Call For Papers: Metaphor in Language and Argumentation

New: Call for Papers: Metaphor in Language and Argumentation 


Call for papers - Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio
www.rifl.unical.it

Vol. 10, N. 2/2016: Metaphor in Language and Argumentation
Edited by Elisabetta Gola & Francesca Ervas

Deadline: 20.06.2016




In classical argumentation theory, metaphors usually lead to fallacies of reasoning: metaphors are indeed governed by heuristic rules that never guarantee the preservation of truth (Tindale 2006; Fischer 2014, 2015). However, in recent decades, the frameworks of cognitive linguistics and embodied cognition have strongly influenced the concept of language and reasoning, which are no longer conceived as the processing of logic-formal systems (Kahnemann 2003, Evans & Frankish 2009). Moreover, varied disciplines have demonstrated the productive use of metaphors in reasoning: physics (Hesse 1996), biology (Keller 1995), psychology (Gentner & Grudin 1985), etc. Metaphors are highly creative and might have a positive role in reasoning, as the history of science testifies. Metaphor is indeed based on a cross-domain mechanism of projection (mapping), which preserves relations from a source to a target domain, thus favouring analogical reasoning (Black 1962, Lakoff & Johnson 1980).
What still needs to be clarified, however, is how metaphors influence argumentation. As metaphors might require imagination as their own main source of understanding, they have been considered as too subjective and emotionally-driven, to be investigated under the lenses of argumentation theory. It has been supposed that the intuitive nature of metaphors clashes with the reflective nature of argumentation. However, they are not necessarily antithetical and, in case of live metaphors, imagination might deeply influence the intuitions of truth in argumentation (Carston 2002, 2010). In this perspective, metaphors could elicit a more creative and productive argumentation style. Under this respect, metaphor should not be interpreted as a trap leading to fallacies, but as a helpful means for creative thinking (Blackburn 1984).
Contributions are welcome aiming to focus on the nature of the link between metaphor, language and argumentation, and to address questions such as the following:
-          To what extent does the view of argumentation change as a consequence of the centrality of metaphor in language?
-          What is the relation between metaphor and argumentation?
-          What is the relation between live metaphors, imagination and argumentation?
-          How do metaphors work in different research areas?
-          What is the relationship between metaphor and truth, especially in argumentation?
-          What is the current status of the compositional approaches to metaphor meaning?
-          What is the perceptual grounding of metaphors?
-          Do metaphors elicit creative and productive thinking?
-          What is the relationship between metaphor and analogy?
Manuscripts should have a theoretical focus. Papers from the following areas are accepted: philosophy of language, linguistics, semiotics, history of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.
Submissions may be in English, French, Italian and Spanish. All submissions must be prepared for blind review. The author’s name, the institutional affiliation and the title’s paper must be placed in a separate file.  Papers must be sent as Microsoft Word file (.doc or .rtf) to: segreteria.rifl@gmail.com

Instructions for authors:
Max length:
40000 characters (including spaces) for articles (including the references) and reviews;
20000 characters (including spaces) for interviews;
10000 characters (including spaces) for specific paper review.
Submission deadline: June 20, 2016
Notification of acceptance: July, 2016
Issue publication: December 2016

Stone and Arcioni on Australian Constitutional Culture and the Social Role of the Constitution

Adrienne Stone, Melbourne Law School, and Elisa Arcioni, University of Sydney Faculty of Law, have published Australian Constitutional Culture and the Social Role of the Constitution as Sydney Law School Research Paper No. 16/01. Here is the abstract.

This article, a contribution to a Symposium on Australasian Constitutionalism, addresses the disinclination of Australians to treat their Constitution as a source of shared values or aspirations. In this article the authors argue that there is, nonetheless, a meaningful way that the Australian Constitution articulates the values of the Australian people. Moreover, it is argued that recent movements for constitutional reform suggest a shift in Australian constitutional culture towards an acceptance that the Constitution does and should define the values of the Australian people.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call for Papers, 2016 Law & Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop

Call For Papers 2016: One day left for submissions to the 2016 Law & Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop

PLEASE NOTE:  THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO JANUARY 15, 2016 FOR SUBMISSIONS TO THE 2016 JUNIOR SCHOLARS WORKSHOP, DESCRIBED IN THE FOLLOWING ANNOUCEMENT.

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, Georgetown University Law School, and Stanford 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 15, 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 contact Elizabeth Boylan at 212-854-0167 or at 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

Norman Spaulding
Clyde Spillenger
Nomi Stolzenberg

Conveners

Faraguna on Regulating Religion in Italy

Pietro Faraguna, University of Ferrara Faculty of Law, has published Regulating Religion in Italy: The Constitution Does (Not) Matter. Here is the abstract.

Regulating religion in Italy has always been a crucial issue, starting from the outset of the national history. It is not necessary to have a deep knowledge of the history of the Italian state to be aware of this exceptionalism: geography is telling enough. The Italian state – a relatively weak state that always had to deal with a strong religion – is the only example of a state that contains another independent ecclesiastical (or sacerdotal-monarchical) state entity in the middle of its territory. In this paper, I focus on a specific aspect of this “constitutional” exceptionalism. I particularly focus on state-Church relations and on the peculiar implementation of the “idea of secularism” in Italy. The paper shows that the constitutional regulation of religion does not tell so much about the regulation of religion in the Italian constitutional experience. This is not due to a lack of constitutional provisions regulating religion and religious freedom. On the contrary, both the pre-republican constitutional charter and the republican Constitution accorded a very prominent role to the regulation of the religious phenomenon. Nonetheless, I will show that an investigation of the “living constitution” reveals that constitutional provisions have been implemented in diverging directions throughout the history of Italian secularism. To this end, in this paper I firstly provide an outline of the formal constitutional provisions of the 1848 Constitution followed by a brief overview of legislative and jurisdictional developments of the 19th and of the first half of the 20th century. Secondly, I address the constitutional provisions adopted in 1947, focusing on the constitutional “compromise” reached by the Constituent Assembly. Thirdly, I investigate briefly how the actors under the living constitution (the legislator, the government, common judges and the constitutional court in particular) tried to balance and develop the potentially conflicting principles included in the 1947 Constitution in the field of religious freedom, equality and state-Church relations. In particular, I focus on three particularly controversial examples: the teaching of religion in state schools; the display of the crucifix in classrooms and mechanisms for state funding of religious denominations. Finally, I argue that insofar as the regulation of religion in Italy is concerned, the actual shift in paradigm did not occur within the formal Constitution, but rather in the living Constitution.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Barzun on Jerome Frank, Lon Fuller, and Romantic Pragmatism

Charles L. Barzun, University of Virginia School of Law, has published Jerome Frank, Lon Fuller, and a Romantic Pragmatism as Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 6. Here is the abstract.

