Corcos on Law and Norms and Will and Grace @LpcProf @WillandGrace

Christine A. Corcos, Louisiana State University Law Center, has published Law and Norms and Will and Grace at 50 Cumberland L. Rev. 85 (2020). Here is the abstract.

Like many other popular series featuring lawyers and law-related characters that are not primarily legal shows, Will & Grace was and is primarily a “relationship” show. The show features the friendships and closeness among the four main characters, best friends Will Truman and Grace Adler, who originally met in college, and Will’s friend Jack McFarland and Grace’s friend Karen Walker, who are brought together through their relationships with Will and Grace and also eventually become friends. Jack and Karen’s friendship is an exaggerated analogue of Will and Grace’s relationship. While it is not a legal show, Will & Grace does often feature legal themes, partly because one of its main characters is an attorney and partly because the law is such an important part of daily American life. If we have a problem or a dispute, we often consider whether the appropriate solution is a legal one, or whether we will be satisfied with a less formal and perhaps less binding outcome. More and more, we tend to view relationships and interactions through the legal system, using the law’s language and the law’s behavior. However, the characters in Will & Grace do not always decide on legal solutions to their problems. They may fashion other solutions that they think suit their needs, or they may never consider the law at all.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Savage on COVID-1619: A Brief History of Racism @Dr_Audra_Savage @EmoryLaw

Audra Savage, Emory University Law School,has published COVID-1619: A Brief History of Racism. Here is the abstract.

Racism is the use of Black people to achieve the goals of white people without regard to the personhood, humanity, and agency of Blacks. This essay explores this definition of racism by tracing the influence of the twin institutions of law and religion in creating and maintaining the slave system in early colonial America. The essay then demonstrates the pernicious and persistent nature of racism by mapping this definition onto the current COVID-19 pandemic and its disproportionate impact on Black Americans.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Hadley on Tribal Tattoos and the Politics of Cultural Appropriation Claims @DrMarie_IP

Marie Hadley, Newcastle Law School, has published Tribal Tattoos and the Politics of Cultural Appropriation Claims. Here is the abstract.

This article explores the nature of cultural appropriation claims as a statement of possession over cultural property and a performative utterance that resists oppression. A close study of the aesthetics and ethics of tribal tattoo imagery, and in particular the tattoo created by artist S. Victor Whitmill for former world heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson, is used to reflect upon the politics of alleging cultural appropriation. Empirical fieldwork with Māori tā moko artists is used to show that cultural appropriation claims are unstable property claims whose politics exceed the merely possessive. Critical perspectives on performativity expand the inquiry. It is argued that seeking inspiration from the art of the Other, as tribal tattoos do, is problematic – not so much because of the appropriation of cultural property per se but rather because doing so recreates colonial dynamics of demand, desire, and oppression.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Blackman on Presidential Subpoenas During the Burr Trials @JoshMBlackman

Josh Blackman, South Texas College of Law, Houston, has published Presidential Subpoenas during the Burr Trials. Here is the abstract.

Between March and October of 1807, Aaron Burr stood for two treason trials arising from the same set of facts: the first, for a felony charge, and the second, for a misdemeanor charge. Chief Justice John Marshall presided over the proceedings in the Circuit Court for Virginia in Richmond. During this period, Marshall issued seventeen written opinions, and delivered several shorter decisions from the bench, that spanned over two-hundred pages in the reporter. In the end, based on Marshall’s narrow construction of the crimes of treason, the jury acquitted Burr of both the felony and the misdemeanor charges. Marshall’s rulings, however, were not limited to technical aspects of criminal law. In both trials, Aaron Burr asked the court to issue a subpoena duces tecum to President Jefferson. Such a subpoena would have required the witness to appear in court, and bring a specific document. Specifically, Burr wanted Jefferson to produce a letter authored by General Wilkinson, dated October 21, 1806. Burr insisted that this transmission to the President was material to his defense. Moreover, the Defendant demanded that Jefferson produce the original copy of Wilkinson’s letter. The United States Attorney, George Hay, would only offer to provide a redacted copy of the letter, with certain portions excluded. As the deliberations proceeded, Hay would frequently write to the President, who traveled between the White House and Monticello. Jefferson, who took a keen interest in the case, would usually write back immediately. The correspondences between Jefferson and Hay outside of court can shed light on the interactions between Hay and Marshall in court. That is, the government’s positions were based on direct instructions from the President himself. In the felony trial, Marshall ordered that Jefferson was required to submit the original copy of the letter, without redaction. Jefferson did not comply with this order. In the misdemeanor trial, Jefferson would provide a redacted copy of the letter. Because of the lengthy nature of the proceedings — in which Marshall and Jefferson took different positions at different junctures — it is difficult to draw too many broad conclusions from the prosecution as a whole. This essay will walk through each phase of the proceedings, with an eye towards understanding the limits on presidential subpoenas.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

CFP: Special Issue, Art Law and Cultural Heritage Law, Brazilian Journal of International Law @franca_marcilio

CALL FOR PAPERS

BRAZILIAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

SPECIAL ISSUE – Art Law and Cultural Heritage Law

The Brazilian Journal of International Law, review indexed on Scopus and Qualis A1, invites submissions for a special issue on Art Law and Cultural Heritage Law to be published in December 2020. The issue will be edited by Professors Marcílio Toscano Franca Filho (Universidade Federal da Paraíba – UFPB, João Pessoa, Brazil) and Ardyllis Alves Soares (Centro Universitário de Brasília, Brasília, Brazil).

Submissions on all international aspects of Art Law and Cultural Heritage Law are welcomed.
Conscious of the undoubted significance of culture for peaceful international relations, for economic and social development, for the well-being of humanity and for the progress of civilization; and convinced of the worldwide relevance of culture as a source of remembrance, understanding, identity, dialogue and cohesion; the guest editors look forward to receiving innovative contributions that analyze the internationalization of Art Law and Cultural Heritage Law.

