de

Making Constitutions

Stephen Gardbaum, University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, has published Revolutionary Constitutionalism as UCLA School of Law Research Paper No. 15-26. Here is the abstract.

One important recent trend in constitution-making around the world has been revolutionary constitutionalism: using the constitution-making process to attempt to institutionalize and bring to a successful conclusion a political revolution. Although a good deal of attention has been paid to the specific revolutions involved, there has been far less on the general phenomenon of revolutionary constitutionalism as such. This article attempts to begin redressing this gap by offering some reflections on the general phenomenon and then employing them to inform an analysis of constitution-making in the revolutionary context. The article makes three main claims. The first is that revolutionary constitutionalism is a useful and illuminating category for the discipline of comparative constitutional law. Empirically, it encompasses a range of situations that implicate constitutionalism in a particular way and raise special challenges. Analytically, it is a distinct concept from the neighboring term "constitutional revolution." Recognizing this permits us to distinguish, for example, the American Revolution from the New Deal constitutional revolution in qualitative terms, as different in kind and not merely degree. The second is that revolutionary constitutionalism contains within itself certain paradoxes and practical problems that have their source in the combination of initial radical transition and subsequent resistance to further radical change that constitutionalization brings. The final claim concerns the role and importance of constitution-making in the revolutionary context. Although relative to a broad array of socio-political variables, this role is generally less central to the ultimate outcomes of revolutionary constitutionalism than constitutional lawyers often think, it can respond to one distinctive challenge: the need to re-establish political authority lost by the old regime. As the comparison between recent experiences in Egypt and Tunisia suggests, constitution-making can make a key contribution here as one source of the legitimacy that the new regime must acquire.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

David Foster Wallace and the Mysterious World of Tax Law

Arthur J. Cockfield, Queen's University Faculty of Law, has published David Foster Wallace on Tax Policy, How to Be an Adult, and Other Mysteries of the Universe at 12 Pittsburgh Tax Review Faculty of Law 89 (2015). Here is the abstract.

As one of the most highly acclaimed fiction writers of his generation, David Foster Wallace had many things to say on a seemingly endless variety of topics. In his last work, the unfinished novel The Pale King, he chose to elaborate on, of all things, tax policy and tax administration. Wallace directed tax topics at one of the novel’s main themes: true adulthood often involves overcoming boredom in the workplace to derive a sense of community and care for others. In a sense, the book serves as a guide on how to become a reasonably happy and fulfilled adult. This Article integrates archival research conducted by the author within the Collected Works of David Foster Wallace at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Ubiquity of Crime in Popular Culture

Rachel M. A. Spencer, University of South Australia School of Law, has published "Crime," in Law and Popular Culture 81 (M De Zwart, B Richards & S Le Mire (eds), Australia, LexisNexis/Butterworths, 2015). Here is the abstract.

Crime pervades every type of modern popular culture: television programs, crime fiction, true crime, crime movies, 'news' in newspapers, television, radio and social media. Crime makes a lot of money for those who report it, write about it, perform it or fictionalise it. This chapter focuses on four main texts and also makes reference to several others which readers are encouraged to explore.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Declining Public Support For Bans On Handguns

Nelson Lund, George Mason School of Law, has published Public Opinion and the Second Amendment at 5 Journal of Law 87 (2015). Here is the abstract.

Gallup polling data going back to 1959 shows a dramatic decline in public support for bans on handguns. This short comment suggests that we may have witnessed an important cultural shift that was driven in part by public policy experiments at the state level. The shift is likely to endure because those experiments proved successful and because of subsequent developments in constitutional law that are consistent with changed public attitudes.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. The essay is also available in volume 4 of the Journal of Legal Metrics (2015).

Whence Cometh the Legal Notion of "The Reasonable Person"?

Another publication from the amazingly productive Simon Stern at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. R. v. Jones (1703): The Origins of the 'Reasonable Person', forthcoming in Ian Williams, Phil Handler, and Henry Mares, eds., Landmark Cases in Criminal Law (Oxford: Hart, 2016).

