A New Book on Lawyers Who are Writers and Writers Who are Lawyers, From the Middle Ages To the Enlightenment

New from Classiques Garniers:

Écrivains jurists et jurists écrivains du Moyen Âge au siècle des Lumières (Bruno Mèniel, ed., Paris,2016) (Esprit desLois, Esprit des Lettres; 8). 

Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website. 

Does legal practice result in modes of thought, a rapport with language and with reality, which manifest themselves in the works of legal writers? As rigorous as it might be, is it not the case tha tlegal discourse contains an imaginary world that a literary eye can flush out?

More here via Frederik Dhondt@HerakleitosMD.

Kessler and Pozen on A Life Cycle of Legal Theories

Jeremy K. Kessler and David Pozen, both of Columbia Law School, are publishing Working Themselves Impure: A Life-Cycle Theory of Legal Theories in the University of Chicago Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Prescriptive legal theories have a tendency to cannibalize themselves. As they develop into schools of thought, they become not only increasingly complicated but also increasingly compromised, by their own normative lights. Maturation breeds adulteration. The theories work themselves impure. This Article identifies and diagnoses this evolutionary phenomenon. We develop a stylized model to explain the life cycle of certain particularly influential legal theories. We illustrate this life cycle through case studies of originalism, textualism, popular constitutionalism, and cost-benefit analysis, as well as a comparison with leading accounts of organizational and theoretical change in politics and science. And we argue that an appreciation of the life cycle requires a reorientation of legal advocacy and critique. The most significant threats posed by a new legal theory do not come from its neglect of significant first-order values -- the usual focus of criticism -- for those values are apt to be incorporated into the theory. Rather, the deeper threats lie in the second- and third-order social, political, and ideological effects that the adulterated theory’s persistence may foster, down the line.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call for Papers: A Conference on Law and Crime Fiction

Via the Call for Papers website, maintained by the Department of English, University of Pennsylvania

Crime Fiction Here and There: Time and Space 13-15 September 2016
Dr Agnieszka Sienkiewicz-Charlish/University of Gdansk
contact email:
crimegdansk@gmail.com

From the locked room to the mean streets of the metropolis, the concept of space has always played as important role in crime fiction as the concept of time. A lot has been said in recent years about the importance of a specific locale in crime fiction. Both readers and writers like to divide crime novels into certain national and spatial genre variants: Nordic Noir, Tartan Noir, L.A. Noir etc., but are these variants really so different from each other? How does space define a particular formula? Studies on crime fiction and temporality usually refer to Todorov’s well-known chapter in his book The Poetics of Prose entitled “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” in which he argues that crime fiction narratives are structured by a double temporality: the reconstruction of events leading up to the murder and the progress of the detective’s investigation, with both narratives eventually converging at the point of the crime’s solution. However, if one looks at some contemporary crime novels as well as contemporary criticism this model certainly needs to be revised or at least reformulated. Although the construction of time and space in terms of genre conventions has been discussed quite extensively by critics, there still seems to be room for further analyses.
We invite papers on crime fiction in literature, cinema and the new media which will deal with one or more of the following points (the list is by no means exhaustive):
•constructing time and space in crime narrative
•time and space in nation-specific crime writing (e.g. Polish / Scottish / Austrian crime fiction, Nordic noir, etc.)
•place-specific crime writing (e.g. academic mystery, domestic noir, etc.)
•oneiric, imaginary or other alternative worlds in crime writing
•closure and openness in crime fiction (e.g. locked rooms, manor houses, mean streets, prisons and other ‘crime spaces’ )
•gendered spaces in crime fiction
•the detective and the city
•setting as a protagonist?
•noir city
•psychogeography
•across time and space: movement trajectories in crime fiction
•the aesthetics / theory of space: the ‘spatial turn’ in literature and cinema.

Please send an abstract and a short biographical note tocrimegdansk@gmail.com by 31 May 2016. The abstract should include a title, name and affiliation of the speaker and a contact email address. We welcome proposals from both postgraduate students and established scholars. Proposals for suggested panels are also welcome. Papers should be no longer than 20 minutes of presentation time and should be delivered in English.
Conference fee: 400 PLN (100 Euro/ 75 GBP), Students - 350 PLN (80 Euro/65 GBP)
Conference dinner on Wednesday 14th of September (optional): 25 Euro/20 GBP/ 100 PLN

The fee includes a delegate pack, lunches and other refreshments on all 3 days. Please note that it does not include accommodation. The conference dinner on Wednesday is optional and should be booked during the registration. There is going to be an informal conference warming on Monday, the 12th of September.
For further information, see our conference website
https://www.crimegdansk.wordpress.com
For more information on Captivating Criminality Network, see
http://www.captivatingcriminalitynetwork.netOrganising committee:
Ludmiła Gruszewska-Blaim
Agnieszka Sienkiewicz-Charlish
Maja Wojdyło

Conference secretaries: Irina Antonenko, Arco van Ieperen

LoPucki on Disciplinary Legal Studies, Legal Scholarship, and Legal Academic Hiring

Lynn M. LoPucki, UCLA Law School, is publishing Disciplinary Legal Empiricism in volume 76 of the Maryland Law Review (2017). Here is the abstract.

