Call for Papers: Law and Humanities Institute Conference, Spring 2014

Revealing the Links Between Law and Magic

A Conference Sponsored by the Law and Humanities Law Institute and

Thomas Jefferson School of Law

June 5-6, 2014

Thomas Jefferson School of Law

1155 Island Avenue, San Diego CA 92101

Call For Papers

On June 5 and 6, 2014, the Law and Humanities Institute, New York, New York (USA) and Thomas Jefferson School of Law, San Diego, CA (USA) will sponsor a Conference on Law and Magic.

Law and magic interact in many ways. Not only can the law influence the practice of magic, such as in the areas of freedom of speech and religion and intellectual property; but also magic can influence the law, such as in trial tactics and evidence. In addition, magic illuminates the crossroads of other law and humanities fields, such as the emerging area of law and neuroscience, rhetoric, and law and popular culture. Papers discussing or developing these or any aspect of the relationship between law and magic are welcome, especially those that further an understanding of the theory, underpinnings, and/or philosophy of the field. 

Materials and presentations will be in English. The organizers of the conference are Christine Corcos, Louisiana State University Law Center (christine.corcos@law.lsu.edu) and Julie Cromer Young, Thomas Jefferson School of Law (jcromer@tjsl.edu).

We invite you to submit an abstract of a 20-minute paper that you would like to deliver at the conference. Abstracts should be between 250 and 500 words and sent to Christine Corcos at the email address above accompanied by the author’s brief biographical statement. Please put “Law and Magic Conference June 2014” in the email subject line and submit the abstract and biographical statement no later than November 1, 2013.  We will send notifications regarding acceptance of presentations by February 1, 2014.

If you would like us to consider your paper for publication,  please indicate that in the body of your email.  Conference papers accepted for publication will appear in the Spring 2015 issue of the Thomas Jefferson Law Review.

Please address questions to Christine Corcos at the email address above.

Call For Papers

From Anne Wagner, Editor in Chief, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law:

INVITATION TO SUBMIT INDEPENDENT PAPERS FOR THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW is:
- The interdisciplinary nature of the journal between law and semiotics.
- The ONLY journal in the world which focuses on the discipline of legal semiotics.
- The interdisciplinary nature of the journal between language and law, jurilinguistics.
- The interdisciplinary nature of the journal between Legal Philosophy and Philosophy of Language
- The International Journal for the Semiotics of Law is an independent entity and the leading international journal in legal semiotics The Journal was first published in 1987.
The International Journal for the Semiotics of Law welcomes submissions, in English or in French, which include semiotic analyses of the law.
Submissions to The International Journal for the Semiotics of Law should ideally critique, apply or otherwise engage with semiotics or related theory and models of analyses, or with rhetoric, history of political and legal discourses, philosophy of language, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, deconstruction and all types of semiotics analyses including visual semiotics. Submissions which reflect on legal philosophy or legal theory in general, hermeneutics, the relation between psychoanalysis and language, the relation between law and literature, as well as the relation between law and aesthetics, will also be considered.

[Full Disclosure: Your blog editor is on the Editorial Board of the IJSL]. 

Criminal, Teacher, Businessman

From the July 28th New York Times, A. O. Scott on the true nature  of "Breaking Bad"'s Walter White, and the intersection of his career path with recent events.

And the Winners Are...

The ABA Journal, August issue has the annual pop culture feature: this year is devoted to "the 25 Greatest Law Novels." The panel chose, in order, the following novels as numbers 1 through 25:

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
Herman Melville, Billy Budd
Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy
John Jay Osborn, The Paper Chase
Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener
Richard Wright, Native Son
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
John Grisham, A Time To Kill
Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Leon Uris, QB VII
John Grisham, The Firm
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Oxbow Incident
Jane Gardam, Old Filth


The August issue isn't available online yet, but should be posted soon here.

This list does seem to be heavily U.S.-centric. Which legal novels would be on your "Best 25" list? Some or all of the above? What novels by non-U.S. authors would you choose?

Update: Check out the list here online.

Separation of Powers in Eastern European Democracies

Cristina E. Parau, University of Oxford, Department of Politics and International Relations, and J. Wittmeier Bains are publishing Constitutional Designs: Lessons We Can Learn from the Early American Republic in the Romanian Journal of Comparative Law. Here is the abstract.

This article addresses the vexed question of who should have the “last word” in saying what a democratic constitution means in controversies between the Judiciary and the other Branches of government. The aim is to contribute to debates in post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), which to date have been dominated by the paradigm of a Constitutional Court (CC) with monopoly power to expound the constitution. This institutional configuration sits uneasily with the separation of powers and checks and balances – shibboleths which are nonetheless poorly understood in CEE. It is believed that the American Founders, who invented these practical mechanisms in their modern and now universally accepted forms, may offer particularly fruitful insights which constitutional designers everywhere could learn from.

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

Prisoner Games

F. E. Guerra-Pujol, Barry University School of Law & Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico, has published The Parable of the Prisoners. Here is the abstract.

Of the 78 possible strategic games in two-person game theory, one has acquired the most attention, and the most notoriety, from scholars and laymen alike. The so-called “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” or what we prefer to call the “Parable of the Prisoners,” is not only the most famous formal model of conflict and cooperation in the mathematical theory of games; it has also has generated extensive commentary in a wide variety of social sciences and other fields, including psychology, biology, politics, economics, law, and philosophy. In this paper, we shall revisit the origins of this popular parable and review a small but representative sample of this diverse literature, identifying common themes and ideas. We shall also present an opposing parable to show that the dilemma in the Prisoner’s Dilemma is unavoidable and inescapable in the one-shot version of the game, and we shall explain why this parable is more than just a story; it is an exemplar or mathematical “paradigm.”
In summary, this paper is organized as follows: following this brief introduction, Part 2 reconstructs the origins of the Parable of the Prisoners. Part 3 then reviews various versions of the parable and the uses to which this parable has been put. By way of contrast, Part 4 presents a diametrically different model of behavior — the Altruist’s Dilemma — based on a suggestion by Schelling (1968), and Part 5 explains why the original Prisoner’s Dilemma is not just an instructive parable but also a scientific “paradigm.” Part 6 concludes.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Moses Medelssohn as Theorist of Contract

Helge Dedek, McGill University Faculty of Law, Institute of Comparative Law, has published Duties of Love and Self-Perfection: Moses Mendelssohn's Theory of Contract at 32 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 713 (2012). Here is the abstract.

