AALS Annual Meeting: The 2017 AALS Law and Film Series Selections Are...

Information via @rockandrollprof: 

As in prior years, AALS is sponsoring the showing of two wonderful films at the Annual Meeting. Below is a short description of each movie. If you plan to attend the Annual Meeting, please consider also attending these events. You'll have a great time! (--Ed.)

Tuesday, January 3, 2017 at 7:00 pm 

AALS Law and Film Series - The Feature Film Selection: Anatomy of a Murder 

“Anatomy of a Murder” is a 1959 directed by Otto Preminger, and is widely considered a classic film. (It was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture, and three of the actors were also Oscar-nominated.) It features James Stewart, Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick, and George C. Scott in a small town murder mystery, and is framed by an exquisite Duke Ellington musical score, which won a Grammy for best soundtrack. The film turns on a fascinating series of trial tactics, evidence, mental states, and professional ethics. The discussion will be led by Professor Christine Corcos (LSU). 

Thursday, January 5, 2017 at 6:30 pm 

AALS Law and Film Series – The Documentary Film Selection - La Jaula de Oro/The Golden Dream  

La jaula de oro ("The Cage of Gold"/ “The Golden Dream” (2013) is a Mexican feature film directed by Diego Quemada-Díez. The film features an ensemble cast of Central American younger undocumented immigrants fleeing Guatemala, and who make their way to the United States in a harrowing fashion by foot and by “la bestia,” the train that snakes its way to the border, with immigrants clinging to it at great peril. This is a timely film, made with great skill and narrative power. It has begun to be shown on college campuses, and it will be discussed by immigration law professor Michael A. Olivas (Houston) and Jaula producer Luis Salinas, an award-winning filmmaker.

Kamp on the English Origins of the Second Amendment

Allen R. Kamp, The John Marshall Law School, has published The English Legacy of the Second Amendment — History and Myth. Here is the abstract.

According to the majority opinion of Justice Scalia in Distri ct of Columbia v. Heller, pre-Second Amendment adoption English history informs the Amendment’s meaning. The majority opinion discusses the historical background after analyzing the language of the Amendment: “Putting all of these textual elements together, we find that they guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation. This meaning is strongly confirmed by the historical background of the Second Amendment. We look to this because it has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment, like the First and Fourth Amendments, codified a pre-existing right.” My paper investigates the actual historical practice in England regarding gun rights before the adoption of the Second Amendment. It focuses on four topics involving rights to bear arms in England of that era: the Declaration of Rights, the writings of Blackstone, the Game Laws, and the Militia.​ The paper concludes that although Heller purports to be based on pre-second Amendment historical practice, its description of that practice is more mythical than real.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Meyer @pmeyer6104 on The Uses of Comedy In the Courtroom

Check out Philip Meyer's new ABA Journal column "Don't Underestimate the Value of Comedy in the Courtroom." Link here.

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law: Volume 29, Number 3, Is Now Available

Table of Contents with links to the articles here.

As usual, many of interest, including

Judges as Readers, Authors and Dialecticians: Legal Interpretation in the ECtHR Cases on Mental Disability

Anita Soboleva Pages 557-575

Download PDF (415KB) 

 

The Use of the Biblical Oath and Its Development

Sol Azuelos-Atias Pages 685-707

Download PDF (717KB)

 

"Paradise Lost" as a Discussion of Early Modern Legal Justice

Alison A. Chapman, Professor of English, University of Alabama, Birmingham, has published The Legal Epic: “Paradise Lost” and the Early Modern Law (Harvard University Press, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

The seventeenth century saw some of the most important legal changes in England’s history, yet the period has been largely overlooked in the rich field of literature and law. Helping to fill this gap, The Legal Epic is the first book to situate the great poet and polemicist John Milton at the center of late seventeenth-century legal history. Alison A. Chapman argues that Milton’s Paradise Lost sits at the apex of the early modern period’s long fascination with law and judicial processes. Milton’s world saw law and religion as linked disciplines and thought therefore that in different ways, both law and religion should reflect the will of God. Throughout Paradise Lost, Milton invites his readers to judge actions using not only reason and conscience but also core principles of early modern jurisprudence. Law thus informs Milton’s attempt to “justify the ways of God to men” and points readers toward the types of legal justice that should prevail on earth. Adding to the growing interest in the cultural history of law, The Legal Epic shows that England’s preeminent epic poem is also a sustained reflection on the role that law plays in human society.