Suggested topics:
– 25th Anniversary of the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects;
– 50th Anniversary of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property;
– Due Diligence in Art Law and Cultural Heritage Law;
– Concept of Artist and Artwork under International Law;
– Archaeological and Underwater Cultural Heritages;
– International Museum Law and Codes of Conduct;
– Cooperation, Restitution and Repatriation of Cultural Property;
– Climate Change, Sea Level Rise and Cultural Heritage
– International Arbitration and Artworks;
– The Role of Trusts and Freeports in Cultural Heritage Law;
– Protection of the Cultural Heritage of Indigenous Peoples;
– Digital Art, its Definition And Preservation;
– Restitution of Holocaust-era Assets;
– Looted Art and Cultural Heritage in times of War;
– Succession of States and Cultural Heritage;
– Organised Crime, Terrorism and Cultural Heritage;
– Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Measures in the Art Market;
– International Circulation of Cultural Property;
– International Tax & Customs Law;
– Auction Houses under International Law;
– Monuments and Memorials as Reparations of Human Rights Violation
– Monument-Toppling

THE JOURNAL

The Brazilian Journal of International Law is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal which publishes three issues per year.

SUBMISSION PROCESS

Manuscripts may be submitted in English, French, Portuguese, Italian or Spanish. Submitting articles in English is strongly recommended. Manuscript revisions will be in the language of submission. Non-native speakers are strongly encouraged to have their paper read by a native speaker. The Journal will reject articles if the level of chosen language is insufficient.
The Journal has a double-blind peer-review policy. The response from the reviewers will normally be provided within 30 days from the submission. Authors are expected to correct and return proofs of accepted articles within 15 days.
Authors should preferably hold a PhD and/or have a strong professional/academic background in Art Law and Cultural Heritage Law at the time of submission. The editors reserve the right to scrutinize and provide feedback on manuscripts before review with regard to their suitability for the journal, including concerning analytical consistency, non-compliance with the applicable submission guidelines, and linguistic and stylistic matters.
The deadline for submission is August 15th. 2020.

COPYRIGHT

All content published by the Journal, except where identified, is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-type BY-NC. This will ensure the widest dissemination and protection against copyright infringement of articles. The “article” is defined as comprising the final, definitive, and citable Version of Scholarly Record, and includes: (a) the accepted manuscript in its final and revised form, including the text, abstract, and all accompanying tables, illustrations, data; and (b) any supplemental material. As an author, you are required to secure permission to reproduce any proprietary text, illustration, table, or other material, including data, audio, video, film stills, and screenshots, and any supplemental material you propose to submit. This applies to direct reproduction as well as “derivative reproduction” (where you have created a new figure or table that derives substantially from a copyrighted source). The reproduction of short extracts of text, excluding poetry and song lyrics, for the purposes of criticism may be possible without formal permission on the basis that the quotation is reproduced accurately and full attribution is given.MANUSCRIPT STRUCTUREGuidelines for preparing and submitting your manuscript to this journal are provided below. The Journal considers all manuscripts on the strict condition that they have not been submitted elsewhere, that they have not been published already, nor are they under consideration for publication or in press elsewhere. Contributions must report original research and will be subjected to review by referees at the discretion of the Editorial Committee.GENERAL GUIDELINES Manuscripts should be written in Times New Roman, size 12, space between lines 1.5 throughout the manuscript (including all quotations, endnotes and references). Pages should be numbered consecutively. Notes should be listed consecutively at the end of the article (endnotes), and clearly marked in the text at the point of punctuation by superior numbers. Endnotes should be used for clarification purposes only. Manuscripts must be submitted in Word format (.doc). PDF files will not be accepted. All the authors of a paper must attach their short curriculum vitae (CV), which must consist of a single one paragraph-text of 100-120 words in length, each. This is to be done online during the submission process. The affiliations of all named co-authors should be the affiliation where the research was conducted. If any of the named co-authors moves affiliation during the peer review process, the new affiliation can be given as a footnote. Please note that no changes to affiliation can be made after the article is accepted. All manuscripts submitted should be free from jargon and be written as clearly and concisely as possible. Non-discriminatory language is mandatory. Sexist or racist terms must not be used. All submissions should be made online via http://www.publicacoesacademicas.uniceub.br/index.php/rdi/user/register FORMAT Articles should be based on original research and develop an original argument falling within the scope of the journal. The articles are subjected to a blind-peer review and must include: Title Abstract of up to 200 words 5-7 keywords Main text References (at the end of the article) Footnotes Acknowledgements (if appropriate) Table(s) and Figure(s) with caption(s) (on individual files) (if appropriate) FURTHER INFORMATION For questions regarding the content of this special issue, please contact: Professor NitishMonebhurrun — Editor of the Brazilian Journal of International law (nitish.monebhurrun@gmail.com)

ISSN 2236-997X (impresso) – ISSN 2237-1036 (on-line)

Mirow on Felix Varela y Morales (Cuba, 1788-1853)

M. C. Mirow, Florida International University College of Law, is publishing Félix Varela y Morales (Cuba, 1788-1853) in Law and Christianity in Latin America: The Work of Great Jurists (M.C. Mirow and Rafael Domingo, eds., Routledge, 2020) (Forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Born in Havana, Félix Varela y Morales was an eminent Cuban intellectual of the nineteenth century. An educator, philosopher, and deputy, he advocated for Cuban independence through peaceful revolution. He was ordained a priest in 1811, lived modestly, and disposed of his property for the benefit of the poor. Varela served as a professor of constitutional law in Havana, wrote one of the first books on constitutional law in Spanish, and served as a deputy to the Spanish Constitutional Cortes in 1822 and 1823. This chapter explores Varela’s constitutional thought through his writings and service as a deputy to the Cortes. His work in this field reveals a form of eclectic liberalism infused and consistent with Catholic thought. In the Cortes, Varela’s interventions advocated for autonomous structures of colonial government in the Americas and urged Spanish recognition of the independence of new American republics. He defended the interests of the church and promoted a wide variety of issues related to education. He spent his last thirty years in the United States in exile from his Cuban homeland. He was a thoughtful apologist for the Catholic Church in New York and served several parishes there. His poor health led him to return to Saint Augustine, Florida, where he had spent his childhood.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Corcos on Three Ways of Looking at Law and Popular Culture @LSULawCenter @IRPI_Paris_II

Christine A. Corcos, Louisiana State University Law Center, has published Three Ways of Looking at Law and Popular Culture in Propriete Intellectuelle et Pop Culture: Nouveaux enjeux, nouveaux defis 9 (Actes du colloque: PI et pop culture) (Actes du colloque des JUSPI) (IRPI, 2020). Here is the abstract.