In his Doctrine of Right, Immanuel Kant calls Moses Mendelssohn, the towering figure of the German and the Jewish Enlightenment, a ‘Rechtsforscher’ – a legal scholar. Yet not only Kant, but numerous scholars of natural law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, refer to and reflect on the juridical aspects of Mendelssohn’s work, in particular his thoughts on the law of contract. In this paper, I hope to shed some light on this hitherto rather unexplored facet of Mendelssohn’s oeuvre. Mendelssohn develops his theory of contract from the starting point of the officium amoris: the unenforceable ‘duty of love’ to exercise beneficence. Mendelssohn’s theory knows nothing yet of the modern contrast between altruism, distributive justice, and ‘freedom of contract'. By exploring Mendelssohn’s theory, we will, thus, be able to catch a glimpse of the birth pangs of the modern Western discourse on the ‘freedom of contract', which formed the backdrop, as well as the jumping-off point, of the development of a ‘liberal’ will theory of contract. Since this ‘liberal’ model is still the paradigm of how contract is mostly perceived today, Mendelssohn’s theory also exemplifies the possibility of an alternative to our own conceptualizations of contract that inescapably shape the way we think.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Legal Argumentation

Eveline T. Feteris, University of Amsterdam, and Harm Kloosterhuis, Erasmus School of Law, have published Law and Argumentation Theory: Theoretical Approaches to

Legal Justification. Here is the abstract.

In the past thirty years study law and argumentation has become an important interdisciplinary discipline. It draws its data, assumptions and methods from legal theory, legal philosophy, logic, argumentation theory, rhetoric, linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, sociology, and artificial intelligence. Scholars from various traditions have attempted to explain structural features of legal decision-making and justification from different points of view.

One of the main incentives for the growing interest in legal argumentation has to do with changing views on judicial tasks. In modern legal systems a judge not only applies legal rules but also resolves interpretation problems and justifies his doing so in a reasoned decision. Although it is a part of the Rule of Law that legal decisions must be justified, explicit legal norms for this justification can hardly be found. One of the important problems in the study of legal argumentation is the question which standards of soundness the argumentation should meet. Is it enough that the judge mentions the facts of the case and the legal rules, or does he also have to explain why the legal rules are applicable to the concrete case? How can the interpretation of a legal rule be acceptably justified? What, in the context of legal justification, is the relation between legal rules, legal principles and general moral norms and values?
A second important problem is the question how to reconstruct real life argumentation in legal decisions in order to evaluate the justification. For instance when a judge resolves an interpretation problem in deciding a case, he can choose different types of interpretative arguments to justify his decision. Ideally, these arguments are recognizable in the justification of the legal decision. But in practice these arguments are not always presented explicit, clear and well ordered. The critical reader who wants to evaluate the argumentation must therefore solve a number of reconstruction problems in order to evaluate the argumentation.
Legal argumentation-theory has a descriptive and a normative dimension. It is descriptive in the sense that it gives a reconstruction that starts from arguments expressed in legal discourse and it is normative because the reconstruction is related to a model of acceptable justification. Given these two dimensions, five research components can be distinguished. The philosophical component attends to the normative foundation of a theory of legal argumentation. A central question is which criteria of rationality should be used in evaluating legal argumentation. In the theoretical component, models for legal argumentation are developed, in which the structure of legal argument and norms and rules for argument-acceptability are formulated. The reconstruction component shows how to reconstruct real life argumentation within the framework of a theoretical model. This reconstruction forms a basis for the evaluation of arguments. The empirical component investigates the construction and evaluation of arguments in actual legal practice. It establishes in which respects legal practice fits in or conflicts with theoretical models and examines how possible discrepancies might be explained. Finally the practical component considers how various results forwarded by the philosophical, theoretical, reconstruction, and the empirical components might be used in legal practice. Practical applications are methods for improving skills in analyzing, evaluating and writing legal argumentation.
This chapter describes how researchers deal with these questions depending on their different points of view. Ideas about standards of soundness for legal argumentation and methods for reconstruction, developed by influential authors in the field, will be examined. In the sections 2, 3 and 4 we will discuss the three dominant traditions in legal argumentation-theory: the logical, the rhetorical and the dialogical approach. In section 5 we conclude with some questions for the agenda.

Download the full text of the paper from SSRN at the link. 

History of Some Principles of the German Criminal Law

Markus D. Dubber, University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, has published Ultima Ratio as Caveat Dominus: Legal Principles, Police Maxims, and the Critical Analysis of Law. Here is the abstract.

A comparative and historical analysis of the so-called ultima ratio principle reveals that, despite its Latinate veneer, it is neither ancient nor universal, but a recent addition to the German criminal law canon. Upon further inquiry, ultima ratio also turns out to be ill-defined, undermotivated, and toothless, a fundamental legal principle and distinctive feature of criminal law honored in its ubiquitous breach. In the end, the iron legal principle of ultima ratio may appear more like the flexible police maxim of caveat dominus. Its frequent invocation suggests the need to reconceive legal science as a critical analysis of law in general, and of law's supposed principles in particular. 

Download the full text of the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Regulating Sex Workers In Reconstruction New Orleans

Simon Stern of the University of Toronto notes that Elizabeth Parish Smith has published "In a Bar Room Called the 'Fifteen Amendment'": Reconstruction and the Women of New Orleans's Demimonde," 112 South Atlantic Quarterly 473 (2013). 

Here is the abstract.

This essay examines the experiences of three women—one Creole, one black, one white—in New Orleans’s Reconstruction-era demimonde. Enacted just months after the end of the Civil War and surviving in various forms for fifty-two years, a regulatory system governed the sex trade in this, the largest and most cosmopolitan city of the former Confederacy. Postwar regulation made no racial distinctions among women in the trade, and prostitutes’ lives were thus often remarkably similar. Women worked and resided in the same parts of town, even on the same notorious block; faced similarly explosive, dangerous bursts of violence; and exploited the physical intimacy of their work to steal from clients.

In large measure due to their similar legal treatment under regulation, many prostitutes shared W. E. B. Du Bois’s common “economic condition and destiny” across racial lines. Nevertheless, Du Bois uses prostitution in Black Reconstruction as a rhetorical device representing capitalism’s moral corruption, not as a practice affecting real women’s lives. Reading the experiences of three New Orleans prostitutes against the larger racial and economic politics of the period allows us to see how some of the most radical and far-reaching changes of Reconstruction occurred among women living at the law’s edges.

