Law and Pornography

John M. Kang, St. Thomas University School of Law, has published "Taking Safety Seriously: Using Liberalism to Fight Pornography," in volume 15 of Michigan Journal of Gender & Law (2008). Here is the abstract.

In the law review literature on pornography, there is sometimes the depressing story that either liberalism is limply unhelpful to combat pornography or, in its role as philosophical handmaiden, liberalism happily does pornography's bidding. Liberalism as referred to here is not meant as shorthand for the political ideals of the Democratic Party. Rather, it is meant to serve as an emblem for a loose collection of commitments to free speech, legal equality, toleration, and limited government. But the description of liberalism that pervades the law review literature on pornography seems exaggerated and far from inevitable. Liberalism, as a jurisprudential principle, need not be pornography's indifferent observer or spineless sycophant; liberalism can be used to fight pornography. In this Article, I propose to illuminate what appears to me the most essential aspect of liberalism in its inviolable dedication to peace and safety. By drawing upon the work of the early liberals, I argue that liberalism's most basic ethos is conceptually incompatible with pornography, as the latter celebrates an unjustified form of violence as its own end.

Civility, Constitutionalism, and the Image of Men

John M. Kang, St. Thomas University School of Law, has published "Manliness and the Constitution," at 32 Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 261 (2009). Here is the abstract.

Much of the legal scholarship regarding gender focuses justifiably on discrimination against women; accordingly, if such scholarship does discuss men, it does so chiefly to illuminate the ways in which women have been oppressed by them.

My article seeks to explore men's identity as its own topic, specifically in its relation to the Constitution. I begin my exploration with early modern England, for the American colonists would have to grapple with the ideas that arose during this time. My argument proceeds as follows. Prominent conceptions of male identity in early modern England made constitutional democracy, as the eighteenth century Americans understood it, philosophically unrealistic. Thomas Hobbes represented one view, Robert Filmer the other. Hobbes argued that men's violent hypermasculinity made them ineligible for the disciplined and mature enterprise of self-government; he believed that only an absolute monarch could control men for purposes of collective peace. Filmer also argued that men were generally incompetent for self-government. But unlike Hobbes, he argued that men were psychologically infantile and thus insufficiently manly for self-government. Filmer insisted that only the king had the requisite manliness of a powerful father and that men required the former's love and guidance while they owed him complete obedience.

The American colonists constructed a new understanding of male identity, one that was compatible with the logic of self-government in their constitution. Against Hobbes, the colonists pressed American men to embrace civility rather than being driven by a violent hypermasculinity. Against Filmer, the colonists urged American men to evince their manly independence by deliberating political truths instead of deferring to social betters. I then explain how these views by the colonists were manifested in the federal Constitution.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Spiritualists and Copyright

Christine A. Corcos, Louisiana State University Law Center, has published 'Ghostwriters': Spiritualists, Copyright Infringement, and Rights of Publicity, in Law and Magic: A Collection of Essays (Christine A. Corcos, ed.: Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2009). Here is the abstract.

In 1917, British-born editor and publisher Mitchell Kennerley (1878-1950) offered for sale Jap Herron, a new novel which he implied was written by the eminent Mark Twain. There was no author's name on the title page, but the frontispiece was a portrait of Mark Twain. This book included an introduction by St. Louis journalist and author Emily Grant Hutchings explaining the odd origins of the novel. Indeed, they were odd - Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, had been dead for six years, and the manuscript of Jap Herron was not some old piece of fiction he had left behind in a desk to be discovered after his demise. In her preface, Mrs. Hutchings claimed that Twain, to whom she referred familiarly as Mark, and whom she had met during his life, had dictated the book, as well as two short stories, to her through a Ouija Board, that is, through spirit communication via a board labeled with the alphabet, and with the assistance of a spirit medium, Mrs. Lola V. Hays.

Testimony in Literature

Pramod K. Nayar, University of Hyderabad, Department of English, has published "Human Rights and Testimonial Fiction: Alicia Partnoy and the Case of Argentina's Disappeared," at 1 Icfai University Journal of Commonwealth Literature 61-78 (2009). Here is the abstract.

This essay explores a particular genre in postcolonial literature: the literature of human rights. It uses a semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical narrative, the Argentinian Alicia Partnoy's account of her incarceration. The essay begins by proposing, following contemporary theorists of human rights, that a narrative tradition of human rights exists. It then moves on to discuss the 'literature of trauma'. Partnoy's work, it argues, demonstrates two strategies - the enumerative narrative of witnessing and self-witnessing. Partnoy produces a 'fiction of trauma', or 'testimonial fiction'. This fiction, the essay concludes, works at the level of a 'moral imagination', where the act of imagination is a performative through which the subject is formed, but also one that allows Partnoy to speak of the victims who did not survive the camp. This becomes the 'fiction of human rights' because it constructs the subjectivity - which includes agency - of Partnoy. If the focus of human rights discourses is the protection of the subject's agency, then the construction of subjectivity in The Little School makes it a narrative of human rights. It concludes by proposing, via Ashis Nandy's argument that the (postcolonial) Third World can become the 'collective representation of man-made suffering', that such narratives fit into a global history of trauma and human rights.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Law and Cultural Heritage

From the Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation (LCCHP):
Three Important Announcements

LCCHP 2009 Student Writing Competition in Cultural Heritage Preservation Law
Database of Internship/Externship/Job Opportunities in Cultural Heritage Law
Students & New Professionals Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation being formed

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Student Writing Competition in Cultural Heritage Preservation Law

The Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation announces the 2009 LCCHP Annual Student Writing Competition in Cultural Heritage Preservation Law. Due to the generosity of our competition sponsor - the law firm Andrews Kurth LLP - the awards for the 2009 competition are $1000 for first place and $500 for second place. The deadline for submissions is June 12, 2009, but papers may be submitted at any time before that date. We encourage those of you teaching seminars or with other student papers this semester to ask your students to submit papers now. Only current law students are eligible to enter the competition. Instructions for submission of papers and of faculty supporting nominations may be found at:

www.culturalheritagelaw.org/education/competition2009

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Database of Internship / Externship / Job Opportunities in Cultural Heritage Law

LCCHP is pleased to announce that its database of internship and externship opportunities in cultural heritage law is now available on our website at:

www.culturalheritagelaw.org/members-only

We know that this listing will be in great demand by law students and other students studying cultural heritage. If you know of any opportunities in this field that you think should be listed, we invite you to send us a short description with a web link. Please forward this request to government agencies and nonprofit organizations that may be interested in posting an announcement, and feel free to post this message to other relevant listserves and blogs. The listing is available only to LCCHP members, but we offer an attractive student rate.


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Students & New Professionals Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation is being formed

LCCHP is creating a special Student and New Professional Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation. This Committee will give students and recent graduates an opportunity to network and share information, while they also participate in several LCCHP activities, such as overseeing our soon-to-be launched blog in cultural heritage law and planning cultural heritage related events on their school campuses. You may want to bring this group to the attention of your students. For more information, contact Board Member Donald Craib at:

http://www.culturalheritagelaw.org/members-only


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About LCCHP

The Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation is an organization of lawyers, professors, law students, and like-minded friends who have joined together to promote the preservation and protection of cultural heritage resources in the United States and internationally through education and advocacy. Cultural heritage law is a growing legal field, as our society comes to appreciate the important symbolic, historical, and emotional role that cultural heritage plays in our lives. Cultural heritage law encompasses several disparate areas, including the protection of archaeological sites, preservation of historic structures and the built environment, preservation of and respect for both tangible and intangible indigenous cultures, international market in art works and antiquities, and recovery of stolen art works.


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Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation (LCCHP)
428 Hume Ave, 2nd floor, Alexandria, VA 22301
tel: 703-549-1110 | fax: 703-995-4890
web: www.culturalheritagelaw.org | email: info@culturalheritagelaw.org

Justice in "Measure For Measure"

John V. Orth, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Law, has published "'The Golden Metwand': The Measure of Justice in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure," in the Adelaide Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Measure for Measure, one of Shakespeare's problem plays, is a dark comedy depicting Duke Vincentio's effort to restore respect for the law after a period of lax enforcement. Peopled with a wide variety of law-enforcers and law-breakers, the play implicates numerous legal issues and has consequently attracted the attention of lawyers and judges. In the eighteenth century Sir William Blackstone contributed notes on the play, while in the twentieth century judges have quoted from it in their judicial opinions. Like all good legal dramas, Measure for Measure ends with a trial scene, but - as we would expect from Shakespeare - one with an unusual twist. When charges of corruption are brought against Angelo, the deputy appointed to enforce the law, the Duke orders an immediate trial: Come, cousin Angelo / In this I'll be impartial; be you judge / Of your own cause. When the deputy's guilt is disclosed, the Duke commands that he suffer the punishment he intended for others - measure for measure, putting the Bible-conscious play-goer in mind of the passage: Judge not, that ye be not judged. / For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you againe. By ordering Angelo to be the judge of his own cause, the Duke is inviting the deputy to measure out his own punishment. And Shakespeare is forcing us all to confront the difficulty of doing earthly justice.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Law and Semiotics

Here is the table of contents for volume 22 of the International Journal of the Semiotics of Law (no. 1, 2009--Special Issue: Lawyers Making Meaning - the Roberta Kevelson Seminar on Law and Semiotics.

