James Boyd White On the Links Among Law, Thought, and Language

James Boyd White, University of Michigan Law School, has published "Establishing Relations Between Law and Other Forms of Thought and Language," 1 Erasmus Law Review (2008). Here is the abstract.

The law does not, and could not, exist in an intellectual or linguistic vacuum. No one believes that the law is or should be impervious to other languages, other bodies of knowledge. In this sense the argument about the 'autonomy' of law is an empty one: law cannot be, should not be, perfectly autonomous, unconnected with any other system of thought and expression; yet it plainly has it own identity as a discourse, it own intellectual and linguistic habits, which it is our task as lawyers to understand and develop. It follows that an essential topic of legal thought is the proper relation between law and other forms of thought and expression - a topic that is important, difficult and full of interest. In this paper, Professor White compares three ways in which the law is related to other fields: translation (as in the use of expert testimony), disciplinary imperialism (as in law and economics), and comparison of modes of thought and expression (as in law and literature).

Download the article from SSRN here.

Call For Papers

American University Washington College of Law

IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections

6th Annual Symposium

April 24, 2009

Special Theme: Female Fan Cultures and Intellectual Property

Sponsored by
American University Washington College of Law’s

Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property

Women and the Law Program

Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

In collaboration with

American University’s Center for Social Media

The Organization for Transformative Works

Rebecca Tushnet, Georgetown University

Francesca Coppa, Muhlenberg College

Deadline for submission of abstracts: December 19, 2008


The 6th Annual Symposium on “IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections” seeks papers on female subcultures and their relationship to intellectual property and copyright regimes, with a particular emphasis on fan works and culture. Appropriate topics include: fan arts, including fan fiction, arts, music, filk, crafts, and vids; and fan communities: including clubs, forums, lists, websites, wikis, discussion groups, rec sites, and other creative, celebratory, or analytical communities.

Introduction & Context

Historically, the study of subcultures has been biased toward male groups and activities: first, because male activities (e.g. punk rock, motorcycling, football hooliganism) tend to be public, and therefore visible; second, because many male groups have been seen as overtly resistant to mainstream norms. In contrast, many female subcultural activities took place in private, in the domestic realm or in other less visible spaces, and those that were visible tended, in the words of Sarah Thornton, to be "relegated to the realm of a passive and feminized 'mainstream' (a colloquial term against which scholars have all too often defined their subcultures)"; in other words, the things women did and do have often been framed as mainstream, passive, commodified, and derivative; consuming (in the negative sense of passive product consumption), rather than consuming in the sense of a passionate obsession or devotion to art or criticism.



This has changed significantly in the last twenty years, not only due to a rising feminist interest in subculture studies but also with the rise of fan and audience studies. In their pioneering "Girls and Subcultures" (1975), Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber presciently suggested that scholars turn their attention "toward more immediately recognizable teenage and pre-teenage female spheres like those forming around teenybop stars and the pop-music industry." Even they had trouble seeing what girls do as interesting and importing, noting that "[b]oys tended to have a more participative and a more technically-informed relationship with pop, where girls in contrast became fans and readers of pop-influenced love comics." McRobbie and Garber don't associate being "fans" with participation, and they see girls as "readers" only. In fact, as we know from fifteen years of fan and audience studies, fandom is a highly participatory culture, and female fans also write, edit, draw, paint, "manip," design, code, and otherwise make things.

However, even within this brave new world of mashup, remix, and fan cultures, what boys do (fan films, machinima, music mash-ups, DJing) is often seen by outsiders and critics as better--more interesting, more original, more clearly transformative-- than what girls do (fan fiction, fan art, vidding, coding fan sites, social networking). This normative judgment risks legal consequences.

We are seeking projects (including papers, installations, artwork, video and multimedia presentations) that investigate the ways in which issues of originality and ownership as related to copyright and other issues of intellectual property intersect with this gendered understanding of cultural productions and engagement, especially since these historically female subcultural activities and practices have increasingly become culture.

IP/Gender Mapping the Connections Organizational Details
· DEADLINE for submission of abstracts is DECEMBER 19 at 5:00pm.
· To submit an abstract or project description for consideration, fill in the web-based form at https://www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/ipgender/proposals.cfm . Participants will be notified if their project has been accepted for presentation by January 15. Selected presentations will be eligible for travel scholarships to attend the conference.

· The symposium will begin at 6:00 Thursday, April 23, 2009 at the American University Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C. The symposium will convene from 9:00 am until 4:00 pm on Friday, April 24, 2009.

· To view programs from prior IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections symposia, please visit www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/go/events/ip/gender/ip/gender-mapping-the-connection

· Papers may be published in the American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law.

· If you are interested in attending the event, but not presenting work, please contact Angie McCarthy, Women and the Law Program Coordinator at angiem@wcl.american.edu for details.

A Blog On Crime Fiction and Writing

If you like, or are interested in trying to write crime fiction, check out the blog Hey There's a Dead Guy in the Living Room, written by a writer, a publisher, an agent, a book reviewer, a bookshop owner, an editor, and a p.r. person. They're all alive, and in your (virtual) living room, and in your conservatory, and in your library....

A Draft Syllabus For a Course in Law and Literature

Simon Stern, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, has published "Law and Literature Seminar, Draft Syllabus." Here is the abstract.

This is a draft syllabus for an introductory seminar on law and literature. Courses in this area tend to focus primarily (often exclusively) on literary texts. My view is that literature can be more productively studied in a law school setting when literary and legal materials are placed next to each other. This approach does not treat law as the taken-for-granted backdrop that students already know, but instead makes explicit the similarities and differences between the two areas. Among other things, this approach may help to remind law students of what they know but easily forget - that what they have already learned about the law in their other classes is not inevitably alien to the qualities of literary writing and analysis. In that way, the course is not an effort to re-educate law students by illustrating passions and qualities that are presumptively absent from the rest of law school, but is instead designed to show how legal modes of thought are sometimes already present in literary texts and vice versa. To that end, my syllabus combines literary readings, literary criticism, judicial opinions, and legal scholarship.

These materials are a work in progress, and I welcome suggestions concerning new readings and new juxtapositions of literary and legal texts and scholarship.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Call For Papers

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Utopian Studies on Law and Utopia
Guest Editor: Peter Sands, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Utopias are prescriptive, normative alternatives to already existing societies. Thomas More, himself a lawyer, envisioned a society free from lawyers and with few positive laws, and that trope has since made frequent appearance in utopias and dystopias. But, like all societies, utopias depend on rules and rule-making—they are societies of laws.

Law itself, too, is a utopian expression, an attempt to shape a particular vision of society. Such visions enact conflicts between and among competing views of rights, duties, punishment, redemption, distribution, and nearly every other aspect of human life. Zoning laws describe someone’s desired organization of space and industry. Constitutions write into being a normative alternative to the society that exists before the constitution takes effect. Positive law presents a normatively different belief system from natural law, carrying implications for societal organization.

In fiction and film, utopian and dystopian expression addresses fundamental jurisprudential issues of good and evil, of right and wrong, of rights proper, of economics, criminality, state power and more. A Handmaid’s Tale dramatizes, for example, conflicts over reproductive rights; The Dispossessed juxtaposes anarchist, capitalist, and socialist societies. Soylent Green and Zardoz imagine wholly alternate legal structures and their consequences.

For this special issue of Utopian Studies we invite papers on any aspect of law and utopia.

Deadline: complete drafts by 31 May 2009.

Guidelines: http://www.utoronto.ca/utopia/journal/guidelines.html.