Life Is Plastic, It's Fantastic

Rebecca Tushnet, Georgetown University Law Center, has published Make Me Walk, Make Me Talk, Do Whatever You Please: Barbie and Exceptions, in Intellectual Property at the Edge (Rochelle Dreyfuss & Jane Ginsburg eds., 2013). Here is the abstract.

Barbie represents an aspiration to an ideal and also a never-ending mutability. Barbie is the perfect woman, and she is also grotesque, plasticized hyperreality, presenting a femininity exaggerated to the point of caricature. Barbie’s marketplace success, combined with (and likely related to) her overlapping and contradictory meanings, also allow her to embody some key exceptions to copyright and trademark law. Though Mattel’s lawsuits were not responsible for the initial recognition of those exceptions, they illuminate key principles and contrasts in American law. Mattel attempted to use both copyright and trademark to control the meaning of Barbie, reflecting a trend towards such overlapping claims. In order to ensure that their combined scope is no greater than the sum of their parts, both trademark and copyright defenses ought to be considered together. The Barbie cases highlight the problem that overlaps between the two regimes can challenge the very idea of IP boundaries, unless robust defenses exist against overclaiming. 

Download the full text of the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Law and Society Association: Early Information About the 2014 Annual Meeting

From the Law and Society Association:

We are excited to announce early information about the Law and Society Association 2014 Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, May 29 – June 1.  We have many changes and new features this year, including:
 ·       Earlier deadlines
·       New submission software
·       New “Salon” sessions
·       New process for Author Meets Reader sessions
·       CRN session protocols
 2014 is also the 50^th Anniversary of the Law and Society Association!  Many special events are planned, and we believe this will be an exceptional conference.
 All current and future information about the Annual Meeting will be located at http://www.lawandsociety.org/minneapolis2014/Minneapolis2014.html, so bookmark and visit often!  We will update the information as it becomes available.
 Now is the time to start thinking about your paper or session submission so you will be ready by the new deadline. Details about all the new features will appear in the Call for Papers in August.
 

Assessing Lynn White's Arguments Forty Years On

John Copeland Nagle, Notre Dame Law School, has published What Hath Lynn White Wrought? at 2 Fare Forward 44 (2012). Here is the abstract.

Lynn White’s 1967 article on “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” famously blamed Christianity for modern environmental problems. White’s historical analysis viewed Christianity for cultivating a dismissive view toward nature and for embracing technology in a way that resulted in unchecked pollution and extinctions. Since White wrote his article, Christian scholars have accepted the challenge that White’s diagnosis presented. Other nations, perhaps most notably China, have experienced crippling environmental destruction even in the absence of a legacy of Christian thought. More positively, White’s thesis has encouraged a generation of scholars to explore the positive aspects of Christian thought for environmental policy. 

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

A New Book On Comparative Law

Vivian Grosswald Curran, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, has published Book Review: Gilles Cuniberti, Grands Systèmes De Droit Contemporains (2d ed., L.G.D.J., 2011) at 61 American Journal of Comparative Law (2013). Here is the abstract.

Professor Cuniberti’s book instructs and engages. He has successfully rendered the pluralism of law through a wealth of information about governments, cultures, religions and judicial systems.

Download the full text of the review from SSRN at the link. 

Starring Fnu Lnu

When the criminal justice system uses an acronym to refer to a defendant, sometimes not everyone gets the memo. The New York Times' Benjamin Weiser explains further, noting that at least one playwright used one acronym (Fnu Lnu for "first name unknown, last name unknown) as the inspiration for a work).

Interpreting Guantanamo

The New England Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement has published the proceedings of a fall play and panel discussion and spring symposium, all discussing the US government's policies at Guantanamo since 9/11. Michael Meltsner, one of the nation’s leading authorities on capital punishment, wrote the play, In Our Name, and Victoria Marsh, Company One Boston, directed it. The symposium proceedings include contributions by Victor Hansen, Joseph Hutson, Bradley Wendel and Elizabeth Wilson.  Here is a link to more information about the proceedings.

The Sweet Sounds of Justice

From NPR: news that a composer/lawyer has put the philosophical iconic battle between Justices Scalia and Ginsburg to music. Derrick Wang, who holds a Masters in Music from Yale, and won a BMI Student Composer Award in 2010, finds the court opinions of the two Justices are, well, lyrical. Mr. Wang's opera, called Scalia/Ginsburg, casts Justice Ginsburg, appropriately enough, as a soprano, and Justice Scalia as a tenor. Somehow I was "ear" picturing him as a baritone. Or a bass. Maybe I've been listening to Don Carlo too much. More about Mr. Wang here.

Conference on Law and Religion, University of Virginia Law School and College of William and Mary, August 21-23

From Elizabeth Clark, Associate Professor of Law, Brigham Young School of Law:

The International Consortium for Law and Religion Studies is pleased to announce its Third Biannual Conference, "Religion, Democracy,and Equality," to be held August 21-23 at the University of Virginia Law School and the College of William and Mary.
 The conference will feature a keynote address by U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Heiner Bielefeldt, who is also the Chair of Human Rights and Human Rights Policy at the University of Erlangen, Germany.  Speakers will include over 70 experts from  25 countries.
 Plenary topics and speakers include:
Religious Pluralism and Treatment of Religious Minorities

• Asher Maoz (Peres Academic Center Law School)

• Ayelet Shachar (University of Toronto) (invited)

• John Witte Jr. (Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory)

• Angela Banks (William & Mary)

Hate Speech, Hate Crimes, and Religious Minorities

• Agnes Callamard (Article 19)

• Toby Mendel (Centre for Law and Democracy, Canada)

• Mohammed Saeed Eltayeb (Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

• Michael O'Flaherty (Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland)

• Robert C. Post (Yale)

• Jeroen Temperman (Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands)

Religion and Gender: Same-Sex Marriage

• Rex Ahdar (University of Otago, New Zealand)

• Ursula Basset (Catholic Pontifical University, Argentina)

• Douglas Laycock (University of Virginia)

• Renata Uitz (Central European University, Hungary)

• Kent Greenawalt (Columbia) 

Religion and Anti-Discrimination Norms

• Katayoun Alidadi (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)

• Carmen Dominguez Hidalgo (Pontifical University of Chile)

• Andrew Koppleman (Northwestern)

• Lawrence Sager (University of Texas)

• Eiichiro Takahata (Nihon University, Japan)

A $50 discount for early registration for the conference is available through July 10.  A registration fee of $250 covers all conference meals and transportation.  A discount of $100 is available for ICLARS members.  Click here to join ICLARS.  Registration closes August 1. Click here to register for the conference.  A group rate has been negotiated at the Hilton Garden Inn in downtown Richmond.  Click here to book a room at the conference rate.
   