Although the origins of the “reasonable person” standard are usually traced to the 1837 tort case of Vaughan v. Menlove, eighteenth-century jurisprudence offers various examples of a personified, objective standard. This paper focuses on an early version of this standard, in a 1703 fraud case, R. v. Jones, which uses the “person of an ordinary capacity” to draw the line between civil and criminal liability. The discussion examines how this standard was transformed in the course of the eighteenth century; considers the blend of normative and descriptive features that were already driving the standard at this time; and seeks to explain what is significant about the personified form of the standard, such that it fits some areas of criminal law, such as duress and provocation, better than others, such as fraud. Although fraud would ultimately prove to be an inhospitable area for the use of this standard, R. v. Jones provided a vehicle for its circulation, so that it might eventually take root elsewhere. In the course of the discussion, I show how William Hawkins’s treatise on criminal law reformulated the standard in terms that are far more familiar to modern eyes (“a man of common prudence and caution”), and I discuss some of the early nineteenth-century American jurisprudence, which would have made the application of the standard a question for the jury.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

The History of the North Carolina Eugenics Movement

Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, School of Law, and Elizabeth Lea Troutman (Independent Scholar), have published The Eugenics Movement in North Carolina as UNC Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2650083. Here is the abstract.

“The Eugenics Movement in North Carolina” places North Carolina into the social, political, and legal context of the movement in the United States that resulted in the sterilization of more than thirty thousand people from the 1920s through the 1960s. We sketch the social and political arguments that were mobilized to support sterilization, as well as the arguments judges developed alongside these arguments from the 1910s through the 1930s. State courts slowly accepted sterilization until the United States Supreme Court’s decision in 1927 in Buck v. Bell. Then courts and legislatures around the United States more readily accepted it, even as legal scholars expressed reservations about sterilization. North Carolina was one of those states that embraced sterilization. The machinery of the state went into facilitating sterilization. The Eugenics Board of North Carolina, the state board in charge of reviewing petitions from public health officials for sterilization, produced pre-printed forms to facilitate the approval of sterilization. They presided over the petitions and routinely granted the vast majority of them. The few sterilization orders that were challenged in court were also routinely upheld. For nearly two decades, until the United States’ entrance into World War II, sterilization was broadly accepted by courts. But the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Skinner v. Oklahoma in 1942 began to turn the tide against sterilization, as did unease with a procedure that was reminiscent of what was happening in Germany during the War. Yet, even after Skinner v. Oklahoma and after World War II ended, as the rest of the nation began to abandon sterilization, sterilizations continued in North Carolina. We conclude with a discussion of the recent legislation in North Carolina to provide modest payments to the victims of the state’s sterilization program. In particular we discuss the design of a payment regime and how the legislature can justify payments for this concentrated episode of state infringement on personal liberty. And we suggest that the North Carolina legislation may provide a model for future legislative action aimed at payments for people sterilized involuntarily in other states.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

What's Right With Law Reviews

Cass R. Sunstein, Harvard Law School, is publishing In Praise of Law Reviews (And Jargon-Filled, Academic Writing) in the Michigan Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Many people, including many lawyers and judges, disparage law reviews (and the books that sometimes result from them) on the ground that they often deal with abstruse topics, of little interest to the bar, and are sometimes full of jargon-filled, excessively academic, and sometimes impenetrable writing. Some of the objections are warranted, but at their best, law reviews show a high level of rigor, discipline, and care; they have a kind of internal morality. What might seem to be jargon is often a product of specialization, similar to what is observed in other fields (such as economics, psychology, and philosophy). Much academic writing in law is not intended for the bar, at least not in the short-term, but that is not a problem: Such writing is meant to add to the stock of knowledge. If it succeeds, it can have significant long-term effects, potentially affecting what everyone takes to be “common sense.”

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Historical Arguments and Federal Jurisprudence

Amanda L. Tyler, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, is publishing Assessing the Role of History in the Federal Courts Canon: A Word of Caution in volume 90 of the Notre Dame Law Review (2015). Here is the abstract.