All submissions should be sent to:

Utopian Studies
Department of English
University of Alaska Anchorage
3211 Providence Drive
Anchorage, AK 99508
e-mail: utopia@uaa.alaska.edu
Inquiries about the special issue to: Peter Sands

Lawyer Ethics In Popular Culture

Michael Asimow, University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, and Richard Weisberg, Yeshiva University, Cardozo School of Law, have published "When the Lawyer Knows the Client is Guilty: Client Confessions in Legal Ethics, Popular Culture, and Literature," forthcoming in the Southern University Interdisciplinary Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

This article concerns a classic puzzle in legal ethics: what should a criminal defense lawyer do when the lawyer is certain that the client is factually guilty (usually because the client confessed to the lawyer), but the client insists on an all-out defense? Legal ethicists have struggled with this problem since the Courvoisier case in 1840, but it remains unresolved. This article draws a distinction between strong and weak adversarialism and explains how these two normative positions guide a lawyer's tactical decisionmaking. The article suggests that lawyers should have discretion to choose between the strong and weak positions, depending on context and their personal conscience. Both popular culture and great literature provide interesting perspectives on the strong vs. weak adversarialism dilemma. According to numerous films, television shows and novels, the right answer to the lawyer's dilemma is no adversarialism at all. The good lawyer should betray evil clients to insure that the truth is discovered. Pop culture's no-adversarialism model is a universe few lawyers would care to inhabit but which reflects popular views on the relationship of lawyering to truth. Literature casts doubt on whether a lawyer can know with certainty whether a client is telling the truth. It presents numerous models of successful strong adversarialists and unsuccessful weak adversarialists. Few literary lawyers manage to be both skilled advocates and decent human beings.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Call For Papers

Posted on behalf of Ruth Ann Robbins, Rutgers-Camden School of Law

Once Upon a Legal Time, Chapter Two: Applied Storytelling in Law

Lewis & Clark Law School; Portland, Oregon July 22-24, 2009

Introduction

We are pleased to issue this Call for Proposals for the second biennial

international Applied Storytelling Conference. The deadline is December 8,

2008. Building on the success of the first conference, held in London in 2007,

this conference seeks to foster collaboration and dialogue about the skill of

storytelling in law and about teaching storytelling and other skills to law

students and practitioners. This conference will bring together academics,

judges, and practitioners to explore the role of narrative in legal practice and

curricular strategies that will prepare students to use story and narrative as

they enter the practice of law.



Potential topics on the role of narrative in the practice of law may include

(but please, feel free to be creative):

-using storytelling in litigation or transactional work or in legislative

processes;

-the process of creating compelling legal stories as part of best practices;

-examining current models used to teach storytelling skills in education

and/or practice;

-narrative and negotiation;

-the place of storytelling in legal reasoning;

-differentiating between stories and narratives and the uses of each;

-comparative storytelling in legal systems;

-the ethical limits of storytelling, whether with clients lawyers or judges;



Selected papers from the 2007 conference were published in two journals: 43

The Law Teacher (Thomson, 2007); and 14 Legal Writing: The Journal of the

Legal Writing Institute (LexisNexis, 2008). Volume 14 of Legal Writing is

available on-line at http://www.journallegalwritinginstitute.org/



Format

The conference will include 45-60 minute presentations as well as roundtable

discussions. Proposals may indicate a preference for format. We also

encourage people to present works in progress for feedback.



Proposal Submissions

The deadline for submissions is December 8, 2008. Submissions should be

made on the attached Submission Form and should be sent, preferably

electronically, to:

Prof. Steve Johansen, Lewis & Clark Law School, tvj@lclark.edu

10015 SW Terwilliger Blvd., Portland, OR 97219



Logistical Details

Proposal Format: Please include a cover sheet, the form of which appears at

the end of this document, plus a description or narrative. Proposal narratives

can be as short as a few paragraphs but please do not exceed 2-3 pages of text

including whatever partial or full bibliography you attach.

Please make sure that your contact email address is included in the body of

the proposal. That is how we will be communicating with you.



Selection Process: After all proposals are received, the Conference Program

Committee will review all proposals. Submitters of successful proposals will

be notified of acceptances by January 15, 2009.



When and Where: The conference will take place from Wednesday, July 22

(opening reception) to Friday, July 24, 2009(closing dinner) at Lewis and

Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon. The School is a short ride from

downtown Portland, nestled on the edge of Tryon Creek State Park.

Transportation to and from the conference hotel will be provided.



Costs to Participants: Final conference costs have not been finalized. We

anticipate the conference fee to be approximately $350.



Housing: We have reserved blocks of rooms at the Heathman Hotel

($179/night), and the Downtown Marriott Hotel ($149/night). Both hotels are

in the heart of pedestrian-friendly downtown Portland. For more details on

the hotels, please visit their websites: http://portland.heathmanhotel.com/

http://marriottportland.com/

This conference is made possible through the generous support of the Legal

Writing Institute and Lewis and Clark Law School.



Proposal for the 2nd Applied Storytelling conference

Please include the following information as part of a one-page cover sheet

submitted with the proposal. You don’t have to submit this page of the call for

proposals (i.e. we know that you are seeing it in pdf and we aren’t asking you

to reproduce the page borders, etc.). Using your letterhead or a plain

document is fine.



Title of Proposed Program:



Name of Presenter (contact person for panel presentation):



Affiliated organization:



Contact info including E-mail

(Email is how we will mostly communicate)



Additional presenters, if applicable:



Program Summary:

[Please include on your cover sheet your short summary of the presentation

for the conference brochure. Summaries are generally 2-3 sentences].



Proposal Narrative:

[please limit this to no more than 2 pages, single spaced].

Call For Papers

From the Stetson Law Review

In December 2009 the Stetson Law Review will publish a symposium issue on law, literature, and film. Articles may focus on literature, film, or both; short fiction and poetry will also be considered. Regarding proposed submissions, please contact Robert Batey, the faculty coordinator of the symposium issue, at batey@law.stetson.edu or (after December 1st) at 727-562-7852. Final submissions must be received by June 2009.

Lyrics and Law

Camille Nelson, Saint Louis University School of Law, has published "Lyrical Assault: Dancehall Versus the Cultural Imperialism of the North-West," at 17 Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 231 (2008). Here is the abstract.

This article examines Jamaican Dancehall music's implications and international perceptions and explores a possible legal remedy for what has been dubbed "Murder Music." The impact of Jamaican Dancehall, the equivalent of American Hip-Hop, its lyrics and history upon Jamaica and the North-West are put into context and interrogated through the lens of cultural studies. Homophobic lyrics have triggered international boycotts and bans of this music and its artists. Despite the fact that Dancehall lyrics are perceived as violent, anti gay, anti-women, and very masculinist, international condemnation is based exclusively upon the homophobic lyrics. This article analyzes the implications of this ban and situates the international response within a masculinist colonial context. Specifics issues discussed include whether the colonization of Jamaica and the codification of its "Offenses against the Person Act" play a role in the propagation of homophobic lyrics, and why it is that Jamaica was criticized as one of the "most homophobic places on earth," given the anti-same sex marriage backlash in the United States and the fact of extreme instances of homophobia in many countries. While this article condemns homophobic lyrics and suggests the discontinuation of their use, it situates Jamaican homophobia as a vestige of colonial prerogatives and urges the abandonment of homophobia as the right thing to do and as a post-colonial move towards true independence.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Shakespeare and Sovereignty

P. G. Monateri, University of Turin, School of Law, has published "Sovereign Ambiguity - From Hamlet to Benjamin via Eliot and Schmitt." Here is the abstract.

The Author examines how Romantic Ambiguity lies at the heart of the legal notion of Sovereignty, applying a law and literature approach to notions developed by Benjamin and Carl Schmitt.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Robert Tsai's Eloquence and Reason

Professor Robert Tsai (American University, Washington College of Law), who previously guest blogged here in January 2006, has just published Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture (Yale University Press, Nov. 2008). According to the back cover blurb:

This provocative book presents a theory of the First Amendment’s development. During the twentieth century, Americans gained trust in its commitments, turned the First Amendment into an instrument for social progress, and exercised their rhetorical freedom to create a common language of rights. Robert L. Tsai explains that the guarantees of the First Amendment have become part of a governing culture and nationwide priority. Examining the rhetorical tactics of activists, presidents, and lawyers, he illustrates how committed citizens seek to promote or destabilize a convergence in constitutional ideas. Eloquence and Reason reveals the social and institutional processes through which foundational ideas are generated and defends a cultural role for the courts.

I've read a few chapters of this book earlier on, and I highly recommend it. Robert Tsai's work is always interesting and thought-provoking. He writes beautifully, and he demonstrates with great insight how rhetoric influences constitutional law.

From a blurb on the back cover by Professor Mark Tushnet (Harvard Law School): "A provocative meditation on the ways the metaphors used in constitutional doctrine empower, limit, create, and recreate the public over which the written Constitution is said to assert authority. Intriguing case studies arise from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Christian Right of the 1980s, and the attacks on Jehovah's Witnesses in the 1940s."