Happy Birthday, Franz Kafka

The July 3, 2013 Google doodle is a tribute to Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis": see here. Kafka's work is shot through with legal themes. Below, a quick and dirty bibliography.


Glen, Patrick J., The Deconstruction and Reification of Law in Franz Kafka's "Before the Law" and The Trial
Glen, Patrick J., Franz Kafka, Lawrence Joseph, and the Possibilities of Jurisprudential Literature
Kafka, Franz, The New Attorney
Kirchberger, Lida, Franz Kafka's Use of Law In Fiction (Peter Lang Publishing, 1986).
Teubner, Gunther, The Literature Before It Is Law

The Kafka Project

Throwing the Game?

Ronald J. Rychlak, University of Mississippi School of Law, has published Gambling with the Bronx Bombers: Betting on, Against, and with the Yankees.

Here is the abstract.

The New York Yankees, arguably the most hallowed name in all of professional sports, has probably had more money wagered on the outcome of its games than any other team in any sport. Although few people today may be aware of it, the team itself has a long history of association with gamblers and gambling. The first owners of the Yankees were notorious gamblers; the team’s first captain was indicted in the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal; one Yankees’ pitcher was suspected of having thrown another Series game; one owner had ties to underworld figures in Las Vegas; another owner was suspended for his dealings with a known gambler; and one of the most beloved Yankees of all time was barred from baseball due to his association with a casino. Additionally, it has been suggested that the Yankees’ threat of moving to New Jersey in the mid-1990s was linked to New York State authorizing gambling.

Download the full text of the paper from SSRN at the link.

If You're Happy and You Know It....

Estelle Derclaye, University of Nottingham School of Law, is publishing What Can Intellectual Property Law Learn from Happiness Research? in Methods and Perspectives in Intellectual Property (G. Dinwoodie ed.; Elgar Publishing, forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

As the description of the 2012 ATRIP congress’s theme highlights, traditionally, scholars have used historical, doctrinal or comparative analyses, law and economics, political economy or philosophy, to discuss intellectual property law. Other methods such as empirical analysis, international relations, and human development are more recent. This paper looks at intellectual property law in a new way namely through the angle of happiness or well-being research.
The field of happiness research is not that recent but strangely, so far, happiness researchers have hardly discussed the relationship between well-being and technology despite the pervasive role of the latter in contemporary society. Likewise, the discussion of happiness is also rare in the legal field (except of course in (mental) health law) and it is absent from intellectual property law , except indirectly through the discussion of the capability approach in the discourse on intellectual property and development. I consciously leave the capability approach for another article but it needs to be noted that there are parallels to be drawn between the application of happiness research on the one hand and the capability approach on the other hand, to intellectual property law. In effect, the two approaches converge or are complementary in many respects.
There is a debate to be had about the value of happiness research for the field of intellectual property law. The discussion is worth having especially to check whether the current basis of intellectual property rights (IPR), and the norms that derive from it, are still up-to-date or else should be revised. This article focuses on the application of happiness research to patents and related rights, by and large designs, utility models and plant variety rights. However, a broader reflection of the relationship between happiness or well-being and other IPR such as copyright and trademarks, is worth pursuing as well. This article is obviously concerned only with one way to increase happiness, namely through the fostering of technology using the intellectual property system. There are many other ways to increase happiness, for instance to promote positive traits in a person, and this often does not need any technology. As Frey says, “[i]n current happiness research, [...] the integration among disciplines often go so far that it is not possible to identify whether a particular contribution is due to an economist, a psychologist, a sociologist or a political scientist.” In addition, many of their findings and recommendations coincide. Therefore, the paper will amalgamate the recommendations of the researchers in each branch (law, economics, political sciences, psychology, sociology and philosophy), only highlighting differences of opinion between the branches if and when they exist.
The article first traces the origin and history of happiness research, it then defines happiness (section 2) and summarises the findings (section 3) and the recommendations (section 5) of happiness research, after having determined that policy-makers should take happiness research into account (section 4). Finally, section 6 explains the relevance of happiness research to intellectual property law and draws from happiness research findings to propose a recalibration of patents and related rights’ goals and substantive law.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

A Blog To Check Out

Mark Weiner of Rutgers Law School (Newark) sent me a link to a thread on his fascinating blog, Worlds of Law. The thread discusses connections between writer E.B. White and international law, and ranges from Webster's Dictionary, to Charlotte the spider, to Stuart Little. Professor Weiner discusses even more of interest to law and humanities folks at Worlds of Law. There's consideration of a Deanna Durbin film here  (she just passed on, by the way), and what we can make of the admiration a judge in the movie has for her, and a look at Bedouin law via a video Prof. Weiner made. It's a blog that provides provocative and light-hearted posts. Recommended.

Law and Dance

Miriam Aziz, Visiting Scholar at Cardozo Law School, has published Lost For Words: Embodying Law Through Tanztheater, 7 Law and Humanities 91 (2013). Here is a link to the abstract.

Professor Aziz also tells me that the project has its own blog at Lost For Words by Miriam Aziz and Artist(s) at Large. Lots of things to explore, including a soundtrack.

More Bloomsday!

A lovely Bloomsday post from our friend Jose Calvo Gonzalez of the University of Malaga at his blog, Iurisdictio-Lex Malacitana. Lots of excellent Joyce and the law citations to peruse here!

Bloomsday!

It's Bloomsday! More here from the James Joyce Centre, here from the Rosenbach Museum and Library.
Selected Joyce and the Law Bibliography here.

