Meyler on LIberal Constitutionalism and the Sovereign Pardon

Bernadette A. Meyler, Stanford Law School, is publishing Liberal Constitutionalism and the Sovereign Pardon in The Scaffold of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept (Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr, eds., New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Theorists as diametrically opposed as Carl Schmitt and Immanuel Kant conceive of the pardon as an exception to the normal operation of law and associate that exception with the figure of the sovereign. This should not be surprising to those familiar with early modern political theory, which generally construed the pardon as one of the sovereign’s most significant powers. Those setting up the foundations for liberal constitutionalism, like Kant, failed to generate a new account of pardoning that would render it an important component of either the rule of law or democracy rather than a relic of monarchical sovereignty. Hence the pardon seems to fit more naturally into the anti-liberal Schmittian account of politics than into the contemporary U.S. constitutional order. As this essay contends, such a result was not inevitable; an alternative, non-sovereign conception of pardoning that appeared in early modern drama presented another possible basis for the act, one that was never implemented within politics. Kant associates pardoning with a particular kind of staging of the splendor of the king’s majesty, one trumped only by the horror of the spectacle of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence. This theatrical version of the pardon scene as affirming the height of the sovereign above the people — a version that manifests itself in the spectacular finales of early modern plays such as Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure — is countered by another kind of drama, in which forgiveness comes from a stranger or a friend, and is passed among citizens to reconstitute the state. The article concludes by analyzing an example of one such play, The Laws of Candy, and the path offered by its non-sovereign staging of pardoning.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Zucca on Legal, Social, Political, and Economic Conflicts in the Merchant of Venice

Lorenzo Zucca, King's College Lond, Dickson Poon School of Law, has published Global Crisis in Shakespeare: Legal, Social, Political and Economic Conflicts in the Merchant of Venice as TLI Think! Paper 15/2016. Here is the abstract.

Shakespeare’s Venice is the prototype of a global city: open to trade and business, it attracts a great flux of money and people. Its laws have to facilitate trade and provide incentives for business interactions. They also have to punish swiftly those who do not respect business contracts to maintain an impeccable image of a trade-based city state. Shakespeare uses this image of Venice to highlight a series of conflicts arising in the rest of Europe and in particular in England. Europe is moving from a class-based Aristocratic society to a trade-based bourgeois society, this creates a great number of uncertainties. Moreover, law is administered by a chaotic number of jurisdictions (in England, common law courts are working side by side with equity courts and ecclesiastical courts), which also increases legal uncertainty as to whom exercises justice and according to which procedures. Last but not least, Europe is plagued by religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants as well as between Christians and non-Christians. Shylock embodies the threat at the legal, social, economic, and religious level. The Merchant of Venice has never been as topical for our contemporary societies where law, religion, economics and politics are undergoing deep transformations and uncertainty reigns sovereign.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Law and Culture Conference, 5th-6th September 2016: Call For Papers

Reminder: from the mailbox:

Centre for Law and Culture

St Mary’s University, Twickenham

5th-6th September 2016

Law and Culture Conference 2016

‘(In)visibility’

Call for papers

What does it mean to be seen? What does it mean to see? What can and cannot, should and should not, be visible? What are the limits of legal sight, and what lies beyond? What can academic and critical study make visible to law? Can (in)visibility produce (in)justice? The Law and Culture Conference 2016 aims stimulate a wide ranging and in-depth discussion on the tensions, significance, implications and critical dimensions of the open theme of ‘(In)visibility’.

Indicative concerns include:

·         political and legal visibility/invisibility, including critical gender and race studies, the legal and cultural responses to current migration crises, the protection and rights of minorities

·         the visible/unseen dimensions of law and its institution, including legal aesthetics, law and visuality

·         law’s regulation of visibility, including law and art, the regulation of culture, illegitimate images

·         law’s (in)visibility within culture, including popular culture, film, comics, literature and television

·         legal history, including seen/unseen histories,

·         ‘hidden victims’ in criminal and other contexts

·         visible and hidden voices in the legal academy

Please submit abstracts (250 words), plus 3 keywords and a short biography (50 words), via email by 30 April 2016. Papers will be 20 minutes in length, with additional time for questions.

Confirmed Plenary Speakers: Sionaidh Douglas-Scott (Anniversary Chair in Law, Queen Mary University of London), Amanda Perry-Kessaris (Professor of Law, Kent Law School), Stuart Toddington (Professor of Jurisprudence, University of Huddersfield)

About the Centre for Law and Culture

Launched by Lady Hale in 2014, the Centre for Law and Culture (CLC) is an interdisciplinary hub for research at the intersections of law, justice, and the humanities. It is a home for the cultural study of law, and as a rallying point for such culturally enriched legal research, the Centre engages legal study that spans topics and themes from across critical and cultural legal studies. It thereby aims to incubate and promote critical research that crosses and challenges traditional legal boundaries in a cultural context. For more information, visit www.stmarys.ac.uk/law-and-culture.

Location: St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London TW1 4SX (www.stmarys.ac.uk/contact/location-maps.htm).

For information and submissions, please contact: Thomas Giddens thomas.giddens@stmarys.ac.uk

Registration:

There is an anticipated £60 registration fee (plus booking), which will cover attendance, refreshments and lunch for both days and the conference dinner. Reduced cost packages will be available for single-day attendance.

Gavels? You Can't Handle the Gavels!

A Twitter account runs herd, quite amusingly but passionately, on the mistaken use of the image of judges' gavels in popular culture (mostly in images of English courtrooms and judges). It has its work cut out for it.  Do people get annoyed?


 





You be the judge. 

Check out the Twitter feed at Inappropriate Gavels.

House of Cards, David Cameron, and the Intersection of Life and Art

The Guardian checks in on how the popular Netflix U.S. spinoff of House of Cards tweaked David Cameron over his appearance in the Panama Papers. Demonstrating that life often intersects with art: actual tweets on the topic turn up in Frank Underwood's Twitter feed. The Independent reports another life/art link: the law firm involved in the Panama Papers transactions is supposed to have created them from a base set up in the condo used for shoots for the Miami Vice television series.

And the Guardian features a tweet from popular blogger and tweeter David Allen Green in its article. Carry on, Guardian.

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 |