Michael Crichton Dies

Author Michael Crichton has died. The physician and author (Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, Coma) was 66.

The CSI Effect

Donald E. Shelton, Eastern Michigan University, has published "The 'CSI Effect': Does it Really Exist?" in volume 259 of the National Institute of Justice Journal (2008). Here is the abstract.

Many attorneys, judges, and journalists have claimed that watching television programs like CSI has caused jurors to wrongfully acquit guilty defendants when no scientific evidence has been presented. This so-called effect was promptly dubbed the "CSI effect," laying much of the blame on the popular television series and its progeny. This study of 1027 jurors found that 46 percent expected to see some kind of scientific evidence in every criminal case; 22 percent expected to see DNA evidence in every criminal case; 36 percent expected to see fingerprint evidence in every criminal case; and 32 percent expected to see ballistic or other firearms laboratory evidence in every criminal case. The findings also suggested that expectations for particular types of scientific evidence seemed to be rational based on the type of case.

For all categories of evidence CSI viewers generally had higher expectations than non-CSI viewers but the CSI viewers had higher expectations about scientific evidence that was more likely to be relevant. Interestingly, potential jurors' increased expectations of scientific evidence did not translate into a demand for this type of evidence as a prerequisite for finding someone guilty. Jurors were more likely to find a defendant guilty than not guilty even without scientific evidence if the victim or other witnesses testified, except in the case of rape. On the other hand, if the prosecutor relied on circumstantial evidence, the prospective jurors said they would demand some kind of scientific evidence before they would return a guilty verdict.

There was scant evidence in our survey results that CSI viewers were either more or less likely to acquit defendants without scientific evidence. Only 4 of 13 scenarios showed significant differences between viewers and non-viewers on this issue, and they were inconsistent. In the "every crime" scenario, CSI viewers were more likely to convict without scientific evidence if eyewitness testimony was available. In rape cases, CSI viewers were less likely to convict if DNA evidence was not presented.

In both the breaking-and-entering and theft scenarios, CSI viewers were more likely to convict if there was victim or other testimony, but no fingerprint evidence. Although CSI viewers had higher expectations for scientific evidence than non-CSI viewers, these expectations had little, if any, bearing on the respondents' propensity to convict.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Other scholars and commentators have written about the "CSI Effect." Here are some citations.

Stefan Lovgren, CSI Effect Is Mixed Blessing
Kit D. Roane, The CSI Effect
Jeffrey Toobin, The CSI Effect

A New Edition of Frankenstein

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Charles Robinson, Professor of English at the University of Delaware, has prepared an edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, stripped of Percy Shelley's improvements. We can now see what Mary Shelley actually wrote, and compare it to what we've been reading all these years. The two Shelleys' collaboration, says Robinson, took him years to take apart. Such is the result of the marriage of two minds.

Tony Hillerman, Author of Mysteries Featuring Native American Sleuths, Dies

Tony Hillerman, the author of numerous bestselling mysteries featuring Navajo sleuths Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, has died of pulmonary failure. Here's more from the International Herald Tribune.

Mr. Hillerman's first Joe Leaphorn novel was The Blessing Way. For more about Mr. Hillerman's writing, check out the following websites (not a comprehensive list)

Tony Hillerman at mysterynet.com
Tony Hillerman at dancingbadger.com
Susan Mueller's Tony Hillerman Page

For more about Mr. Hillerman's work, try

Balassi, William Victor and John F. Crawford, This Is About Vision: Interviews With Southwestern Writers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990).

Balibar, Renee, Philosophies du roman policier (Fontenay aux Roses: E.N.S., 1995).

Bargainnier, Earl F., Cops and Constables: American and British Fictional Policemen (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986).

Bauer, Joyce M., The West Is Not God’s New Garden of Paradise: Demythologizing the American West in the Hardboiled Detective Fiction of Tony Hillerman, Bernard Schopen, and James Crumley (Dissertation, University of Nevada, Reno, 1998).

Carter, Catherine Anne, A Critical Analysis of the Detective Fiction of Tony Hillerman (Master’s thesis, Radford University, 1993).

Coale, Samuel, The Mystery of Mysteries: Cultural Differences and Designs (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000).

Erisman, Fred, Tony Hillerman (Boise: Boise State University Press, 1989).

Fischer-Hornung, Dorothea, and Monika Mueller, Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003).

Freese, Peter, The Ethnic Detective: Chester Himes, Harry Kemelman, Tony Hillerman (Essen: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 1993).

Glassman, Steve, and Maurice O’Sullivan, Crime Fiction and Film in the Southwest: Bad Boys and Bad Girls of the Badlands (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001).

Hamm, Ron, The Navajo Detective Novels of Tony Hillerman: A Bridge Between Two Cultures (Master’s thesis, Texas A&M University, 1989).

Heiss, Gwen Garnsey, Walking in Beauty: Tony Hillerman’s Indian Detective Fiction (Master’s thesis, San Diego State University, 1994).

Heite, Donna, Tony Hillerman: Mystery Novelist With a Southwestern Slant (Master’s thesis, Western New Mexico University, 1991).

Herbert, Rosemary, The Fatal Art of Entertainment: Interviews With Mystery Writers (NY: G.K. Hall, 1994).

Kaminsky, Stuart M., Behind the Mystery: Top Mystery Writers (Cohasset, MA: Hot House Press, 2005).

Kelleghan, Fiona, 100 Masters of Mystery and Detective Fiction (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2001).

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers (Westport, CT: Greenwood Electronic Media, 2001--).

Quirk, Tom, Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the American Literary Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001).

Reilly, John M., Tony Hillerman: A Critical Companion (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996).

Six, Beverly G., Slaying the Monsters: Native American Spirituality in the Works of Tony Hillerman (Dissertation, Texas Tech University, 1998).

Timmons, Janice, The Elevation Theme and Disjoint Themes in the Detective Fiction of Tony Hillerman (Master’s thesis, California State University, Dominguez Hills, 1996).

Winks, Robin W., Colloquium On Crime: Eleven Renowned Mystery Writers Discuss Their Work (NY: Scribner, 1986).

I'll be mentioning some articles about Mr. Hillerman's work in a future post.

Anti-Semitism and Religion in Kafka

Arnold Heidsieck, University of Southern California, has published "On Judaism, Christianity, Anti-Semitism in Kafka's the Castle, His Letters and Diaries." Here is the abstract.

In his writings Kafka scrutinized, encouraged by his friend Max Brod, the early 20th-century German-speaking disputes on the ancient Jewish origins of Christianity and attempted an explication of the Christian-Germanic ideology of anti-Semitism.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

You Don't Tread On Superman's Cape

From EvidenceProfBlog: Colin Miller writes cleverly and authoritatively about claims brought against Superman by a victim he rescues in an episode of the show Lois and Clark. So what does this tell us about Good Samaritan laws?

Short Law Review Article, Long Memory?

Erik M. Jensen, Case Western Reserve School of Law, has published "The Intellectual History of 'The Shortest Article in Law Review History'," in volume 59 of the Case Western Reserve Law Review. Here is the abstract.

"The Shortest Article in Law Review History" appeared in 2000 to a mixture of acclaim ("Brilliant!"), horror ("Don't you have anything better not to do?"), and indifference ("Huh?"). Since then, many have asked how the article came into being and what its effect on legal scholarship has been. (Well, the author's mother and sister did once raise those questions, or one of them anyway.) This new article provides readers with just about everything needed to understand a twenty-first century development in the life of the mind.

Download the paper from SSRN here.
And I remember Professor Jensen when he was writing (extensively) about buffalo law....

A Look at Native American Law Through a Michigan Novelist's Eyes

Matthew L. M. Fletcher, Michigan State University College of Law, has published "Laughing Whitefish: A Tale of Justice and Anishinaabe Custom," as MSU Legal Studies Research Paper 06-16. Here is the abstract.