In 1989 the Stanford University Law School professor Lawrence Friedman offered a definition of “popular legal culture.” In an often-cited article, he wrote that, “In the first place, legal culture acts as an intervening variable, a mechanism for transforming norms of popular culture into legal dress and shape. In the second place, legal and popular culture, as images of each other, help explicate and illuminate their respective contents”. He notes that law and culture interact in two ways. Law is outward-looking; it depends on and interacts with the society from which it springs. At the same time it shapes that society. We can and do also talk about at least two current and differing uses of law and popular culture in legal education. We can use law and popular culture to teach legal principles. This use makes legal doctrine entertaining and accessible. We can also dig for the messages it gives us about the interaction of law and society. This second method requires us to interact with the texts of both law and popular culture. Currently in legal education we can and do examine at law and popular culture in both of the ways Friedman identifies. I suggest that we can identify and should examine a third intersection of law and popular culture that scholars have begun to study, that I suggest we should formally acknowledge as a part of law and popular culture studies. This third intersection is the actual trans-formative effect or trans-formative turn that popular culture and law have on each other. I would suggest both that certain types of intellectual property studies and certain types of activity fall into this category. One example is law’s response to the creation of fan fiction and of fan use of copyrighted and trademarked materials that force a response from the rights holders, or force fans to cease a particular activity because the rights holders refuse permission to proceed. We have many examples of the legal responses and changes in norms that illustrate these interactions. What we don’t yet seem to have in the general theory of law and pop culture is a definition for this third intersection. It may be that this third intersection is now most obvious in intellectual property law, perhaps because of the accessibility and spread of technology as well as the overwhelming importance of social media in our lives today. It exists in other areas of law as well, for example in family law, in criminal law, in privacy law, and has for some time. I would suggest that this intersection creates the possibility for the working out of the tensions between law and culture, as the public through pop culture identifies how the law works, what the law is, and then reacts to the law, makes demands on the law, and in some cases, forces changes in the law.

The full text is not currently available from SSRN.

Simon on The Power of Connectivity: The Science and Art of Transitions @uarizonalaw

Diana Simon, University of Arizona College of Law, is publishing The Power of Connectivity: The Science and Art of Transitions in volume 18 of the Legal Communications & Rhetoric: JALWD (Fall 2021). Here is the abstract.

Do transitions really matter? Yes. This article explores the impact of transitions in legal writing beyond simply improving flow and readability. First, with the help of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, the science behind transitions is addressed, because science shows that transitions increase comprehension and improve processing times. Second, the omnipresence and significance of transitions is addressed with the help of singer-songwriter Justin Timberlake and his song, “SexyBack” and comedian Brian Regan and his stand-up bit, “I Walked on the Moon.” Third, various types of transitions in legal writing are addressed with a special focus on the “magic of three” in persuasion in both legal writing and beyond.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

CFP: Comics Forum 2020: Pages of Whiteness @ComicsForum

Comics Forum 2020: Pages of Whiteness

November 2020, Online

Conference Lead: Olivia Hicks

Call for Contributions

In White, Richard Dyer argues that race is something which is only applied to non-white people; and thus white people are allowed to speak from a non-racialised, normalised position of power.1  In Unstable Masks, Sean Guynes and Martin Lund state that whiteness is a set of malleable historical, geographical and cultural values, that is ‘one of the key historical formations of power, surveillance and control’ in the West.2 Drawing attention to whiteness is drawing attention to what is naturalised and/or normally invisible.

The title of this conference comes from Tracy D. Morgan’s essay ‘Pages of Whiteness’, which explores white supremacy in the erotic fantasies of the queer physical culture movement in the American post-war period.3 The essay title refers both to the white paper used to produce physical culture magazines, but also the overwhelming presence of white bodies within, and the suffocating racist fantasies which inform the rare appearances of Black or Latino models. The phrase suggests an intersection of identity, materiality and (comics) production. This essay is one of many exposing how whiteness shapes the media we create and consume. The idea of whiteness as a ‘norm’ and the backdrop against which all other identities are contrasted and controlled, filters into

every facet of the comics we read and study; from the over-abundance of white characters and storylines, the privileging of white editorial and creative voices, to the ‘whiteness’ of the comic’s pages, suggesting a white, blank default, to the inks which are used in production, which privilege white skin tones. As Zoe D. Smith notes in her essay ‘Four Color-ism’, ‘Brown skin in comics of this period fails in part because there’s too much ink. The layers of cyan, magenta, and yellow are unreliable and painfully noticeable. White skin, by contrast, is thoughtlessly stable.’4

Maintaining the status quo of Western society is a thoughtless action; challenging the structuring logic of our worlds is a task which requires engagement and action. This conference is calling for a critical examining of whiteness and the structuring systems of comics and comics scholarship. One could respond to this theme by exploring whiteness within comics and/or comics academia. One could also choose to examine those identities which are marginalised or excluded; exploring creators and characters with marginalised identities. This call also encourages work on the production and materiality of comics; submissions on colouring (which is an underappreciated part of comics production) and zine culture, where creators often deliberately choose colourful paper or a collage effect which disrupts the notion of the white page being the norm.