Balsamo, Gian, Legitimate Filiation and Gender Segregation: Law and Fiction in Texts By Derrida, Hegel, Joyce, Pirandello, Vico (Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1994).
Bauerle, Ruth, Date Rape, Mate Rape: A Liturgical Interpretation of The Dead,, in New Alliances in Joyce Studies 113 (Bonnie K. Scott, ed., 1988).
Denvir, John "Deep Dialogue"--James Joyce's Contribution to American Constitutional Theory, 3 Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 1 (1991).
In the Name of the Law: Marital Freedom and Justice in Exiles, 834/839 La Revue des Lettres Modernes 39 (1988).
Lowe-Evans, Mary, "The Commonest of all Cases: Birth Control on Trial In the Wake, 27 James Joyce Quarterly 803 (Summer 1990).
Lowe-Evans, Mary, The Mime Against Fecondité: Joyce Encodes the Code de la Famille, 37 (3/4) James Joyce Quarterly 509 (Spring/Summer 2000).
McMichael, James, Ulysses and Justice (1991).
Valente, Joseph, James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference (1995).

The Other Big Brother

According to the "Tuned In" column in the June 24, 2013 issue of Time, U.S. popular culture has been predicting government surveillance of U.S. citizens for a while now.Think shows like Chuck and Person of Interest, and next season's new series Intelligence.  The essay, by James Poniewozik, discussses the attractions that such issues have for writers. After all, a good secret makes for good drama. Time's content is available to subscribers online, but the issue is available for purchase on newsstands now.

Sally Draper On the Couch

Courtesy of Gwynne Watkins, who explains the Mad Men's teen's possible problems after catching her dad with a neighbor.  From New York Magazine's Vulture blog). Not to mention the adultery, the alienation of affections...

Legal Reform and Political Economy

Evgeny Finkel, George Washington University Department of Political Science, Scott Gehlbach, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Center for the Study of Institutions and Development, and Tricia D. Olsen, have published  Business Ethics & Legal Studies, University of Wisconsin, have published Does Reform Prevent Rebellion? Evidence from Russia's Emancipation of the Serfs. Here is the abstract.

Contemporary models of political economy suggest that unrest and revolution can be prevented by reforms that target excluded groups, but little is known about the actual effect of such reforms on social stability. We explore the impact of reform on rebellion with a new dataset on peasant disturbances in nineteenth-century Russia. Using a difference-in-differences design that exploits the timing of various peasant reforms, we document a large increase in disturbances among former serfs following the Emancipation Reform of 1861, a development completely counter to reformers' intent. Drawing on a simple global game that illustrates the various mechanisms by which reform might affect rebellion, we trace this outcome to elite divisions and limited state capacity, two political constraints that together contributed to a reform that favored the gentry in its design and was captured the nobility in its implementation.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Learned Hand, Recording Artist

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University School of Law; The Green Bag, has published Learned Hand Sings, Part One: Liner Notes for 'Songs of His Youth'. Here is the abstract.

This is part one of a two-part set of liner notes for Songs of His Youth – a complete edition of Learned Hand’s 1942 folk music recording session at the Library of Congress. This part deals with the immediate business of how Hand ended up singing and talking into a microphone at the Library, and with what he sang and said, including a lightly annotated transcript of the recordings, which can be difficult to follow in places. The second part (in the next issue of the Green Bag) will deal mostly with the background and aftermath of the recording session.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Blasphemy Laws: A Examination of Six Legal Regimes

Jeremy Patrick, University of Southern Queensland School of Law, has published The Curious Persistence of Blasphemy: Canada and Beyond. It is his PhD dissertation from Osgood Hall Law School (April, 2013).

Here is the abstract. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the history and future of the crime of blasphemy. In the introduction, several key questions are examined: (1) What is blasphemy? (2) Why do people blaspheme? and (3) What are the real or perceived harms of blasphemy? Subsequently, Part I examines the history of blasphemy and blasphemy-like laws in six jurisdictions around the globe: England, Ireland, Australia, Pakistan, the United Nations, and the United States. The jurisdictions chosen illuminate the fact that blasphemy is a complex concept which can be regulated in a wide variety of ways. These six provide an excellent picture of the varied and diverse ways the concept of blasphemy has operated and an understanding as to why it remains relevant today. Part II of this dissertation turns away from a global, comparative examination of blasphemy and instead provides a comprehensive, in-depth study of a single jurisdiction: Canada. This sustained history of blasphemy in Canada, the first ever published, allows for a valuable snapshot of the evolution of the crime into its modern form. Part III synthesizes the research and analysis in Parts I and II to answer the fundamental questions: what is the future of the crime of blasphemy in Canada and beyond?

Download the full text of the dissertation from SSRN at the link. 

Acculturating Copyright

Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder, both of the University of California, Davis, School of Law, are publishing Copyright's Cultural Turn in the Texas Law Review (2013). Here is the abstract.

How ironic that the scholarship on the area of law most directly regulating the culture industries has long resisted learning from scholarship on culture! Rather than turning to cultural studies, anthropology, geography, literary theory, science and technology studies, and media studies, over the last few decades, copyright scholars have relied largely on economics for methodology. In this review essay, we argue that Julie Cohen’s new book, Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice, is part of a cultural turn in intellectual property scholarship. Cohen’s book marks an important expansion of the tools available to analyze intellectual property.
In this paper, we contextualize her book through comparison with the reigning law and economics approach. We go further to highlight some aspects of a cultural analysis of copyright. We identify two central insights of the cultural turn in copyright: the relationship between cultural products and the self, and the relationship between culture and human development, which we characterize as the relationship between goods and a good life. Under Martha Nussbaum’s and Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, which Cohen embraces, intellectual property policy would be evaluated under a new metric, not simply increased products (in the form of patents, copyrighted works, or trademarked goods), or its contribution to the gross domestic product, but rather its role in enhancing human capabilities. A cultural approach to copyright would measure law’s success by its ability to better the lives of real people.

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

A New Biography of Gandhi

Charles Richard DiSalvo, West Virginia University College of Law, is publishing M. K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law: The Man Before the Mahatma with the University of California Press (Fall 2013). Here is the abstract.

Students of Gandhi have long recognized that there exists a significant gap in the Gandhi scholarship. None of Gandhi’s many biographers has focused on Gandhi’s extensive practice of law. Similarly, scholars have not examined Gandhi’s experience in the law as a critical factor contributing to the development of his philosophy and practice of nonviolence. This book takes up those tasks. Using previously unexamined archival materials, it brings to light for the first time Gandhi’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to use the courts to defend Indian rights. It argues that Gandhi’s subsequent disillusionment with litigation as a tool for justice and social change led him to experiment with a new approach — nonviolent civil disobedience.
The book does not conclude that Gandhi abandoned his faith in the rule of law. Rather, it concludes that he discovered within the law the grand dynamic that converts disobedience to change — change even in the law itself.
As it makes this argument, the book does not ignore the person of Gandhi. It demonstrates that it was the practice of law that allowed Gandhi to transform himself from a shy and awkward youth into the competent and confident public person who would later lead India to freedom.
The appendix for the book is available at the following URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2268724.
The complete endnotes for the book are available at the following URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2268712.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

African-American Feminist Theory

Kristie Dotson, Michigan State University Department of Philosophy, has published Knowing in Space: Three Lessons from Black Women's Social Theory in the January/June issue of labrys, études féministes/estudos feministas.