Laughing Whitefish, a novel by Robert Traver, the pen name of former Michigan Supreme Court Justice John Voelker, is the fictionalized story of a case that reached the Michigan Supreme Court three times, culminating in Kobogum v. Jackson Iron Co., 43 N.W. 602 (Mich. 1889). The petitioner, Charlotte Kobogum, an Ojibwe Indian from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, brought suit to recover under a note issued to her father, Marji Gesick, by the mining company in the 1840s. The company had promised a share in the company because he had led them to one of the largest iron ore deposits in the country, the famed Jackson Mine. Despite the company's defense that Mr. Gesick was a polygamist and therefore Ms. Kobogum could not be his legitimate heir, the Michigan Supreme Court held that state courts had no right to interfere with internal, domestic relations of reservation Indians, and upheld the claim. Justice Voelker's tale is a powerful defense of the decision, and offers insights into why state courts should recognize the judgments of tribal courts even today.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

John Voelker (Robert Traver) is also the author of Anatomy of a Murder, filmed with Jimmy Stewart, Ben Gazzara, and Lee Remick.

Fan Fiction, Harry Potter, and Copyright Law

Aaron Schwabach, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has published "The Harry Potter Lexicon and the World of Fandom: Fan Fiction, Outsider Works, and Copyright," has TJSL Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1274293. Here is the abstract.

Fan fiction, long a nearly invisible form of outsider art, has grown exponentially in volume and legal importance in the past decade. Because of its nature, authorship, and underground status, fan fiction stands at an intersection of issues of property, sexuality, and gender. This article examines three disputes over fan writings, concluding with the recent dispute between J.K. Rowling and Steven Vander Ark over the Harry Potter Lexicon, which Rowling once praised and more recently succeeded in suppressing. The article builds on and adds to the emerging body of scholarship on fan fiction, concluding that much fan fiction is fair use under 17 U.S.C. section 107. But much is not, as well.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Kafka's POV

Arnold Heidsieck, University of Southern California, has published "Kafka's Narrative Innovation and Ethical Intuitions." Here is the abstract.

In his fictions Kafka develops an innovative narrative POV (uni-polar 'self-narration') and a penetrating (near-psychoanalytic) scrutiny of motives. Additionally, throughout his fictions and his non-fiction he works out a contextually rich individualist ethics.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

New Book on Shakespeare and the Law

Hart Publishing is offering a new title called Shakespeare and the Law, edited by Paul Raffield and Gary Watt. It collects the proceedings of a July 2007 conference held at the University of Warwick School of Law. Here's further information provided by the publisher.

In July 2007, the School of Law at the University of Warwick hosted an international conference on 'Shakespeare and the Law'. This was a truly interdisciplinary event, which included contributions from eminent speakers in the fields of English, history, theatre and law. The intention was to provide a congenial forum for the exploration, dissemination and discussion of Shakespeare's evident fascination with and knowledge of law, and its manifestation in his works.



The papers included in this volume reflect the diverse academic interests of participants at the conference. The eclectic themes of the edited collection range from analyses of the juristic content of specific plays, as in 'Consideration, Contract and the End of The Comedy of Errors', 'Judging Isabella: Justice, Care and Relationships in Measure for Measure', 'Law and its Subversion in Romeo and Juliet', 'Inheritance in the Legal and Ideological Debate of Shakespeare's King Lear' and 'The Law of Dramatic Properties in The Merchant of Venice', to more general explorations of Shakespearean jurisprudence, including 'Shakespeare and Specific Performance', 'Shakespeare and the Marriage Contract', 'The Tragedy of Law in Shakespearean Romance' and 'Punishment Theory in the Renaissance: the Law and the Drama'.



Paul Raffield is an Associate Professor in Law at Warwick University. Gary Watt is Reader and Associate Professor in Law at Warwick University.



Aug 08 312pp Pbk 9781841138251 £30 / €45 / US$63 / CDN$67.50

Discount Price: £24 / €36 / US$50 / CDN$54 See further details

Contents

Foreword (Carol Chillington Rutter)

Introduction (Paul Raffield and Gary Watt)



I. Shakespeare, Money and the Law of Contract

1. Mark Fortier, ‘Shakespeare and Specific Performance’

2. Andrew Zurcher, ‘Consideration, Contract and the End of The Comedy of Errors’



II. Shakespeare, Women and the Law

3. Jonathan Bate, ‘The Bawdy Court’

4. Germaine Greer, ‘Shakespeare and the Marriage Contract’

5. Erika Rackley, ‘Judging Isabella: Justice, Care and Relationships in Measure for Measure’



III. Shakespeare and the Law of Love

6. Bradin Cormack, ‘Shakespeare Possessed: Legal Affect and the Time of Holding’

7. Katrin Trüstedt, ‘The Tragedy of Law in Shakespearean Romance’

8. Daniella Carpi, ‘Law and its Subversion in Romeo and Juliet’



IV. Justice and the Royal Prerogative

9. Carolyn Sale, ‘The King is a Thing’: the King’s Prerogative and the Treasure of the Realm in Plowden’s Report of the Case of Mines and Shakespeare’s Hamlet’

10. Giuseppina Restivo, ‘Inheritance in the Legal and Ideological Debate of Shakespeare’s King Lear’



V. Violence, the State and the Citizen

11. Harry Keyishian, ‘Punishment Theory in the Renaissance: the Law and the Drama’

12. Ian Ward, ‘Terrorists and Equivocators’

13. Paul Raffield, ‘Terras Astraea reliquit’: Titus Andronicus and the Loss of Justice’

14. Christian Biet, ‘Titus Andronicus vs Le More Cruel and Les Portugais Infortunés: Humiliation, Punishment and Violence in the Shakespearean and French Theatre of the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century’



VI. The Merchant of Venice and the Infinite Meanings of ‘Law’

15. Gary Watt, ‘The Law of Dramatic Properties in The Merchant of Venice’

16. Istvan Pogany, ‘Shylock in Transylvania: Anti-Semitism and the Law in East Central Europe’

17. Anton Schütz, ‘Shylock as a Politician’

18. Richard H. Weisberg, ‘The Concept and Performance of ‘The Code’ in The Merchant of Venice’

The publisher notes that readers can obtain a 20 percent discount by quoting the reference "SHAKESPEARE" in the special instructions field. See the webpage here.

Law and Lyrics

Alex B. Long, University of Tennessee College of Law, has published "[Insert Song Lyrics Here]: The Uses and Misuses of Popular Music Lyrics In Legal Writing," in volume 64 of the Washington and Lee Law Review (2007).

Legal writers frequently utilize the lyrics of popular music artists to help advance a particular theme or argument in legal writing. And if the music we listen to says something about us as individuals, then the music we, the legal profession as a whole, write about may something about who we are as a profession. A study of citations to popular artists in law journals reveals that, not surprisingly, Bob Dylan is the most popular artist in legal scholarship. The list of names of the other artists rounding out the Top Ten essentially reads like a Who's Who of baby boomer favorites. Often, attorneys use the lyrics of popular music in fairly predictable ways in their writing, sometimes with adverse impact on the persuasiveness of the argument they are advancing. However, if one digs deeper, one can find numerous instances in which legal writers incorporate the lyrics of popular music into their writing in more creative ways.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Call For Papers

Georgetown University Law Center, Columbia Law School, University of Southern California Center for Law, History & Culture, and UCLA School of Law invite submissions for the seventh meeting of the Law & Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop to be held at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. on June 7 & 8, 2009.


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, and welcomes critical, qualitative work in the social sciences. Between five and ten papers will be chosen, based on anonymous evaluation by an interdisciplinary selection committee, 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. Moreover, 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 should be works-in-progress between 10,000 and 15,000 words in length (including footnotes/endnotes), and must include an abstract of no more than 200 words. 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 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 travel expenses of authors whose papers are selected for presentation.



Submissions (in either Word or Wordperfect, no pdf files) will be accepted until January 9, 2009, and should be sent by e-mail to:



Center for the Study of Law and Culture

culture@law.columbia.edu



Columbia Law School

435 W. 116th Street

New York, N.Y. 10027



Please be sure to include your contact information. For more information: Tanisha Madrid, 212.854.0692 or culture@law.columbia.edu. The full text of the Call for Papers is available at: http://www.law.columbia.edu/center_program/law_culture/lh_workshop.

Antigone and the Politics of Lamentation

Bonnie Honig, American Bar Foundation, has published "Antigone's Laments, Creon's Grief: Mourning, Membership and the Politics of Exception," as American Bar Foundation Research Paper 08-02. Here is the abstract.