The contents of the Special Issue: Lawyers Making Meaning - The Roberta Kevelson Seminar on Law and Semiotics, Guest Editors: Jan Broekman and William Pencak is as follows:

Jan M. Broekman, William Pencak / Lawyers Making Meaning

Francis J. Mootz III / Vico and Imagination: An Ingenious Approach to Educating Lawyers with Semiotic Sensibility

Denis J. Brion / Trial Argumentation: The Creation of Meaning

Jan M. Broekman / Face to Face

Philip Grier / Gustav Shpet and the Semiotics of 'Living Discourse'

William Pencak / The Lawyer, the Judge, and the Historian: Shaping the Meaning of the Boston Massacre, American Revolution, and Popular Opinion from 1770 to the Present Day

Michelle L. Wirth / Who's You Daddy? -- Or: Using Semiotic Tools to Deconstruct Legal Determinations of Who Holds Parenthood Obligations and Privileges

Jeffrey A. Ellsworth / Michael H. v. Gerald D.': A Case Study of Political Ideology Disguised in Legal Thought


Book review/Paper reviews

Paper Review: Etat (Postmoderne) de droit, Logique textuelle et theorie micropolitique du droit: sur un exemple de pensee juridique "Soft" (Guillaume Tusseau)

Review Paper: Derrida and legal scholarship: A Certain Step Beyond (by Jacques de Ville).

Culbert, Jennifer. L. Dead Certainty: The Death Penalty and the Problem of Judgment, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. 235 pages (index). (by George Pavlich).

Legal Narrative and Street Law

Elizabeth L. MacDowell, Chapman University School of Law, has published "Law on the Street: Legal Narrative and the Street Law Classroom," in volume 9 of Rutgers Race and the Law Review (2008). Here is the abstract.

This Article argues that the failure of anti-discrimination law to address the problems of subordination reflects the hegemonic perspective in legal narratives. For the lawyer concerned with social change, it is imperative to identify these narratives and the ways in which they not only inhibit deep social change, but may perpetuate the conditions of subordination. Yet, law school polices against the consciousness necessary for the lawyer to identify the hegemonic narrative in the law, and often instills attitudes which are antithetical to the project of social change. In this context, Street Law - a practical law course taught by law students to high school students in inner city neighborhoods and juvenile facilities - is an arena for the development of counter-hegemonic consciousness in the lawyer and in subordinated communities.

Literature on narrative from the legal and social science communities informs this analysis. Part I is the Introduction. Part II conceptualizes the classroom as a narrative moment in which legal text, interpretation and experience come together, and then establishes a framework for analyzing these elements. First, the Castlemont community in Oakland, California where the author taught Street Law is characterized as illustrating conditions of social marginalization and subordination. Next, the concept of narrative is defined in greater detail, and Ewick and Silbey's theory of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narrative is introduced. Lastly, this Part analyzes the narrative of discrimination offered by anti-discrimination law as hegemonic.

Part III explores how legal education thwarts development of the consciousness and skills a lawyer needs to work for social change. First, the conditions associated with counter-hegemonic consciousness are discussed. Next, this Part argues that the objective viewpoint of the law is hegemonic in nature. The manifestation of this viewpoint in law school hinders the development of counter-hegemonic consciousness in persons of the law, instills attitudes which thwart the project of social change, and leads to widespread alienation - particularly among students with viewpoints that are marginalized within law school.

Finally, Part IV returns to the Street Law classroom, and the nature of the opportunity Street Law presents for a person of the law and her students. This Part suggests that Street Law is an opportunity to develop the consciousness and other qualities necessary for social justice lawyering. This Part also suggests that subjectivity is an appropriate methodology to employ in developing a pedagogy which encourages counter-hegemonic consciousness in the Street Law classroom.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Call For Papers

CALL FOR ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS

CRN No. 9 (Gender and Legal Education)

LAW AND SOCIETY ASSOCIATION ANNUAL MEETING



May 28-31, 2009

Denver, CO


DEADLINE FOR PROPOSAL: FEBRUARY 25, 2009





Roundtable: Teaching Gender Inequality in Law Schools



Conversations about gender and sexuality in core law school courses are often focused on equality—constitutional doctrines of formal equality meted out by high courts – rather than underlying causes, effects and forms of inequality. Law students are rarely asked to consider if inequality itself is undesirable, and whether law has a role in perpetuating, creating, resisting or eliminating it. While these concepts are foundational in most sociology or anthropology programs, they are not central to the law school curriculum, especially in the first year.

While there is no doubt that court cases eliminating legal barriers to gender and sexual equality are important for all law students to learn, the conversation is impoverished if they are the only vehicle used to examine gender, sexuality and other intersecting forms of inequality in a typical course of law school study. Teachers of today’s generation of students also must grapple with the fact that gender inequality looks different to students than it did even fifteen years ago. The generation of women entering law school—the beneficiaries of equal opportunity to education under Title IX and employment under Title VII – are members of a community in which young women have excelled. Many of them do not perceive gendered inequality operating in their lives. This creates a displacement where students who are interested in women’s rights are more comfortable examining the inequality of women in exotic foreign locales (such as inequalities suffered by Muslim women, victims of sex trafficking or of mass sexual violence). At the same time, however, they are slow to recognize the structural nature of gendered inequalities that persist closer to home. They may be quick to dismiss their own anxieties as problems that can be overcome by making perfect individual choices. Students interested in eliminating the inequality of the LGBTQ community might perceive that inequality more starkly, but still often lack the vocabulary to discuss questions of law, power and sexuality outside of the bounds of formal equality.

In the climate of change created by recent critiques of legal education, roundtable participants will take up the question of how social scientists and law teachers can become allies in the creation of materials, techniques and strategies to teach law students about the gender, sexual, and intersectional inequalities in the U.S. legal system and culture. Possible topics might include: innovations in legal pedagogy; strategies for exploring gender and sexual inequality in core law school courses (e.g., contracts, torts, criminal law); whether the training of lawyers should include an apprenticeship of identity and purpose that has at its core a commitment to reducing inequality; teaching techniques for reinvigorating courses on discrimination with more nuanced and sophisticated understandings of how structural inequalities play out in the lives of lawyers and their clients; exploring the role of experiential and clinical education in both fighting inequality and teaching students about its nature; incorporating questions of how law enables corporations and consumer culture to create and perpetuate gender inequality into law school teaching; and addressing inequality created or sustained by culture and religion in U.S. domestic as well as international settings.



If you would like to join the roundtable, please email Daniela Kraiem, CRN No. 9 Organizer and Associate Director, Women and the Law Program, American University Washington College of Law at kraiem@wcl.american.edu with a brief paragraph describing your interest in participating in the roundtable by February 25, 2009.



LSA roundtables are generally informal discussions, guided by the questions and themes raised by the panelists. Panelists should be prepared to offer 7-10 minutes of remarks, followed by discussion of roundtable themes. If you are already on two panels at the LSA, I can’t add you as a formal participant, but would love to have you join us as an active member of the roundtable.

Call For Papers

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS



8th International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law (IRSL 2009)

(2-5 December 2009)



TRANSPARENCY, CONTROL AND POWER:

ISSUES IN LEGAL SEMIOTICS

Convenor: Vijay K. Bhatia

Conference Venue: Department of English, City University of Hong Kong .



The overall aim of a State is to protect the social order in which the individual liberty of the citizen is a major concern. As a consequence the State should guarantee simultaneously and paradoxically a high level of individual freedom and an order in which such freedom is made possible and guaranteed.

The 8th International Roundtables for the Semiotics of Law invites contributors to reflect on the growing importance of Transparency, Control and Power in our international community and how these main ideas have been examined over the years. Contributors may choose to explore semiotic, rhetorical, pragmatic, sociolinguistic, psychological, philosophical and/or visual perspectives on Transparency, Control and Power.