Law and the Modern Mind

Concurring Opinions features discussion of a recent symposium centered on Susanna Blumenthal's Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (Harvard 2016).

Post here.

Call For Papers: Tilburg Law Review's Special Issue, Fall 2017: "Translating Law"

Via Twitter @C_Bouteligier

Call for Papers Tilburg Law Review: 'Translating Law'

Tilburg Law Review (TiLR) invites article submissions for its fall 2017 special issue on 'Translating Law'. We imagine this double issue primarily as a collection of articles in law and humanities, but we welcome submissions from other disciplines as well. This issue will also contain the Montesquieu Lecture that Boaventura de Sousa Santos will deliver at Tilburg University in the spring of 2017.
Possible topics include:

• Translations between legal languages, legal cultures
• The right to translation
• Translating legal fictions, legal metaphors
• Translating across disciplines
• Global law as a translation project
• Court interpreters, oral translation, translation as performance
• Legal mistranslations and legal untranslatables
• Copyright and translation rights
• Translating flight narratives in asylum procedures
• Law and its others; law and the ‘other scene’; translating trauma; translating testimony
• Translating between different conceptions of law

Tilburg Law Review is a peer-reviewed academic print journal of international and European law. This special issue seeks to continue the legacy of Willem Witteveen, a professor of jurisprudence at Tilburg Law School who tragically passed away in the MH17 disaster in Ukraine of July 2014. Willem Witteveen was an interdisciplinary scholar who created multiple spaces for law and humanities in the Netherlands.
Practical Information:

• Submission: 15 Dec. 2016 (deadline)

• Notification: 15 Feb. 2017

• Publication: TLR Autumn issue, Volume 22 2017 (double issue)

• Procedure: Submit an anonymous manuscript via http://tilr.edmgr.com/ after you have registered as user; Submissions will be reviewed following the regular blind-review process; TLR does not accept any submissions that count over 10.000 words; All submissions must comply with the OSCOLA citation system.

For more details, please visit our website.
Or contact us via email: tilburglawreview@tilburguniversity.edu

Hertogh and Kurkchiyan on the Existence of a Common European Legal Culture

Marc Hertogh, University of Groningen, Faculty of Law, and Marina Kurkchiyan, University of Oxford, Wolfson College, are publishing 'When Politics Comes into Play, Law is No Longer Law': Images of Collective Legal Consciousness in the UK, Poland and Bulgaria in volume 12 of International Journal of Law in Context (2016).

This paper examines the idea of a common European legal culture by exploring its foundational component, ‘collective legal consciousness’, in three EU states: the UK, Poland, and Bulgaria. Using a comparative research design and a variety of methods of data collection, it suggests that underneath the thin layer of EU consensus there are some fundamental differences in perceptions of law. The evidence shows that legal ideas are infused with perceptions of the political system. This finding suggests that the creation of a shared European legal culture depends on the prior formation of a common transnational polity right across the EU, together with a sense of political identity and of trust in the legitimacy of the European political authorities. The paper also demonstrates the multi-layered character of collective legal consciousness, allowing different images of law to coexist, underpinned by the perception of the source with which each image is associated.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

More Law and Star Trek: The Practicality of the Prime Directive (via @arstechnica)

ArsTechnica investigates whether the Prime Directive could ever be a universal rule of law. Here, with lawyers!

van Domselaar on The Perceptive Judge

Iris van Domselaar, University of Amsterdam, has published The Perceptive Judge. Here is the abstract.

Up until today the way judges perceive has received little attention in legal discourse. Adjudication is most often conceptualized as a practice in which judges apply rules and principles. The focus has predominantly been on the actual decisions judges take, the underlying justificatory rules and principles and the meaning of the decision for the legal system. This paper by contrast puts judicial perception at the centre of adjudication. It offers a philosophical account of judicial perception that understands it as a special ethical, character dependent - skill that a judge needs in order to adequately cope with the case he is confronted with. In this account ‘thick (legal) concepts’ play a vital role. Throughout the text Ian McEwan’s novel The Children Act is used as illustrative source.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Stern @ArsScripta on Narrative in the Legal Text: Judicial Opinions and Their Narratives

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, is publishing Narrative in the Legal Text: Judicial Opinions and Their Narratives in Narrative and Metaphor in Law (Michael Hanne and Robert Weisberg,eds.; Cambridge University Press, 2017. Here is the abstract.