This paper develops a historically situated reading of Sophocles' Antigone as an exploration of the politics of lamentation and the larger ideological conflicts these stand for. The play is supposedly about Antigone's defiance of her uncle Creon's sovereign decree that her brother Polynices, who attacked the city with a foreign army and died in battle, be left unburied as a lesson to all regarding the consequences of treason. But, I argue, the play is not about Polynices and his treason. These are merely occasions for something else: The play explores the clash in 5th century Athens between Homeric/elite and democratic mourning practices. The former memorialize the unique individuality of the dead, focus on the family's loss and bereavement and call for vengeance. The latter, the democratic, memorialize the dead's contribution to the immortal polis and emphasize (as in the Funeral Oration) the replace-ability of those lost by other, future citizens yet to come. Both economies of mourning are limited, necessary and insufficient to the bereavement we feel in the face of death. By staging their critical agonistic engagement, the play calls attention to each one's limits, but also mounts a criticism of democratic Athens' (represented by Creon) intolerance of the Homeric view.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Rousseau's Emile

Eric Engle, University of Bremen, has published "Law and Literature: Instilling Norms by Fable in Rousseau's Emile." Here is the abstract.

The Law and Literature movement proposes that legal interpretation can be improved by borrowing methods from literary interpretation, by seeing legal decisions as stories, and by examining literature from a legal perspective. In Emile Rousseau presents us his Bildungsroman and educative novella about a Model Couple, Emile (the hypostasized Rousseau) and Sophie (the wise, sturdy farm girl). Rousseau recounts several stories in Emile, about false rape claims, faithless partners, women who try to be men and fail and in all a series of stories set around the theme of super-responsibility of women to be in the end: baby factories, to make soldiers for the state. Without intending to, Rousseau is comedic in presenting images of women that by today's standards are pathetically laughable. And yet these images of women influenced legislation and judgements because narrative gives scripts and roles to people to recreate in real life. Only by consciously exposing and deconstructing these roles and scripts would it be possible to live out something other than these prescripted, artificial and limiting roles.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Bells Are Ringing

Via On the Media, a piece by Zachary Pincus-Roth about how phones are vital to the plots of so many Hollywood films.

A Tragic Murder, Ten Years Later

The New York Times has this feature article about The Laramie Project, a docuplay about the Matthew Shepard murder, which took place ten years ago.

Upcoming Symposium On Acquiring and Maintaining Collections of Cultural Objects: Challenges Confronting American Museums in the 21st Century

DePaul College of Law Announces:

8th Annual Symposium
Acquiring and Maintaining Collections of Cultural Objects: Challenges Confronting American Museums in the 21st Century
Museums face increasingly difficult challenges in collecting cultural objects-challenges that must be dealt with in ways that are consistent with best practices. On October 16, 2008, DePaul University College of Law will hold a major conference where leading experts will examine the basic rules of nonprofit museum governance and how those rules apply to the growing challenge of collecting cultural property in light of new laws, court decisions and professional ethical guidelines; evolving museum practices and standards in collecting antiquities; sovereign immunity and immunity of art works; and the need for further standards for donor/collector museum relationships.

OCTOBER 16, 2008
DePaul Center, Room 8005
1 E. Jackson Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois
8:30 AM - 5:30 PM


Registration
www.law.depaul.edu/museum

Co-sponsors
Andrews Kurth LLP
The Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation
Herrick Feinstein
DePaul University College of Law is an accredited Illinois MCLE provider. The Symposium has been approved for 6 hours of CLE credit.

In Agatha Christie's Own Voice, a Window On the Last Third of Her Life

Julie Bosman writes in the New York Times about a cache of tapes found recently featuring Agatha Christie's own voice and discussing a number of issues close to her heart, including whether Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot were ever likely to meet. Her grandson Mathew Prichard discovered the recordings in one of his grandmother's former homes. Read more here.

Legal Briefs, and More

The New York Times' John Eligon plays "What Not To Wear" in this article about fashion flair among legal eagles. Says Mr. Eligon, "For a visitor to the court, a judge without a black robe might prompt a double take. But on any given day in New York City’s courthouses, it is common to see judges on the bench with unzipped or unbuttoned robes; accessories like scarves, jewelry or collars hanging outside of a robe; and, in some cases, no robe at all. Often seen as straitlaced and uncompromising, judges like to consider their freedom of dress a humanizing factor. And they have long found ways to give their robes a bit of pop." Read on, Macduff.

Franz Kafka's Last Wishes and the Kafka Myths

Professor Lior Strahilevitz (U. Chicago Law School) has an interesting post about Franz Kafka's papers. The famous story about Kafka's papers is that Kafka asked his friend, Max Brod, to burn them after his death. Although Kafka had published a few works during his lifetime, a great many stories, parables, letters, and diary entries were unpublished, as were Kafka's two great book masterpieces, The Trial and The Castle. Brod refused to burn them. Instead, he published them, and Kafka would go on to achieve enormous posthumous fame as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
Should Brod have carried out Kafka's wishes? Lior argues yes:

I have written, and continue to believe, that Brod should have destroyed Kafka’s unpublished works, as per Kafka’s instructions, notwithstanding the immense literary value of the work. Kafka had legitimate privacy and artistic integrity interests in the works that should have been respected, and as their creator he was in the best position to decide upon their fate.

Controversies over the Kafka papers have recently reemerged. The New York Times describes a new issue over Kafka's papers:

When Mr. Brod fled to Tel Aviv from Prague on the last train out in 1939 as the Nazis rolled in, he had with him a suitcase full of Kafka’s documents.
Here, he took up with his secretary, and when he died in 1968, he bequeathed to her the remaining Kafka papers, as well as his own from a rich cultural career. For nearly 40 years, the secretary, Esther Hoffe, held the world of Kafka scholarship on tenterhooks, keeping the documents in her ground-floor apartment on Spinoza Street, some of them piled high on her desk (it was originally Mr. Brod’s), where she typed all day and took her meals.
The last time a scholar was permitted into the apartment was in the 1980s. Later, Ms. Hoffe sold the manuscript for “The Trial” for $2 million. No one knows what remains.
Since her death last year at age 101, her 74-year-old daughter, Hava, has indicated that a decision about the coveted papers will be made in the coming months. While most of the Kafka estate is already in archives in the Czech Republic, Britain and Germany, some may still be inside the scuffed front door of the Hoffe apartment.

Lior's article, The Right to Destroy, 114 Yale L.J. 781 (2005) (SSRN version here, final published version here) argues:

I submit that the K papers and manuscripts should be destroyed, on the basis of any of four rationales. . . .
First . . . A society that does not allow authors to have their draft works destroyed posthumously could have
less literary product than a society that requires the preservation of all literary works not destroyed during the author’s life. Protecting authors’ rights to destroy should encourage high-risk, high-reward projects, and might prevent writers from worrying that they should not commit words to paper unless they have complete visions of the narrative structures for their work. . . .
Second, we might accept an economic rationale. . . . K has an economic interest (via his concern for the welfare of his beneficiaries) in assuring that the value of his published works is not diminished by the conceivably inferior quality of the unpublished works.
Third and relatedly, . . . By destroying his unfinished works, K may wish to send a message to the public that he is not the type of artist who will tolerate, let alone publish, inferior works. . . .
Finally, . . . . If a court decides to bar Brod from destroying K’s unpublished works, it is forcing the departed K to speak when he would have preferred to remain silent.

I don't want to take on Lior's arguments in this post, as I find myself greatly torn over the issue. Respecting the privacy and final wishes of the author is a very important value, but there is also enormous social benefit from society's having an author's papers. Imagine if Kafka's wishes had been granted. Nobody would know of The Trial or The Castle, two of the greatest works of literature ever penned. Maybe there should be a special exception for Kafka since his works are so great. . . .
But there's another interesting issue in Kafka's request to Brod. Lior explicitly states that he is assuming, for the sake of his analysis, that Kafka's instructions to Brod were "unambiguous." But Kafka's instructions were, in fact, not so clear. In a recent book, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life (2008), James Hawes attempts to deflate many myths about Kafka. Kafka wrote two "wills" to Brod. In his writing desk, Kafka left the following instruction:

Dearest Max, my last wish: Everything that I leave behind in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters of my own and from others, drawing, etc. (whether in my bookcase, clothes cupboard, writing desk at home or at the office, or in any other place anything may have gotten and you find it) should be burned, completely and unread, as should everything written or drawn in your possession or in the possession of others whom you should ask, in my name, to do likewise. People who do not want to hand over letters to you should at least be made to promise that they themselves will burn them. Yours, Franz Kafka.