This Article reports on an empirical study of one hundred and twenty empirical legal studies published in leading, non-peer-reviewed law reviews and in the peer-reviewed Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. The study is the first to compare studies by disciplinary empiricists – defined as Ph.D. holders – with those by non-disciplinary empiricists – defined as J.D. holders who are not also Ph.D. holders. Three differences identified in the study suggest that Ph.D. hiring is on a collision course with the demands of legal educators, the organized bar, and students that the law schools better prepare students for practice. First, disciplinary legal empiricists focus their studies less directly on legal issues and materials. Second, disciplinary legal empiricists are only half as likely as non-disciplinary empiricists to create new datasets. Instead, they analyze existing datasets statistically, conduct experiments, or administer surveys. Because most J.D.-Ph.D.s have no practice experience when they begin teaching and pursue scholarly agendas that do not engage them with lawyers or legal materials, they are unlikely to become sufficiently familiar with the world of legal practice to effectively prepare students for it. Third, Ph.D.s tend to collaborate with other Ph.D.s. That finding is in tension with the claim that hiring small numbers of Ph.D.s who collaborate with the non-Ph.D.s on law faculties can meet the law schools’ need for pervasive empiricism. This Article concludes that Ph.D. hiring will continue to increase across all levels of the law school hierarchy as a share of tenure-track hiring. But the numbers of tenure-track law faculty hired will shrink as the law schools shift resources to hiring full-time, non-tenure track faculty with legal experience.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Schlag on the Law Review Article

Pierre Schlag, University of Colorado Law School, has published The Law Review Article as Legal Studies Research Paper 16-2. Here is the abstract.

This very short piece describes the form, structure and vexations of the law review article qua scholarly artifact. It also contains Professor Max Stein’s latest thoughts as articulated in Schlag's recently published book, “American Absurd”.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

A Social History of Murder From Linda Stratmann

Linda Stratmann has published The Secret Poisoner A Century of Murder (Yale University Press, 2016). Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

Murder by poison alarmed, enthralled, and in many ways encapsulated the Victorian age. Linda Stratmann's dark and splendid social history reveals the nineteenth century as a gruesome battleground where poisoners went head-to-head with authorities who strove to detect poisons, control their availability, and bring the guilty to justice. She corrects many misconceptions about particular poisons and documents how the evolution of issues such as marital rights and the legal protection of children impacted poisonings. Combining archival research with a novelist's eye, Stratmann charts the era's inexorable rise of poison cases both shocking and sad.

 

Cohen on Artistic Freedom, Privacy, and Literature

Nili Cohen, Tel-Aviv University, is publishing Love, Story, Law – From the Scarlet Letter to Freedom and Privacy in volume 28 of Law and Literature (2016). Here is the abstract.

What are the limits of artistic freedom? How beholden is literature to truth? How confined is literature by truth? What should be the fate of a book relating the love affair between an older married man and a young woman, with close accuracy, so much so that the young woman could be identified by distant acquaintances despite the pseudonyms? An Israeli Supreme Court case rendered a few years ago ruled that the publication of the book would harshly violate the woman’s privacy, while non-publication would moderately injure the author’s artistic freedom. Hence the publication of the book was prohibited and the author was liable to compensate his former lover in the sum of NIS 200,000. The triangle of Love-Story-Law is obviously not a unique Israeli matter. Similar stories raise universal hot debates. The Israeli case took an extreme stand compared with other legal systems. The statement “There are norms for which it is worth even losing a few ‘good books’” raises concerns about the enforcement of the right to privacy as an oblique way of imposing censorship on grounds of morality. The controversial judgment begs the question of its potential value as a precedent. Alternative balancing between the competing rights, some binary, some distributive, which have been adopted in German and American case law, reflect normative decisions along the axis through freedom of action, artistic freedom, privacy and conservatism. But apart from the question of balancing conflicting rights, our love story reveals a whole set of changing values which will be historically scrutinized, starting from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story The Scarlet Letter. Both stories reflect changing normative, cultural and legal perceptions of the freedom to love, and of the power to control the exposure of love in public. The fate in life and literature of protagonists of intimate stories of this kind exhibits a history of a reversal of social-legal perceptions. Policing of personal intimacy gradually gives way to a loosening of sexual fetters and more freedom. At the same time control of publication on the public level yields to lifting the ban on circulation of obscene matter and entrenchment of practically unlimited freedom of expression. State responsibility for policing of such publications gives way to the individual’s bearing the burden of preventing publication of matters that might harm one's dignity, reputation and privacy. The courthouse that was once open to all, even for hearings on intimate family details, now offers protection of names and of identifying details of litigants followed by the closure of its doors to the public for hearings on personal matters. And finally the Platonic perception of art as dangerous and false imitation, to be hidden away, is replaced by the requirement of hiding art away because of the truth in it.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Call for Applications, Visiting Fellowship, the Humanities Reseach Centre, the Australian National University

Via Desmond Manderson, Australian National University College of Law, and College of Arts and Social Sciences:

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: 2017 VISITING FELLOWSHIPS, THE HUMANITIES RESEARCH CENTRE, THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY.
The Humanities Research Centre (HRC) was established in 1972 as a national and international centre for excellence in the Humanities and as a catalyst for innovative Humanities scholarship and research within  the  Australian  National  University. As a core part of its mission, the HRC welcomes visiting fellows from around the world. The HRC interprets the ‘Humanities’ generously. As well as supporting scholarship in traditional Humanities disciplines, its visiting fellowship programs encourage and support interdisciplinary and comparative research both within and beyond the Humanities. As members of the scholarly community at the HRC, visiting fellows make valuable contributions to its intellectual life, and to the intellectual life of the broader university community.