One of the most pervasive and important debates in federal courts jurisprudence is over the role that history should play in interpreting Article III of the United States Constitution. To that end, federal courts jurisprudence is not altogether different from constitutional law jurisprudence more generally. But in the federal courts arena — more so than in the broader domain of constitutional law — originalism has always wielded tremendous influence over much of the judicial and scholarly thinking. It is for this reason that a distinct conversation about its role in the federal courts canon is appropriate. There is little question that in the field of federal courts, historical study has a great deal to contribute to modern debates. Indeed, historical study holds enormous potential to illuminate the founding purpose behind constitutional provisions, to unearth contemporary meanings associated with terms of art that were included in the document, and to uncover important evidence relating to historical practices and context, which in turn can shed light on the background understandings and assumptions that underlie constitutional text. But sometimes — if not often — the historical record on important questions of federal courts jurisprudence is absent, incomplete, or more complex than jurists and scholars tend to acknowledge. In keeping with this idea, one should never forget that certain aspects of the Constitution — including Article III and the structural framework within which it is situated — represented major innovations in their time. At the Founding, the concept of federalism — and with it the idea of two sets of courts, state and federal — was entirely new. Moreover, the separation of powers framework was, at the least, a transformation of the British model, if not a dramatic departure from it. Against this backdrop, it would be curious indeed if the details of the Article III power were fully settled from the outset. More likely, as Madison recognized early on, there would need to be a “liquidat[ion]” of meaning over time. Accordingly, I wish to offer a word of caution about making historical arguments in federal courts jurisprudence. Specifically, in undertaking historical inquiry in the field of federal courts, one must be careful about assigning certain data points from the Founding period determinative weight, rather than treating them as part of a larger conversation about the role of the judicial power in our constitutional framework. This is because in studying the early years following ratification of the Constitution, one tends to find both examples of major principles that remained the subject of disagreement as well as examples of early legislation and practices that today we would reject as plainly inconsistent with the constitutional separation of powers. As historian Jack Rakove has observed, the Founding period documents are the product of collective decisionmaking “whose outcomes necessarily reflected a bewildering array of intentions and expectations, hopes and fears, genuine compromises and agreements to disagree.” In other words, at least to some extent, we must treat the period as a work in progress.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Praise As a Legal Tool To Induce Behavior

Ezra Goldschlager, University of La Verne College of Law, is publishing Praise and the Law in the Creighton Law Review (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

This is the first scholarly examination of praise (messages of approval) as a tool the law can use to affect behavior. As the law increasingly uses positive incentives (as opposed to sanctions), it is important to examine payouts other than financial ones. Financial payouts are ubiquitous, but have significant drawbacks. Financial incentives can decrease actors’ intrinsic motivation to behave how we want them to. Financial incentives have a limited domain; they sometimes seem wholly inappropriate (e.g., in the cases of motivating battlefield heroism or organ donation). Financial incentives can have undesirable wealth effects, affecting behavior less among the wealthy than among others. And, they are expensive, requiring both the payout amount and costly systems to protect against misappropriation. Praise, though today rarely used by the law, does not share these drawbacks. Messages of encouragement and support can increase actors’ intrinsic motivation to behave how we would like. Praise can seem entirely appropriate as a response to behavior where financial incentives do not seem right. Praise may not selectively motivate behavior based on wealth. And, compared to financial incentives, praise is likely to be less costly. Praise also works quite well with the expressive power of law: Praise expresses a meaning compatible with a wide range of visions of a good society, and therefore the public is likely to accept its use. This Article lays the groundwork for a new multi-disciplinary scholarly dialogue on praise and the law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Appropriation of Native American Culture

Angela Riley, University of California, Los Angeles, and Kristen A. Carpenter, University of Colorado Law School, are publishing Owning Red: A Theory of Indian (Cultural) Appropriation in the Texas Law Review (2016). Here is the abstract.

In a number of recent controversies, from sports teams’ use of Indian mascots to the federal government’s desecration of sacred sites, American Indians have lodged charges of “cultural appropriation” or the unauthorized use by members of one group the cultural expressions and resources of another. While these and other incidents are currently in the headlines, American Indians often experience these claims within an historical and continuing experience of dispossession. For hundreds of years, the U.S. legal system has sanctioned the taking and destruction of Indian lands and artifacts, bodies and religions, identities and beliefs, all toward the project of conquest and colonization. Indian resources have been devalued by the law and made available for non-Indians to use of their own purposes. Seeking redresses for the losses caused by these actions, tribes have brought claims under a variety of laws, from trademark and copyright, to the First Amendment and Fifth Amendment, and some have been more successful than others. As a matter of property law, courts have compensated - albeit incompletely - the taking of certain Indian lands and has also come to recognize tribal interests in human remains, gravesites, and associated artifacts. When it comes to intangible property, however, the situation is more complicated. It is difficult for legal decision-makers and scholars alike to understand why Indian tribes should be able to regulate the use of Indian names, symbols, and expressions. Indeed, non-Indians often claim interests, sounding in free speech and the public domain, in the very same resources. To advance understanding of this contested area of law, this Article situates intangible cultural property claims in a larger history of the legal dispossession of Indian property - a phenomenon we call “Indian appropriation.” It then evaluates these claims vis à vis prevailing legal doctrine, and offers a normative view of solutions, both legal and extralegal.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Ethics of TV's "Bad Judge"

Taylor Simpson-Wood, Barry University School of Law, has published The Rise and Fall of Bad Judge: Lady Justice is No Tramp. Here is the abstract.