Kafka wrote Max another letter shortly before his death, listing his published works and saying that "only the following books count" but that :everything that exists in the way of my writings (publications in journals, manuscripts and letters) is without exception inasmuch as it's possible to get hold of it . . . . all this, without exception, is to be burned and you are asked to do this as quickly as possible by me, Franz."
Hawkes contends, and I agree, that Kafka "didn't mean a word of it." Hawes writes:

Kafka was a lawyer. He knew very well what a binding legal document looked like and that neither of these supposed wills was remotely a real one. Brod claims that he'd even told Kafka flat out, at the time of his first will, that he wouldn't carry out the instructions.

Brod was Kafka's best friend and greatest fan. Brod had helped to establish Kafka's reputation as an author, and it was ironic to ask him to destroy the works. Kafka had shown Brod The Trial and back in 1919, Brod even joked with Kafka that Brod would finish it when Kafka's publisher was demanding novels instead of stories from Kafka.
Kafka was a master of irony. His request to Brod, understood in the context of his work, diaries, and letters (much of which, even more ironically, were subject to his request to burn), is typical Kafka. He was asking the man whom he knew never would burn his papers to do so. He could have asked others to carry out his bidding, but he chose Brod. As in all his works, Kafka raises complex issues of interpretation.
The Hawes book is an interesting read, as it attempts to debunk many myths about Kafka. Among the myths are that Kafka was unknown in his lifetime, that he lived a lonely life, and that he was poor. In fact, Hawes points out that Kafka was well-received in literary circles. Kafka had an active social life. Kafka did have dysfunctional relationships with women, a phenomenon Hawes attributes to Kafka's deep ambivalence about being married and raising a family (which Kafka was afraid would take away time from his writing). Kafka made a very good living and was successful at his job. Hawes also notes that although many view Kafka's living at home for most of his adult life demonstrated that he was a failure, this was in fact the norm for young unmarried professionals. People envision Kafka as a tiny gaunt figure, but he was for most of his life in good shape and was quite tall -- about 6 feet tall, which was much taller than average at the time.
Hawes does go a bit overboard at times, contending that Kafka's Jewishness had little influence in his work. In fact, Kafka's works are suffused with countless tropes, images, and references to Judaism. Kafka wasn't a particularly religious man, but he was fascinated by Judaism and studied it extensively. Hawes also makes much of Kafka's porn collection, using it as a way to deflate critics whom Hawes think put Kafka on too much of a pedestal. The porn consisted mainly of illustrations from a journal called The Amethyst, which seems to have been a literary journal that published "edgy fiction" and erotica. The illustrations, some of which Hawes reproduces in his book, are a little weird, but seem much more arty than pornographic. Hawes seems to be a bit too obsessed in attacking his conception of the Kafka critic who views Kafka as an asexual individual, a pure soul devoted solely to abstract ideas. Such critics do exist, but much commentary about Kafka does not view him in this caricatured manner. Nevertheless, despite Hawes' tendency to overclaim, his book is very entertaining and illuminating about Kafka. Too bad it is marred by Hawes' rather obnoxious tone, as the one-and-only myth-slayer designed to bring Kafka back to earth.
Cross-posted at Concurring Opinions

Steven Bochco's New Legal Drama Debuts

Some early reviews are in for Steven Bochco's new legal drama Raising the Bar. Barry Garron of the Hollywood Reporter finds the series, slated to run on TNT, looking like "it had been developed for the CW network. Most of the characters are young lawyers, either public defenders under the tutelage of mother hen Roz Whitman (Gloria Reuben) or fledgling prosecutors under the harsh, cynical thumb of Nick Balco (Currie Graham). They would appear more at home in the Ford Modeling agency waiting room than in Manhattan's gloomy courthouse corridors. As if to emphasize the point, a rotund lawyer appears in the opening scenes of the second episode and is swiftly dispatched by a fatal heart attack. His kind simply is not welcome here." Mr. Garron also seems to find the show a little worn. "Bochco and co-creator David Feige are at their best when they make the story twist and turn over unexpected legal nuances. Too often, though, plots are contrived and coincidental (how many times can Kellerman defend clients against the same prosecutor, who just happens to be his girlfriend?) and lack the wonderful surprises that are trademarks of a Bochco production." Read the entire review here.

But here's what the Wall Street Journal's Nancy DeWolf Smith has to say.

The only real angels here are the public defenders, most prominently Jerry Kellerman (the Heath Ledgerish Mark-Paul Gosselaar). Kindhearted, brave and, above all, idealistic, they are stuck with defending society's victims against the pitiless, and often unethical, prosecutors. In the first three episodes, all of the defendants are either innocents being framed or railroaded by the judge/prosecutors, or sympathetic characters struggling with major problems and facing punishment all out of proportion with their transgressions.

Typical is a case with "To Kill a Mockingbird" vibes, in which the defendant is a young black student who was lured to the home of a trashy white classmate, seduced by her and then threatened by her white boyfriend until he fought back. Even the prosecutor knows that the defendant is no criminal, but in the world of "Raising the Bar" the deeply flawed justice system must nail him to the wall.

Mr. Bochco has felt compelled to claim that the series takes no side between prosecutors and public defenders, that it gives "equal time to both points of view." Equal screen time may be accurate; yet the images that persist are of defense lawyer Jerry agonizing about his innocent, upstanding (minority) client facing the slammer for rape -- while in another office, a white-goddess prosecutor gyrates teasingly on the lap of her smarmy and cynical white boss.

Read her review here.

Finally, the New York Daily News' David Hinckley finds the show entertaining as "straight drama." He notes, "what seems to interest Bochco more, at least in this opening episode, is something about the system itself, the system that sets the unspoken rules under which Kellerman and the typically large ensemble Bochco cast are working. That "something" involves conflicts of interest, mixed loyalties and hidden agendas. In the world of "Raising the Bar," the justice system is a club where everybody knows each other, or is only one degree of separation removed. The characters freely acknowledge this, and have developed a mantra to deal with it: What happens outside the courtroom doesn't matter. Once the judge takes the bench and everyone is seated, the fact the defense attorney knows the prosecutor, or maybe has dated the prosecutor, becomes irrelevant. Justice has its own strict procedures and the outcome of a case is determined solely by the execution of those procedures. All of which, Bochco seems to suggest, is a lie....The pivotal moment that determines the ultimate outcome of the case - whether a man everyone agrees is innocent must still go to jail - revolves around a scene that's subtly filmed, but so cynical and so shockingly unprofessional it will make viewers want to wash their hands." Read his review here.

Women Lawyers on TV

Christine A. Corcos, Louisiana State University Law Center, has published "Damages: The Truth is Out There," forthcoming in Lawyers in Your Living Room, edited by Michael Asimow (ABA Press, 2008). Here is the abstract.

In this essay, part of Michael Asimow's forthcoming collection on lawyers on TV, I discuss the television show Damages and its portrayal of powerful lawyers, and whether their exercise of their power "damages" them. In particular, I examine the show's depiction of women lawyers, and whether their exercise of legal power transforms them. Do we as clients, as lawyers, and as an audience resist the vision of powerful women lawyers? Does the exercise of legal power damage women, or does it make them stronger?

Larry Friedman and Popular Culture

Jo J. Carrillo, Hastings College of the Law, has published "Links and Choices: Popular Legal Culture in the Work of Lawrence M. Friedman," in volume 17 of Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal (2007). Here is the abstract.

Based in part on James Willard Hurst's idea that markets create a social aggregate of behavior that shapes law, Lawrence M. Friedman made one of the earliest arguments for the use of popular culture in the study of law. This paper considers Friedman's social theory and places it into a broader context of scholarship on the same topic.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Copyright Issues at an Early Law School

Angela Fernandez, University of Toronto School of Law, has published "Copying and Copyright Issues at the Litchfield Law School," as University of Toronto Legal Studies Research Paper 08-13. Here is the abstract.