In attempting to create a US Black feminist philosophy, I have uncovered three lessons in US Black women’s social theory. They are the following: 1) oppression is a multistable, social phenomenon; 2) many US Black women identify occupying a negative, socio-epistemic space as part of their experience of oppression; and 3) addressing oppression for many Black women will require grappling with politics of social spatiality. These insights are by no means new. However, the fact that these tropes can be identified in almost 200 years of Black women's social theory in the US is far more distinctive than many allow.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Jeremy Waldron and Jus Gentium

Kevin Toh, San Francisco State University, is publiishing Legal Relativism and Jus Gentium in the APA Newsletter. Here is the abstract.

In "Partly Laws Common to All Mankind," Jeremy Waldron advocates what could be called "the doctrine of jus gentium," according to which, roughly, courts sitting in one country must give some weight in their legal deliberations to some principles that have been accepted or adopted by the legal systems of many other countries. Waldron's arguments for this doctrine raise questions and worries about exactly what the content of the doctrine is, and what justification could be offered for it. Several different versions of the doctrine come into the picture as Waldron argues for jus gentium, and while some versions are plausible, some others are not. Unfortunately, the most plausible of the versions seems to be excluded by Waldron's commitment to a Dworkinian conception of the nature of law. This paper ends up recommending that Waldron drop his commitment to that conception of the nature of law in favor of the plausible version of the doctrine of jus gentium.
This paper is a contribution to a symposium on Jeremy Waldron's work organized by the American Philosophical Association. A revised version will be published in a forthcoming issue of the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Law, with Waldron's reply.

Download the full text of the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Comparative Popular Culture Images of Lawyers

Lorin Geitner, Claremont Graduate University, has published Social Architecture and the Law: Law, Through the Lens of Religion. Here is the abstract.

How can we account for the differing popular images of attorney in various countries? One way of doing so may be to bring a paradigm developed in religious studies to examine the most publically accessible and prototypical venue for attorneys, the courtroom. Specifically, applying the model of critical spatial studies developed by Lefebvre and Soja in order to examine religious ritual space to bear on a different kind of ritual space, the courtroom, its structure, organization, and use may illuminate both societal understandings of how the law relates to the citizen, but also inform the differing perception and status of lawyers in the United States, Britain, and China.

 Download the full text of the paper from SSRN at the link.

Law and Emotions

Jennifer Schweppe, University of Limerick, and John E. Stannard, Queen's University Belfast, School of Law, have published What is so ‘Special’ about Law and Emotions? at 64 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 1 (2013). Here is the abstract.

We are grateful to the editors of the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly for allowing us to put together this special edition on ‘Law and Emotions’. But what is so special about it? The very existence of such a field of study may appear at first sight to be counterintuitive; as has been so often pointed out, law and emotion have traditionally been seen as polar opposites, the former being based on ‘reason’ and the latter on ‘feeling’. However, this has been shown to be a false dichotomy in a number of respects, being an accurate reflection neither of the way the law is structured and administered, nor of the way emotion works, nor indeed of the way humans live. Indeed, such is the influence of emotion on human behaviour that the relevance of emotion to law has been said to be ‘a point so obvious as to make its articulation seem almost banal’. Be that as it may, the study of law and emotions, though now reasonably well established in America, is less familiar to students and practitioners of law, or indeed academics working in the area, on this side of the Atlantic, and this collection is therefore designed to provide an insight into the subject.

Download this introduction to the issue from SSRN at the link. 

The Legal Theology of Nahmanides

Joseph E. David, Oxford University Faculty of Oriental Studies; Wolfson College, has published Dwelling within the Law: Nahmanides’ Legal Theology in 2013 Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 1.

The great medieval Jewish jurist and thinker R. Moses b. Nahman (1194-1270) developed an exceptional legal-theology unprecedented in traditional rabbinic thought. In jurisprudential terms, he reduces the Jewish traditional perception of the Halakhah (i.e. the Talmudic law) and introduces the view of the divine law as a territorial law. My article suggests reading anew his sayings about the God-law-land matrix against the background of his contemporary European Christendom. Our analysis raises new perspectives on his attentiveness to the conceptual vocabulary of the Crusades’ propaganda and the European legal reality.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Picture It

The ABA Journal highlights the work of Nathaniel Burney, author of the Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law. Mr. Burney practices criminal law in New York, and wants to make law more accessible, particularly to high school students. More here.

Amazon Announces First Choices For Its "Amazon Original" Network

Among the shows that Amazon has picked up as an "Amazon Original" to air on Amazon Instant Video is Garry Trudeau's Alpha House, starring John Goodman, Clark Johnson, Matt Malloy, and Mark Consuelos as four Senators sharing D.C. digs.

Customers chose Alpha House and four other shows as Amazon Studios'  first Internet series through open voting over the past few weeks. 

Call For Paper Proposals: Conference On Law, Literature, and the Humanities Association of Australasia, December, 2013

Reminder from Desmond Manderson: Abstracts for single papers or panel proposals for this year's Law, Literature, and the Humanities Association of Australasia Conference are due at the end of this week. More information on the Conference webpage. Link here.

New Reality Show Focusing On Brooklyn Prosecutor's Office Debuts

Legal dramas are perennially popular, and as usual, the networks are already rolling them out for the 2013 season. On Tuesday, May 29, at 10 p.m., 9 Central time, CBS launches a new show, Brooklyn D.A., starring the city itself and the office of the prosecutor, focusing on the ADAs and their work. What is different about this six part series? It's a chance for viewers to look behind the scenes. 

The show is already not without controversy. Abe George, who is running for the office of District Attorney, had attempted to object to the show, arguing that it constitutes election publicity for the office holder, Charles Hynes. A judge denied his motion last week. Today, meanwhile, a man suing the D.A. 's office for wrongful conviction is now attempting to obtain emails exchanged between that office and the show's producers.