Jerome Frank and Lon Fuller are not frequently classed together in discussions of twentieth-century legal thought. Although they both wrote extensively about the nature of law and adjudication over roughly the same period of time (1930s-1950s), they are typically characterized as standing on opposite sides of the issues that matter most in legal theory. Frank is these days seen as an “extreme” realist, who thought judges decided cases on the basis of irrational biases, while Fuller is best known for being a critic of realism, a defender of natural law, and an influential member of the Legal Process school of legal thought, which is itself seen as a response to precisely those excesses of realism that Frank is said to epitomize. In this essay, I argue that when we place these two thinkers on opposite sides of the traditional lines drawn in legal theory – between realism and process theory, natural law and positivism, instrumentalism and formalism – we miss something important, and importantly similar, in their views about law, adjudication, and human knowledge. In particular, both thinkers maintained (1) that the human self was constituted by a mix of impulses, intuitions, emotions, motives and purposes, only some of which are conscious but all of which shape how the mind perceives the external world; (2) that such motives in judges are activated by the facts of particular cases in a way that can, at least sometimes, serve as the basis for just decisionmaking; and, finally, (3) that the first two observations provide a foundation for legal knowledge of the sort judges properly rely on when deciding cases. I conclude by suggesting that we might think of these common themes as reflecting a “romantic” strain of legal and philosophical pragmatism.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Schneiderman on Multiculturalism in Canadian Constitutional Culture

David Schneiderman, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published Multiculturalism in Canadian Constitutional Culture: Domesticating Difference. Here is the abstract.

If neither magic nor gods govern the public sphere, how should disagreement over fundamental values be mediated in secular states? Canada often is touted as a model for others to emulate in solving the problem of living together in divided societies, partly by reason of its policy on multiculturalism. This paper is a reflection on the origins and limits of this element of Canadian constitutional culture. Though Canadian constitutional culture accommodates difference rather well, it has discernible limits. By relying principally on liberal rights like freedom of religion, the Canadian model aims to domesticate difference. Multiculturalism, this paper argues, poses no real threat to dominant cultural values. Its aim, instead, is to tame and assimilate difference, a policy traceable to Canada’s origins in the eighteenth century.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Hallevy on Criminalization of Oppresion Against Women in the Name of Culture

Gabriel Hallevy, Ono Academic College, Faculty of Law, has published Culture Offenses Instead of Cultural Defense – Criminalization of Oppression Against Women in the Name of Culture. Here is the abstract.

About five thousand women are murdered by their families each year in the name of family honor. These crimes are committed in both advanced western countries and countries of origin. Honor killings are not the only offenses committed against women in the name of culture. When the perpetrators are charged in court, they frequently claim the “ignorance of law” defense, since they have been behaving that way for generations, and why would the legal situation be different in their new homeland. In most cases, this claim is rejected, but it is used to mitigate punishments down to ridiculous sentences. Most western countries share this problem. This chapter argues that the mistake of law defense is irrelevant in relation to culture-based crimes against women.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Kreitner, Rosenberg, and Tomlins on Arts and the Aesthetic in Legal History

Roy Kreitner, Tel Aviv University, Anat Rosenberg, Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliyah-Radzyner School of Law, and Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, have published Arts and the Aesthetic in Legal History at 2 Critical Analysis of Law 314 (2015). Here is the abstract.

This special issue of Critical Analysis of Law brings together a rich array of articles at the intersections of arts and legal history. In this introduction we reflect on some of the benefits and implications of this interdisciplinary juncture, which contemporary legal historians have been slow to engage. We highlight the significance of engaging with the arts for theoretical conundrums central to legal history: art as source, the philosophy of time, methodological scripts, and the relation of the descriptive to the normative. The arts, we argue, prove vital in tackling and breaching the limits of imagination imposed by our time and place — disciplinary place included.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Jean D'Aspremont On Methodological Choice in International Law

Jean D'Aspremont, University of Manchester School of Law and University of Amsterdam, has published Methodology as a chapter in his book Epistemic Forces in International Law: Foundational Doctrines and Techniques of International Legal Argumentation 177(Edward Elgar, 2015). Here is the abstract.

This paper constitutes a chapter of the author's monograph entitled 'Epistemic Forces in International Law' (Edward Elgar 2015). After formulating some general considerations on the relationship between theory and methodology, it builds on the idea that methodological choices are most conducive to the persuasiveness of legal arguments and explores the social constraints on methodological choices in international law (I). The paper then turns more specifically to international law and offers a handful of critical observations on methodological debates in contemporary international legal studies (II). In doing so, it revisits some of the methodological postures revered and venerated by international lawyers today: induction, the idea of system, the so-called turn to empiricism, interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, the abiding (need for) methodological revolution, pluralism and methodological perspectivism. It ends with a few observations on deconstruction, structuralism and the critical attitude in international legal studies.

Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.




More information here from the publisher's website.

Bond and Greenleaf on Copyright Duration in Australian Law, 1869 to 2014

Catherine Bond, University of New South Wales, and Graham Greenleaf, University of New South Wales, Faculty of Law, have published Copyright Duration in Australia: 1869 to 2014 at 25 Australian Intellectual Property Journal 155 (2015). Here is the abstract.