The notebook method of legal education used at the famous Litchfield Law School (1774-1833) has long been a subject of intense interest among Connecticut historians, legal historians, and those interested in legal education and the legal profession. The present article, Copying and Copyright Issues at the Litchfield Law School, forthcoming in the fall 2008 volume of Connecticut History, sets the notebook method used at the School in its copying context. More specifically, it explains how the copying of lectures used to create these notebooks gave rise to the problem of rampant unauthorized reproduction, a serious threat to an institution the raison d'etre of which was the production of a set of these notebooks. The article reports on and reproduces excerpts from an 1826 letter evidencing just how dire the situation had become and the lengths to which the School's surviving proprietor, James Gould, was willing to go in order to protect the lectures, as against the sense of the students that they were ripe for reproduction. Gould registered the lectures for copyright protection in 1827 and the question is, given how strongly he felt about the matter, why he did not do it sooner. It would seem that, like the students, Gould took some time to see these notes as a proper object of copyright protection.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Daytime TV Judges

Taunya Lovell Banks, University of Maryland School of Law, has published "Judging the Judges - Daytime Television's Integrated Reality Court Bench," in Lawyers in Your Living Room, edited by Michael Asimow, (ABA Books, 2008). Here is the abstract.

This essay looks at the integrated courtroom on daytime reality television court shows like "Judge Judy", the reasons for the persistent over representation of women and non-white male judges on these shows, why some shows are more popular than other shows, and how these shows may influence the real American legal system.

Keywords: daytime television court judges

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Call for Book Reviews: Women and the Law

Proposals Due September 25, 2008

The editors of Pace Law Review invite proposals from scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals for contributions to a special book review issue to be published in Winter 2008. We seeks proposals for reviews of any book published in 2008, 2007 or 2006 that contributes to the understanding of women’s experiences with the law.

Pace Law School has a longstanding commitment to both the study of women and the law and the development of women as lawyers and leaders. The Pace Women’s Justice Center was founded in 1991 as the first academic legal center in the country devoted to training attorneys and others in the community about domestic violence issues. Pace is a vibrant and intellectual community that contains several nationally-recognized scholars of women’s, children’s and LGBT rights.

A law review volume devoted to books concerning women and the law promotes an ongoing discourse on women and the law, justice and feminist jurisprudence.

Please submit book review proposals of no more than 500 words by attachment to plr@law.pace.edu by September 25, 2008. Proposals should include (a) the intended reviewer’s name, title, institutional affiliation and contact information; (b) the title and publication date of the book proposed for review; (c) a description of the importance of the book to the general topic; and (d) any other information relevant to the book or proposed review (e.g., the proposed reviewer’s expertise or any relationship with the author). Authors are welcome, but not required, to submit a CV as well. We expect to make publication offers by October 1, 2008.

Complete manuscripts from authors of accepted proposals will be due November 1, 2008. Completed book reviews should not exceed 8,500 words.

Cybercrime in Fiction

David S. Wall, University of Leeds, has published, "Cybercrime and the Culture of Fear: Social Science Fiction(s) and the Production of Knowledge about Cybercrime," forthcoming in Information, Communication & Society. Here is the abstract.

This article builds upon my previous work (Wall, 2007 & 2008) to map out the conceptual origins of cybercrime in social science fiction and other faction genres to explore the relationship between rhetoric and reality in the production of knowledge about it. The article goes on to illustrate how the reporting of dystopic narratives about life in networked worlds shapes public reactions to technological change. Reactions which heighten the culture of fear about cybercrime, which in turn, shapes public expectations of online risk, the formation of law and the subsequent interpretation of justice. Finally, the article identifies and responds to the various mythologies that are currently circulating about cybercrime, before identifying the various tensions in the production of criminological knowledge about it that contribute to sustaining those mythologies.

Download the paper here.

Law and Literature in the Duke Curriculum

Robin L. West, Georgetown University Law Center, has published, "Literature, Culture, and Law - At Duke University," in Teaching Law and Literature, 2008. Here is the abstract.

The article compares programmatic questions from the Law and Literature movement from the 1970s to 1990s with more recent suggestions regarding the foundational questions for the Law and Culture movement. It argues that in both movements, but particularly the latter, scholars have focused on questions regarding the nature of law, culture, and interpretation, and neglected substantive jurisprudential claims regarding law sometimes found in literature and other cultural texts. It argues that this emphasis on theory over substance is unfortunate. To illustrate, the piece examines a false rape claim brought against some university athletes in Durham, North Carolina in the summer of 2006, and a novelistic depiction of sexual exploitation in Tom Wolfe's popular novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons. The novel was repeatedly invoked by commentators and bloggers when the charge was first made and widely believed, to make the case that the Duke campus was drenched in a culture tolerant of rape. The novel, then, might be sensibly understood as central to a cultural understanding of how this false rape charge was interpreted, and then came to be widely believed. Although true enough, the article argues that we miss something important, if we look at (and indict) Wolfe's novel only as a part of a cultural/legal explanation for a sex panic that resulted in a miscarriage of justice. We miss Wolfe's substantive, narrative account of sexual exploitation (not rape) and the harms, quite specific, that undesired, unwanted and unwelcome sex can occasion, on college campuses and elsewhere.

Download the paper here.

Film As Evidence

Jessica Silbey, Suffolk University Law School, has published "Cross-Examining Film," in volume 8 of the University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class (2008). Here is the abstract.

The Supreme Court decision in Scott v. Harris holds that a Georgia police officer did not violate a fleeing suspect's Fourth Amendment rights when he caused the suspect's car to crash. The court's decision relies almost entirely on the filmed version of the high-speed police chase taken from a "dash-cam," a video camera mounted on the dashboard of the pursuing police cruiser. The Supreme Court said that in light of the contrary stories told by the opposing parties to the lawsuit, the only story to be believed was that told by the video. In Scott v. Harris, the court fell into a dangerous and common trap of believing - to the point of enshrining in our law - that film captures reality. As Justice Breyer said in oral argument of the case seemingly flabbergasted by contrary findings below: "I see with my eyes ... what happened, what am I supposed to do?"

The Supreme Court is not the first court to fall prey to the persuasive power of film. It is typical for courts and advocates to naively treat filmic evidence as a transparent window revealing the whole truth, as a presentation of unambiguous reality. But film has a history in art as a constructed medium. As filmmakers and critics have known since the beginning of cinema, film's appearance of reality is an illusion, an illusion based on conventions of representation.

How could Mr. Scott have countered the weight of the film and its persuasive power? When faced with prejudicial filmic evidence, how does an advocate undermine the assertive nature of film and its overwhelming appearance of exposure? The advocate must cross-examine the film the way she cross-examines witnesses. Because films are assertive in nature, an advocate faced with filmic evidence must treat it the way she treats other testimonial evidence, critically and with careful scrutiny. She must cross-examine the film. This article will set forth certain examination techniques using a piece of filmic evidence (linked to the article) from a recent case as an example. By doing so, it aspires to be a teaching tool for other courts and advocates in their treatment and consideration of filmic evidence.

Download the paper here.

Librarians Are Your Friends--Do Not MAKE THEM ANGRY!

MSNBC.com has this story about a Wisconsin woman who failed to return two books in a timely fashion to her local public library, and paid no attention to its sad entreaties about their overdue status. The result: the librarians flexed their muscle, called out local law enforcement, and had her arrested and booked for failure to pay fines and overdues. No joke: this little episode cost her and her family several hundred dollars. The books? They were appropriately law-related: Janet Fitch's White Oleander and Dan Brown's Angels and Demons. The moral? Spider Robinson puts it best.

"Librarians are the secret masters of the universe. They control information. Never piss one off."

Is There a "CSI Effect"?

Donald E. Shelton, Eastern Michigan University, has published "The 'CSI Effect': Does it Really Exist?" in volume 259 of the National Institute of Justice Journal (2008). Here is the abstract.