Some ways Pages of Whiteness could be interpreted are as follows:

Whiteness and Comics

Comics and Race

Comics and Identity

Comics and Activism/Protest

Queering Comics

Comics Production (including colouring)

Zine Culture

Colour and Comics

Comics scholarship; new approaches to studying comics

Comics Practice as research

Digital “Page-less” Comics

Formats

Comics Forum 2020 will take place online. We invite contributors to submit proposals in the following formats, but we are open to other suggestions if speakers are in a position to offer them:

Pre-recorded videos: This may be a single speaker talk of 10-15 minutes, or a 20-minute conversation between two or more speakers. These can be followed by live Q&As either in a video call and/or via Twitter (please specify which you wish to use when you submit your proposal).

Live Events: These may be workshops, reading groups, demonstrations of practice or research methods etc. Events will be hosted on relevant openly-accessible platforms suitable for large-scale live video calls – if you would like to use a particular platform please specify this, otherwise make clear in your proposal what the format of your proposed event is so we can ensure we have access to a platform that will support it. Please note that time-zones mean that live events can be geographically exclusive, so if you can run your event in a way that includes some asynchronous content this will enable more people to participate.

Digital Zines: Zines on the conference theme can be submitted in PDF format for inclusion in the event via Issuu.

Proposals of up to 250 words in length for contributions in the formats detailed above are now being accepted at the following link: https://tiny.cc/comicsforum20. The deadline for submissions is the 1st of September 2020 and you will be notified of acceptance by or before the 14th of September 2020. Please include a short (100 word) biography with your proposal.

Comics Forum 2020 is part of the Thought Bubble Sequential Art Festival. Find out more about Thought Bubble at: https://www.thoughtbubblefestival.com/.

Note: The Comics Forum organising committee asked Olivia Hicks to be a co-organiser for the 2020 conference in 2019. In January 2020, Olivia proposed the call ‘Pages of Whiteness’ which as accepted by the team immediately. The call was an urgent call to action in comics scholarship in January, and recent events have only served to further highlight how necessary this work is.

1: Richard Dyer, White, (London: Routledge, 1997), p.2.

2: Sean Guynes and Martin Lund, ‘Introduction’ in: Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019), p.2.

3: Tracy D. Morgan, ‘Pages of Whiteness: Race, Physique Magazines, and the Emergence of Gay Culture’ in Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Anthology, edited by Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), pp.280-297.

4: Zoe D. Smith, ‘4 Colorism, or, the Ashiness of it all’, Women Write About Comics (24 May 2019), <https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2019/05/4-colorism-or-the-ashiness-of-it-all/>

Partlett on Constitutional Historiography @WPartlett @MelbLawSchool

William Partlett, Melbourne Law School, has published Constitutional Historiography as University of Melbourne Legal Studies Research Paper No. 896. Here is the abstract.

This paper will argue that the insights of professional historians can and should be used to better understand the use of history in constitutional argument. Historiography—the methodology of professional historians—demonstrates that history is frequently used selectively to advance a favored outcome. Judges and constitutional scholars should therefore be highly critical of claims that history provides objective answers to constitutional questions. At the same time, historiography shows that non-selective accounts of history can and should play an important role in finding answers to contemporary constitutional questions. In this role, history is under-determined and best used to support or shed new light on a constitutional argument. Historiography therefore demonstrates not just the perils of historical argument but also its possibilities for constitutional argument.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call For Submissions: The Crossroads of Crime Writing: Historical, Sociological, and Cultural Contexts/Intersections/Perspectives

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS—EDITED COLLECTION Proposal/abstract deadline: November 1, 2020

Final essays due: April 2021 The Crossroads of Crime Writing: Historical, Sociological and Cultural Contexts/ Intersections/ Perspectives

This volume, which will be proposed to a leading independent academic publisher, seeks to explore the implications of crime writing in its various narrative forms through essays which situate orientations fictional and non-fictional, past and present in relation to public perspectives. Just as real crime has served as inspiration for fictional accounts, Kieran Dolin reminds us in Fiction and the Law (Cambridge Press, 2009) that crime literature has long influenced popular understanding of social institutions as well. And so, we are not only interested in offering a comprehensive overview of crime writing in its diverse forms, but in examining how crime writing simultaneously reflects temporal biases and influences popular conceptions of politics, the law, psychology, the self, and more. Over a century ago, in his examination The Sensational in Modern English Fiction (1919), Walter Clarke Phillips declared, “Whatever sources of appeal may come or go, there is one which from the very structure of modern democratic society seldom bids for applause unheeded — that is, the appeal to fear” (2). And, it is to this appeal that we owe the abundance of crime writing at our disposal— a trove of mystery that undoubtedly fascinates in its ability to entertain while safely reflecting the ugliest truths about ourselves and the societies in which we live. It is in this vein that Catherine Nickerson asserts in “Murder as Social Criticism,” that crime fiction “is deeply enmeshed with most of the thornier problems of the Victorian, modern, and postmodern eras, including gender roles and privileges, racial prejudice and the formation of racial consciousness, the significance and morality of wealth and capital, and the conflicting demands of privacy and social control” (American Literary History). And, this is just as true of Gothic and Victorian Sensation novels which generally expose social anxieties in relation to cultural, institutional and individual identities as it is of the ever-growing contemporary genre of True Crime which typically concentrates “upon certain events and figures as kinds of cultural flashpoints, and it also has a long history, from colonial narratives to early twentieth-century pulp fiction” (Rosalind Smith, “Dark Places: True Crime Writing in Australia”). 

We invite essays that provide new insights into the works of significant authors, series or sub-genres of crime literature that we once thought we knew and/ or examine the intersections of the real and fictional within the broader genre of Crime Writing in meaningful ways. Contributors are encouraged to dissect the historical, cultural, and/ or sociological significance of crime fiction, as well as examine how such works influence true crime writing or vice versa. 