Guidelines
The theme for 2017 is ‘The question of the stranger’. Full details may be found below. This theme is not intended to constrain, but, interpreted imaginatively, to foster collaboration between scholars from diverse fields and backgrounds.

Visiting fellows are awarded grants to cover travel (up to $AUD3,000) and accommodation in Canberra. While we particularly encourage applicants working on projects connected to the annual theme, some fellowships will be awarded outside of this theme. One non-thematic fellowship will also be offered in partnership with the Australian National University’s Gender Institute.  

Fellowships are from 6 to 12 weeks, with preference given to periods of longer duration. (Shorter and longer periods of tenure may be considered in special circumstances.)
All visiting fellows receive an office within the Centre, access to its facilities, and to the resources of the ANU library and the National Library of Australia. Residence in Canberra also offers enviable access to national and indigenous archives and to a variety of the nation’s cultural institutions. Fellows are encouraged to forge connections with other Australian universities and the HRC can assist in their negotiating assisted travel within Australia.

Eligibility
Applicants must have an institutional affiliation with a University or with an equivalent research organisation, and generally have at least a higher research degree or equivalent professional experience, research, and publications. The HRC aims to appoint fellows engaged in innovative research of a high calibre, and to select a mixture of early career scholars as well as more established researchers, and to achieve a gender balance.
Applications for 2017 fellowships are due 30 April, 2016.
For full details of the application process and eligibility requirements, please visit our website: http://hrc.anu.edu.au/news/hrc-2017-visiting-fellow-applications
Informal enquiries should be addressed to the Head of the Humanities Research Centre, Prof. Will Christie (william.christie@anu.edu.au)

Annual theme: The question of the stranger         
‘The cluster of words describing those who are (or who are made to seem) different from us (whoever ‘us’ is)—the foreigner, the alien, the stranger—has been critical in the articulation of how we live after 9/11’.
So wrote David Simpson in the study from which we take our theme for 2017.  The theme asks us to look at the way individuals and cultures have understood, represented, and dealt with strangers in their intellectual, linguistic, legal, cultural, and artistic traditions; the way the dialectic of the familiar and the foreign has become the very condition of understanding and organisation in the world we have created for ourselves to live in. The question of the stranger not only reaches back to the oldest human culture and earliest human imaginings, it also presents (arguably paradoxically) with a special urgency today, in the so-called ‘global’ age we currently inhabit. ‘Its ramifications are legal, ethical, and indeed comprehensively human’, writes Simpson: ‘who is welcomed and who is turned away? Who is a friend and who is an enemy? Who deserves the protection of the law and who is outside it? At what point does the working norm give way to the exception, and who gets to decide?’ Over the last 350 years, we have witnessed an Enlightenment project of cosmopolitan universalism that sought to overcome the conditioned estrangement of religion, race, gender, and country of origin by way of reason, science, or sympathy, break down in protracted war, cultural misunderstanding, ‘scientific’ racial stereotyping, and the birth of often aggressive forms of racism and nationalism. Indeed, it is precisely because we are everyday forging more and more global connections with peoples once geographically distant and culturally alienated that we need to engage with the question of the stranger as it continues to inform human thought and feeling and their critical and creative expression.

Burri on Diversity in the Internet Age

Mira Burri, University of Bern Law School, World Trade Institute, is publishing Cultural Diversity in the Internet Age: In Search of New Tools That Work in volume 101 of the Digiworld Economic Journal (2016). Here is the abstract.

The article considers the key media policy objective of enhancing cultural diversity and explores one of the possible paths towards it in the digital media space – namely, by addressing the new intermediaries that have an increasingly critical role in contemporary media experiences. It sketches some particular problems that policymakers need to take into account, such as tailored content consumption, as well as some ways to solve them, such as through content curation in the public interest.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Law Book: A New Legal Reference From Michael H. Roffer

Michael H. Roffer, New York Law School, has published The Law Book: From Hammurabi to the International Criminal Court, 250 Milestones in the History of Law (Sterling Publishing, 2016). Here is a description of the contents.

Offering authoritative context to ancient documents as well as today’s hot-button issues, The Law Book presents a comprehensive look at the rules by which we live our lives. It covers such diverse topics as the Code of Hammurabi, the Ten Commandments, the Trial of Socrates, the Bill of Rights, women’s suffrage, the insanity defense, and more. Roffer takes us around the globe to ancient Rome and medieval England before transporting us forward to contemporary accounts that tackle everything from civil rights, surrogacy, and assisted suicide to the 2000 U.S. presidential election, Google Books, and the fight for marriage equality. Organized chronologically, the entries each consist of a short essay and a stunning full-color image, while the “Notes and Further Reading” section provides resources for more in-depth study. Justice may be blind, but this collection brings the rich history of the law to light.