The law’s most familiar and characteristic mode of written expression, the judgment, lacks two of the key ingredients that contribute to the lure of literary narrative — namely, the drive, fueled by uncertainty and anticipation, that propels readers on towards the conclusion, and the pleasure of observing and reflecting on others’ mental states, which accounts for a considerable part of fiction’s cognitive appeal. The absence of these features should alert us to the questionable premises underlying any treatment of the judgment as simply one more form of narrative, whose fundamental similarity to novels and films can be taken for granted. Using a few fundamental concepts in the study of narrative, involving the definition of plot and the power of the “reality effect” (whose analogue, I propose, is the “legality effect”), this chapter asks what we can learn about legal decisions by considering them as having distinctive narrative features, rather than summarily lumping them together with literary narratives. The results, I suggest, help to make sense of the doctrinal analysis as well as the decision's formal structure.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A New Book on Authors, Copyright, and Celebrity

Mark Rose, University of California, Santa Barbara, has published Authors in Court: Scenes From the Theater of Copyright (Harvard University Press, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website. 

Through a series of vivid case studies, Authors in Court charts the 300-year-long dance between authorship and copyright that has shaped each institution’s response to changing social norms of identity, privacy, and celebrity. Authors’ self-presentations in court are often inflected by prevailing concepts of propriety and respectability. And judges, for their part, have not been immune to the reputation and standing of the authors who have appeared before them in legal dramas.

Some authors strut their roles on the public stage. For example, Napoleon Sarony—the nineteenth-century photographer whose case established that photographs might be protected as works of art—was fond of marching along Broadway dressed in a red fez and high-top campaign boots, proclaiming his special status as a celebrity. Others, such as the reclusive J. D. Salinger, enacted their dramas precisely by shrinking from attention. Mark Rose’s case studies include the flamboyant early modern writer Daniel Defoe; the self-consciously genteel poet Alexander Pope; the nineteenth-century abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe; the once-celebrated early twentieth-century dramatist Anne Nichols, author of Abie’s Irish Rose; and the provocative contemporary artist Jeff Koons. These examples suggest not only how social forms such as gender and gentility have influenced the self-presentation of authors in public and in court but also how the personal styles and histories of authors have influenced the development of legal doctrine.

Via @LawandLit and Legal History Blog.

Who Ya Gonna Call?

What is the rebooted Ghostbusters about? In a review for The Scholarly Kitchen, Joseph Esposito views it as actually about academic peer review, the Kristen Wiig character's attempt at rehabilitating her scientific reputation, and digs at academic publishing. Unusual fare for Hollywood, but intriguing. Color me interested. But then, I'm the one who interpreted the original version as a metaphor for environmental regulation.

Via @lisambayer, @mobabb3700

A New Book On Murder Ballads From University of Kentucky Law Professor Richard Underwood

University of Kentucky law professor Richard H. Underwood has published CrimeSong: True Crime Stories From Southern Murder Ballads (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2016). The book explores the real life events behind 24 Southern murder ballads. Professor Underwood developed the book from an article he wrote some years ago with research assistance from a law librarian who worked at the University of Kentucky, and to whom he has dedicated the book.

Copies are available directly from the publisher.  More about the book here from the UKy College of Law website. 

Bruncevic @doctorbruncevic Publishing Book With Routledge on Law, Art, and the Commons

Forthcoming from Routledge:

Merima Bruncevic, Department of Law, University of Gothenburg, is publishing Law, Art and the Commons (November 30, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

The concept of the cultural commons has become increasingly important for legal studies. Within this field, however, it is a contested concept: at once presented as a sphere for creativity, democratic access and freedom of speech, and as one that denies property rights and misappropriates the public domain. In this book, Merima Bruncevic takes up the cultural commons not merely as an abstract notion, but in its connection to physical spaces such as museums and libraries. A legal cultural commons can, she argues, be envisioned as a lawscape that can quite literally be entered and engaged with. Focusing largely on artin the context of the copyright regime, but also addressing a number of cultural heritage issues, the book draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari in order to examine the realm of the commons as a potential space for overcoming the dichotomy between the owner and the consumer of culture. Challenging this dichotomy, it is the productive and creative potential of law itself that is elicited through the book’s approach to the commons as the empirical basis for a new legal framework, which is able to accommodate a multitude of interests and values.

Sharafi @mjsharafi On Parsi Legal History In Film and Fiction

Worth a read: an interesting post on Parsi legal history in film and fiction from the website of University of Wisconsin law prof and legal historian Mitra Sharafi, South Asian Legal History Resources.