Possible essay topics could include (but are not limited to) the following: •The History/Genesis of Mystery/Crime Writing and/or its Structure or Tenets •The Nineteenth-Century Police Force and the Detective Novel •Intersections between the Real and Fictional in Historical Crime Novels •British Aesthetic vs. American Hardboiled Crime •The Dime Novel and/or Early Hardboiled Fiction •The Police Procedural and Popular Culture •Historical Mystery as a Means of Contextualizing the Current •Crime Writing and Gender Roles •Racial Consciousness and Detection •Socio-economics of Crime and Detection •Socio-political Readings of the Gentleman Detective and/or Hardboiled Detective •Cross-Dressing and/or Queering in Mysteries •LGBTQ+ Portrayals in Mysteries •Intersections between Detective Film and Literature •Exploring Law through Literature/ Legal Thrillers •Lawyers and the Courtroom Drama •The Serial Killer and Contemporary Culture •Holmesian Influence/Pervasiveness in Western Culture •American Realism in Crime Writing •Capers/The Criminal Mind •Crime Fiction’s Influence on Journalistic Reporting/True Crime •(Neo)Gothic or (Neo)Victorian Sensation Novels

Please email 500-word abstracts along with a 200-word biographical statement to Meghan Nolan (mnolan2@sunyrockland.edu and Rebecca Martin (doc.rmartin@gmail.com by November 1st, 2020. The deadline for selected essays of 5000-7000 words is April 2021.

International Conference: CFP: Detecting Europe in Contemporary Crime Narratives: Print Fiction, Film, and Television @DetectH2020

International Conference: Call for Papers

Detecting Europe in contemporary crime narratives: print fiction, film, and television

 

21-23 June 2021

Link Campus University

Via del Casale di San Pio V 44 – Rome

Conference Website: https://www.detect-project.eu/detect2021/

Among the different expressions of popular culture, no other genre more than crime – meant as a composite made up of many different variants or subgenres -- has proved able to travel and expand its reach into international markets and with audiences. Nor has any other genre been more adept at laying bare the conflicts and contradictions – social, political and historical – that characterise contemporary European societies. The Detecting Europe conference offers an open forum to explore and discuss how narratives of crime and investigation, as well as their production and reception, have helped define the major industrial, commercial, thematic and stylistic trends of European popular culture since 1989, fostering both the transnational circulation of its products and the appearance of new transcultural representations in line with the emergence

of new social identities. We welcome proposals that interrogate the notion of Europeanness as a critical category, and its viability for the study of contemporary popular culture, both in print and screen media. We wish to explore both the scope and limits of the interrelated notions of transnational identity and cosmopolitanism when applied to the works of European crime fiction, including print fiction, film, and TV. 

 

A few general — but not exclusive — questions may be asked. Are we to conceive of cosmopolitanism and the  process of European transculturation merely as unifying factors, fostering the generation of a shared and uniform transnational identity? Or should we better acknowledge the existence of a variety of European transcultural identities, expressed in different writing and audio-visual styles, characteristic narrative models, place-specific production cultures and distribution and consumption patterns? What is the impact of national media ecologies in shaping the idea of the European, and how the national translate the European when foreign products appear in its mediascape? Should hybridization and transculturation be assumed as markers and powerful drivers of cultural homologation? Or rather the opposite is true, namely that cultural hybridization entails a growing differentiation of narrative forms and styles, contents and formats, production and reception practices, thus contributing to the emergence of a post-national assemblage of multiple and possibly diverging cosmopolitan identities? We deem it important, at this particular time, that the notion of Europeanness and its eventual instantiations in contemporary crime narratives is approached having in mind the multiple crises that are currently affecting the continent and its population.

 

We invite proposals from multiple fields of cultural studies, including representation studies, industry and production studies, and reception and audience studies. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

 

• Main stylistic trends of the crime-genre works produced in Europe in the last 30 years.

Debating/reframing Euronoir as a critical category for cultural studies.

• Hybridization and transculturation: toward homologation or increased cultural differentiation?

• Crime fiction and the European crisis: immigration, migrant labour, Brexit, and the rise of right-wing popularism.

• The restaging and critical analysis of Europe’s recent past in the work of crime writers, screenwriters and directors.

• Images of Europe and Europeans: investigating social change through the study of popular crime narratives.

• Restating vs challenging class, gender and ethnic stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination in the representation of crime.

• The multiple facets of European diversity: how have social, spatial and historical identities been expressed in the works of the European crime genre?

• Ecocriticism and environmental humanities in the era of widescale ecological crisis: eco-noir and the challenges to European environment policies.

• The profiled position of crime in fostering transnational cooperation in the European cultural and creative sectors.

• Relationships and discrepancies between national/local creative industries and transnational cultural policies in the production milieu of the European crime genre.

• Transnational production and distribution and the emergence of transcultural formats.

• The hopes and limits of European cohesiveness, as revealed in practices of co-production and

distribution of crime novels, films and TV dramas across the continent.

• Crime narratives and the media discourse on organized trans-European crime.

• Fictional representations of legal and forensic practices in comparative perspective.

• Translation, dubbing, subtitling as strategies for cultural adaptation and appropriation.

• The imbrication of local, national and transnational identities in the reception of foreign crime stories, between old and fresh perspectives on proximate or distant neighbors.

• Transnational distribution and the role of audiences in shaping the circulation patterns of European crime narratives across the continent.

• Detecting transcultural identity and social change through the study of the audiences’ response to crime stories and trans/cross-media universes.

• Engagement and design of crime audiences in the age of digital markets and online distribution.

• Making sense of social change through the audience’s response to the representation of female, gay, lesbian and queer characters.

• Theorising transnational/transdisciplinary research for the study of European crime narratives in print and screen media.