Review from the New York Law Journal here.

Poetics and Politics: A New Journal Devoted To Philosophy

A new journal, Poetics and Politics: A Journal for Humane Philosophy.

 In the current volume:


Articles by:

Paul M. Dowling, 'England's Re-formation in King Henry VIII' Full Article PDF

Patrick Martin, 'The Measure of Justice: Isabella’s Recusancy and Two Royal Couples' Full Article PDF |
Martin Thibodeau, 'Hegel on Intention, Action, and Tragedy' Full Article PDF |

Nikolas Prassas, 'Beauty and Theoria in Ruskin's Modern Painters' Full Article PDF |

Mikołaj Sławkowski-Rode, 'The Possibility of Christian Tragedy' Full Article PDF |

Heinze on Sovereign Authority in Shakespearean Political Drama

Eric Heinze, Queen Mary University of London, School of Law, is publishing Foundations of Sovereign Authority: The Example of Shakespearean Political Drama in Shakespeare and Authority (K. Halsey and A. Vine, eds., Palgrave, 2016-17). Here is the abstract.

As post-Renaissance Europe creates modern concepts of statehood and sovereignty, figures like Bodin, Grotius, and Hobbes undertake ‘constructive’, system-building theories of sovereign authority. Dramatists, in the meantime, are de-constructing sovereignty by unsettling the divergent bases of authority and legitimacy claimed for it. Concepts like ‘rule of law’, ‘popular consent’, or ‘natural law’ often serve to characterise rival legitimacy claims, but such concepts’ scope and interrelationships can be vague. This essay proposes a vocabulary and topology of legal and political authority within early modern drama. Two core categories — ‘right’ and ‘duty’ — are introduced to analyse legitimacy claims more precisely. Those, in turn, attach to twin normative claims, identified as legal ‘transcendence’ and legal ‘positivity’. Hence four basic types of legitimacy claims, each constantly defining itself in contrast to the others: ‘transcendent right’, ‘transcendent duty’, ‘positive right’, and ‘positive duty’. As those exercising or seeking power manoeuvre through their various legitimacy claims, they enact the scope and limits of the claims themselves, pointing us towards ‘deconstructive’ theories of sovereign authority.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Appleton and Stiritz on Law, Literature, and the Formal and Informal Regulation of Sex

Susan Frelich Appleton, Washington University (Saint Louis) School of Law, and Susan Ekberg Stiritz, Washington University (Saint Louis) College of Arts and Sciences, have published Going Wild: Law and Literature and Sex at 69 of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 11 (2016) (Special Issue: Feminist Legal Theory). Here is the abstract.

This paper explores four works of contemporary fiction to illuminate formal and informal regulation of sex. The paper’s co-authors frame analysis with the story of their creation of a transdisciplinary course, entitled “Regulating Sex: Historical and Cultural Encounters,” in which students mined literature for social critique, became immersed in the study of law and its limits, and developed increased sensitivity to power, its uses, and abuses. The paper demonstrates the value theoretically and pedagogically of third-wave feminisms, wild zones, and contact zones as analytic constructs and contends that including sex and sexualities in conversations transforms personal experience, education, society, and culture, including law.

 The full text is not available from SSRN.

Pop Culture Political Marriages

Caryn James discusses television political spouses for The Hollywood Reporter here.
Of particular interest--those political wives who are also lawyers, like The Good Wife's Alicia Florrick.

William Henry Ireland: Poet, Law Clerk, and Forger

A copy of William Henry Ireland's forged "Shakespeare" play, Vortigern, goes on display at the British Library beginning April 15th. When first performed, the play caused quite a lot of debate over its authenticity. More here from the Telegraph.

For more on William Henry Ireland's origins and his history as a forger, poet, and sometime law clerk, see the Smithsonian Magazine. 

And remember, National Poetry Month begins April 1st...

Pop Culture Women Lawyers Everywhere!

New law-related shows on offer:

From the WE: Sisters-In-Law. This reality series premieres tonight (March 24) on the WE at 10 p.m., 9 Central time. It features African-American female attorneys based in Houston. Here's coverage from The Electronic Urban Report (EUR).

WE is also offering up Ladies of Law, a reality series about African American female attorneys who practice entertainment law in NY. More here from Deadline: Hollywood. 

Meanwhile, Viola Davis ("How To Get Away With Murder") is involved in a new project, a series based on the career of the dynamic Kym Worthy, chief prosecutor in Michigan's Wayne County. The series, "Conviction," would air on TNT. More here from Deadline: Hollywood. 

Meanwhile, Hayley Atwell ("Captain America") is joining the cast of ABC's tv series centering a female attorney, which is also called "Conviction."

Lots of potential new members of the Popular Culture Lawyers Bar Association!