Via @maksdelmar.

Justin Trudeau, Marvel Comics Superhero

Marvel Comics is introducing a new superhero: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He's the second member of his family to make an appearance in Marvel's pages: his father, Pierre Eliott Trudeau, featured in a comic in 1979. What's Mr. Trudeau's superpower in the comic, you ask? Well, apart from the "cool factor" (which isn't bad--not a lot of politicians have that), I'm not quite sure yet, but it just might be ensuring human rights. That's an excellent superpower.

The storyline appears to include Mr. Trudeau debating the ethics of using predictive policing with the Canadian superheroes Alpha Flight. Captain Marvel is for using that power to lock up those who would do evil in the future, and Iron Man is against it. Just FYI, I'm with Iron Man. I think we'll have to read the comic to find out, though. It will be on sale soon, and Marvel is taking pre-orders now.  More here from the CBC,  here from NPR

Mike Pence: Cartoonist

From the ABA Journal: discussion of Mike Pence's law school career as a cartoonist. More here from the Washington Post. Some are critical of his work, but because I can't draw at all, I think his work is at the very least, passable.

As a side note, cartoonist Stephen Pastis also has a law degree: from UCLA Law.  His character Rat was born in what was apparently a particularly boring law school class. (We won't ask).  Follow Mr. Pastis' strip Pearls Before Swine here.

NBC Commissions Pilot Based On Marcia Clark's Novel "Blood Defense"

NBC has commissioned a pilot (and very likely a series) based on former L.A. prosecutor Marcia Clark's novel Blood Defense (Thomas and Mercer, 2016). Ms. Clark, Elizabeth Craft, and Sara Fain will co-write. The protagonist is criminal defense attorney Samantha Brinkman.  More here from The Hollywood Reporter.



 

Jensen on E. B. White As Writer

Erik M. Jensen, Case Western Reserve School of Law, is publishing E. B. White Could Nod Too: Thoughts Occasioned by Reading 'Death of a Pig' in the Journal of Legal Education (2017). Here is the abstract.

This is an essay on grammar and writing, with extended consideration of the value of Strunk & White as a guide. Although the essay defends Strunk & White against several of that volume’s strongest critics, it also illustrates that even the best writers — and E. B. White was terrific, as was Antonin Scalia — sometimes make mistakes. (At great, perhaps excessive, length, the essay dissects a problematic passage in White’s “Death of a Pig.”) We should learn from those mistakes, not accept them as inevitable.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

 

Weisberg on What Remains "Real" about the Law and Literature Movement: A Global Appraisal

Richard Weisberg, Cardozo School of Law, is publishing What Remains 'Real' About the Law and Literature Movement? A Global Appraisal in volume 66 of the Journal of Legal Education (2016). Here is the abstract.

For several decades, the reincarnation of studies labeled Law and Literature has served to enliven, challenge, and threaten traditional legal discourse. Always in implicit competition with the interdiscipline of Law and Economics, Law and Literature has withstood (and been strengthened by at least some) criticism from within and without. Recognized in late century and beyond as one of the primary contributors to North American jurisprudence, Law and Literature continues to inspire from both sides of the aisle a discourse not so much of ironic abhorrence of the law as of an aspiration to just norms of law and an insistence that perennial deviations from such norms are neither inevitable nor inexplicable. In many iterations, and in what follows here, Law and Literature seeks the reunion of the fields, conjuring a 2000-year- old continuum from Cicero to Cardozo as a challenge to more obvious and more flawed trajectories, some of which — like the development of mainstream Western religious discourse — have arguably brought about these deviations. This essay first brings the non-specialist reader up to date on the various claims, counterclaims, and provocations connected to American Law and Literature scholarship. It reveals that the field has burst through to dynamic invocations in many other countries. Finally, it restates what is always already there in the modern version of the interdiscipline: the rigorous assessment through stories of the way law operates, of how it is interpreted by its major speakers, and of how — above all — its minor, major, and catastrophic errors can be traced through the unique medium of stories to idiosyncratic deviations in the words and deeds of authoritative lawyers and judges. The path to justice always is readily available in these stories; it is the identifiable reason for its denial that helps the practitioner understand and correct why law so often goes terribly wrong. The claim is that only fictional narratives, which move through time together with characters whose actions and words are revealed, permit us to understand dynamically the jurisprudence of our era.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Plagiarism on "Criminal Minds"

Plagiarism Today discusses the issue of plagiarism as it appears in pop culture on "The Gathering," an episode of the series Criminal Minds. Read the post here. 