 

Conference Chairs

Monica Dall’Asta (University of Bologna), Federico Pagello (University of Chieti-Pescara), Valentina Re (Link Campus University)

 

Organizing Committee 

Luca Antoniazzi (University of Bologna), Sara Casoli (University of Bologna), Massimiliano Coviello (Link Campus University), Paola De Rosa (Link Campus University), Lorenzo Orlando (Link Campus University)

 

Advisory Board 

Stefano Arduini (Link Campus University), Maurizio Ascari (University of Bologna), Jan Baetens (KU Leuven), Luca Barra (University of Bologna), Stefano Baschiera (Queen’s University Belfast), Giulia Carluccio (University of Turin), Silvana Colella (University of Macerata), Caius Dobrescu (University of Bucharest), Andrea Esser (University of Roehampton), Nicola Ferrigni (Link Campus University), Katarina Gregersdotter (Umeå University), Kim Toft Hansen (Aalborg University), Annette Hill (University of Lund), Dominique Jeannerod (Queen’s University Belfast), Sandor Kalai (University of Debrecen), Matthieu Letourneux (University Paris Nanterre), Natacha Levet (University of Limoges), Giacomo Manzoli (University of Bologna), Janet McCabe (Birkbeck University), Jacques Migozzi (University of Limoges), Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast), Marica Spalletta (Link Campus University)

 

Deadlines and practicalities

Abstracts deadline: 15 November 2020

Feedback: 15 December 2020

Registration deadline: 31 January 2020

Regular conference fee: €120

Reduced conference fee (PhD students, Postdoctoral researchers): €90

Further information: info@detect-project.eu

 

Submissions guidelines

Submissions are welcome as individual papers (max. 20 minutes) and pre-constituted panels (3/4 papers).

Individual presenters are required to provide their name, email address, the title of the paper, an abstract (max. 300 words), references (max. 200 words), and a short bio (max. 150 words).

 

Submit your paper proposal here 

Submit your panel proposal here (panel organizers are also asked to submit a panel title and a short description of the panel (max. 300 words).

 

The conference is supported by CUC – Consulta Universitaria del Cinema, Italy.

 

Luca Antoniazzi

 

Post-doctoral Researcher

Università di Bologna 

Dipartimento delle Arti 

Via Barberia, 4, 40123 Bologna (IT)

Brostoff on The Encyclopedist Code: Ancien Droit Legal Encyclopedias and Their Verbatim Influence on the Louisiana Digest of 1808 @LSULawCenter

Seth Brostoff, Louisiana State University Law Center, is publishing The Encyclopedist Code: Ancien Droit Legal Encyclopedias and Their Verbatim Influence on the Louisiana Digest of 1808 in volume 13 of the Journal of Civil Law Studies. Here is the abstract.

This Article identifies nearly one hundred articles and provisions in Louisiana’s first civil code, the Digest of 1808, which were copied verbatim or almost verbatim (that is, literally or almost literally) from three French legal encyclopedias popular during the Ancien Régime: M. Lerasle’s Encyclopédie méthodique: Jurisprudence (8 vols., 1782-89), Jean-Baptiste Denisart’s Collection de décisions nouvelles (1st ed., 6 vols., 1754), and Joseph-Nicolas Guyot’s Répertoire de jurisprudence (2d ed., 17 vols., 1784-85). As the Appendix indicates, verbatim and almost verbatim extracts from Lerasle, Denisart, and Guyot constitute at least 4-5% of the Digest’s source material. This Article therefore serves as a supplement (and partial corrective) to Rodolfo Batiza’s 1971 and 1974 studies of the Digest’s “actual sources”. The present study argues that the Digest’s primary redactor, Louis Moreau Lislet, borrowed language from French legal encyclopedia entries largely for pedagogical purposes, including introducing into Louisiana’s new civil code civilian definitions and other material that would be useful for lawyers and judges trained in the common law. As a result, Louisiana’s first civil code possesses a didactic quality that is absent from its Napoleonic prototype. Equally important, this study suggests that earlier scholars’ assumptions that the Digest’s source material reflects Louisiana’s mixed Spanish-French legal history should be revisited: while discovery of a significant presence of French legal encyclopedic sources certainly reveals the drafter’s preference for, and familiarity with, ancien droit legal literature, it further undermines previous assumptions about the widespread indirect influence of Roman and Spanish-Castilian sources.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Heyman on Reason and Conviction: Natural Rights, Natural Religion, and the Origins of the Free Exercise Clause @ChicagoKentLaw

Steven J. Heyman, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois-Institute of Technology, is publishing Reason and Conviction: Natural Rights, Natural Religion, and the Origins of the Free Exercise Clause in volume 23 of the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law.

One of the most intense debates in contemporary America involves conflicts between religious liberty and other key values like civil rights. To shed light on such problems, courts and scholars often look to the historical background of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. But this inquiry turns out to be no less controversial. In recent years, a growing number of scholars has challenged the traditional account that focuses on the roles of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the movement to protect religious liberty in late eighteenth-century America. These scholars emphasize that most of the political energy behind the movement came from Evangelical Christians. On this revisionist account, we should not understand the Free Exercise Clause and corresponding state provisions in terms of the Enlightenment views of Jefferson and Madison, which these scholars characterize as secular, rationalist, and skeptical – if not hostile – toward religion. Instead, those protections were intended to promote religion and especially Christianity. In this Article, I offer a different understanding of the intellectual foundations of the Free Exercise Clause. The most basic view that supported religious liberty was neither secular rationalism nor Christian Evangelicalism but what contemporaries called natural religion. This view held that human beings were capable of using reason to discern the basic principles of religion, including the duties they owed to God and one another. Because religion was founded on reason, individuals had an inalienable natural right to develop their own beliefs and to worship in accord with them. At the same time, that right was limited by the law of nature, which required people to respect the rights of others. In this way, the concept of natural religion established both the foundations and the limits of religious liberty. This view enabled people with different religious and philosophical perspectives to find common ground. It provided the basis for a political coalition between Evangelicals, rationalist Christians, and Enlightenment liberals that secured the adoption of state and federal constitutional guarantees for religious freedom. The Article begins by demonstrating that natural religion and its associated ideas of natural law and natural rights were central to the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Americans. Those ideas played a vital part in many areas of thought, including political and moral philosophy, natural jurisprudence, English law, Christian and Deist theology, and even Newtonian natural science – intellectual strands that came together in the Radical Whig ideology that animated the American Revolution. Next, I explain how those ideas can enhance our understanding of the religious liberty provisions of the first state declarations of rights; the political controversy that culminated in the passage of Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia; and the debates surrounding the adoption of the Federal Constitution and the Free Exercise Clause itself. Finally, I explore the founders’ views on the problem of religious exemptions from civil laws, and discuss the implications of this history for our current debates over civil rights and religious liberty – a subject that the Supreme Court recently grappled with in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and that it has agreed to revisit next Term in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Rosenblum on The Antifascist Roots of Presidential Administration @narosenblum @NYULaw

Noah A. Rosenblum, New York University School of Law; Columbia University Department of History, has published The Antifascist Roots of Presidential Administration. Here is the abstract.