A New Book on the Inns of Court as Centers of Law and Literary Thought: Winston on Law, Literature, and Politics in the Late Sixteenth Century

Jessica Winston, Professor of English, Idaho State University, is publishing Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 (Oxford University Press, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Many early modern poets and playwrights were also members of the legal societies the Inns of Court, and these authors shaped the development of key genres of the English Renaissance, especially lyric poetry, dramatic tragedy, satire, and masque. But how did the Inns come to be literary centres in the first place, and why were they especially vibrant at particular times? Early modernists have long understood that urban setting and institutional environment were central to this phenomenon: in the vibrant world of London, educated men with time on their hands turned to literary pastimes for something to do. Lawyers at Play proposes an additional, more essential dynamic: the literary culture of the Inns intensified in decades of profound transformation in the legal profession. Focusing on the first decade of Elizabeth's reign, the period when a large literary network first developed around the societies, this study demonstrates that the literary surge at this time developed out of and responded to a period of rapid expansion in the legal profession and in the career prospects of members. Poetry, translation, and performance were recreational pastimes; however, these activities also defined and elevated the status of inns-of-court men as qualified, learned, and ethical participants in England's 'legal magistracy': those lawyers, judges, justices of the peace, civic office holders, town recorders, and gentleman landholders who managed and administered local and national governance of England. Lawyers at Play maps the literary terrain of a formative but understudied period in the English Renaissance, but it also provides the foundation for an argument that goes beyond the 1560s to provide a framework for understanding the connections between the literary and legal cultures of the Inns over the whole of the early modern period.

 

Schlag on Knowledge Production in Law

Pierre Schlag, University of Colorado Law School, has published The Knowledge Bubble — A Diagnostic for Expertopia. Here is the abstract.

Contemporary legal thought aims at a variety of different objectives: explanation, understanding, interpretation, edification, elucidation, observation, critique, narrative, norm-selection, norm-justification, political action — any of these and more, including all manner of hybrids. In U.S. law schools (particularly the elite schools) there is now an ascendant genre that might be called “knowledge production.” This genre is intellectually sophisticated, technically rigorous, methodologically scrupulous, and theoretically conversant. Its overt aim is to produce a piece of knowledge that is definitive, enduring, and if at all possible, unassailable. The most notable qualities of this genre are expertise and mastery. This essay sets forth a series of challenges and problems for knowledge production. The idea is that knowledge production efforts must successfully negotiate the challenges and problems described herein to successfully achieve their ambitions — the production of knowledge. Nonetheless, most knowledge production efforts in American legal thought seem to be only dimly aware of these challenges and problems. Instead, these difficulties are typically bypassed in order to get on with the knowledge production enterprise. Somewhat vexingly, however, it is precisely the failure to address and negotiate these difficulties that precludes so much knowledge production in law from actually yielding knowledge in any deep sense of the term. The essay concludes with a description of why and how this matters intellectually, aesthetically, economically, morally, politically, and critically.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Sarah Palin as a Courtroom TV Judge?

Will Sarah Palin be the next daytime court TV judge? Various media outlets, including The Hollywood Reporter, are reporting that she has signed a deal with production company Warm Springs (Montana), apparently to develop some kind of show like this for the 2017 season.

More here from TV Guide,  CBS, ABC, and CNN.

The former Republican Vice Presidential candidate and Governor of Alaska continues to be a popular presence in some quarters and has a large Twitter following (1.24 million as of today), but unlike those courtroom TV judges banging a gavel on today's shows, she doesn't have a law degree.

Higdon on Oral Advocacy and Vocal Fry

Michael J. Higdon, University of Tennessee College of Law, is publishing Oral Advocacy and Vocal Fry: The Unseemly, Sexist Side of Nonverbal Persuasion in volume 13 of Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD (2016). Here is the abstract.

In 2015, Naomi Wolf warned that “the most empowered generation of women ever — today’s twentysomethings in North America and Britain — is being hobbled in some important ways by something as basic as a new fashion in how they use their voices.” She was referring to the phenomenon referred to as "vocal fry" — a speech quality in which the speaker lowers her natural pitch and produces a "creaking" sound as she talks. Naomi Wolf is not alone in her warnings; vocal fry has received quite a bit of negative attention recently. Specifically, these critics warn that those who speak in vocal fry are doing themselves great harm by undermining the speakers’ overall perceived effectiveness. In fact, recent studies even lend some support to these arguments, showing that listeners tend to rate those who speak in vocal fry more negatively. The problem, however, is that much of this criticism is directed at young women, and for that reason, some defenders of vocal fry have countered that these criticisms are merely attempts to regulate how women talk. In other words, a preference for speech that does not contain vocal fry is actually motivated by pernicious stereotypes about how women "should" talk. Thus, on the one hand, there are those studies supporting the argument that women who engage in vocal fry are less likely to be perceived positively, yet on the other hand, there exists the very real likelihood that these perceptions are based on gender stereotypes. Accordingly, the question emerges: what should a young woman do? Should she eliminate all instances of vocal fry from her speech so as to maximize her perceived effectiveness as a public speaker if, in so doing, she is reinforcing the very gender stereotypes upon which such preferences are based? Or should she openly confront such stereotypes and employ vocal fry as much as she likes, knowing that, by taking that approach, she is taking the risk that she might be hurting not only herself but also those upon whose behalf she speaks? This essay, by first discussing this background on vocal fry, delves into that very dilemma. It does so specifically in the context of female attorneys given that 1) public speaking is a key component upon which their effectiveness is gauged and 2) to the extent their public speaking is judged to be less than ideal, they are not only harming themselves, but also potentially a client. Finally, in wrestling with this question, these essay hopes to shed light on a bigger concern — specifically, how useful are studies on effective nonverbal behavior when the results of those studies are largely driven by underlying societal prejudice.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

April 17, 2016: Symposium on Forty Years in Law and Literature: A Celebration of a Festscrift for Richard Weisberg at Cardozo Law School

Reminder: Cardozo Law School is hosting Forty Years in Law and Literature: A Symposium to Celebrate a Festscrift for Richard Weisberg.