Many attorneys, judges, and journalists have claimed that watching television programs like CSI has caused jurors to wrongfully acquit guilty defendants when no scientific evidence has been presented. This so-called effect was promptly dubbed the "CSI effect," laying much of the blame on the popular television series and its progeny. This study of 1027 jurors found that 46 percent expected to see some kind of scientific evidence in every criminal case; 22 percent expected to see DNA evidence in every criminal case; 36 percent expected to see fingerprint evidence in every criminal case; and 32 percent expected to see ballistic or other firearms laboratory evidence in every criminal case. The findings also suggested that expectations for particular types of scientific evidence seemed to be rational based on the type of case.

For all categories of evidence CSI viewers generally had higher expectations than non-CSI viewers but the CSI viewers had higher expectations about scientific evidence that was more likely to be relevant. Interestingly, potential jurors' increased expectations of scientific evidence did not translate into a demand for this type of evidence as a prerequisite for finding someone guilty. Jurors were more likely to find a defendant guilty than not guilty even without scientific evidence if the victim or other witnesses testified, except in the case of rape. On the other hand, if the prosecutor relied on circumstantial evidence, the prospective jurors said they would demand some kind of scientific evidence before they would return a guilty verdict.

There was scant evidence in our survey results that CSI viewers were either more or less likely to acquit defendants without scientific evidence. Only 4 of 13 scenarios showed significant differences between viewers and non-viewers on this issue, and they were inconsistent. In the "every crime" scenario, CSI viewers were more likely to convict without scientific evidence if eyewitness testimony was available. In rape cases, CSI viewers were less likely to convict if DNA evidence was not presented.

In both the breaking-and-entering and theft scenarios, CSI viewers were more likely to convict if there was victim or other testimony, but no fingerprint evidence. Although CSI viewers had higher expectations for scientific evidence than non-CSI viewers, these expectations had little, if any, bearing on the respondents' propensity to convict.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Cross posted to the Seamless Web.

Why Lawyers Should Read Shakespeare

Michael P. Maslanka, the managing partner of Ford & Harrison in Dallas, has this article on Law.com about why lawyers should read Shakespeare. The article begins:

Why do students still read Shakespeare? A conspiracy of finger-wagging, we-know-what's-best-for-you high school English teachers? No. It's his empathetic powers, making people see ourselves as we are -- rationalizations not permitted.

Shakespeare has much to teach lawyers. Eschewing Judge Judy, his questions are penetrating: How should judges go about judging? Does the rule of law matter? Are mercy and justice mutually exclusive, or are they complementary?

The article goes on to discuss Shakespeare's play, Measure for Measure.

Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities Invites Applications for Dissertation Award

Julien Mezey Dissertation Award

The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities invites submissions for its 2009 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award. This annual prize is awarded to the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture and the humanities. The award will be presented at the Association's annual meeting in Boston, April 3-4, 2009, hosted by Suffolk University Law School.

The Association seeks the submission of outstanding work from a wide variety of perspectives, including but not limited to law and cultural studies, legal hermeneutics and rhetoric, law and literature, law and psychoanalysis, law and visual studies, legal history, and legal theory and jurisprudence. Scholars completing humanities-oriented dissertations in SJD and related programs, as well as those earning PhDs, are encouraged to submit their work. Applicants eligible for the 2009 award must have defended their dissertations successfully between September 1,
2007 and August 31, 2008. Each submission must be accompanied by a letter of support from a faculty member.

Deadline for nominations for the 2009 award: November 1, 2008. On or before that date, each member of the committee must receive by email the
following: 1) a letter of nomination that details the genesis, goal, and contribution of the dissertation; 2) a letter of support from a faculty member familiar with the work; 3) an abstract, outline, and the first chapter of the dissertation); 4) contact information for the nominee.

All materials should be sent to each of the following:

Professor Jodi Dean, jdean@hws.edu
Professor James Martel, jmartel@sfsu.edu Professor Martha Umphrey, mmumphrey@amherst.edu

Award finalists will be notified by December 1. At that point, they should be prepared to send a physical and electronic version of the entire dissertation to each of the committee members. The winner will be determined by early February and invited to the April meeting of the ASLCH. ASLCH will pay travel and lodging costs.

Questions should be addressed to Jodi Dean, jdean@hws.edu

The "Discourse of Madness"

Ian Ward, University of Newcastle, has published "The Rochester Wives," in Law & Humanities, v. 2 (2008). Here is the abstract.

During much of the nineteenth century England was gripped by periodic 'lunacy scares'. In large part, these scares addressed a more particular concern regarding 'wrongful confinement'. There was a narrower jurisprudential concern here; one which focussed on the relative lack of legal regulation in such circumstances. As the century progressed the demand for reform of this regulatory provision grew ever louder. There was also a rather larger, essentially cultural, concern; which framed the evolving shape of a distinctive 'discourse' of madness. The purpose of this article is to examine these two concerns, and perhaps most importantly their relation. It will do so moreover through a particular investigation of the Rochester 'case'; as it found literary expression in the novels of Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys.

The article is priced.

Film and Historical Narrative

Daphne Barazk-Erez, Tel Aviv University, has published "The Law of Historical Films: in the aftermath of Jenin Jenin," at 16 Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, 495(2007). Here is the abstract.

Filmmaking and the narration of history have been engaged in a complex relationship ever since the early days of filmmaking. Many films tell stories unfolding in previous times or about actual historical events, and their narration of history is often criticized as inaccurate, fictitious, or even intentionally misleading. When a highly publicized film suggests a controversial narrative of a certain chapter in history, a debate usually follows in the public arena, be it as part of the ongoing intellectual discourse or even in a political context. At times, however, the public debate is translated into legal terms. The article focuses on the difficulties confronting the attempt to apply legal regulation to historical films argued to be false—either by using private law causes of action, such as defamation and infringement of privacy, or by recourse to administrative censorship powers. The recent and highly controversial film Jenin, Jenin by the Israeli-Palestinian actor and filmmaker Muhammad Bakri, which professed to tell the story of residents of the Jenin refugee camp during an Israeli military operation, is used as a case study. In general, the courts insist on avoiding decisions on historical facts even when dealing with serious arguments about distortions in specific films. The article supports this judicial policy on the grounds that courts and governments should refrain from restraining freedom of speech based on arguments of truth and falsity. Yet, it also points to the inevitable disadvantages of this viewpoint given that the marketplace of ideas, particularly in the debate around realistic film making, is controlled by actors who have the power to shape collective memory.

Download the paper from bepress Legal Repository here.

Batman and George W. Bush

Andrew Klavan writes in the Wall Street Journal that Batman, at least as he is portrayed in the new film The Dark Knight, and George W. Bush have a lot in common. "There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past." This contention has caused comment in the blogosphere. See reaction at Slashfilm.com, Verum Serum, and Thompson on Hollywood, among other sites. Interesting.

Cross-posted to The Seamless Web.

The Uses of Narrative

Doron Menashe, University of Haifa, Research Authority, and Hamutal Esther Shamash, have published "Pass These Sirens By: Further Thoughts on Narrative and Admissibility Rules, " in International Commentary on Evidence, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2007.
Here is the abstract.

Fact finders assess the relative plausibility of stories presented by comparing them to narratives which have gained general acceptance, some of which are hegemonic narratives. In doing so, they run the risk of choosing a narrative that does not accurately represent the historic truth of events in suit, as a narrative with which to compare the stories offered by parties. Once fact finders choose an inappropriate narrative, they may commit the narrative fallacy and choose to grant increased weight to evidence that coheres with the inappropriate narrative, and to disregard evidence that does not, rather than discard the narrative when subsequent evidence tends to show that it is inappropriate. Admission of prejudicial evidence may trigger the use of inappropriate narratives that are hegemonic, or at least prejudicial, leading to inaccurate fact finding. Seen in that light, despite arguments to the contrary made by Robert Burns and by Ronald Allen, further relaxation of admissibility rules towards a free proof system would be undesirable.

Download the entire paper from SSRN here.

Law in Eighteenth Century English Literature

Rebecca Probert, University of Warwick School of Law, has published "Examining Law Through the Lens of Literature: The Formation of Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England," in the journal Law & Humanities (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

This article examines what eighteenth-century novels and plays can tell us about the formation of marriage both before and after the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753. It shows how the practices and, perhaps more crucially, the assumptions, of fictional characters were consistent with legal sources of the time, and that such primary sources fundamentally undermine many modern analyses of the making of marriage.

The entire text is available through subscription.