Papers which examine the ways ‘actors’ in our society (legislators, politicians, activists, movie producers, singers, painters, graffiti artists, photographers etc.) have provoked public discourse to confront Transparency, Control and Power are particularly welcome.

The Roundtable will provide an opportunity for a general discussion of issues in the semiotics of law as well as open discussions to increase our knowledge about our Transparency, Control and Power with respect to Legal Semiotics.

In the interest of a cohesive roundtable, prospective participants are requested to adhere to the theme as outlined in the call for papers.

Proposals in either English or French (max 300 words) should be sent by e-mail by the 1st of May 2009 to Vijay K. Bhatia at enbhatia@cityu.edu.hk and to Anne Wagner at valwagnerfr@yahoo.com

Selected papers will be published in a special annual issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (http://www.springer.com/law/journal/11196).

Matlock From Across the Pond

Steve Greenfield and Guy Osborn, University of Westminster School of Law, and Peter Robson, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, School of Law, have published "Matlock - America's Greatest Lawyer - Case Closed: A Transatlantic Perspective," in Lawyers in Your Living Room (Michael Asimow, ed.; ABA Press, 2009). Here is the abstract.

Matlock for people in Britain is an almost entirely unknown series, and the eponymous hero is remembered very vaguely as a slimmer, rather more handsome successor to private eye Frank Cannon. We are interested in writing about Matlock from a British perspective because he seems to us to exemplify American cultural hegemony, curiously, at both its strongest and weakest. We are aware that Matlock contains many cultural references that will pass over the heads of the British audience, but that will have been appreciated by an American audience. We hope that our restricted understanding of the nuances in this portrayal of the Southern American lawyer will not limit our remarks too much. Indeed, L.A. Law has been on British TV screens for the past 20 years almost continuously and the characters and situations have been appreciated and understood on this side of the Atlantic. Despite our suggestion that Ben Matlock is, for British audiences, largely forgotten or misremembered, we in Britain may be about to take him to our hearts at the end of the first decade of the 21st century in a way undreamt of when he first came to the small screen. Perhaps he even has the potential to overtake L.A. Law in the public imagination. To explain why this might happen, a little bit of the context on screen lawyers needs to be provided.

The Visual, French History, and Virtual Memory

Daniel Maxwell Sussner has published "Projections: The visual structure of French history," a dissertation in partial completion of the requirements for the PhD at Harvard University. Here is the abstract.

How do visual media structure historical thinking? In the context of collective memory, this essay argues that engraving, the daguerreotype and film organize how historians make sense of the past. Specifically, analogizing from the digital technique of "virtual memory," the simulation of contiguous accessible digital memory available to efficiently manage computer programs, this essay shifts direction away from studies employing visual material to illustrate arguments or demonstrate historical meaning. Instead, virtual memory explains how visual media (re)organize memory, staging a collective dreaming of the past. "History," Tocqueville reminds us, "indeed, is like a picture gallery in which there are few originals and many copies."

Three hypotheses underscore this applied mechanics of thinking visually: (1) visual media displace aspects of human memory; (2) copyright law politically empowers visual media; and (3) visual media virtualize collective memory. Each chapter advances a case study elaborating a visual medium's organization of collective memory in techniques specific to its mode of reproduction Chapter One, in detailing the decline of the ancíen regime, explains the emergence of a public visual space for engraving as the collective mediation of political representation. Chapters Two, Three and Four consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution together, not simply in terms of direct or retrospective impact, but as the fruition of commemorative practices indelibly linked to Rousseau's obsession with the communication of visual memory. Rousseau's "memory project" engaging the engraving medium to organize key moments of his complete works, provided readers with the mnemonic tools to virtualize Rousseau's collective memory. Chapter Five frames the emergence of the daguerreotype, emphasizing the transition from engraving to new historical modes of virtual memory. The focus here will be a now-forgotten trial involving French plagiarisms of Edgar Allen Poe. Finally. Chapter Six explores the medium of film. From the internal struggle between content and medium to the ineluctable complicity between moviegoers and historians in ascribing objectivity to fictional films about the past, cinema has much to teach us. In particular. Alain Resnais changes the rules of the game: if earlier visual media structure collective memory, the point of film is to smash it.

His advisor is Patrice Higonnet.

Update: For those interested in obtaining dissertations, they are generally available from University Microfilms International.

Call For Papers

“LAW, LITERATURE & RELIGION”
ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS
FIRST ANNUAL VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW AND DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
LAW AND LITERATURE SYMPOSIUM
OCTOBER 1 – 3, 2009

Villanova’s Law School and Department of English will hold a law and literature symposium, the first in a projected annual series, beginning Thursday evening, October 1, 2009, and ending Saturday afternoon, October 3, 2009. The symposium has also been supported by a grant from the Law and Humanities Institute.

We invite interested scholars to submit abstracts of proposed papers. Peter Goodrich (Professor of Law and Director of Law and Humanities, Cardozo School of Law), Steven Mailloux (Professor of English and Chancellor’s Professor of Rhetoric, Department of English, University of California – Irvine), and Robin West (Associate Dean, Research and Academic Programs, and Frederick J. Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy, Georgetown University Law Center), will be keynote speakers.

The conference theme for 2009, “Law, Literature, and Religion”, is broadly conceived. Papers may include but are not limited to papers on any literary, rhetorical, narrative, or textual aspects of law and religion; the exegesis and hermeneutics of legal texts or topics; interpretation in law, literature, and religion; shared languages and histories of law and religion; discursive intersections of civil and canon law; ethics and justice explored in religious and secular literature; the comparative poetics or rhetoric of legality and religion; legal priesthoods; political theology; orthodoxies and/or heterodoxies; humanisms; Pauline studies; religious images in law; literary works about religion in/and/as law; and law as a civil religion. Papers will be 20-25 minutes long to permit time for discussion.

Abstracts of proposed papers should be sent to Professor Penelope Pether (pether at law.villanova.edu), to whom inquires may also be addressed. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words, and should arrive before March 15, 2009. Invitees will be notified by April 30, 2009, and will receive room and board at (but not transportation to and from) the symposium, provided by Villanova University School of Law.

It is anticipated that a limited number of places will be available for attendees who are not presenting papers. The symposium is being convened by Professor David S. Caudill, Arthur M. Goldberg Family Chair in Law, and Professor Penelope J. Pether of Villanova University School of Law; and Professors Evan Radcliffe (Departmental Chair) and Cristina Maria Cervone of the Department of English at Villanova University.

The Law and Literature of Basil Montagu

David Graham and John Paul Tribe, Kingston University Law School, have published "Basil Montagu QC (1770-1851): A Portrait of an Early 19th Century Life in Literature and the Law." Here is the abstract.

In 1814 Basil Montagu, by now an extremely busy member of the Chancery bar took up residence at 25 Bedford Square in fashionable Bloomsbury. Together with his wife, large family and servants he continued to live at this address for the next 20 years or so. On Sundays Mrs Montagu often reigned over a salon that attracted prominent literary figures amongst whom were several long-standing friends of her husband. At the time of their marriage in 1808 Montagu had already been married twice before; his wife had been a widow for about six years and was bringing up her daughter who would one day as Mrs Proctor have her own salon frequented by a new generation of poets and authors. Montagu's chambers were at 10 New Square; his practice was mainly concerned with insolvency matters, serving as a Commissioner in Bankruptcy at the Guildhall. He was a prolific writer on commercial law but is best remembered, if at all, for his many books on bankruptcy and for a lengthy series of law reports. He also wrote numerous pamphlets on contemporary topics such as Catholic and Jewish emancipation. Additionally he published a book of essays one of which dealt with the general principles of law reform and a best selling philosophical anthology. If Bedford Square reflects Montagu's commitment to literature, then New Square represents his professional dedication; sometimes these two segments of his life came together; he acted as junior counsel for Shelley in the proceedings brought by the poet after his wife's death to obtain custody of their children; on at least one occasion Coleridge arrived at chambers to discuss Montagu's Francis Bacon project; urgent steps were taken by him and Bryan Waller Proctor, his step-son in law, to rescue Hazlitt from imprisonment for debt. In this article little attention is given to Montagu's legal career, his role as founder of the Legal & General Insurance Company, or to his work after 1836 as the first Accountant-General in Bankruptcy. Instead it concentrates on his literary activities and private life so often clouded by tragedy. It is suggested that when Montagu died at Boulogne in 1851 he was living there in exile fearful of arrest for debt at home resulting from involvement with the financial disaster of his principal publisher, William Pickering. His death does not end the story that must continue with the hunt, still in progress, for his voluminous papers, manuscripts and other documents together with reminiscences about him. Our research indicates that notwithstanding a belief that much of this material is lost this is by no means the case.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Witnessing in The Accused

Jessica A. Silbey, Suffolk University Law School, has published "A Witness to Justice," in Studies in Law, Politics, and Society: A Special Symposium Issue on Law and Film (Austin Sara, ed. 2009), pp. 61-91. Here is the abstract.