One of the most significant features of any copyright statute is the duration of the rights granted to works and subject matter other than works pursuant to that law. The most "appropriate" length of copyright also continues to be a recurring theme in legislative, policy and academic debates. However, despite both the significance of and interest in the term of copyright, there has been little empirical evidence presented on how long, in light of both statutory term and life expectancies, copyright will likely protect a work. This article provides a historical account of both the duration of copyright and its various extensions, from the introduction of the first colonial copyright statute through to today. It reveals that, while multiple legislative extensions have lengthened the term of protection, continual increases in life expectancies have also added to the duration of copyright, to the point where, today, copyright will likely protect a work for well over 100 years. The paper concludes that it is worth questioning whether IP terms are out of alignment when one form of creation – patents – only warrants a 20 year period of protection whereas another – copyright – garners 120 years. The haphazard legislature approach to copyright terms identified in this article needs to cease, and a more considered approach taken. It feels akin to science fiction that, today, copyright in a work created by a 35 year old today will generally not expire until well after the deaths of a generation that is yet to be born, and extend for more than a century. Furthermore, given the current creations found to be "literary works", this would apply to, for example, a computer program, the practical utility of which will cease over a century before its copyright expires, and where its literary or artistic appeal never existed.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A New Book on Graffiti and Street Art, Edited by Jeffrey Ian Ross, Available From Routledge

Available this month from Routledge: Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art (Jeffrey Ian Ross, ed., 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

The Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art integrates and reviews current scholarship in the field of graffiti and street art. Thirty-seven original contributions are organized around four sections: History, Types, and Writers/Artists of Graffiti and Street Art; Theoretical Explanations of Graffiti and Street Art/Causes of Graffiti and Street Art; Regional/Municipal Variations/Differences of Graffiti and Street Art; and, Effects of Graffiti and Street Art. Chapters are written by experts from different countries throughout the world and their expertise spans the fields of American Studies, Art Theory, Criminology, Criminal justice, Ethnography, Photography, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Visual Communication. The Handbook will be of interest to researchers, instructors, advanced students, libraries, and art gallery and museum curators. This book is also accessible to practitioners and policy makers in the fields of criminal justice, law enforcement, art history, museum studies, tourism studies, and urban studies as well as members of the news media. The Handbook includes 70 images, a glossary, a chronology, and the electronic edition will be widely hyperlinked.

David Bowie and Law

From LegalITInsider:

While David Bowie was still David Jones, he had a day job at Legastat (litigation support) (in London, near Lincoln's Inn). Oh, yes. Pix and more info here.

Earthlings
I don't want knowledge
I want certainty
I don't want knowledge
I want certainty

-- David Bowie and Reeves Gabrels

Call For Papers: Graphic Justice, SLSA 2016

Via the wonderful blog Graphic Justice:

Call for papers: Graphic Justice Theme for SLSA 2016

Graphic Justice

Convenor: Thomas Giddens

This stream invites submissions exploring the crossover between law and justice and comics of all kinds. A growing area of research, comics and graphic fiction are of huge significance to law, justice and legal studies. On the level of production, comics are a complex art-form, with multiple creators working in individual, group, commercial and industrial contexts, raising questions of ownership and exploitation. On the level of culture, comics are historically embroiled in debates of free speech whilst today inspire countless pop culture adaptations to television and cinema, and can be seen to reflect and shape popular visions of justice, morality and law. On the level of content, from mainstream superhero narratives tackling overt issues of justice, governance and authority, to countless themes related to morality, justice and humanity in stories beyond the mainstream, comics are replete with legal material. On the level of form, the comics medium’s unique and restless blending of different media and types of representation (text, image, visuality, aesthetics, inter alia) radically opens up discourse beyond the confines of the word, enabling greater critical engagement amidst our increasingly visual age. In short, comics bring rich cultural, practical and aesthetic contexts and mediations to long-standing and emerging legal problems and settings.

Broad questions framing this ‘graphic justice’ intersection might include: What are the relationships between comics and law—culturally, socially, theoretically, jurisprudentially...? How can we use comics in law—in practice, education, theory, research...? Can we consider comics as an object of legal regulation in their own right—raising issues of definition, ownership, consumption, value...? The crossover between law and comics is an expansive and open one. The examples above are merely indicative of possible issues and questions; submissions are welcome for papers that traverse any potential intersection between law and comics—both broadly defined.

Abstracts may only be submitted via the Easy Chair Platform. They must be no longer than 300 words and should include your title, name and institutional affiliation and your email address for correspondence.

The deadline for submissions is Monday 18th January 2016.

Rossi on Insurance in Elizabethan England: A New Book from Cambridge University Press

Guido Rossi, University of Edinburgh, is publishing Insurance in Elizabethan England: The London Code (Cambridge University Press, 2016)(Cambridge Studies in English Legal History). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

English insurance came into being almost entirely during the Elizabethan period. However, the Great Fire of 1666 consumed most of London's mercantile document, and therefore little is known about early English insurance. Using new archival material, this study provides the first in-depth analysis of early English insurance. It focuses on a crucial yet little-known text, the London Insurance Code of the early 1580s, and shows how London insurance customs were first imported from Italy, then influenced by the Dutch, and finally shaped in a systematic fashion in that Insurance Code. The London Insurance Code was in turn heavily influenced by coeval continental codes. This deep influence attests the strong links between English and European insurance, and questions the common/civil law divide on the history of commercial law. In-depth research of early English insurance fills a significant gap in our understanding of the formation and development of insurance in England. Provides a meticulous analysis of the London Insurance Code of the late sixteenth century, and its continental origins. Comparative overview of early modern insurance highlights the deep links between England and the Continent on insurance.

Faulkner on Law and Authority in the Early Middle Ages: A New Book From Cambridge University Press

Forthcoming: Thomas Faulkner, Law and Authority in the Early Middle Ages: The Frankish leges in the Carolingian Period (Cambridge University Press, 2016) (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series). 