Much of the fabric of the modern world is woven on the loom of popular culture. While scholars have defined pop culture differently, there is a general consensus as to its strong influence on modern society. As television has become our society's principal means of storytelling, its offerings concerning the world of lawyers have become a staple of the popular culture consumed by Americans. There is a "feedback loop" between law and popular culture which is self-perpetuating: popular culture influences the viewing public's perception of the law, which in turn affects the public's expectations, which are reinforced by the misconduct of actual members of the legal profession, which affects what the networks will portray as popular legal culture. This cause and effect scenario is the result of what might be referred to in dance parlance as the "Popular Legal Culture Two-Step." In light of the self-perpetuating nature of the Popular Legal Culture Two-Step, the burning inquiry must be whether there is any way to interrupt or ameliorate the ramifications of the relationship between law and televised legal popular culture in instances where what is broadcast defaces the law as an honorable profession. The urgency of addressing this query was highlighted with the airing of a new series during the fall of 2014, Bad Judge. Bad Judge serves as a prototype for the type of legal shows which television should not be broadcasting and is a perfect platform on which to illustrate the harm which may result from the cultivation effect. To delve a bit deeper into the underpinnings of the Popular Legal Culture Two-Step put forth in this piece, Part II of the article discusses the "cultivation theory," "heuristic processing", and the cultivation process known as "resonance," the lynchpins for the premise that television viewing does affect the viewer's perception of reality. It also examines the influence of "resonance" in the context of both "syndi-court" shows and actual incidents of judicial misconduct. Part III critiques a number of episodes of Bad Judge and evaluates the actions and conduct of Judge Rebecca Wright in light California's Canons of Judicial Ethics. It also focuses upon a written entreaty to NBC made by the Miami-Dade chapter of the Florida Association for Women Lawyers requesting cancellation of the show. Finally, the article explores possible responses to the demeaning portrayal of the judicial system and female judges and attorneys conveyed in Bad Judge in order to ameliorate the influence of television's cultivation of viewer perceptions of the legal world and to prevent such perceptions from becoming viewer reality.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A Look at Latinos In Film, On TV, and In Music

Michael Olivas, University of Houston Law Center, on Latino/Latina film history and culture: New Insights Into Latino Film History--and the Future.

Call For Applications: Law Center Dean, LSU

From Louisiana State University: Call for Applications

LAW CENTER DEAN Paul M. Hebert Law Center Louisiana State University Louisiana State University (LSU) invites nominations and applications for the position of Dean of the Paul M. Hebert Law Center. The Dean provides administrative oversight for all aspects of academic life within the center, including strategic planning, fiscal management, personnel development, academic programs, research enterprises and student enrollment. The Dean also has primary responsibilities for external initiatives that include community outreach and development. The Dean will report to the Executive Vice President and Provost and serve as the chief academic and administrative officer for the Paul M. Hebert Law Center.

About the Law Center: From its founding in 1906, the Law Center has offered its students a legal education recognized for its high standards of academic excellence, an outstanding teaching and research facility, and integrated programs in Louisiana civil law and Anglo-American common law. All LSU Law graduates receive a Juris Doctor, and students may also earn the optional Graduate Diploma in Comparative Law in recognition of extensive, optional coursework in the civil law. In 2012, the LSU Law Center received formal approval from the Louisiana Board of Regents and the LSU Board of Supervisors to establish an Energy Law Center, the first such center in Louisiana and one of a handful operating in law schools nationwide. The Law Center has 42 full-time faculty members. The Law Center is a successful path to practice with a 2014-15 bar pass rate for first time takers in Louisiana at 81%, 114% of the state’s bar passage rate; a graduation rate of 89%; and 94% of graduates from the class of 2014 were employed within ten months of graduation.