The symposium will take place April 17, 2016, from 8:15 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Speakers will present papers for discussion on a wide range of topics, including the genesis of Law
and Literature as a field of study, its development as a movement, as well as its proliferation into other scholarly disciplines, such as Holocaust Studies and Constitutional Law.

Speakers include:

Marguerite DeHuszar Allen, convener
Susan Noakes
Peter Brooks
Greta Olson
Vivian Curran
Michael Pantazakos
Stanley Fish
David A.J. Richards
Todd Grabarsky
Thane Rosenbaum
Sanford Levinson
Jon-Christian Suggs

(with “cameo” appearances as well….)

The event includes lunch and a reception, and is free and open to the public.

RSVP to m.dehuszar@gmail.com

Hutchinson and Davies on The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes: "The Field Bazaar"

David Hutchinson, Jenner & Block, LLP, and Ross E. Davies, George Mason University School of Law and The Green Bag, have published The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes: 'The Field Bazaar' (Illustrated) at 2016 The Green Bag Almanac & Reader 464. Here is the abstract.

Would The Strand Magazine have published “The Field Bazaar” — that odd little 1896 Sherlock Holmes and John Watson vignette — if Arthur Conan Doyle had opted not to give it to The Student magazine at Edinburgh University? I am pretty sure The Strand would have taken the story, gladly. Herbert Greenhough Smith, editor-in-fact of The Strand, liked tales of Sherlock Holmes. But in fact, “The Field Bazaar” did not appear anywhere other than The Student until the mid-1930s. Since then it has floated on the margins of the world of Holmes and Watson, denied not only canonical status, but also original illustration. It has been, really, an orphan work. Canonizing is outside the scope of the Green Bag’s authority (and interest, and competence), but illustrating and publishing are not. So, having both some sympathy for “The Field Bazaar” and some appreciation for the story it tells — whether canonical or comical, it is fun to read — the Green Bag has enlisted an excellent modern illustrator to illuminate it — David Hutchinson.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Weinrib on Civil Liberties Lawyering Between the World Wars

Laura M. Weinrib, University of Chicago Law School, is publishing From Left to Rights: Civil Liberties Lawyering between the World Wars in Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Here is the abstract.

In the formative years of the modern First Amendment, civil liberties lawyers struggled to justify their participation in a legal system they perceived as biased and broken. For decades, they charged, the courts had fiercely protected property rights even while they tolerated broad-based suppression of the “personal rights,” such as expressive freedom, through which peaceful challenges to industrial interests might have proceeded. This article focuses on three phases in the relationship between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the courts in the period between the world wars: first, the ACLU’s attempt to promote worker mobilization by highlighting judicial hypocrisy; second, its effort to induce incremental legal reform by reshaping social values; and third, its now familiar reliance on the judiciary to insulate minority views against state intrusion and majoritarian abuses. By reconstructing these competing approaches, the article explores the trade-offs — some anticipated and some unintended — entailed by the ACLU’s mature approach.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Basedow on One Hundred Years of Comparative Law/Hundert Jahre Rechtsvergleichung

Juergen Basedow, Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, is publishing Hundert Jahre Rechtsvergleichung – Von wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisquelle zur obligatorischen Methode der Rechtsanwendung – (One Hundred Years of Comparative Law – From a Scholarly Source of Knowledge to an Obligatory Method in the Application of Law) in volume 71 of JuristenZeitung (JZ) (2016). Here is the abstract.

Deutsche Zusammenfassung: Als das römische Recht vor einem Jahrhundert in die Rechtsgeschichte relegiert wurde, wuchs in der Wissenschaft in ganz Europa das Bedürfnis für einen neuen Referenzrahmen; ihn versprach man sich vom Vergleich der nationalen Rechte. Im Hintergrund stand hier zunächst das wissenschaftliche Bedürfnis nach der Ausdehnung des geistigen Horizonts und der Erweiterung des Reservoirs an praktischen Lösungen. Doch lässt sich eine allmähliche Transformation der Rechtsvergleichung in eine obligatorische Rechtsanwendungsmethode beobachten. Der Aufsatz zeichnet diese Entwicklung für das allgemeine Völkerrecht, die Menschenrechte, die Konventionen des Einheitsrechts, verschiedene Aspekte des Europarechts und das Internationale Privatrecht nach.