The barbarian law codes, compiled between the sixth and eighth centuries, were copied remarkably frequently in the Carolingian ninth century. They provide crucial evidence for early medieval society, including the settlement of disputes, the nature of political authority, literacy, and the construction of ethnic identities. Yet it has proved extremely difficult to establish why the codes were copied in the ninth century, how they were read, and how their rich evidence should be used. Thomas Faulkner tackles these questions more systematically than ever before, proposing new understandings of the relationship between the making of law and royal power, and the reading of law and the maintenance of ethnic identities. Faulkner suggests major reinterpretations of central texts, including the Carolingian law codes, the capitularies adding to the laws, and Carolingian revisions of earlier barbarian and Roman laws. He also provides detailed analysis of legal manuscripts, especially those associated with the leges-scriptorium. Examines the uses of the leges barbarorum in Carolingian Europe, contributing to a long-standing debate in English and German historiography on the use of written law codes in early medieval Europe. Contributes to the study of early medieval kingship, dispute settlement, ethnic identity and literacy Brings German scholarship to the attention of English speakers, providing Anglophone readers with a guide to otherwise inaccessible work.

More about the publication at the publisher's website here.

Gies On Media Images of Human Rights

Lieve Gies, University of Leicester, has published Mediating Human Rights: Media, Culture and Human Rights Law (Routledge, 2015). Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

Drawing on social-legal, cultural and media theory, this book is one of the first to examine the media politics of human rights. It examines how the media construct the story of human rights, investigating what lies behind the apparent media hostility to human rights and what has become of the original ambition to establish a human rights culture. The human rights regime has been high on the political agenda ever since the Human Rights Act 1998 was enacted. Often maligned in sections of the press, the legislation has entered popular folklore as shorthand for an overbearing government, an overzealous judiciary and exploitative claimants. This book examines a range of significant factors in the mediation of human rights, including: Euroscepticism, the war on terror, the digital reordering of the media landscape, , press concerns about an emerging privacy law and civil liberties. Mediating Human Rights is a timely exploration of the relationship between law, politics and media. It will be of immense interest to those studying and researching across Law, Media Studies, Human Rights, and Politics.

More information about the book here from the publisher's website.

New from Routledge: Cultural Studies and the "Juridical Turn": Culture, Law, and Legitimacy in the Era of Neoliberal Capitalism

Forthcoming from Routledge in March 2016: Cultural Studies and the 'Juridical Turn': Culture, Law, and Legitimacy in the Era of Neoliberal Capitalism (Jaafar Aksikas and Sean Johnson Andrews, eds.). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

The relationship between culture and the law has become an emergent concern within contemporary Cultural Studies as a field, but the recent focus has been largely limited to the role played by cultural representations and identity politics in the legitimation of legal discourse and policies. While continuing this emphasis, this collection also looks at the law itself as a cultural production, tracing some of the specific contours of its function in the last three decades. It argues that, with the onset of neoliberal or late capitalism, the law has taken on a new specificity and power, leading to what we are calling the ‘juridical turn’, where the presumed legitimacy of the law makes other forms of hegemonic struggle secondary. The collection not only charts the law and cultural policy as they exert their powerful—if often overlooked—influence on every aspect of society and culture, but it also seeks to define this important field of study and demonstrate the substantial role law plays in the production of our social and cultural worlds. In this trailblazing collection of contributions by leading and emerging figures in the field of cultural legal studies, chapters examine various ways in which this process is manifested, such as U.S. legislation and Supreme Court Decisions on gay marriage, immigration, consumer finance, welfare, copyright, and so-called victim’s rights, along with international comparisons from Europe and Latin America. It promises to be a pathbreaking analysis of our juridically-determined conjuncture. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

More here from the website.

Cusack on the "F Word" in Pedagogy and Higher Learning

Carmen M. Cusack, Nova Southeastern University, is publishing Use of the Word 'Fuck' in Pedagogy and Higher Learning in volume 8 of the Journal of Law & Social Deviance (2014). Here is the abstract.

George Carlin famously stated that “fuck” is “perhaps one of the most interesting words in the English language today. In English, ‘fuck’ falls into many grammatical categories. With all these multipurpose applications, how can anyone be offended when you use the word?” Discussing “fuck” as a fascinating component of grammar certainly makes the word “fuck” seem like it belongs in academia. This Article endeavors to analyze students’ complex opinions about use of the word “fuck” in American pedagogy and higher learning. Section II analyzes First Amendment case law and use of the word in educational and societal contexts. Section III discusses some Sociology students’ opinions about the use of the word “fuck” in pedagogy and higher learning. Their perspectives about the use of the word include positive, negative, and neutral feelings and perceptions. Ultimately, students felt positively about the use of the word, in general, and felt that free speech protected its use at their public university. However, many students cautioned that context was important to maintaining a safe learning environment, avoiding offense, and appropriately expressing ideas. They also suggested several contexts in which use of the word “fuck” would be inappropriate. Section IV discusses how students’ opinions may be relevant to educators’ decision to include the word “fuck” in pedagogy, and also considers legal and social standards that limit such speech. Students’ opinions about propriety may be important for understanding Constitutional jurisprudence and speech limits in pedagogy because limits on speech are often defined by the words’ offensiveness.

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

Albert on the Progressive Era of Constitutional Amendment

Richard Albert, Boston College Law School and Yale University Law School, is publishing The Progressive Era of Constitutional Amendment in Eficiência e Ética na Administração Pública (Luiz Alberto Blanchet et al. eds., 2015). Here is the abstract.

As hard as it is today to amend the United States Constitution — and empirical studies confirm that it is one of the hardest democratic constitutions to amend, if not the hardest, in the entire world — the United States Constitution was once thought too easy to amend. During the Progressive Era, a period of social activism and institutional reform from the 1890s through the 1920s, the United States adopted four constitutional amendments in a short span of roughly 10 years: the Sixteenth Amendment, authorizing a direct income tax; the Seventeenth Amendment, establishing direct elections to the United States Senate; the Eighteenth Amendment, imposing prohibition; and the Nineteenth Amendment, constitutionalizing women’s suffrage. In this Essay prepared for a conference on corruption and institutional design in comparative perspective, I explore the impetus for the Seventeenth Amendment, which was in large measure driven by an effort to curb corruption in senatorial elections. Today, roughly one hundred years since the entrenchment of the Seventeenth Amendment, there appears to be some support to repeal it. The challenge, however, is that it is much harder today than before to formally amend the Constitution.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Harper Lee Prize For Legal Fiction Competition 2016 Opens

The University of Alabama Law School announces this year's competition for the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. More here at the website. Deborah Johnson won last year for The Secret of Magic (Random House/Penguin).