In the 1988 film The Accused, a young woman named Sarah Tobias is gang raped on a pinball machine by three men while a crowded bar watches. The rapists cut a deal with the prosecutor. Sarah's outrage at the deal convinces the assistant district attorney to prosecute members of the crowd that cheered on and encouraged the rape. This film shows how Sarah Tobias, a woman with little means and less experience, intuits that according to the law rape victims are incredible witnesses to their own victimization. The film goes on to critique what the right kind of witness would be. This article explains how the film The Accused is therefore about the relationship between witnessing and testimony, between seeing and the representation of that which was seen. The article elaborates the relationship between the power and responsibility of being a witness in law - one who sees and credibly attests to the truth of her vision - as well as it unpacks the significance of bearing witness to film - what can we know from watching movies.

Download the essay from SSRN here.

British Advisory Group Says British TV Stereotypes Women

The National Skills Forum, an independent British group, has slammed British television, saying it presents a stereotyped view of women. Somehow, I'm not surprised. In a report to be released tomorrow, the group says
"No major British broadcaster has made any commitment to challenging gender stereotypes at work. This should change."

According to the Guardian, "The report does not name the unsympathetic portrayals it refers to, but they might include Jane Tennison, the police detective played by Helen Mirren in ITV's Prime Suspect. Tennison became an alcoholic who found it difficult to maintain a stable relationship. However, the report praises the BBC's Silent Witness, which starred Amanda Burton and Emilia Fox as pathologists, for producing a "huge increase" in the number of women training to be forensic scientists."

Read more here.

Gender stereotyping on tv and in film is nothing new. Whether it's because those who make films and tv think it's what the viewers demand, or it's because those who make films and tv really do think men and women fit into such roles is an interesting question. But the fact remains that we rarely see women tv lawyers, for example, in happy marriages and pursuing successful careers. Much more often, they're manipulating harpies who can't attract and keep nice guys.

It's not just true on legal dramas. I just finished watching a marathon of that hit, House (on opposite the Super Bowl for those of us who couldn't stomach another football game, no matter how hyped). The character is abrasive, and unethical, and selfish. Yet we are supposed to love him because he's a brilliant diagnostician. Actually he's not--I started to count the number of mistakes he makes per show. If he were female, would ANYONE put up with him, no matter how brilliant?

Even "nice" women are treated badly, and tv can show them as unsuccessful, measured against male norms of success, although this might actually be more true than we wish. Look at what happens to House's colleague, Cameron, when she objects to Foreman's "theft" of her idea for an article ("Sleeping Dogs Lie"). She's told to "suck it up." Unless she can adjust to male norms, she's not going to succeed. When she tries to patch up the quarrel with him, he refuses, saying, "I haven't done anything to apologize for," and "We're not friends. We're colleagues." It's a classic example of male-speak and a lack of ability to understand what she is saying. Further, it's a classic refusal on the part of a man to make an attempt to understand. Why doesn't Foreman reciprocate and apologize as well? Because he doesn't have to, and he knows it. Like House, he'll succeed because his gender makes the rules. The best advice, in a sense, Cameron gets is from the uber-boss, a woman, who tells her to write another article, and to wait until Foreman is "up for department chair" somewhere, and then needs her recommendation. The unspoken suggestion is that she can then give a poor recommendation, based on her inside knowledge. But would Cameron do that? Probably not. She's not mean-spirited. Her poor recommendation would in any case sound like sour grapes, and be dismissed as just that. She is in a classic "no-win" situation.

Treatise on Legal Visual Semiotics: Call For Papers

The original call for papers specified a closing date of January 15. This call for papers extends the date to February 15th.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS, TREATISE ON LEGAL VISUAL SEMIOTICS
Editors: Anne Wagner, Sophie Cacciaguidi-Fahy and Richard Sherwin
Publisher: Springer SBM

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES AND TIMELINE:
Expression of interest should be addressed by e-mail to valwagnerfr@yahoo.com
Please make sure that the document clearly indicates on a separate page your name, affiliation, and contact information.
Date of submission: Abstracts of 2 pages to be submitted by 15 February 2009
Decision for authors: 15 March 2009
Full paper submission: Full papers to be submitted by 15 December 2009
Final version of selected papers: Revised and final version of paper to be submitted by 15 March 2010
Length of chapters: Between 7,500 words and 10,000 words
All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis.

OVERVIEW:
The visual is above all a means of communicating and understanding. In general terms, symbols, images and gestures have the potential to convey multiple levels of meaning and often represent concepts that are challenging to articulate explicitly due to their complexity, novelty or lack of specificity. When we have recourse to the visual, the subtleties and possibilities of communication increase exponentially.

The overall aim of the proposed two volumes is to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality. As an original project, its aim is to provide a comprehensive analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. The two volumes will endeavor to adopt a comparative perspective with a view to identifying a common ground for semiotics analyses of the converging and/or merging aspects of law and the visual.

The project seeks to harness the diverse and innovative work to date in the fields of visuality and semiotics, anchoring them in the legal context. It will seek to bring together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward.

TOPICS:
Contributions should reflect the interdisciplinary nature of legal semiotics research. They should focus on:
- Theories and conceptualization of legal visual semiotics
- Pictorial semiotics and law
- Visuality of legal language
- Media and the law

These might include but are not limited to analyses on:
- Interface between text, images and oral signs
- Globalisation, time, space and place and its impact on media and law
- Law and architecture, specifically architecture and criminology
- Law and landscapes
- Cartoons and the law
- Gesture and the law
- Dress codes and the law
- Religion and law: e.g. images, icons, representation of the sacred, etc.
- Legal construction, interpretation of legal subjects and objects through the mediation of images e.g. cultural objects and the law; the body as a legal object etc.
- Aesthetics and the law: e.g. aesthetics and psychoanalytic jurisprudence; Deleuze, art and law; painting and the law; murals and the law; aesthetics and indigenous representation of customary law, specifically native American and African
- Digital technologies and law: e.g. surveillance and law, specifically use of images for forensic evidence; law, advertising and the production of meaning etc.
- Digital media, law and culture: e.g. technology in the courtroom and the law classroom; digital images and law, internet and the law, including pornography
- Media, culture and the law: e.g. cinema, popular culture and law; representation of law and/or legal events in media, specifically the representation of human rights, criminal trials in films and/or historical documentaries; representation of victims, perpetrators etc.

Law, Literature, and Political Thought

P. G. Monateri, University of Torino 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. Moving from a sophisticated analysis of literary texts, the inquiry intends to unveil the subtle strategies that lay behind the construction of Modernity and of its representational canon. The research perspective intentionally discloses the inherent dialectic between aesthetics and law. On this ground this paper rethinks the theory of the 'state of exception' as a pivotal concept for a deep understanding of Law and Politics (and their proper untraced boundaries), offering an alternative interpretation with respect to Giorgio Agamben's thought. The Author's lecture comes to rewrite even the centrality of representation as a fundamental notion both in literary and in political terms.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

I Like To Slog/Among the Blogs

From Mental Floss Blog: Stacy Conradt entertains with 10 Stories Behind Dr. Seuss Stories. They include the little known fact that "If I Ran the Zoo, published in 1950, is the first recorded instance of the word “nerd.” On the human rights front:

Horton Hears a Who! Somehow, Geisel’s books find themselves in the middle of controversy. The line from the book, “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” has been used as a slogan for pro-life organizations for years. It’s often questioned whether that was Seuss’ intent in the first place, but I would say not: when he was still alive, he threatened to sue a pro-life group unless they removed his words from their letterhead. Karl ZoBell, the attorney for Dr. Seuss’ interests and for his widow, Audrey Geisel, says that she doesn’t like people to “hijack Dr. Seuss characters or material to front their own points of view.”

References To Homer in Australian Judicial Opinions

Leslie Katz has published "Homer in Australian Reasons for Judgment or Decision." Here is the abstract.

The paper discusses various allusions to Homer or his works in the reasons for judgment of Australian courts or the reasons for decision of Australian tribunals.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Hip Hop, Criminal Law, and Legal Critique

Nick J. Sciullo has published "Conversations with the Law: Irony, Hyperbole and Identity Politics or Sake Pase? Wyclef Jean, Shottas, and Haitian Jack - A Hip-Hop Creole Fusion of Rhetorical Resistance to the Law," in volume 34 of Oklahoma City University Law Review (2009). Here is the abstract.