More here from the New York Times, here from the New York Daily News.

Call For Papers: Law, Peace, and Violence Conference, March 14, 2014

From Yxta Murray at Loyola Los Angeles Law School, a call for papers for a conference on Law, Peace, and Violence: Jurisprudence and the Possibilities of Peace, a symposium at Seattle University School of Law on March 14, 2014, hosted by the Seattle Journal of Social Justice. Below is the description of the Conference, with more information about the CFP. We are working to get a webpage with this information loaded, and will update this post later.

Drink Up! Oh, and Live Long and Prosper!

Ah, the uses of trademark law! Check out Vulcan Ale, now for sale in Vulcan, Alberta, in honor of the town's centennial. If you'd rather have Romulan Ale, or a Star Wars, Monty Python, or Game of Thrones brew, check out the possibilities here.

Law's Sovereignty

Justin Richland, University of Chicago, is publishing Jurisdiction: Grounding Law in Language in the Annual Review of Anthropology. Here is the abstract.

Jurisdiction, a concept often demarcating law’s territorial scope, and thus the bounds of state sovereignty, is offered here as a theory of legal language and its relation to law’s social force. Reconsidered in light of its etymology as “law’s speech,” new theories of jurisdiction suggest how law is simultaneously founded and enacted through language both spectacular (such as courtroom arguments or in the preambles of Constitutions) and mundane (such as in legal aid in-take exchanges, or in the forms of bureaucratic records). Jurisdiction points up how the force of law, and the sovereignty that law’s force presupposes, can be seen as being made, and made seemingly unassailable, in the discursive and textual details of law’s actual accomplishment. This review considers a segment of legal language scholarship produced in recent decades, while arguing for the ground that language, as jurisdiction, always holds for law and sovereignty.

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

Tracing the History of Freedom of Sexual Expression Under the First Amendment

Ronald K. L. Collins, University of Washington School of Law, has published Theodore Schroeder and the Pre-1919 Defenses of Free Speech: The Case for Freedom of Sexual Expression as University of Washington School of Law Research Paper No. 2013-16. Here is the abstract.

The modern First Amendment began with a turn of the clock, on a Monday on March 13, 1919, the moment of the release of Justice Holmes’s seminal opinion in Schenck v. United States. At that pinpoint in time, First Amendment history was reconfigured and the liberty-denying past gradually began to fade away in the years and opinions that followed. Holmes laid his claim to the conceptual turf and what followed is what we call modernity. True, Learned Hand had his moment, too, in 1917 with his district court opinion in Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten. But that opinion, for all its insights, took on meaning primarily as a comparative point to the work of the Great Holmes. And then there is the work of Zechariah Chafee, the scholar who lent his own measure of staying power to the Holmesian notion of free speech law. Before these three Harvard men, however, there was Utah born man who came onto the First Amendment scene, a man far less credentialed and polished, a University of Wisconsin Law School trained lawyer who championed a libertarian creed and contested the will of a very powerful man, Anthony Comstock. That radical lawyer, whose name and work have largely remained cabined in the confines of forgotten history, was Theodore A. Schroeder. Like Holmes, he too had a vision of free speech law. What follows is the first of a series of articles that introduces the reader to Schroeder and his many works concerning free expression. Those works first took root not in political speech, but in area of freedom far more important to the progressives of his day – sexual expression. We come to his story thirteen years before Holmes’s glorious moment in 1919, on an occasion when Messrs. Schroeder and Comstock were to debate the topic of sexual expression. Several months later, Theodore Schroeder published an article in the Albany Law Journal (“The Constitution and Obscenity Postal Laws”), which is the main focus of this article. Drawing on a measure of history and analysis, the aim is to provide the reader with an idea of how Schroeder conceptualized his vision of free speech freedom.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Conference On Human Rights, Denmark, January, 2014

From Daniela Carpi, Professor of Literature, University of Verona, writing for AIDEL, Associazione Italiana di Diritto e Letteratura. Here is an announcement of an upcoming conference, Negotiating Human Rights, and the associated call for papers.

Negotiating Human Rights: Aesthetic, Cultural, and Political FramingsArr. by Humanistic Studies of Human Rights
Aarhus University, Denmark, January 23.-25. 2014  The aim of this conference is to focus on the multiple ways that human rights are framed through specific aesthetic, cultural and political discourses. The conference will facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion about this in a both historical and contemporary context. The conference is motivated by the increasing use of human rights in global, political and cultural contexts and the simultaneous lack of consensus regarding their precise definition and function. Human rights discourses are used in the construction of cultural identity and political communities but at the same time, a question is raised regarding the nature of communality: we are all human beings but what is human about human rights and how does this human nature qualify us as bearers of rights within specific cultural and political contexts?
We invite papers on the rhetorical, aesthetic, and mediatised framing of human rights: how do human rights-narrations work, how are they used to create empathy, what is the form and function of atrocity tales or tales of victimhood, what is the relation between documentary and fictional strategies, how do we talk about human rights in political debates and in television shows, literature, movies, on the net etc.? There is a constant translation-process going on between law, politics, and culture. This ‘translation’ is not pure and neutral but motivated and based on selection and rhetorical choices. This conference focuses on the changes – losses and gains – of concrete mediatised human rights discourses in specific contexts.Furthermore, in order to understand the function of human rights discourses, this conference invites papers that focus both on historical and contemporary contexts. If we talk about human rights in a very strict sense in the western world, they only go back to 1948 but all modern human rights discourses draw on a much older heritage. In order to understand the implications and constitution of modern human rights discourses we welcome studies on their development within global history, from antiquity till today and from different parts of the world. Confirmed keynote-speakers:
Costas Douzinas (Professor of Law and Director of Birkbeck Institue for Humanities, Birckbeck, University of London)Susan Maslan (Associate Professor, Dep. of French, University of California, Berkeley, USA)Joseph Slaughter (Associate Professor, Dep. of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York, USA)Lena Halldenius (Professor of Human Rights, and Director of Human Rights Program, Dep. of History, University of Lund, Sweden)
We invite papers on the following (or related) subjects:
·         Cultural contextualizations of human rights
·         The relationship between universality and particularity in concrete human rights discourses
·         Political uses of human rights
·         Human rights in intercultural dialogue in a global world
·         Styles of human rights: rhetorical framings, narrativization, aesthetization, fictionalization
·         Human rights in art, literature, movies etc.
·         Human rights and global history
·         Human rights in different media
·         Gains and losses in the process of ‘translation’ from one field of knowledge to another.
 Fee: Participation fee will be 100 Euros.
 Paper-suggestions should be no more than 400 words and should be sent before September 1, 2013 to Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Associate Professor, Comparative Literature, Director of Humanistic Studies in Human Rights, Aarhus University, Denmark: negotiatinghumanrights2014@hum.au.dk
             

ABA Announces Silver Gavel Award Winners for 2013

From an ABA news release: (The information below is excerpted from the release)

The American Bar Association announced today its selections for the 2013 Silver Gavel Awards for Media and the Arts, which recognize outstanding work that fosters the American public’s understanding of law and the legal system. This is the ABA’s highest honor in recognition of this purpose, and no more than one Silver Gavel is presented in each category.