Sneddon on Gender Bias in the Language of Wills

Karen J. Sneddon, Mercer Law School, is publishing Not Your Mother's Will: Gender, Language, and Wills, in volume 98 of the Marquette Law Review (Summer 2015). Here is the abstract.

“Boys will be boys, but girls must be young ladies” is an echoing patriarchal refrain from the past. Formal equality has not produced equality in all areas, as demonstrated by the continuing wage gap. Gender bias lingers and can be identified in language. This Article focuses on Wills, one of the oldest forms of legal documents, to explore the intersection of gender and language. With conceptual antecedents in pre-history, written Wills found in Ancient Egyptian tombs embody the core characteristics of modern Wills. The past endows the drafting and implementation of Wills with a wealth of traditions and experiences. The past, however, also entombs patriarchal notions inappropriate in Wills of today. This article explores the language of the Will to parse the historical choices that remain relevant choices for today and the vestiges of a patriarchal past that should be avoided.

. Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Jackson on Law and Narrative in the Book of Ruth

Bernard Jackson, University of Manchester, has published Law and Narrative in the Book of Ruth: A Syntagmatic Reading. Here is the abstract.

It is important to follow the plot line of the Book of Ruth, paying attention to who knows what when — both the characters in the story and its (ancient and modern) audiences. This is the syntagmatic dimension of the text, which should be viewed independently of its possible interpretation in terms of its possible intertextual references (which may not have been available to its ancient audiences). The article focuses on the developing issue of the fate of Elimelekh's original land, and its relationship to the marital history of his surviving family, and concludes with a new analysis of the legal dénouement in ch.4, which at last reveals what had happened to Elimelekh's land. The ultimate resolution does not accord with Pentateuchal legal norms, but also suggests that the pragmatics of the text (the author's purpose) may have been related to landholding disputes between "returnees" from the Babylonian exile, and "remainees" in ("exilic") Judah.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Cover on How Americans See and Believe in the Constitution

Aliza Cover, University of Idaho College of Law, is publishing Archetypes of Faith: How Americans See, and Believe in, Their Constitution in volume 26 of the Stanford Law & Policy Review (2015). Here is the abstract.

In this Article, I offer a new framework to illuminate how American faith in the Constitution is sustained over time. I build upon the evocative Passover story of the Four Sons — one of whom is wise, one wicked, one simple, and one who does not know how to ask — and argue that these archetypes resonate deeply in the constitutional context. I identify the “wise sons” of the American constitutional community — the legal elites who maintain the vitality of the constitutional faith through a fastidious, intergenerational, yet somewhat detached analysis of the intricacies of law; the “simple sons” — the People writ large, who relate to the Constitution through deep yet nontechnical faith in its overarching principles and symbolic significance; the “wicked sons” — those who have been historically excluded from the constitutional community and those whose faith is tempered by doubt; and the “sons who do not know how to ask” — the young and those marginalized into silence. Although its primary function is explanatory rather than predictive, this Four Sons framework reveals new insights into why and how the Constitution has retained its symbolic significance as Higher Law. And while most judicial opinions will not — and need not — consciously engage with these multiple constitutional audiences, this framework illuminates why certain opinions such as Brown v. Board of Education attain canonical status by deliberately and successfully speaking to each of the Four Sons.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Barring [the] Fly: The Seventy Four Deaths of Shakepeare's Characters

Tim Crouch is directing a play at the Northampton Royal and Derngate Theatre that includes all 74 human deaths in Shakespeare--the play omits the death of a fly in Titus Andronicus. Reporter Alice Vincent notes that the acculumation of gore "makes Shakespeare's complete works more gory that notorious HBO TV show Game of Thrones, which has scripted 61 deaths in 50 episodes...". Of course, GOT isn't over yet.

More here from The Telegraph.

A Review of Ummni Khan's Vicarious Kinks: S/M in the Socio-Legal Imaginary

Kyle Kirkup, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, is publishing Review of Vicarious Kinks: S/M in the Socio-Legal Imaginary, by Ummni Khan in volume 53 of Osgoode Hall Law Journal (2015). Here is the abstract.

Canvassing an array of texts — from recent Supreme Court of Canada decisions to Fifty Shades of Grey — Ummni Khan’s Vicarious Kinks: S/M in the Socio-Legal Imaginary aims to get to the bottom of representations of sadomasochism (s/m) in law and culture. While resisting singular definitions, practitioners of s/m tend to describe it as “appropriating social hierarchies, restaging power imbalances, and/or re-signifying pain within a consensual context.” Rather than analyzing the practice of s/m itself, however, Khan is interested in the discursive production of s/m in three key cultural sites: the psychiatric profession, the feminist sex wars of the 1980s and 1990s, and mainstream cinematic representations. After pulling apart the multiple and competing understandings of s/m in these sites, Khan directs her gaze at judicial decisions, carefully reading the Supreme Court of Canada’s pornography jurisprudence, a trilogy of cases from the United Kingdom involving consensual s/m activities, and a series of Canadian cases in areas including criminal law, family law, and human rights law.

Download the review from SSRN at the link.

More from the publisher's website here.

Bailey On Marriage Law in Jane Austen's World

Martha Bailey, Queen's University Faculty of Law, is publishing The Marriage Law of Jane Austen's World in volume 36 of Persuasions On-line (Winter 2015). Here is the abstract.

Marriage is the central theme and conclusion of Jane Austen’s novels. But marriage in Regency England was a very different institution from what it is here and now, in large part because of changes in the law relating to marriage. Knowledge of the marriage law of Austen’s world gives a deeper understanding of her books. More importantly, the books give us a richer appreciation of how marriage laws structured the lives of men and women. Austen conveys the lived reality of those subject to early nineteenth century laws relating to the economic arrangements of marriage, pre-marital sex, the marriage of relatives, clandestine and underage marriage, divorce, and adulterine bastardy.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Romance Novelists With Law Degrees: A List From the ABA Journal

Another interesting ABA Journal gallery: Romance novelists with law degrees. Start here.

The ABA Journal Presents---The Ten Top Lawyers In Comics

The ABA Journal's choice of ten top lawyers in comics. I love the idea, though I'm not crazy about the format. I really dislike having to click through lists, frame by frame.