We live, it is said, in an age of presidential administration. This Article uncovers the intellectual foundations of presidential control of the administrative state, and, on the basis of original archival research and new contextualization, grounds its legitimacy in the fight against fascism. It shows how the architects of presidential administration reconciled a strong executive with democratic norms by embracing separation of powers with the aim of making democracy responsible and antifascist. These previously overlooked developments have important consequences for contemporary debates about executive power in general and the role of the president in administration in particular. The Article shows that presidential administration was not a haphazard occurrence, but the culmination of a longstanding project to make modern democracy efficacious and accountable. It traces the roots of the office of the president back through the executive reorganization acts of the New Deal to a world of Progressive Era executive-centered reform thought. It then shows how the New Deal reformers on the President’s Committee on Administrative Management drew from and adapted this Progressive Era tradition. At the heart of this story is a stunning, if partial, reversal: where Progressive Era reformers rejected formal constitutionalism in general and the principle of separation of powers in particular, New Deal reformers embraced them. This consequential shift was closely connected to the need to distinguish and protect emergent American presidential-ism from fascism. Recovering this forgotten origin story has significant normative consequences. It establishes the fundamental importance of internal separation of powers and other antifascist adaptations of the modern administrative state. The Article thus raises a historically-grounded challenge to those who maintain that direct presidential control of administration is the only constitutionally or normatively desirable public law arrangement. It also proposes an antifascist litmus test that any adequate theory of Article II should have to meet. Anti-fascism, the Article shows, was the condition on which the institutions of the modern, empowered American presidency were actually imagined. Fidelity demands we grapple with that commitment today.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Guerra-Pujol, Champnella, Mayo, Travers, and Vitulli on Teaching Tiger King @lawscholar

F. E. Guerra-Pujol, Christiana Champnella, Benjamin Mayo, Morgan Travers, and Antonella Vitulli, all of the University of Central Florida, have published Teaching Tiger King. Here is the abstract.

When our home institution moved all instruction online in response to the global pandemic, we began redesigning our business law survey course from scratch. Specifically, we decided to use the popular docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness to explore the legal and ethical environments of business with our undergraduate students. We deliberately chose this surprise-hit TV show in order to make our online course as relevant, timely, and engaging as possible. The remainder of the paper will describe the contents of each module of the course, explore their relation to Tiger King, and explain the logic of our design choices.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Risinger on Female Law Librarians as Pioneer Women Law Professors @SetonHallLaw

D. Michael Risinger, Seton Hall University School of Law, has published Female Law Librarians as Pioneer Women Law Professors: A (Belated) Response to Dean Kay, with Some Suggested Additions to Her Canonical List. Here is the abstract.

The late Herma Hill Kay was the preeminent cataloguer of the pioneer women law professors of the modern era, that is, those who taught after the advent of formalized quality recognition of law schools, either through membership in the Association of American Law Schools (which began in 1900) or through American Bar Association accreditation (which began in 1923). Dean Kay excluded from her list female law librarians who held titles of ordinary faculty professorial rank, apparently because, form her point of view, they were not recognized as “full-fledged” faculty members. In my view this was a questionable omission. The very fact that they were granted professorial rank, at a time when such status was rare for law librarians and even rarer for female law librarians, cuts strongly in favor of adding them to any list of pioneer women law faculty, and to that end the article identifies those librarians who carried professorial rank at ABA/AALS law schools from 1923 through 1959 for inclusion on the list of pioneer woman law professors. But first, the article address a broader methodological point concerning Dean Kay’s list. Dean Kay sought to include in her list of female pioneer law professors only those who would have been fully recognized as members of the legal academy, even by the dominant males of the academy. Under this stringent standard, she counted only female faculty members at schools that were both ABA-accredited and admitted to membership in the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). I have no quibble with a restrictive approach, directed as it is to an important question of the status of women in the legal academy. However, accepting Dean Kay’s time frame, which is anchored to the beginning of ABA accreditation in 1923, I believe it was a mistake to exclude female full-time faculty with professorial rank at ABA-accredited law schools which were not members of the AALS. There were not many of these—the article only identifies three. But these three should be on any list of pioneer woman law professors.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Blake on A Positivist Baseball-Centric Critique of Originalism

William Blake, University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), Department of Political Science, has published A Positivist, Baseball-Centric Critique of Originalism. Here is the abstract.

Some scholars have argued that respect for the Constitution compels judges to adopt originalism. This paper evaluates the claim of “compelled originalism” by comparing the language of the baseball rulebook to that of the U.S. and other constitutions. First, I describe how different rules of our national pastime align with originalism, while others invite umpires to use a living Constitution approach. I then leverage H.LA. Hart’s philosophy of legal positivism to evaluate baseball and constitutional rules. Hart claims public officials must accept the most fundamental rules of their legal system, which would include any guidance about how to interpret the Constitution. Because compelled originalism is rooted in respect for the Constitution’s legitimacy and supremacy, one would assume the text would instruct judges to be originalists. Of course, the Constitution says no such thing. By contrast, the baseball rulebook sometimes provides specific instructions to umpires about how to adjudicate certain rule violations. I conclude by demonstrating how originalists have managed to turn the debate over constitutional legitimacy on its head. If the goal of originalism is to prevent judges from reading provisions into the Constitution, originalists must take seriously that no requirement to use original public meaning exists in the constitutional text.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Wilf on What We Talk About When We Talk About Fictional Characters (and Copyright) @UConnLaw

Steven Wilf, University of Connecticut School of Law, is publishing What We Talk About When We Talk About Fictional Characters (and Copyright) in volume 7 of Critical Analysis of Law (2020). Here is the abstract.