Call For Papers: Art In Law In Art Conference, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, July 4-5, 2017

From the mailbox:

We are pleased to announce that The University of Western Australia Law School will host the Art in Law in Art Conference on 4 & 5 July 2017. We look forward to welcoming you, and are now calling for papers for this conference. Please click Here for the call for papers.

The Art in Law in Art Conference will be held in the beautiful Perth Cultural Precinct at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth. 

Art in Law in Art is an interdisciplinary conference investigating the broad themes of how law sees visual art, and how visual art sees law. The Conference will be an exciting mix of different perspectives from international experts on the art-law nexus, as scholars, practitioners and artists come together and exchange ideas. 

The Conference has two main themes: 

1. Art in Law: law touches upon a range of legal topics and areas, and this theme explores the full breadth and depth of issues.2. Law in Art: this theme explores how law is perceived and represented by artists and theorists. This theme explores the broad question of how the law is perceived in the theory and practice of visual art.Confirmed speaker: Carey Young, visual artist. 

Please visit the conference website at http://www.law.uwa.edu.au/research/art-in-law-2017  for updated information about the conference, and to register your interest.

We would very much appreciate your help in bringing this conference to the attention of your colleagues, and anyone who might be interested in attending, whether as a paper presenter or otherwise. 

If you require further information, please contact the conference convenor, Jani McCutcheon, at jani.mccutcheon@uwa.edu.au

Thank you and we look forward to seeing you in Perth in July 2017.

Call For Papers: Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Special Issue Spring 2018: Law and Literature from the Global South

From the mailbox:

Call for Papers

The Journal of Commonwealth andPostcolonial Studies

Spring 2018 Special Issue: Law and Literature from the Global South

Guest Editors: David Babcock (James Madison University) and Peter Leman (Brigham Young University)

Deadline for Submissions (approximately 4,000-5,000 words): December 20, 2016

Website: jcpcsonline.com

Contact Email: jcpcs.lawlit@gmail.com

The editors of this special issue of JCPCS seek essays that respond to the question: what does it mean to study law and literature from the global south? “Law and Literature,” as a field, has responded in recent years to criticism of its longstanding attention to Anglo-American contexts, and more and more, scholars are turning to regions of the global south in thinking about the literary in relationship to international, colonial, and post-colonial forms of law. Though this widening geographical scope is praiseworthy and necessary, there remains the question of method: can the literatures and legal cultures of the global south inflect, augment, or otherwise reshape not only where we direct our critical attention as scholars of law and literature but how?

In posing this question, we take as initial inspiration Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff’s Theory From the South (2012), in which they question the tendency of theory work to be unidirectional, emerging from the north and then circulating within and being “applied to” the south. If, however, the global south has played an essential role in “world-historical processes” (7) and can, therefore, afford “privileged insight into the workings of the world at large” (1), then perhaps theory—including law and literature—ought to take this into account. When we speak of “postcolonial law and literature” or “law, literature, and the global south,” are we speaking of the conventional critical paradigms of law and literature as it emerged from Anglo-American contexts in the 1970s and 80s, or does the postcolonial/global open us up to new configurations of the legal and the literary? If so, what might these configurations look like? What new concepts emerge? Are there forms of law, justice, obligation, harm, personhood, etc. that originate in but circulate beyond the cultures of the global south that might provoke us to think differently about the dominant normative assumptions of the field at large? Are there colonial legal practices that still survive in contemporary states, and if so, what creative concepts or images of law can we see emerging in literary responses to these problematic legacies? In what ways has international law been adapted, reimagined, or otherwise modified in its years of deployment throughout the global south—for good or for ill—that can be understood through the lens of the literary and brought back to our conventional assumptions about law as it has developed in the north? Are there forms of intersection between law and literature in the global south that make even the implied distinction of “and” irrelevant? Submissions should seek to demonstrate how the literatures and cultures of the global south, broadly conceived, offer provocative ways for scholars throughout the world to think about the field of law and literature and the fluid nature of its most fundamental terms.

Manuscripts must be written in English and follow the MLA Style Manual. JCPCS uses a double-blind review process. Full, formatted manuscripts should be submitted to jcpcs.lawlit@gmail.com by December 20, 2016.