Why Star Wars Fascinates

Patti McCarthy, Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Pacific, explores the attraction of Star Wars at theconversation.com.

The Way They Lived Then

The Guardian points out that Victorian literature isn't as buttoned up as we usually think. There's a lot of sex in those nineteenth-century novels, of the plain vanilla and 31-flavors variety. It's just that their authors were a little less obvious, a little more restrained, and a little more elegant about revealing the what, where, when, who, and why.

Readers Take On a Challenge: Designing Covers For Christie's Mysteries

The Guardian asked its readers to design book covers for Agatha Christie's mysteries. Here are some of the results.

Harry Potter's "Hermione" and Color-Blind Casting

Noah Berlatsky weighs in on the controversy over a black Hermione in the play "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" here, for the Guardian. Says Mr. Berlatsky (in part):

If Hermione is black, then ... themes about racism become much more pointed. Hermione, remember, is the one person at Hogwarts who is horrified by the enslavement of the house elves. When she’s black, her sympathy inescapably becomes rooted in her racial identity – her knowledge of her own marginalised status, and of her own people’s history. Similarly, the racial epithets thrown her way by Draco Malfoy and others take on a greater weight and ugliness. When Malfoy calls her a “filthy little mudblood”, he’s referring to the fact that her parents are non-wizards, or muggles. But if Hermione is black, you have to read it also as a racial insult. If Hermione isn’t white, it can’t be coincidence that the “mud” in “mudblood” is brown.

More about color-blind casting here and about casting Hermione as black here.

Edmundson on the Charlie Hebdo and Paris Attacks, John Rawls, and Liberal Political Culture

William A. Edmundson, Georgia State University College of Law, is publishing Charlie Hebdo Meets Utility Monster in The Critique. Here is the abstract.

The Charlie Hebdo massacre in January 2015 and the subsequent attacks of November 13 cast a garish light onto a conundrum at the center of how liberal democracies understand themselves. The Syrian emigrant crisis has added further color. How can a tolerant, liberal political culture tolerate the presence of intolerant, illiberal, sub-cultures while remaining true to its principles of tolerance? The problem falls within the intersection of two developments in the thinking of John Rawls, the great American political philosopher who died in 2002. The later Rawls struggled with the problem of how society might stably survive the clash of plural sub-cultures that a liberal society - unless it is oppressively coercive - must itself foster and allow to flourish. And he separately struggled with the problem of how liberal peoples might peacefully share the planet with illiberal, but "decent" peoples elsewhere. This article shows that Rawls's two solutions do not easily mix.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Ross on Prostestants, Catholics, Law, and the Fate of the Soul

Richard J. Ross, University of Illinois College of Law, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of History, has published Binding in Conscience: Early Modern English Protestants and Spanish Thomists on Law and the Fate of the Soul at 33 Law and History Review 803 (2015). Here is the abstract.

Romans 13:5 said that Christians should obey law not only for fear of punishment but “also for conscience sake.” What could this mean in practice? Early modern Protestants and Catholics agreed that violations of laws that bound conscience, if unrepented, threatened damnation. But which types of law bound? Natural and divine moral law did. Human laws presented a complicated case. Disobedience to only certain classes of human laws — but not all — imperiled the soul. Catholics and Protestants debated how to distinguish ordinances that obligated conscience from those that did not. The stakes were considerable. Romans 13:5 multiplied the potency of rulers, who treasured the suggestion that God’s ultimate penalty of damnation reinforced their authority. But a world in which violation of any ordinance brought damnation would be unlivable for subjects. And it would preclude the bargaining about law at the heart of early modern politics. The application of Romans 13:5 necessarily became a dialectical endeavor. Theorists generated arguments to bind conscience and release it. This essay explores the ways in which early modern Spanish Thomists and English Protestants linked human law to the fate of the soul and challenged that connection. They relied heavily on juridical concepts for assessing the validity and meaning of law in order to know which human ordinances obligated conscience under what circumstances. Manipulating borrowed jurists’ categories, they turned Romans 13:5 into a vital system for regulating conduct, with crucial effects in politics and daily life. Seeing Romans 13:5 from this perspective directs attention to the deep and changing intersections of legal and religious thought over a century and a half.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call for Papers, Copyright and the Circulation of Knowledge

From the website of the Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle

Copyright and the Circulation of Knowledge

du 7 octobre 2016 au 8 octobre 2016
 

C  A  L  L     F  O  R     P  A  P  E  R  S

International Conference
7-8 October 2016
Salle Claude Simon, Maison de la Recherche, Sorbonne Nouvelle


Copyright and the Circulation of Knowledge:

Industry Practices and Public Interests

in Great Britain from the 18th Century to the Present

New combinations of technology, culture, and business practice are transforming relationships among authors, publishers, and audiences in many fields of knowledge, including journalism, science research, and academia. Self-publishing, open-access, open source, creative commons, crowd sourcing and copy left: these are a few of the key words associated with recent changes in how knowledge is produced and circulated. While being celebrated for their potential to democratize knowledge, many of these changes have been accompanied by heated debates on such questions as the appropriate role of experts and ‘gatekeepers’; how to ensure that such projects are both trustworthy and economically viable; and how best to balance the interests of authors, publishers, and the general public. Copyright is often at the centre of these discussions.

Though the technologies involved have changed dramatically since the eighteenth century, similar questions were debated in the decades following the first British copyright statute (1710). Indeed, today’s discussions of piracy and copyright sometimes echo the eighteenth-century ‘battle of the booksellers' that pitted advocates of a limited-term copyright (and the creation of a public domain) against proponents of authors’ natural (and perpetual) rights over their works. Then as now, many felt that the law was not always in step with cultural norms or trade practices. While some denounced all unauthorized republications as piracies, others experimented with new ways of disseminating knowledge through translations, abridgements, compilations (including the first magazines), and cheap reprints. During the nineteenth century, technological and cultural changes and the increasingly international market for books led to more debates over the legitimacy and public utility of various forms of reprinting, as well as new strategies for combatting piracy.