English Abstract: As Roman law was relegated to the field of legal history a century ago, academia across Europe detected a growing need for a new frame of reference; the comparative analysis of national laws was seen as being capable of filling this void. Initially, the development was driven by the need to expand intellectual horizons and to deepen the reservoir of practical solutions. But one could observe comparative analysis gradually transforming into an obligatory method in the application and interpretation of law. The present article traces this development in respect of general public international law, human rights law, and uniform law conventions as well as for various aspects of European law and private international law. Note: This pre-print is published in the Max Planck Private Law Research Paper Series with the permission of the rights owner, Mohr Siebeck. All full-text JuristenZeitung articles are available via pay-per-view or subscription at IngentaConnect, a provider of digital journals on the Internet. Downloadable document is in German.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The New Ancient Legal History: A Special Issue of Critical Analysis of Law

Now available: Volume 3, number 1, a special issue of Critical Analysis of Law, focusing on the New Ancient Legal History. Clifford Ando is the guest editor. Below is the table of contents. The publisher has provided PDFs of all articles and book reviews.

The Varieties of Ancient Legal History Today, Clifford Ando

When Law Goes off the Rails: or, Aggadah Among the iurisprudentes, Ari Z. Bryen

Means and End(ing)s: Nomos Versus Narrative in Early Rabbinic Exegesis, Natalie B. Dohrmann

Law, Empire, and the Making of Roman Estates in the Provinces During the Late Republic, Lisa Pilar Eberle

Calculating Crime and Punishment: Unofficial Law Enforcement, Quantification, and Legitimacy in Early Imperial China, Maxim Korolkov

The State of Blame: Politics, Competition, and the Courts in Democratic Athens, Susan Lape

Jewish Law and Litigation in the Secular Courts of the Late Medieval Mediterranean, Rena N. Lauer

The Servitude of the Flesh from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Century Marta Madero

Consent in Roman Choice of Law William P. Sullivan

Book Forum: Anna Su, Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power (2016)

Exceptional and Universal? Religious Freedom in American International Law Peter G. Danchin

Religious Liberty and American Power Saba Mahmood

America, Christianity, and Beyond Samuel Moyn

Saving Faith Anna Su

Special Issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society: Feminist Legal Theory

Clare Huntington, Fordham University School of Law, and Maxine Eichner, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Law, have published an introduction to Studies in Law, Politics, and Society in volume 69 of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Special issue: Feminist Legal Theory (2016). Here is the abstract.

Half a century after the beginning of the second wave, feminist legal theorists are still writing about many of the subjects they addressed early on: money, sex, reproduction, and jobs. What has changed is the way that they talk about these subjects. Specifically, these theorists now posit a more complex and nuanced conception of power. Recent scholarship recognizes the complexities of power in contemporary society, the ways in which these complexities entrench sex inequality, and the role that law can play in reducing inequality and increasing agency. The feminist legal theorists in this volume – Susan Appleton, Katharine Baker, Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, Maxine Eichner, Angela Harris, Jennifer Hendricks, Michelle Oberman, and Susan Stiritz – are emblematic of this effort. They carefully examine the relationship between gender, equality, and power across an array of realms: sex, reproduction, pleasure, work, money. In doing so they identify social, political, economic, developmental, and psychological and somatic forces, operating both internally and externally, that complicate the expression and constraint of power. Finally, they give sophisticated thought to the possibilities for legal interventions in light of these more complex notions of power.

The full text is not available from SSRN. Link to publisher's website.

A New Course on Shakespeare and the Law

New on YouTube: Dr Hannah Crawforth, Department of English, Faculty of Arts & Humanities, King's College, London and Professor Lorenzo Zucca, Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College,  discussing Shakespeare and the Law, a module for undergraduates offered by the Department of English and the Dickson Poon School of Law.

Tuori on Ancient History and Legal History in the Making of Legal Anthropology

Kaius Tuori, Research Fellow, University of Helsinki, Lawyers and Savages: Ancient History and Legal Realism in the Making of Legal Anthropology (Routledge, 2015).  Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

Legal primitivism was a complex phenomenon that combined the study of early European legal traditions with studies of the legal customs of indigenous peoples. Lawyers and Savages: Ancient History and Legal Realism in the Making of Legal Anthropology explores the rise and fall of legal primitivism, and its connection to the colonial encounter. Through examples such as blood feuds, communalism, ordeals, ritual formalism and polygamy, this book traces the intellectual revolution of legal anthropology and demonstrates how this scholarship had a clear impact in legitimating the colonial experience. Detailing how legal realism drew on anthropology in order to help counter the hypothetical constructs of legal formalism, this book also shows how, despite their explicit rejection, the central themes of primitive law continue to influence current ideas – about indigenous legal systems, but also of the place and role of law in development.

Written in an engaging style and rich in examples from history and literature, this book will be invaluable to those with interests in legal realism, legal history or legal anthropology.

Shuy on the Language of Murder Cases

In case you missed it:

Roger W. Shuy, The Language of Murder Cases: Intentionality, Predisposition, and Voluntariness (Oxford University Press, 2014).

• Describes fifteen murder cases for which Roger Shuy served as an expert language witness
• Explains the issues at stake in murder trials for lawyers and linguists
• Examines how vague legal terminology can be clarified by analysis of the language used by suspects, defendants, law enforcement officers, and attorneys

Spoo on Piracy, Publishing, and Copyright

Now in paperback:

Robert Spoo: Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain (Oxford University Press, 2016). 