This article sets out to prove why the law must be investigated in an interdisciplinary fashion which invites an intersection between law, popular culture, and identity politics. First, this article describes how Wyclef Jean, a hip-hop artist, is an active voice of legal criticism and why his criticism is important to a larger discussion of the law. Second, this paper develops a conception of Creole/Haitian legal studies and its importance as an analytical lens through which to perceive the law and legal institutions. Third, this piece formulates a rhetorical criticism of the law through the rhetorical terrain of Wyclef's hip-hop music and cultural aesthetic to critique criminal law and legal institutions. The fusion of hip-hop, Haitian/Creole cultural identity, and rhetorical criticism, opens a new area for legal analysis and understanding. This article concludes by suggesting that rhetorical criticism, hip-hop, and other rhetorical acts (among them irony and hyperbole) provide new terrain from which to understand the law, and further, that the Haitian/Creole cultural identity is an important and underrepresented facet of legal culture, which further compliments current critical race theory.

Download the article from SSRN here.

John Mortimer Dies

John Mortimer, author of the "Rumpole of the Bailey" stories, as well as numerous other books, has died at the age of 85. Read more here.

McGoohan, Montalban Die

Patrick McGoohan, known for a number of law-related roles: as "Number 6" in the cult series "The Prisoner," as "John Drake", the hero of the series "Danger Man" and "Secret Agent," and as various villains in several "Columbo" movies, as well as a number of well-received films, has died at the age of 80. The announcement of his death follows that of the news of the death of accomplished actor Ricardo Montalban, who most famously played the Nietzchean character Khan in an episode of Star Trek and reprised the role in the second big screen Star Trek film.

Read more about law in The Prisoner and Star Trek in some of the selected references below.
The Prisoner

Christine A. Corcos, Narratives of Imprisonment: "I Am Not a Number! I Am a Free Man!": Physical and Psychological Imprisonment in Science Fiction, 25 Legal Stud. Forum 471 (2001).

Star Trek

Christine Corcos, Isabel Corcos, and Brian Stockhoff, Double-Take: A Second Look at Cloning, Science Fiction, and Law, 59 Louisiana Law Review 1041 (1999).

Paul Joseph and Sharon Carton, The Law of the Federation: Images of Law, Lawyers, and the Legal System in “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” 24 University of Toledo Law Review 43 (1992).

Richard J. Peltz, On a Wagon Train to Afghanistan: Limitations on Star Trek’s Prime Directive, 25 University of Ar-kansas (Little Rock) Law Review 635 (2003).


Michael P. Scharf and Lawrence D. Robert, The Interstellar Relations of the Federation: International Law and “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” 25 University of Toledo Law Review 577 (1994).

Methods of Teaching Native American Literature and Law

Cristine Soliz, Colorado State University, Pueblo, and Harold Joseph have published "Native American Literature, Ceremony, and Law," in MLA Options for Teaching Literature and Law (Austin Sarat, Cathrine Frank & Matthew Anderson, eds., 2009). Here is the abstract.

The joint study of law and literature offers a platform for Indigenous Studies and other programs to explore divergent philosophies and systems of law that have marked the Americas since 1492: Native American Ceremony and Euro-U.S. Law. Although law and literary culture are seen as inextricable and thus seemingly preclusive of Native American ceremony, our essay suggests a rationale and approaches for exploring, in a classroom, the theme of Native American ceremony in its relation to law.

Native American ceremony, as fundamentally anomalous to Old World or Eurasian ceremony and law, interrogates, in the relation, the collective imaginary and ethos or internal logic that enters into creating and even needing law. This relation can be explored using imaginative literature and contrasted to networks that legitimate our practices, as well as to changing definitions of law, such as St. Augustine's Natural Law, and Jeremy Bentham's early definition that tied law to monarchy. Euro-U.S. law in America since 1492, for example, has relied on punitive force as its normative power, but what are the consent mechanisms in Native American ceremony and how does it differ from normative domains described by Euro-U.S. practices, such as religion and even literature? An exploration of this theme through interactive readings of literature and law would focus on what the relationship between law and Native American ceremony might be, based on the continuing presence of Indian ceremony against the force of the U.S. system of law as it increasingly exercises control over Native Americans on tribal lands. Despite the legalities of Euro-U.S. past and present control over Indians, Native American ceremony continues to play a strong part in the psychological processes of the Native American imaginary.

James Welch's Fools Crow is an exemplary fiction that raises these issues, which are made clearer through legal texts. The plight of a small village of Blackfeets and the implied historical events that follow receive a fuller reading through the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Andrew Jackson's Report to Congress in 1829 and 1835, including congressional rhetoric and Acts contemporary to the 1870s, the temporal setting of Fools Crow. These texts give access to divergent cultural practices both through the experience of imagination and through grounding the fictive in the reality of the political setting, setting being an important element of fiction. A reading through the lens of the legal texts motivates questions about why, in the last chapter, Fools Crow and the people observe a 7-day ceremony, even though they realize they are being overwhelmed by invasions of U.S. soldiers and settlers. This locus in the text creates an interpretive opening to the conflict between U.S. and Indian law, to divergent views of law itself and the collective imaginary that goes into its formulation and enactment. Law, as seen in Indian ceremony across America, is strongly tied to harmonious interaction with what the land offers.

Classroom approaches can be organized around major time periods addressing three kinds of legal texts: ceremony, Indian treaties, and federal law with corresponding texts in themes important for the 21st century because of environmental, humanitarian, and sustainability concerns and because of pressures for development of natural resources, many of which can be found on what remains of Indian land. Much of the conflict between Native Americans and Non-Indians, from the Makah whale hunt to more recent Hopi and Navajo opposition to creating artificial snow on San Francisco Peaks in Arizona, has been because of a lack of understanding of Indian Ceremony as valid law in the Americas.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Some New Books Of Interest

New books of interest

Lisa Surwillo, The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2008).

David Thomas et al., Theatre Censorship From Walpole To Wilson (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Rhetoric, Law, and Religion: Jefferson's "Letter to the Danbury Baptists"

Ian C. Bartrum, Yale Law School & Vermont Law School, has published "Of Historiography and Constitutional Principle: Jefferson's Reply to the Danbury Baptists," in volume 51 of the Journal of Church & State. Here is the abstract.

This article examines the ways that the Supreme Court has used Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists ("a wall of separation between church and state") as a rhetorical symbol. It finds the letter at the heart of the Court's debate over competing theories of religious neutrality. The article then explores the treatment the letter has received in several leading academic histories, and concludes that professional historians have largely tailored their arguments to match the Supreme Court's ideological divide. The article concludes that, because the goals of historical argument and legal argument are fundamentally different, this "incestuous" kind of relationship between historiography and constitutional principle is potentially destructive.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Legal TV

As with nearly every new tv season, new legal series are in development. David E. Kelley has one in the wings, Legally Mad, which will star Charity Wakefield. Now, NBC has agreed to develop Rob Morrow's Barely Legal, based on the true story of Kathleen Holtz, who at 18 passed the California Bar.

Harry Potter the Anglo-Saxon

Susan Liemer, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale School of Law, has published "Bot and Gemots: Anglo-Saxon Legal References in Harry Potter," forthcoming in Harry Potter and the Law (Carolina Academic Press). Here is the abstract.

In the popular Harry Potter book series, author J.K. Rowling obliquely references the legal world of the old Anglo-Saxon tribes. This article explains how she does so and offers explanations to help readers understand the parallels between legal institutions of the Anglo-Saxon world and the legal institutions in Harry's wizard world. This understanding may deepen readers' appreciation of the dynamics in each trial scene in the series.

Download the essay from SSRN here.

English Common Lawyers and Tradition

Cristina Costantini, University of Bergamo, has published "The Keepers of Traditions: The English Common Lawyers and the Presence of Law." Here is the abstract.

This paper looks into the subtle frame of the legal traditions, exploring the structural relationship that indissolubly binds history, law and narrative. The core of the Author's thought is that the ontological and epistemological views on the nature of historical past decide the fate of legal discourse and juridical arguments. Rediscovering the centrality of T.S. Eliot's notion of pastness as a meaningful concept that claims to be investigated when cultural heritage is at stake, this paper inquires into the active role played by English Legal Profession in the formulation of a foundational narrative with the structure of a legal tradition. Common Lawyers were the skilful selectors of the means of expression of political power and authority of Law. It is in the common lawyers' narrative and aesthetics that we meet a conscious paradigm of political theology.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Law, Literature, and Doctor Faustus

Shaina Kovalsky has published "Legally Speaking: State as Community in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus." Here is the abstract.