This conference seeks to bring together specialists of Great Britain from the eighteenth century to the present to explore the complex relationship between copyright and the circulation of knowledge. We welcome case studies that focus on a particular time period as well as papers that show how attitudes and practices have changed over time. Papers that bring past and present concerns into dialogue are especially welcome. Potential topics may include:

¤ the economics of publishing in a given period or sector, and its effects on the circulation of knowledge;

¤ the political, cultural, or philosophical underpinnings of public access to knowledge;

¤ the strategies developed by authors or publishers to protect their intellectual property;

¤ the perceived boundaries between legitimate and piratical publications;

¤ the consequences of specific laws or institutional arrangements for the circulation of knowledge in different domains;

¤ the use of historical examples in arguments about copyright and the public domain;

¤ the different forms of publication developed to republish or recirculate existing works, whether authorized or not.

Interested scholars should send an abstract of their proposed paper (200 words) and a short biography-bibliography (100 words)
by 15 January 2016. Answers will be given by 15 March 2016.
Proposals should be sent to copyright-conference@univ-paris3.fr

Organizers:           
¤ Emmanuelle Avril - professeur des universités - Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (CREW/CREC EA 4399)

¤ Bénédicte Miyamoto - mcf - Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (CREW/CREC EA 4399)

¤ Sarah Pickard - mcf - Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (CREW/CREC EA 4399)

¤ Will Slauter - mcf - Université Paris Diderot (LARCA UMR 8225)

¤ Louisiane Ferlier - digitization project manager - the Royal Society
 

Link to the call for papers here.

 Tip of the beret to Kate Sutherland, twitter handle @lawandlit

Star Wars and....

Cultural studies are in the spotlight with the release of the newest Star Wars film.  According to a new study from Thomson-Reuters, nearly 1200 papers focus on "Star Wars and" sorts of themes, including Star Wars and psychology, Star Wars and religion, and Star Wars and ancient Rome. What, no Star Wars and law? You know there's at least one paper out there among the galaxies on the topic.

Link here.
For a little more, check out this blog's index.

More here from Pacific Standard.

DesBaillets on Magna Carta and Contemporary Canadian Law

David DesBaillets, University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM), Faculty of Law; University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, has published Symbolism and Significance: The Place of Magna Carta in Contemporary Canadian Law. Here is the abstract.

When the e-mail arrived in my inbox inviting me to view the Magna Carta I was, as I imagine any law student would be, utterly thrilled. The event was part of the international celebration of the 800th anniversary of the ancient Latin legal document from the 13th century BCE that would see a handful of surviving copies tour the world, including a Canadian sojourn, and be given the sort of red carpet treatment normally reserved for rock stars and foreign heads of State.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Repost and Reminder: Call for Papers from No Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice

Repost and Reminder:

NO FOUNDATIONS: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF LAW AND JUSTICE

No Foundations is currently accepting general submissions and book reviews for NoFo 13 (2016).

To facilitate the review process please send us your manuscript before March 1, 2016. Please include an abstract of no more than 200 words with your submission.

For more information check here: http://www.helsinki.fi/nofo/

No Foundations is an international peer-reviewed journal committed to publishing interdisciplinary legal scholarship of the highest quality at the interface between law and justice. We encourage contributions from all areas of law and beyond, with the aim of bridging the gap once opened between law and other social and human activities and experiences. On the assumption that law is a socially embedded phenomenon that cannot be fully understood as an autonomous discipline, we aim to connect law both with its real effects on the lives of individuals and societies, and with the realm of human aspirations and ideals that give it life and meaning.

Contact Information:

Monica Lopez Lerma, PhD Coeditor-in-Chief,
No Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice

http://www.helsinki.fi/nofo/

Researcher,CoE in Foundations on European Law and Polity Research
P.O. Box 4, Yliopistonkatu 3 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
https://helsinki.academia.edu/MonicaLopezLerma 
www.helsinki.fi/katti/foundations/

Levy and Cohen on Mental Illness, Dangerousness, and Involuntary Civil Commitment

Ken Levy, Louisiana State University Law Center, and Alex S. Cohen, Louisiana State University, have published Commentary on Szmukler: Mental Illness, Dangerousness, and Involuntary Civil Commitment in Philosophy and Psychiatry: Problems, Intersections, and New Perspectives 147(Daniel D. Moseley and Gary J. Gala: Routledge, 2016). Here is the abstract.

Prof. Cohen and I answer six questions: (1) Why do we lock people up? (2) How can involuntary civil commitment be reconciled with people's constitutional right to liberty? (3) Why don't we treat homicide as a public health threat? (4) What is the difference between legal and medical approaches to mental illness? (5) Why is mental illness required for involuntary commitment? (6) Where are we in our efforts to understand the causes of mental illness?

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Gordon on the History of International Criminal Law and War Crimes at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

Gregory S. Gordon, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law, has published International Criminal Law's 'Oriental Pre-Birth': The 1894-1900 Trials of the Siamese, Ottomans and Chinese in 4 Historical Origins of International Criminal Law 119 (M. Bergsmo et. al., TOAEP, 2015). Here is the abstract.