... 

SILVER GAVEL AWARDS

BOOKS

Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History
John Fabian Witt, Author
Simon & Schuster/Free Press
http://books.simonandschuster.com/Lincoln’s-Code/John-Fabian-Witt/9781416569831

DOCUMENTARIES

The Central Park Five
Florentine Films
Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, Directors/Writers/Producers
Michael Levine, Editor
Stephanie Jackson, Production Coordinator
http://www.florentinefilms.com/ffpages/BOS-frameset.html

NEWSPAPERS

Lax Controls Leave Ex-Cons Free to Kill
Detroit Free Press
L.L. Brasier and Gina Damron, Co-Authors and Staff Writers
Amalie Nash, Assistant Managing Editor
Andre J. Jackson, Staff Photographer
Elisha Anderson, Contributor and Staff Writer
http://www.freep.com/article/99999999/NEWS06/120928082

TELEVISION

Electoral Dysfunction
Trio Pictures in association with WTTW National Productions
David Deschamps, Leslie D. Farrell and Bennett Singer, Producers/Writers/Directors
Mo Rocca, Host
Jay Keuper, Editor
Joe Friedman, Cinematographer
http://electoraldysfunction.org/

HONORABLE MENTIONS

BOOKS

Stand Up That Mountain: The Battle to Save One Small Community in the Wilderness Along the Appalachian Trail
Jay Leutze, Author
Simon & Schuster/Scribner
http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Jay-Erskine-Leutze/402711770

DOCUMENTARIES

West of Memphis
Sony Pictures Classics
Amy Berg, Director/Producer
Damien Echols, Lorri Davis, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, Producers
http://www.sonyclassics.com/westofmemphis/

NEWSPAPERS

Loss of Trust
San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News
Karen de Sá, Staff Reporter
Dai Sugano and Pat Tehan, Photojournalists
http://www.mercurynews.com/trust

TELEVISION

The Real CSI
Frontline (WGBH Boston), ProPublica and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley
Lowell Bergman, Correspondent, Producer and Writer for Frontline
Andres Cediel, Producer and Writer
Leah Bartos, Reporter for ProPublica
Raney Aronson-Rath, Series Senior Producer
David Fanning, Executive Producer

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/real-csi/ 

For more about the Silver Gavel Awards and the ABA's Public Education Division, see here. 

If You Need...

To take a break from grading, check out Anatasia Salter's post "Researching In Public On Tumblr." Professor Salter suggests a number of Tumblr sites for time-wasting refreshing thought while you rejuvenate your overloaded brain and shake out the snowflakes. My favorite: Academic Tim Gunn. Make it work.

Benjamin Franklin's Constitutional Convention Chaplin Proposal

Louis J. Sirico, Jr., Villanova University School of Law, has published Benjamin Franklin, Prayer, and the Constitutional Convention: History as Narrative, as Villanova Law/Public Policy Research Paper No. 2013-3026. Here is the abstract.

Anecdotes from the Convention continue to inform contemporary discussions on the Constitution’s meaning. This article discusses an anecdote from the Convention that shows how history and false history shape our laws and cultural traditions.
The article focuses on Benjamin Franklin’s proposal to hire a chaplain and begin each day with a prayer. The Convention deputies showed little interest in the proposal, and it died aborning. However, decades later, a fictional version emerged in which Franklin’s proposal succeeded and saved the Convention from collapse.
The factual and mythical Franklin prayer narratives offer us the opportunity to examine their history and rhetorical use in arguing for integrating religion into America’s public life. This examination also offers the opportunity to reflect on how advocates can use history to fashion a persuasive argument. The history of the narrative demonstrates how writers, government officials, lawyers, and judges have employed it to further their own purposes. As for the continuing popularity of the story, Franklin and the archetype he personifies play a critical role in making the narrative persuasive. And as the narrative shows, histories, both factual and mythical, can support persuasive narrative arguments.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

The Image of Lawyers and Legal Ethics

Amy Salyzyn, Yale University Law School, is publishing John Rambo v. Atticus Finch: Gender, Diversity and the Civility Movement in volume 16 of Legal Ethics (2013). Here is the abstract.

The need for increased civility has been a recurring theme in conversations about lawyer professionalism in the United States and Canada over the last several decades. In addition to having many advocates, however, the civility movement has also been subject to criticism. In large part, the critiques made to date have focused on the problems or risks created when civility rules or guidelines are enforced against lawyers. This article takes a different focus to provide a complementary, yet distinct critique. The object of analysis is the discourse of the civility movement. More specifically, the assumptions and concepts of lawyer professionalism embedded in our conversations about civility are explored.

Upon review, the discourse of the civility movement reveals a dominant narrative framed in terms of competing masculinities: the aggressive, testosterone fueled Rambo-lawyer is cast as the anti-hero to be vanquished against renewed calls for the return of the gentlemanly Atticus Finch. I argue that this ‘Rambo-Finch narrative’ is hostile to inclusive understandings of lawyer professionalism in three inter-related ways: (1) it renders women and other ‘outsider’ lawyers largely invisible; (2) it romanticizes past discriminatory concepts of lawyer professionalism; and (3) it reflects anxieties about the destabilization of traditional, exclusionary claims or modes of authority in the legal profession. The exclusionary understandings of lawyer professionalism contained in the Rambo-Finch narrative should be of concern to those interested with improving gender equity and diversity in the legal profession as there is good reason to believe that this discourse translates into ‘real world’ consequences in how ‘outsider’ lawyers are viewed and treated within the legal profession.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.