CBS, Jennifer Lopez, Michael Rauch, and a New Legal Drama

Jennifer Lopez and Michael Rauch (Royal Pains) are offering CBS a legal drama featuring identical twins who don't get along outside the courtroom but complement each other at the bar. The unnamed show is the sort of thing networks perenially like to offer audiences: a law-related series with predictability (the "partners that clash" thing) and just a twist of the new (the "they're twins" thing). I'll be interested to set if it turns up on our small screens in the near future. More here from The Hollywood Reporter.

Robert Durst Docudrama In the Works at Lifetime

Lifetime is working on a tv movie about the life and crimes of Robert Durst, who was the subject of the HBO documentary Jinx. The Lifetime project will be based on the Matt Birkbeck true crime book, A Deadly Secret: The Bizarre and Chilling Story of Robert Durst.

Liebowitz on the Payment of British Authors in 19th Century America

Stan J. Liebowitz, University of Texas, Dallas, School of Management, Department of Finance & Managerial Economics, has published Paradise Lost or Fantasy Island? The Payment of British Authors in 19th Century America. Here is the abstract.

The payments to British authors by American publishers during the mid-19th century, when the works of British authors lacked American copyright protection, has been presented as evidence that copyright might have little benefit to authors. This paper reexamines the evidence that has been used to support this claim and then presents previously unexamined information on payments to British authors by leading American publishers of the period. The main finding is that payments to British authors were minimal or non-existent prior to the establishment of a no-compete agreement among leading American publishers. Even after implementation of this agreement, many British authors were not paid, and those who were paid received considerably less than they would have received under copyright. Because antitrust disallows such agreements, this 19th natural experiment indicates that the removal of copyright in modern economies would likely eviscerate payments to authors.

The full article is not available for download.

Interdisciplinary Workshop on Intoxication, Discourse, and Practice, September 30-October 1, 2016, Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield

Via Legal History Blog:

Interdisciplinary Workshop on Intoxication, Discourse, and Practice, Friday 30th September and Saturday 1st October, 2016 Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield

Since at least the sixteenth century intoxication has frequently been seen as a problem in western cultures – a medical, social, political, moral, and economic concern, affecting both individuals and social bodies, that huge amounts of public funding and energy have been devoted to understanding, addressing, and preventing. Just as frequently, these attempts have failed, even when they are based on apparently incontrovertible ‘scientific’ evidence – to do with serious physiological damage done by alcohol to the brain and liver, for example, or serious personal and social harms caused by illicit drugs.

Organised by the Sheffield research project Intoxicants and Early Modernity: England, 1580-1740, the focus of this workshop is: · discourses that have and/or continue to frame intoxication as a problem over time · other discourses that have represented intoxicants as an integral and valuable feature of social life and personal identity · the relationship between these various discursive traditions and practices of intoxication in different times and places To this end the interdisciplinary workshop brings together exponents of and experts in different kinds of discourse: medical, psychological, cultural, economic, law and politics, public health. But it also brings together experts in social practice: for example, social historians, anthropologists, and sociologists. The workshop provides an opportunity for speakers to think about the epistemologies, language, and assumptions of discourses relating to intoxicants and – in particular – the means by which they are publicly communicated: by whom, to whom, in what media and genres. It also asks students of social practices to think about the key discursive influences on their construction, reproduction, meaning, and value over time.

For a full list of speakers and registration, please click

https://www.intoxicantsproject.org/project-workshop-intoxication-discourse-and-practice/


The deadline for registration is 16 September 2016.

Of Intellectual Disability and the Death Sentence

From the New York Times: In Moore v. Texas, No. 15-797, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider the question of mental capacity and whether a defendant should be eligible for the death sentence if he or she has an I.Q. that is so low that s/he is essentially unable to function in society. This standard is named after the character of Lennie in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.  

More about Lennie and the "Lennie Standard" below.

Carl Bailey, "He's Dumb as Hell, But He Ain't Crazy."

Julia Barton, Judging Steinbeck's Lennie. Life of the Law.

Dianna Wray, "Texas Uses 'Of Mice and Men Standards' To Execute Mentally Disabled  Man," Houston Press, January 29, 2015.

Yoon on Academic Tenure

Albert Yoon, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published Academic Tenure at 13 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 428 (2016). Here is the abstract.