Conventional wisdom often traces the origins of international criminal law (ICL) to the 1474 prosecution for atrocities in Alsace of Burgundian governor Peter von Hagenbach and then straight to the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials post-World War II. But this paper demonstrates that history has ignored a remarkable decade at the end of the nineteenth century when three international criminal proceedings with links to the Orient took place: (1) in 1894, a French-Siamese mixed court sat in judgment of Phra Yot, a Siamese governor charged with the death of a French military commander; (2) in 1898, an International Military Commission of four European powers prosecuted versions of war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from Muslim-Christian inter-communal violence on the Ottoman-controlled island of Crete; and (3) in 1900, another international criminal tribunal, this one also consisting of four European powers, presided over the trial of participants in the Boxer Rebellion for proto-crimes against humanity. The paper describes the origins of these three "Oriental" tribunals, including an overview of the noble, and at turns, cynical rationales that inspired the Great Powers to turn to adjudication efforts and international processes. ICL scholarship has examined the trials separately but never together, within their broader historical context. Doing so reveals that they took place during an odd confluence of European colonialism's apogee and the international peace movement's founding. This fascinating period features the erosion of the Congress of Vienna framework, Industrial Revolution demand for overseas cheap labor, raw materials, and new markets, and nascent efforts at establishing transnational arbitral institutions. While Africa was carved up among the European powers at the 1884 Berlin Conference, there was no such orderly division of territory in the Orient. The paper posits that the featured trials are the product of peace movement arbitral impulses in coping with outbursts of violence and resulting tensions among the Europeans competing for imperial possessions in the context of that violence -- without a Berlin Conference-style regional master plan. The trials anticipated many important ICL developments, including proto-formulations of war crimes and crimes against humanity and the establishment of ad hoc and hybrid tribunals. But, sadly, they did not pave the way for Allied use of ICL to achieve justice in the imminent wake of World War I. At that point in history, the Europeans were ready to sit in judgment of their imperial subjects but not of themselves. Thus, these remarkable ICL efforts seem more a subliminal outgrowth of the era's Zeitgeist than a needed groundwork for post-Versailles justice. Still, when viewed holistically and contextually, these late-nineteenth century inquests supply an important missing link between the Hagenbach trial and the proper advent of ICL in the twentieth century.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Manderson and Van Rijswijk on Representations of Land and Sea in Law, Literature, and Geography

Desmond Manderson, ANU Colege of Law, ANU COllege of Arts and Social Sciences, and McGill University Faculty of Law, and Honni Van Rijswijk, University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Law, have published Introduction to Littoral Readings: Representations of Land and Sea in Law, Literature, and Geography at 27 Law & Literature 167 (2015). Here is the abstract.

This essay introduces a collection of new work that addresses law, literature, and geography. Organized around the relationship between land and sea, and in that sense building on the book of that title by Carl Schmitt, the collection recognizes the importance of geographic spatial phenomena in the contours of our literature, and as these play out in legal concepts. But we need to pay attention to the particular contours of this relation, the highly specific -- indeed incorrigibly plural -- forms and fantasies such a relationship takes in specific places and concerning specific jurisprudential issues. The first axis involves recognizing the role of the imaginary in transforming social and legal conditions, and in delineating legal responsibility. The second axis invites us to recognize how closely connected are legal structures and practices to the material experience of concrete spaces and environments. The fictional nature of literature, the non-fictional nature of geography, and the normative nature of law are constantly refracting each other. The way to understand law as culture is to see how its modes and strategies pass through literature and the imaginary on the one hand, by way of geography and the material on the other. In this essay and the collection that it introduces, the particularities of Australia -- its law, its geography, and its literature -- are used as case studies through which to develop this interdisciplinary methodology.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Dabner on Multiculturalism and Legal Plurality in Australia

Justin H. Dabner, James Cook University, Cairns Campus, has published Multiculturalism and Legal Plurality in Australia. Here is the abstract.

The great multicultural experiment that is Australia has engendered a reconsideration of core values. Even the traditionally conservative legal system has not been immune. While the law remains anchored in its British Christian common-law traditions, the influence of other cultures and beliefs are emerging. The primary two instances of this are the partial accommodation of Indigenous customary law and a debate over the accommodation of Islamic law principles. The adoption of “foreign” legal concepts goes to the essence of what it means to be a liberal democratic society: does it mean wholesale legal plurality, or are there foreign legal principles excluded because they are unacceptable to a free and equal society? Putting this in the Australian context, should Australia accept the customary and religious laws of minorities, or is multiculturalism about establishing one legal framework that applies to all, equally, and without discrimination? This article explores the implications for the legal system of an increasingly multicultural Australia. It will be observed that legal plurality does exist in Australia but largely in the shadows where the vulnerable of society lack protection.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Ngara on Language and the Immigration Debate

Emily C. Torstveit Ngara, University of Baltimore School of Law, is publishing Aliens, Aggravated Felons and Worse: When Words Breed Fear and Fear Breeds Injustice in the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Here is the abstract.

As presidential candidates casually and inaccurately throw the term “anchor baby” into public discourse, the time is right to examine the Immigration and Nationality Act for many other examples of misleading language in the statute. This article undertakes the critical task of examining how the language of immigration law, using prevailing immigration metaphors, manipulates perceptions of noncitizens. From the use of the term “alien” to describe any noncitizen and emphasize otherness, to describing “prosecutorial” enforcement decisions to strengthen the alien-as-criminal narrative, these word choices are significant. This is especially true when noncitizens are interacting with the criminal justice system. These words and metaphors find their way into the collective subconscious and impact cognitive bias against immigrant communities. This article identifies several terms that are particularly problematic, then advocates for alternative language that more accurately reflects of the definitions provided by the INA.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Kang on Conflicting Images of Manliness in Civil Society

John M. Kang, St. Thomas University School of Law, has published Fractured Manliness in volume 13 of the Seattle Journal for Social Justice (2014). Here is the abstract.

In this very short contribution to a symposium organized by the Seattle Journal for Social Justice, I illustrated how the law, on the one hand, stigmatizes in civil society the same sort of courage that it impels men to embrace in war. More than another instance of majestic hypocrisy, the disjuncture speaks to a fractured image of men, and how society exploits this fracture for its immediate ends.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Muniz-Fraticelli and David on Religious Institutionalism and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Victor M. Muniz-Fraticelli, McGill University Faculty of Law and Department of Political Science, and Lawrence David, McGill University Faculty of Law, are publishing Religious Institutionalism in a Canadian Context in the Osgoode Hall Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

Does freedom of religion protect religious institutions, or does it only protect the individual religious conscience? Canadian jurisprudence after the Charter of Rights and Freedoms takes a decidedly individualist turn, deliberately avoiding the question of the rights of religious institutions. This individualist focus neglects the historical trajectory of religious freedom, the social understanding of religious faith by religious adherents themselves, and the institutional structures in which religion emerges and develops, and through which it is ultimately protected. An institutional account of religious liberty can complement the individualist account, as it better explains the legal order, better reflects actual religious practice, and better preserves both institutional and individual religious liberty. Recent decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada go some way towards correcting this individualist bias, but balk at resolving the legal status of religious institutions. This persistent ambiguity will prove problematic in controversies over religious autonomy already making their way through the courts.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.