Marlowe's Doctor Faustus appears to have largely neglected by scholars in law and literature, despite its seeming promise in that arena. The paper first reads the play through the lens of a debate between Robin West and Richard Posner about autonomy and consent in Kafka, dredging up the bits and pieces of law and literature-type scholarship along the way. The paper then argues that it is important to remember that, at the time of the play's publication, there were actual laws outlawing pacts with the devil, and so Faustus can be read both as a metaphor and as the product of actual contemporary fears.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Law, Literature and the Holocaust

Richard Weisberg, Cardozo School of Law, has published "Law and Literature as Survivor" as Cardozo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 221. Here is the abstract.

While human rights lawyers from Nuremberg on tried to respond to the evils of Hitler's Europe with cautious directness, humanistic theorists in the post-modernist modes of the post-war period resisted all generalizations, including the establishment of legal norms through international codes of law. Addressing with some admiration the Holocaust-related later works of Geoffrey H. Hartman and (with less reverence) the anti-code and largely antinomian writings of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, this essay places in opposition the code-identifying and code-evaluating work of Law and Literature to that of the always equivocated writings of these deconstructionists for whom every grand narrative and every attempt to base act and choice on precedent was anathema. Although Hartman's aversion to all generalization is ethically sound considering the damage caused by Hitler's blunt and conclusory rhetoric, this essay relies on work about legal discourse during the Holocaust to indicate that this aversion emerges from a mis-placed logic about how institutions managed to adjust their ingrained beliefs and practices to such grotesque pronouncements.

More skeptical perhaps of complexity for its own sake, Law and Literature studies tend to locate codes (public or private, written or unwritten) within the great stories of the law and then unabashedly to value those codes in the Nietzschean sense as good or bad, justice-serving or reactionary. Discourse confronts ethical dilemmas - including those still unresolved six decades after the Holocaust - and to speak of them through a direct language of choice that often informs the canonical narratives we study.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Life, Art, and Bernie Madoff

Patricia Allen notes that life seems to have imitated art, at least in the case of the current Bernie Madoff scandal. She seeks out the commentary of a number of critics and writers, who compare it to Harley Granville-Barker's The Voysey Inheritance, which David Mamet has lately adapted. Other analogies: Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, various works of Charles Dickens, and Arthur Miller's All My Sons. BTW, here's more about Mr. Madoff's scheme, and the history of such schemes.

But, does life imitate art, or do artists take what they see in life and work with it, and do we simply then recognize the analogies, as indeed we should, since artists are working with the truth about human beings?

Some Recently Published Titles In Law and Literature

A round-up of selected titles published in law and literature in the past year or so.


Almog, Shulamit, The poetics of the legal system in the digital age: contemporary challenges to traditional concepts of justice (2007).

Atkinson, Logan, and Diana Majury, Law, mystery, and the humanities: collected essays (2008).

Bertini, Fabio, "Havere a la giustitia sodisfatto" : tragedie giudiziarie di Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio nel ventennio conciliare (2008).

Bishop, Stephen L., Legal oppositional narrative: a case study in Cameroon (2008).

Boboc, Andreea Delia, Justice on Trial: Abuse and acculturation in late medieval English literature, 1381-1481 (Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2006).

Caspar, Timothy W., Recovering the Ancient View of Founding: a commentary on Cicero's De legibus (Dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 2006).

Chaplin, Susan, The gothic and the rule of the law, 1764-1820 (2007).

Cormack, Bradin, A Power To Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509-1625 (2007).

Danovi, Remo, Tra fantasia e diritto: List of Novels (2004).

Dolin, Kieran, A Critical Introduction To Law and Literature (2007).

Edelman, Bernard, Quand les juristes inventent le réel: la fabulation juridique (2007).

Eska, Joseph F., Law, literature and society (2008).

Everingham, Anthony Samuel, Form and function in legal adjudication: legal "meaning", hermeneutics and systems theory (Master’s thesis, Monash University, 2007).

Farenga, Vincent, Citizen and Self in Ancient Greece: Individuals Performing Justice and the Law (2006).

Ferk, Janko, Recht ist ein "Prozess": über Kafkas Rechtsphilosophie (2006).

Gaakeer, A. M. P., and François Ost, Crossing borders: law, language and literature (2007).

Geonget, Stéphan, Littérature et droit, du Moyen Âge à la période baroque: le process exemplaire : actes de la journée d'études du groupe de recherches Traditions antiques et modernités de Paris VII, 29 mars 2003 (2008).

Glover, Susan, Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2006).

González Echevarría, Roberto, Amor y ley en Cervantes (2008).

Hegel, Robert E., and Katherine Carlitz, Writing and Law in Late Imperial China (2007).

Hepburn, Allan, Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance (2007).

Hofmann, Gert, Figures of law : studies in the interference of law and literature (2007).

Hutson, Lorna, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (2007).

Jurasinski, Stefan, Ancient privileges: Beowulf, law and the making of Germanic antiquity (2006).

Kanarek, Jane, Let the story remain with us: Biblical narrative and the formation of rabbinic law (Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2007).

Kane, Baydallaye, La justice répressive dans la littérature africaine (2006).

Kezar, Dennis, Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance (2007).

Kaul, Suzanne, Poetik der Gerechtigkei : Shakespeare-Kleist (2008).

Latham, Sean, The art of scandal: modernism, libel law, and the roman à clef (2009).

Lemmens, Koen, François Jongen, Droit & littérature (2007).

Lin, Laifan, Fa lü yu ren wen=Law & humanism (2007).

Lockey, Brian, Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature(2006).

Majeske, Andrew J., Equity in English Renaissance literature: Thomas More and Edmund Spenser(2006).

Mangham, Andrew, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture (2007).

Masson, Jean, Le droit dans la littérature française(2007).

Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle, Le tribunal imaginaire: essai(2006).

Mautner, Menachem, Mishpat ve-tarbut (2008).

McGinnis, Reginald, Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment(2008).

Méchoulan, Eric, Law and literature (2006).

Morawetz, Thomas, Literature and the law (2007).

Morgan, Brian James, Documentary culture and prophecy in Piers Plowman (Thesis (M. Litt.), University of Oxford, 2006).

Morgan, Edward M., The aesthetics of international law (2007).

Mueller-Dietz, Heinz, Recht und Kriminalität in literarischen Spiegelungen (2007).

Mukherji, Subha, Law and representation in early modern drama (2006).

Murphy, Stephen M., What if Holden Caulfield went to law school?: selected legal fiction and nonfiction (2007).

O’Brien, Ellen L., Crime in Verse: The Poetics of Murder in the Victorian Era (2008).

Oliveira, Mara Regina de, Shakespeare e a filosofia do direito: um diálogo com a tragédia Julio César (2006).

Olson, Greta, and Martin Kayman, Law, Literature, and Language (2007).

Osborough, W. N., Literature, Judges, and the Law (2008).

Pennsylvania Bar Institute, What literature tells us about lawyers & the practice of law (2008).

Plesko, Forrest Vincent, “A little information about the law": Judgments, jurisprudence, and (in)justice in William Faulkner's Snopes trilogy (Master’s thesis, University of Southern Mississippi, 2006).

Rabell, Carmen, Ficciones legales: ensayos sobre ley, retórica y narración (2007).

Reichman, Ravit, The affective life of law: legal modernism and the literary imagination (2009).

Rielly, Edward J., Murder 101: essays on the teaching of detective fiction (2009).

Ritscher, Lee A., The semiotics of rape in Renaissance English literature (2007).

Scase, Wendy, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272-1553 (2007).

Sokol, B. J., Shakespeare, law, and marriage (2006) Reprint.

Stern, Simon, Law and literature (2007).

Suzack, Cheryl, Law, literature, location: contemporary aboriginal/indigenous women's writing and the politics of identity (Dissertation, University of Alberta, 2006).

Talavera, Pedro, Derecho y literatura: el reflejo de lo jurídico (2006).

Tomain, Joseph P., Creon's ghost: law, justice, and the humanities (2009).

Van Blerk, Nicolaas Johannes, The concept of law and justice in Ancient Egypt, with specific reference to The tale of the eloquent peasant (Master’s thesis, University of South Africa, 2006).

Visconsi, Elliott, Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England (2008).

Weber, Hermann, Literatur, Recht und Musik: Tagung im Nordkolleg Rendsburg vom 16. bis 18. September 2005 (2007).

White, James Boyd, When language meets the mind: three questions (2007).

Zurcher, Andrew, Spenser's legal language: law and poetry in early modern England (2007).

Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought

Lorie Graham and Stephen M. McJohn, Suffolk University Law School, have published "Cognition, Law, Stories," in Minnesota Journal of Law, Science, & Technology (Winter 2009). Here is the abstract.

This essay reviews Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought (Penguin 2007), which offers insights from cognitive science just where it overlaps the most with law - how we use basic cognitive categories like intent, space, time, events and causation. The Stuff of Thought might offer insights into a broad range of issues in legal theory. Legal theory could make more use of such cognitive science concepts as chunking, recursion, and the primary qualities of an object. Other topics likewise resonate in thinking about the law: The book suggests that metaphor is an important cognitive tool, but less constraining than might be thought. Linguistic analysis of verb classes and polysemy suggests that words have surprisingly determinate meaning. Our apparent innate sense of causation (drawn from an analysis of language) sheds light on the legal treatment of causation. Lastly, The Stuff of Thought describes the role of indirect speech, whereby people convey information without revealing their state of mind - which often allows social interaction to proceed smoothly. Default rules in the law, we suggest, often play an analogous role.

The essay then explores the cognitive aspects of stories (following literary theorists like Mark Turner who have linked cognitive science with narrative theory), suggesting a recursive definition of story, and another angle to the trolley problem. Looking at the cognitive role of stories permits a fuller view of legal reasoning, learning, and remembering. This fits well with recent scholarship, such as work on origin stories, and law and genre theory.

Download the essay from SSRN here.

Law and Linguistics

Andrei Marmor, USC Gould School of Law, has published "What Does the Law Say? Semantics and Pragmatics in Statutory Language," forthcoming in Analisi e Diritto. Here is the abstract.

The content of communication in a given speech situation often goes beyond what the speaker has explicitly said. The main purpose of this essay is to explore this aspect of linguistic communication in the legal context. The paper begins with a general outline of the dividing lines between semantics and pragmatics, laying out the main distinctions that need to be employed. Next, the paper suggests that the pragmatic aspects of statutory language differ in some important ways from the pragmatics of an ordinary conversation. The paper explains some of these differences which make the understanding of legal language somewhat problematic. Finally, the paper points toward some solutions, based on the distinction between content that is semantically implicated by an utterance and content that is implicated conversationally.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Law, Morality, and Television

MSNBC.com's Susan Young has this story about the interesting moral dilemmas that television dramas pose "for fun." But do viewers take them too seriously? What do adults and children learn from these dramatizations? Commentators trace the evolution of today's ethically complex hero, from Jim Rockford of the Rockford Files to "24"'s Jack Bauer here.

Some Personal Reflections On "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Sherrilyn Ifill, University of Maryland, School of Law, has published "To Kill a Mockingbird Perspectives," at 41 Maryland Bar Journal 54-59 (September/October 2008). Here is the abstract.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" is one of the most influential and widely acclaimed legal novels in American history. It tells the story of a small-town white lawyer who is appointed to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama. The lawyer, Atticus Finch, is one of the great legal heroes of American fiction. The story, told from the perspective of Atticus' daughter Scout, explores race, class, gender, family and law. Most of all it is a both critical and loving account of the white South.

This article is a personal story about the influence of "To Kill a Mockingbird" on Professor Ifill, an African American civil rights lawyer and law professor. In the piece, she explores the implication of some of the fictional liberties taken by the book's author Harper Lee. Ifill also challenges her own previously uncritical view of the character of Atticus Finch. Ifill then presents the stories of some of the real-life lawyers in Maryland, black and white, who defended black men accused of violent crimes against whites in the 1930s. Professor Ifill learned of the work of these lawyers while researching her 2007 book, "On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century."

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Translation as Metaphor

Robert Leckey, McGill University Faculty of Law, has published "Filiation and the Translation of Legal Concepts," in Legal Engineering and Comparative Law (volume 2)(Geneva: Schulthess, 2009). Here is the abstract.

The paper argues for the use of the metaphor of translation of legal concepts in comparative law by exploring recent reforms to the law of assisted reproduction by the legislature of Quebec. It argues that lawmakers and comparative lawyers may learn from the cautions advanced for literary and legal translators by the translation literature. It argues that the Quebec instance of legislated changes in order to facilitate assisted procreation by lesbian couples shows an excessive literalism in the translation of rules applicable to "natural" procreation to assisted procreation. The legislature might constructively have looked to other parts of the existing private law, as well as to sociological accounts of intentional lesbian reproduction. Translation-as-metaphor also speaks fruitfully to comparatists: it may alert them to the losses of functionalist comparison. Specifically, the treatment of legal rules as "solutions" to a common problem elides distinctive institutional, rhetorical, and discursive differences.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

21 Grams

Bruce L. Hay, Harvard Law School, has published "The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer," in volume 29 of Cardozo Law Review (2008). Here is the abstract.

This paper is part of a symposium issue entitled "Law and Event," whose subject is the work of the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou. The paper offers a reading of "21 Grams," a film that treats in narrative terms some of the central problems addressed in Badiou's work, notably the connections between love, fate, and mathematics, and the mysterious nature of the "event" in history. The paper emphasizes the film's effort to blend Greek myth and philosophy, Christian theology, and modern chaos theory.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Religious Words, Secular Argument

Jack Lee Sammons, Mercer University School of Law, has published "A Rhetorician's View of Religious Speech in Civic Argument," at 32 Seattle University Law Review 367 (2008).

This paper examines the role of religious speech in democratic civic argument by challenging liberal methods of addressing the issue of religious speech with a more rhetorical view of civic argument. The primary issue, from this perspective, is whether or not rhetoric's own constitutive restraints are adequate to address the risks of religious speech. After a brief analysis of liberal methods, the rhetorical nature of civic argument is described, and both the risks of religious speech and the constitutive restraints are examined.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Upcoming Symposium: Women and the Law

From Suzanne Kim, Rutgers School of Law, Newark
Rutgers School of Law-Newark is pleased to be celebrating its centennial this year. To honor the law school's tradition of contributing to social justice, we are hosting a day-long symposium on Feb. 13, 2009 entitled "Rutgers School of Law-Newark Celebrates Women Reshaping American Law."

The event gathers major figures in the development of women's rights law and highlights the connections between Rutgers and that history. United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will deliver the keynote address. Professor Catharine MacKinnon will deliver closing remarks.

Speakers also include Professor Sarah Burns of NYU School of Law, Professor Sally Goldfarb of Rutgers School of Law-Camden, Professor Victoria Nourse of University of Wisconsin Law School, Professor Susan Deller Ross of Georgetown University Law Center, and Professor Wendy Webster Williams of Georgetown University Law Center. Yale College Professor Fred Strebeigh, author of the forthcoming book Equal: Women Reshape American Law (Norton 2009), will deliver opening remarks.

Information about scheduling and registration to come by January. In the meantime, please save the date!

Call For Papers

Reinforcing and Resisting Feminist Representations: Spaces, Voices and Identities
The 12th Annual Louisiana State University Women's and Gender Studies Conference
March 5 - 6, 2009
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Call for Proposals

The theme of this year’s conference, Reinforcing and Resisting Feminist Representations: Spaces, Voices and Identities, addresses the role that women’s and gender studies scholarship has played in challenging, rethinking and expanding repressive and limiting understandings of feminism, gender expression, and identity in the traditional disciplines and society. We invite proposals that broadly address issues of representations of women and gender in innovative and interdisciplinary ways. Possible topics include: representations of gender in popular culture; gender, sexuality, activism and politics; intersections of queer theory, transgender studies and feminisms; global feminisms; women’s autobiography; feminist research methods; the role of interdisciplinary research and pedagogy; and feminist articulations of intersectionality. We also welcome proposals that do not directly address the theme, but which are relevant to WGS scholarship as well as alternative formats such as academic or documentary films and performances. Pre-formed panels are especially encouraged.

Abstracts of 250 words (for individual papers) and 750 words (for pre-formed panels) are due Tuesday January 20th to wgsconference@gmail.com. All submissions should include the following information: Name; Department/Program; University; Title of Presentation; Required Technology
More information can be found here: http://www.lsu.edu/wgs/conference.html
Keynote Speaker
Janet L. Miller, Professor of English Education (Teachers College, Columbia University) and 2008 American Educational Research Association Curriculum Studies Lifetime Achievement Award recipient will present this year’s keynote address. Dr. Miller’s research focuses on feminist curriculum theorizing, constructions of teachers' identities in collaboration and school reform efforts, and issues of representation, especially in autobiographical and biographical forms. Dr. Miller served as Vice-President (1997-1999) and Secretary (1990-1992) for AERA Division B (Curriculum Studies). She was Managing Editor of The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (JCT) from 1978 through 1998 and was Chair of JCT’s Bergamo Curriculum Theorizing Conferences during that time frame. She also was elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (AAACS) for two consecutive terms (2001- 2007). Dr. Miller is the author of Creating Spaces and Finding Voices: Teachers Collaborating for Empowerment (SUNY Press), Sounds of Silence Breaking: Women, Autobiography, Curriculum (Peter Lang), and Co-Editor, with William C. Ayers, of A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation.