About LSU: LSU is Louisiana's flagship public research university and one of America's premier institutions. The main campus occupies 2,000 acres in a culturally rich and distinctive region, bordering the Mississippi River in the state capital, Baton Rouge, 80 miles from New Orleans. LSU's academic programs include undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees. The University brings in more than $150 million annually in outside research grants and contracts, a significant factor for the Louisiana economy. Minimum Requirements: Earned J.D. or its equivalent from an accredited institution. Possession of academic qualifications required to be tenured as a full Professor of Law.

How to Apply: Further information about the position and LSU may be found on the search website, www.lsu.edu/lcdeansearch. Letters of nomination may be e-mailed to the search committee chair, Jane Cassidy, Senior Vice Provost at jcassidy@lsu.edu.

Applications will be accepted online on the LSU Careers website https://lsusystemcareers.lsu.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=59770. Review of applications has been revised to begin October 15, 2015 and continue until the position is filled. No telephone inquiries please. Salary will be competitive and commensurate with qualifications. An offer of employment is contingent on a satisfactory pre-employment background check.

LSU IS COMMITTED TO DIVERSITY AND IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY/EQUAL ACCESS EMPLOYER

The Ratification of the Constitution and Original Intent

Jack M. Balkin, Yale University Law School, is publishing The Construction of Original Public Meaning in Constitutional Commentary (2016). Here is the abstract.

Christina Mulligan, Michael Douma, Hans Lind and Brian Quinn have recently shown that during the ratification of the Constitution in 1787-1788, German and Dutch translations of the Constitution were distributed to non-English speakers in the crucial states of Pennsylvania and New York. These translations differ from the English text in interesting and important ways. As a result, English speakers may have understood the proposed Constitution in one way, while non-English speakers may have understood it quite differently. This essay uses this example to show why original public meaning is not a set of facts that lawyers simply discover and report. Rather, it is a theoretical construction that lawyers fashion in order to do the work of constitutional interpretation. There is no single way to construct original public meaning from the materials of the past. What we do construct depends in part on what we think constitutions are for and how they are supposed to work. It also depends on the practical needs of lawyers in search of a distinctively legal meaning that they can employ in legal argument. Accounts of original public meaning bring some parts of the past forward and leave others behind; they view the past through the lens of theoretical and practical commitments. This would be true even if there had been only one version of the Constitution distributed in English in 1787-1788, because there are likely to be multiple understandings of the meaning of even a single text among the ratifying public. If our account of original public meaning is at all sensitive to the actual understandings of actual people living at the time of adoption, it will pick up these disagreements, and it will have to decide what to do with them. Perhaps the best way to deal with this problem is to choose a version of original public meaning that is the least sensitive to these differences in understanding, and that focuses as much as possible on areas of likely and overwhelming agreement. This approach won’t solve all problems, as Mulligan and her colleagues demonstrate. But it will create fewer difficulties than other approaches to original public meaning. Accordingly, the second part of the essay defends a relatively “thin” theory of original public meaning — essentially confined to the original semantic meaning of the words, taking into account any generally recognized terms of art, and any background context necessary to understand the text. First, a thin theory of original meaning is most consistent with how written constitutions operate and what they are for; I call this a “framework” model of constitutions, as opposed to a “skyscraper” model. Second, because it focuses on areas of likely agreement, a thin theory is best equipped to deal with inevitable differences of understanding and belief among the ratifying public. Third, a thin theory features a division of labor between interpretation (which focuses on original public meaning) and constitutional construction, which deals with questions that cannot be decided by original meaning alone. Because constitutional construction treats history as a resource, not as a command, it is better able to deal with disagreements among the ratifying public, as well as the recurrent problem of translating the ratifying public’s concerns in their time to our concerns in our own. Although it excludes a significant amount of history from the narrower task of interpretation, the thin theory makes far more history available for the important task of constitutional construction.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Treatment of Muslims in Society

Isam M. Shihada, Al Aqsa University, is publishing The Backlash of 9/11 on Muslims in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist in the International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies, volume 2. Here is the abstract.