In academia, a subset of faculty has tenure, which allows its beneficiaries to retain their professorships without mandatory retirement and with only limited grounds for revocation. Proponents of tenure argue it protects intellectual freedom and encourages investment in human capital. Detractors contend it discourages effort and distorts the academic labor market. This article develops a framework for examining academic tenure in the context of U.S. law schools. We construct a unique data set of tenured U.S. law professors who began their careers between 1993 through 2002, and follow their employment and scholarship for the first 10 years of their career. Across all journal publications, tenured faculty publish more frequently, are cited with roughly the same frequency, and place in comparable caliber of journal. These productivity gains, however, largely disappear when excluding solicited publications. These results suggest that legal academics continue to produce after tenure, but channel more of their efforts toward less competitive outlets.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Spiro On Dual Citizenship

Peter J. Spiro, Temple University School of Law, has published At Home in Two Countries: The Past and Future of Dual Citizenship (Introduction) in At Home in Two Countries (NYU Press, 2016). Here is the abstract.

How did dual citizenship evolve from traitorous to trendy? Dual nationality was once considered an offense against nature, an abomination on the order of bigamy. It was the stuff of titanic battles between the United States and European sovereigns. As those conflicts dissipated, dual citizenship continued to be the object of loyalty and misplaced security concerns. Only recently has the status largely shed the opprobrium to which it was once attached. The first monograph on the status in several generations, AT HOME IN TWO COUNTRIES charts the transformed understanding of dual citizenship from strong disfavor to general acceptance. Today, the state lacks both the capacity and the incentive to suppress the status as citizenship becomes more like other forms of membership. Dual citizenship allows many to formalize sentimental attachments. For others, it’s a new way to game the international system. The introduction opens with the author’s own experience acquiring dual citizenship. It then outlines the book’s consideration of dual citizenship in historical and contemporary perspective.

Download the introduction from SSRN at the link.

A Review Essay For the TV Show "The Wire," Courtesy of Shawn Peters @shfrpeters

Shawn W. Peters offers a review essay devoted to the tv show The Wire here.

Cameron on Thomas Healy's "The Great Dissent:" Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Abrams Decision

Jamie Cameron, Osgoode Hall Law School, has published The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind – And Changed the History of Free Speech in America, by Thomas Healy as Osgoode Hall Studies Research Paper No. 65/2016. Here is the abstract.

Thomas Healy’s The Great Dissent re-treads the familiar story of US Supreme Court Justice Holmes’s First Amendment conversion between March and November 1919, when he launched his marketplace of ideas theory and strong-form version of the clear and present danger doctrine. Healy’s book demonstrates that fresh perspectives on this vital and ever-intriguing change of mind or transformation on Holmes’s part remain possible. The review offers its own perspective by highlighting the process of “reverse mentoring” which took place, in which the older jurist was mentored on free speech issues by the emerging thought leaders of the day – Laski, Frankfurter, Chafee – and showing how Justice Holmes’s landmark dissent in Abrams was nonetheless and indisputably a product of his own jurisprudential ingenuity.

Download the text from SSRN at the link. 

Which Famous Detective Are You?

Above the Law has posted this quiz for you to "to find out which famous detective you are." Note: at the end you will need to enter personal information to get your results.

A Conference on Feminist Legal Theory and Applied Feminism at the University of Baltimore School of Law, March 30-31, 2017

From the mailbox:

CALL FOR PAPERS

 APPLIED FEMINISM AND INTERSECTIONALITY: 

EXAMINING LAW THROUGH THE LENS OF MULTIPLE IDENTITIES

The Center on Applied Feminism at the University of Baltimore School of Law seeks paper proposals for the Tenth Anniversary of the Feminist Legal Theory Conference.  We hope you will join us for this exciting celebration on March 30-31, 2017.

This year, the conference will explore how intersecting identities inform -- or should inform -- feminist legal theory and justice-oriented legal practice, legal systems, legal policy, and legal activism. Beginning in 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw identified the need for law to recognize persons as representing multiple intersecting identities, not only one identity (such as female) to the exclusion of another (such as African American). Intersectionality theory unmasks how social systems oppress people in different ways.  While its origins are in exploring the intersection of race and gender, intersectionality theory now encompasses all intersecting identities including religion, ethnicity, citizenship, class, disability, and sexual orientation. Today, intersectionality theory is an important part of the Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName movements. For more information, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2015/09/24/why-intersectionality-cant-wait/. 