• Provides a thorough historical survey of the impact of U.S. copyright law on transatlantic modernist authors
• Documents the growth and development across time of the American public domain, as shaped by the historically protectionist and formalistic U.S. copyright law
• Gives fresh insights drawn from unpublished materials-letters by Joyce, John Quinn, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, John M. Price, and others-and makes extensive use of hitherto unknown legal archives

Sarma on Walter White, Legal Narrative, and the Death Penalty

Bidiah Sarma, University of California (Berkeley) School of Law and the Justice Center's Capital Appeals Project, is publishing Why We Would Spare Walter White: Breaking Bad and the True Power of Mitigation in volume 45 of the New Mexico Law Review (2015). Here is the abstract.

What if Walter White had been captured by the federal authorities? Considering that he committed the murders of many individuals and orchestrated many more in the course of building and running his global meth trade, the prosecution would be able to seek the ultimate punishment against him. But, would a jury give him the death penalty? Walt’s gripping journey stirred within viewers a range of complex emotions, but even those revolted by his actions must concede that it is extraordinarily difficult to envision a random collection of twelve people unanimously agreeing that he deserves a state-sanctioned execution. Indeed, it seems that many of us actually rooted for Walt throughout the series, even when we struggled to understand why. This Essay explores the answer to the question of why we would spare Walter White from the death penalty. Its exploration underscores the critical importance of “mitigation” — a capacious term that refers to evidence introduced by capital defense lawyers to persuade jurors to hand down something less harsh than a death sentence. Breaking Bad, through its masterful construction of its core narrative, situated us to empathize with Walt, to view him as someone we could understand, to feel about him the way we might feel about a friend or colleague or neighbor. Whether we argued vociferously in online forums that his actions were nearly always justified or simply watched with a suppressed but distinct hope that he might emerge as a partially redeemed man, many of us never condemned Walt. We did not want him to die an undignified death at someone else’s hands. In fact, we were relieved that death came to him on his own terms. And, if he had been captured, we would not have sent him to the death chamber. Knowing Walt — understanding his “mitigation” — bent us towards mercy. To start, this Essay explains how a capital trial unfolds and sets out the factors that jurors must take into account when they decide whether to choose death for a convicted capital defendant. After establishing the basic framework for the death-determination in Part I, this Essay focuses on Walter White’s hypothetical penalty phase in Part II. It describes both the “aggravating” evidence the prosecution would use to persuade jurors that death is the appropriate punishment and the “mitigating” evidence the defense would use to persuade jurors that a sentence less than death is appropriate. Part II concludes with an explanation of why a jury likely would not sentence Walter White to die. Part III steps back to identify distinct conclusions that we could draw from viewers’ prevailing willingness to ride with Walt until the end. It concludes that it would be unwise to dismiss Walt as a fictitious outlier. Rather than ask ourselves what makes Walt’s particular case for mercy special, we should ask ourselves how the show managed to make him so real. Breaking Bad’s storytelling proved so powerful that the show’s writers were themselves amazed that viewers continued to stand by Walt’s side through it all. If we would spare Walter White, surely we would spare many others facing capital punishment. But to get there, we need to do more than hear that they have struggles and triumphs of their own; we need to walk with them on their journeys. We must feel like we did when the last episode of Breaking Bad began — wondering exactly how things will end, but unwilling to bring that end by our hands.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Dunne On Shakespeare, Revenge Tragedy, and Early Modern Law

Derek Dunne has published Shakespeare, Revenge Tragedy and Early Modern Law (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Revenge tragedies are filled with trial scenes, miscarriages of justice and untrustworthy evidence, yet this is the first study to explore how the revenge plays of Kyd, Shakespeare and others critically engage with their legal system. Featuring groups of citizens taking the law into their own hands, revenge tragedies stage a participatory justice of their own, which problematises the progress of English common law during this crucial phase of English legal history. By connecting English revenge tragedies to major crises within the legal system including the erosion of trial by jury (Titus Andronicus), food riots in the 1590s (Antonio's Revenge), and debates over royal prerogative (The Revenger's Tragedy) a persistent legal critique is revealed to be at work. The book also offers a major new reading of Hamlet that argues against the play's engagement with law, in contrast to the radical socio-legal commentary identified in other revenge plays. Revenge tragedy can thus be understood as an index of early modern citizens' fractious relationship with their law.           

Leggo Our Legos: Lego's Use of Law and Other Mechanisms To Control Its Brand

Dan Hunter, Swinburne Law School and New York Law School, and Julian Thomas, Swinburne University of Technology, have published Lego and the System of Intellectual Property, 1955–2015 at 2016 Intellectual Patent Quarterly 1. Here is the abstract.

This article traces the ways in which Lego has deployed a range of intellectual property regimes since it first developed the Lego system of interlocking bricks in the mid-1950s, in an effort to exert commercial control over its bricks and System of Play. With the bricks initially protected by patent, Lego has, at various times, used copyright, design, trade mark and trade secret laws in an attempt to prevent other firms from marketing competing interlocking bricks. As the patents have expired, Lego has moved from unitary forms of control over the brick, augmenting intellectual property law with more distributed mechanisms of control and governance. The article describes how the law has influenced the broader evolution of the company, where a focus on engineering has broadened into branding, and then digital media.

The full text is not available from SSRN.