This paper examines how Muslims are harshly treated after the backlash of 9/11 in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist and how they become victims and legitimate targets of hate crimes, negative media stereotypes, physical beatings, disappearance, racial profiling, interrogations at American airports, and detentions in secret places. It addresses how such treatment sheds light on the questions of Muslim integration in the American society, citizenship, multiculturalism, identity, and alienation, belonging, and national affiliation. It also disrupts the dominant American official discourse, which links Islam with terror and portrays Muslims as potential terrorists and a threat to America and values of Western civilization. I also argue that Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers a counter literary response not only to the American public rhetoric but also to the dominant literary discourses that prevailed after 9/11, inflamed the American sentiments, and consolidated stereotypes against Islam and Muslims. The study concludes that Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist renders a stark warning message, through its character (Changez) that the harsh treatment of Muslims, American domineering policies, and the blind War on Terror will force many ordinary Muslims to relinquish the American Dream, like Changez, and turn into radicals. The study also reveals that the American reaction toward Muslims after the tragic attacks on 9/11 have been blind, indiscriminate, and disproportionate to such an extent that the very concept of multiculturalism on which the American society is based is threatened. The American society will be prone to internal fissures and disintegration if they fail to accept the “Other” and fail to stop blaming all Muslims for few isolated tragic incidents that they are not actually responsible for. Finally, the research concludes that the mistreatment of Muslims, promotion of Islamophobia, and the War on Terror that followed 9/11 may lead to the exclusion and alienation of Muslims in America, disintegration of the American multicultural society, and the rise of Islamic radical groups such as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Supreme Court Justices and Literature

Scott Dodson and Amy A. Dodson, both of the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, have published Literary Justice at 18 Green Bag 2d 429 (2015). Here is the abstract.

This microsymposium essay empirically (and somewhat humorously) measures which current U.S. Supreme Court justice is the most literate, as determined by citations to great works of literary fiction. It further identifies the justices' favorite literary authors. Consistent with the mission of the Green Bag, the essay is meant to be lighthearted and entertaining, but it also recognizes the underlying importance of the intersection of legal opinion-writing and literary fiction.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Legal History and Rules of Succession In "Game of Thrones"

Jaakko Husa, University of Lapland Faculty of Law, has published Exploring Imaginative Legal History: The Legalism of the House Stark in the Game of Thrones at 20 Media & Arts Law Review 181 (2015). Here is the abstract.

This article examines George R R Martin’s imaginative historical narrative in his book series A Song of Ice and Fire. The first book of the series (A Game of Thrones) is highlighted and discussed from the points of view of legal history and applied legal theory. The article concentrates on the legal mentality of one of the noble Houses in A Game of Thrones and discusses Martin’s rich narrative in its relation to the real feudal legal history and jurisprudential frameworks it displays. Analysis focuses on the rules of succession. It will be argued that even though the House Stark’s attitude and mentality can be labelled as legalistic and surprisingly modern it can be seen as a natural part of the imaginative feudal world of A Game of Thrones. The article concludes that, by studying the legalistic attitude and mentality of the House Stark, we can also learn about the legal theoretical nature of modern legalism. Paradoxically, it is also suggested that the study of imaginative legal history deepens our understanding of ‘real’ legal history. Moreover, the author argues that analysis of imaginative legal history expands our legal mind and immerses us in alternative horizons of law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

ACS Second Annual Constitutional Law Scholars Forum, Barry University School of Law Call For Papers

From Barry University School of Law:

CALL FOR PAPERS

ACS Second Annual Constitutional Law Scholars Forum  FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 2016, Orlando, FL

The student chapter of the American Constitution Society at Barry University School of Law is hosting the Second Annual Constitutional Law Scholars Forum at the Dwayne O. Andreas School of Law Campus, 6441 East Colonial Drive, Orlando, FL 32807.

The Constitutional Law Scholars Forum invites scholarly proposals on constitutional law at any stage of pre-publication development, from the germination of an idea to the editing stage. The Forum provides an opportunity for scholars and educators to vet their work-in-progress in a welcoming, supportive environment. (The Forum is not accepting proposals from students at this time.) The deadline to submit proposals is December 1, 2015.

Barry University School of Law is located within close proximity to recreational activities: Universal Studios, Disney World, Epcot Center, Sea World, world class golf courses, and beaches. Orlando offers an average temperature of 78°F in March/April.

There are no conference fees, but participants are expected to pay their own travel expenses.

Abstract Submissions:

Email proposals to  both Ms. Fran Ruhl, Faculty Assistant, at fruhl@barry.edu, and to Professor Eang Ngov, engov@barry.edu, with “Constitutional Law Scholars Forum” in the subject line.  Submissions should include a short abstract (300 words maximum) and biography (150 words maximum).

Conference Organizer:

Professor Eang Ngov, engov@barry.edu>, office (321) 206 -5677, cell phone (571) 643-2691