What do pictures want? Echoing the famous question posed by art historian W.J.T. Mitchell, this article interrogates that query within the skein of copyright law. The creation of a fictional character means seeing a possibly singular, inert image as having a past and a future, a panoply of emotional responses and, significantly, desires. Fictional characters are not copyrightable per se. Rather, protection stems from expression of those characters in copyrightable works. To determine whether fictional characters have reached the threshold of complexity worthy of copyright, courts inquire how well a character has been delineated. For nearly a century, copyright has relied upon traditional round character literary analysis which looks at a character’s distinguishable features from the audience’s point of view. Recently, flat protagonist criticism examines whether the character serves as a proper vehicle for the author’s story. This article takes another approach—asking what the image is trying to tell us about its own absences, needs, and emotional lacunae. Beyond establishing protection, we need to query what protagonists are unworthy of copyright. I argue that stereotypes should be held to stricter scrutiny as creating insufficiently desiring characters.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Kuersten on The Privacy Effect: A Third Amendment Historiography @KuerstenAndreas

Andreas Kuersten, Georgetown University, Center for Clinical Bioethics, has published The Privacy Effect: A Third Amendment Historiography. Here is the abstract.

This piece tracks early appreciations of privacy, scholarship addressing and interpreting the Third Amendment, and the effect on interpretations of the Third Amendment of twentieth-century court treatments of the Third Amendment linking it to the constitutional right to privacy.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Kathleen Kim and Yxta Maya Murray, Advice & Consent: A Play in One Act (2019) @murrayyxta

Kathleen Kim, and Yxta Maya Murray, both of the Loyola (Los Angeles) Law School, have published Advice & Consent: A Play in One Act as Loyola Law School, Los Angeles Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2020-19. Here is the abstract.

On September 27, 2018, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings concerning Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in the mid-1980s. Advice and Consent is a play by award-winning writer and law professor Yxta Maya Murray, formed of interviews, found text, and transcripts, re-arranged, selected, and edited for poetic and provocative effect. Law professor Kathleen Kim authored the Introduction and composed the play's Musical Score. The drama is designed as a thought experiment about power, pathos, tragedy, politics, gender, race, and truth. Professors Murray and Kim have presented and performed Advice and Consent in various academic and art forums.

Download the play from SSRN at the link.

Acevedo on Crime Fantasies

John Acevedo, University of Alabama Law School, is publishing Crime Fantasies, in volume 46 of the American Journal of Criminal Law (2019). Here is the abstract.

Throughout American history the public has been gripped by fantasies of criminal activity. These crime fantasies manifest in two distinct but related typologies: witch-hunts and crime panics. On the one hand, witch-hunts target individuals based on their beliefs and are exemplified by the two Red Scares of the early and mid-twentieth century and the persecution of the Quakers in seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay. These are fundamentally distinct from crime panics, which target activity that was already classified as criminal but do so in a way that exacerbate deep procedural deficiencies in the criminal justice system. Crime panics are exemplified by the Salem witchcraft trials and the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and 1990s. President Trump’s relentless focus on undocumented immigration can be seen as a partially successful attempt to create a crime panic, while, perhaps surprisingly, the investigation by Robert Mueller is neither a witch-hunt nor a crime panic. By bringing ongoing criminal law issues into conversation with legal history scholarship, this article clarifies our understanding of the relationship between politics and large-scale criminal investigations and highlights areas for future reform.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

CFP: Proposed Special Issue: Law and Literature, Humor and the Law

Proposed Special Issue for Law and Literature (Cardozo Law School):

Humor and the Law

Humor in its various forms, from comedy and satire to stand-up and cartoons, is regularly at the centre of juridical debates and actual litigation: from defamation and blasphemy to copyright violations and incitement to hatred. Yet, due to its inherent ambiguity and frequent elusiveness, humor can make it particularly difficult to draw a clear line between lawful and unlawful expression. How exactly does the law regulate humor, and how does that change across different judicial systems or historical periods? How do certain forms and practices of humor respond, in different places and at different times, to the restrictions of the law? How might humor studies contribute to and illuminate the legal challenges posed by different forms of comic expression? How might humor, moreover, challenge the logics and procedures of law?

Although recent studies have stressed the benefits of collaboration between jurists and humor experts (Godioli 2020, Little 2019, Milner Davis and Roach Anleu 2018), the potential for interdisciplinary dialogue is still vastly unexplored. This special issue will investigate the intersection between humor and the law from various perspectives — we aim to promote diversity in terms of theoretical frameworks, historical and geographical contexts, judicial systems and legal issues addressed. We welcome full-length articles (approximately 8-10,000 words) which should consist of close readings of one specific example of an actual legal case concerning humor in any medium (including for instance literature, stand-up comedy, film, cartoons, or memes).

The special issue proposal has received preliminary interest from Law and Literature (Cardozo Law School). If you are interested in contributing, please send an email to humorandthelaw@gmail.com by 1 November 2020 including an abstract (ca. 250-500 words) and a short bio note (max. 200 words). The outcome of the selection process will be communicated within one month after the deadline. We are expecting completed contributions by Spring or Summer 2021.

Coronavirus note: The editorial team began planning this CFP before the outbreak of Covid-19 and thus under very different conditions and with very different expectations. As a result, we understand that many potential contributors might not be able to complete their articles by the proposed deadline. If, however, you are still interested in contributing, but perhaps along a revised timeline, you should be in contact with the editors (humorandthelaw@gmail.com); we are more than happy to offer flexibility to potential contributors.

Best wishes,

The organizing team:

Brigitte Adriaensen (Radboud University/Open University)

Andrew Bricker (Ghent University)

Alberto Godioli (University of Groningen)

Ted Laros (Open University)

References

Godioli, A. (2020). ‘Cartoon Controversies at the European Court of Human Rights: Towards Forensic Humor Studies.’ Open Library of Humanities, 6(1). DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.571

Little, L. (2019). Guilty Pleasures: Comedy and Law in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Milner Davis, J. and Roach Anleu, S. eds (2018). Judges, Judging and Humour. London: Palgrave Macmillan.