Intellectual Property and Rhetoric

Patricia Louise Loughlan, University of Sydney Faculty of Law, has published "'You Wouldn't Steal a Car': Intellectual Property and the Language of Theft," at 29 European Intellectual Property Review 401 (2007). Here is the abstract.

It is actually quite easy to tell a good guy from a bad guy when one of the guys is being called a thief. He is the bad guy. It is in fact quite hard to think of a thief as any sort of good guy at all once you have begun thinking about him, even just impressionistically, as a thief.

This paper will scrutinise and consider the legitimacy of the pervasive rhetorical use of the language of 'theft' in intellectual property discourse. That language, comprised of words like 'theft', 'thief', 'stealing' 'burglar's tools' and occasionally even 'robbery,' is increasingly employed to describe the unauthorised use of intellectual property, so that new social meanings become attached to acts such as the digital transfer of a musical file or a film:

YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A CAR
YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A HANDBAG
YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A TELEVISION
YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A DVD
DOWNLOADING PIRATED FILMS IS STEALING
STEALING IS AGAINST THE LAW

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Rhetoric and Reparations

Lolita Buckner Inniss, Cleveland-Marshall School of Law, has published "A Critical Legal Rhetoric Approach to 'In Re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation'," as Cleveland-Marshall Legal Studies Paper No. 8-155. Here is the abstract.

In this paper I apply critical legal rhetoric to the judicial opinion rendered in response to the Defendants' Motion to Dismiss Plaintiffs' Second Amended and Consolidated Complaint in 'In Re African American Slave Descendants', a case concerning the efforts of a group of modern-day descendants of enslaved African-Americans to obtain redress for the harms of slavery. The chief methodological framework for performing critical legal rhetorical analysis comes from the work of Marouf Hasian, Jr. particularly his schema for analysis which he calls substantive units in critical legal rhetoric. Critical legal rhetoric is a potent tool for exposing the way in which the public ideologies of society and the private ideologies of jurists, legislators and other legal actors are manifested in legal and law-like pronouncements. After introducing this case, I briefly tracing the evolution and meaning of the term rhetoric and examine the relationship between rhetoric and law. I next explore the connection between rhetoric and ideology, which is crystallized in the form of the ideograph and its use as a tool of what is known as critical rhetoric. Finally, I show how critical legal rhetoric is achieved by bringing critical rhetoric to law, and thereafter apply critical legal rhetoric to the case of 'In Re African American Slave Descendants'.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Patricia Cornwell's "Scarpetta"

CNN.com has this lengthy interview with Patricia Cornwell, author of the Kay Scarpetta novels.

Some Gift Suggestions For the Non-Denominational Holidays

Don't know what to give for the holidays? Pierre Bayard's Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles, newly translated into English by Charlotte Mandell, is now available. In this "revisionist view" of the classic Conan Doyle novel, French critic argues that the iconic detective didn't know what he was doing half the time. Monsieur Bayard is the author of How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read, and Who Killed Roger Ackroyd: The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery.

Now available on DVD: Perry Mason: Season 3, volume 2; The Sopranos: The Complete Series; volume 1 of cult hit Pushing Daises, and both seasons of a little known series Dead Like Me, which came and went quickly, but starred Mandy Patinkin, who heads up a group of "reapers" in charge of leading the recently dead across the line that separates the living from those who have departed this life. I highly recommend Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies, which has a similar theme (crossing the line between life and death), for their wit and thoughtful consideration of the issues that touch us all. Pushing Daisies is, however, more explicitly law-related, since it's about solving crime.

The Unemployed Philosopher's Guild offers a number of interesting and amusing items, including a disappearing civil liberties mug (pour in hot liquid and watch parts of the Bill of Rights vanish) and a Democratic Dream mug (same instructions; all of the U.S. turns a Democratic blue). The site also offers religious items, but be warned--you'll need to bring your sense of humor with you.

Language, Literature, and Constitutional Theories

Ian C. Bartrum, Yale Law School & Vermont Law School, has published "Metaphors and Modalities: Meditations on Bobbitt's Theory of the Constitution," in 17 William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal (2008). Here is the abstract.

This article builds on Philip Bobbitt's remarkable work in constitutional theory, which posits a practice-based constitution based in six accepted "modalities" of argument. I attempt to supplement Bobbitt's theory - which has a static and exclusive quality to it - with an account of interpretive evolution based in Max Black's interaction theory of metaphors. I suggest that we can (and do) create constitutional metaphors by deliberately overlapping Bobbitt's modalities of argument, and that through these creative acts we can grow the practice of American constitutionalism. I then present case studies of this metaphoric process at work in three fields of constitutional practice: from constitutional theory I take Akhil Reed Amar's theory of "intratextualism"; from constitutional advocacy I select Louis Brandeis brief in Muller v. Oregon; and from constitutional judging I look to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. I conclude that the concept of modal metaphors offers practitioners a principled and grammatical way to create new constitutional meanings and resolve constitutional dilemmas.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Rhetoric in Child Custody Decision Making

Linda L. Berger, Mercer University School of Law, has published "How Embedded Knowledge Structures Affect Judicial Decision Making: An Analysis of Metaphor, Narrative, and Imagination in Child Custody Disputes." Here is the abstract.

We live in a time of radically changing conceptions of family and of the relationships possible between children and parents. Though undergoing "a sea-change," family law remains tethered to culturally embedded stories and symbols. While so bound, family law will fail to serve individual families and a society whose family structures diverge sharply by education, race, class, and income.

This article advances a critical rhetorical analysis of the interaction of metaphor and narrative within the specific context of child custody disputes. Its goal is to begin to examine how these embedded knowledge structures affect judicial decision making generally; more specifically, the article's aim is to help advocates make room for difference and diversity in the lives of families.

The rhetorical analysis indicates that the best interests of the child standard fails to explain child custody outcomes, and it suggests that the cognitive setting for custody disputes - cluttered with outmoded metaphors, simplistic images, and unexamined narratives - interferes with the ability of judges to attend to complex and radical transformations of parent and child relationships. The article proposes that practicing lawyers and scholars use rhetorical analysis first to uncover the symbols and stories that affect judicial decision making and then to construct arguments that may overcome deeply rooted constraints, help individual clients, and persuade policy makers.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Legal Language

Andre Marmor, USC Gould School of Law, has published "The Pragmatics of Legal Language," as USC Law Legal Studies Paper No. 08-11. Here is the abstract.

In most standard cases, the content of the law is tantamount to the content that is communicated by the relevant legal authority. It has been long noticed by linguists and philosophers of language, however, that the content of linguistic communication is not always fully determined by the meaning of the words and sentences uttered. Semantics and syntax are essential vehicles for conveying communicative content, but the content conveyed is very often pragmatically enriched by other factors. My purpose in this essay is to explore some of the pragmatic aspects of understanding what the law communicates. I argue that in some respects the pragmatics of legal language is unique, sometimes uniquely problematic. Exploring those problems forms one of the aims of this essay. But I suggest that we can do more than that: by drawing on the distinctions between the various pragmatic aspects of language use, we should be able to offer some generalizations about types of pragmatic enrichment that could be taken to form, or not to form, part of what is actually determined by legal expressions.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Law, Philosophy, and the Rhetorical Tradition

Francis Joseph Mootz III, UNLV School of Law, has published "The Irrelevance of Contemporary Academic Philosophy for Law: Recovering the Rhetorical Tradition," in On Philosophy in American Law (F. J. Mootz III, ed.; Cambridge University Press, 2009). Here is the abstract.

This short paper will appear in a volume of original essays, On Philosophy in American Law (Francis J. Mootz III ed., Cambridge Univ. Press forthcoming 2009). I argue that the undeniable rift between philosophy and law is more than a simple dichotomy of theory and practice. Instead, the sharp distinction between philosophy and law occurred when both disciplines built insular guilds that employed distinctive vocabularies to distinguish themselves from rhetoric, and it is by returning to their roots in rhetoric that philosophy and law might find their common ground in the elucidation of rhetorical knowledge.

Download the paper from SSRN here.