We seek submissions of papers that focus on the topic of applied feminism and intersecting identities.  This conference aims to explore the following questions: What impact has intersectionality theory had on feminist legal theory?  How has it changed law and social policy? How does intersectionality help us understand and challenge different forms of oppression?  What is its transformative potential? What legal challenges are best suited to an intersectionality approach? How has intersectionality  theory changed over time and where might it go in the future?

We welcome proposals that consider these questions from a variety of substantive disciplines and perspectives. As always, the Center’s conference will serve as a forum for scholars, practitioners and activists to share ideas about applied feminism, focusing on connections between theory and practice to effectuate social change. The conference will be open to the public and will feature a keynote speaker. Past keynote speakers have included Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Dr. Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem, Senators Barbara Mikulski and Amy Klobuchar, NOW President Terry O’Neill, EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum, and U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner.

To submit a paper proposal, please submit an abstract by Friday October 28, 2016 to ubfeministconference@gmail.com. Your abstract must contain your full contact information and professional affiliation, as well as an email, phone number, and mailing address. In the “Re” line, please state: CAF Conference 2017. Abstracts should be no longer than one page. We will notify presenters of selected papers in November. About half the presenter slots will be reserved for authors who commit to publishing in the annual symposium volume of the University of Baltimore Law Review. Thus, please indicate at the bottom of your abstract whether you are submitting (1) solely to present or (2) to present and publish in the symposium volume. Authors who are interested in publishing in the Law Review will be strongly considered for publication. For all presenters, working drafts of papers will be due no later than March 3, 2017. Presenters are responsible for their own travel costs; the conference will provide a discounted hotel rate as well as meals.

We look forward to your submissions. If you have further questions, please contact Prof. Margaret Johnson at majohnson@ubalt.edu. For additional information about the conference, please visit law.ubalt.edu/caf.

Fenster on Legal Intellectual History

Mark Fenster, University of Florida College of Law, has published Mr. Peabody's Improbable Legal Intellectual History at 64 Buffalo Law Review 101 (2016). Here is the abstract.

Legal intellectual history, I suggest in this Paper, is the street sweeper in the parade of law’s history and its use of history. Lawyers and legal academics want great, important figures, cases, and theories with and against which they can do battle. The student-edited law reviews prefer bold, clear claims that explain why one answer to an historical question presented will bring justice, while a competing answer is manifestly unjust; why one past approach lacks principle or created worse consequences; or how one theory or another can explain all manner of thorny legal issues which bedevils academics and practitioners. Viewing an appellate decision, legislative enactment, or academic debate, the legal academic must travel back in time to set matters straight, redeeming the past to make certain that the future avoids its confused and unfortunate fate. Intellectual historians trail behind the legal academy’s heavy-breathing and magnificent use of the past, cleaning up its waste by providing context, complicating narratives, and replacing bright trumpet horns with muted tones, vivid colors with shades of gray. Well after the parade has dispersed and marchers have moved on, and often before the next “Big Issue” causes the celebrants to line back up, intellectual history can bring complexity and context back in to the frame. I illustrate this dynamic first by describing the use of legal realism in Brian Tamanaha’s recent monograph on what he describes as the formalist-realist divide in legal theories about judging and about legal doctrine, and in the debate over that divide. In Part II, I describe a relatively minor figure in the pantheon of legal realists (as that pantheon currently exists), Thurman Arnold, and his realist critique of the criminal law and procedure.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A New Version of "Witness for the Prosecution" May Be Headed For the Screen

Ben Affleck may remake Witness for the Prosecution for Fox, according to the Hollywood Reporter.  Billy Wilder famously made the Agatha Christie short story into a hit film in 1957; it starred Tyrone Power, Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, and Marlene Dietrich. Diana Rigg and Beau Bridges starred in a 1984 adaptation for television (Dame Diana taking the Marlene Dietrich role. There was also another 1949 television version.

Below, a selected bibliography on Witness for the Prosecution and the law.


Chase, Anthony, Lawyers and Popular Culture: A Review of Mass Media Portrayals of  American Attorneys, 11 Law and Social Inquiry 281 (April 1986). 

Corcos, Christine Alice, Legal Fictions: Irony, Storytelling, Truth, and Justice in the Modern Courtroom Drama,  25 U. Ark. L. Rev. 503 (2003).

Papke, David Ray, Conventional Wisdom: The Courtroom Trial in American Popular Culture:  Essay, 82 Marquette Law Review 471 (1999). 

Papke, David Ray, American Courtroom Trial: Pop Culture, Courthouse Realities, and the Dream World of Justice, 40 South West Texas Law Review 919 (1999).

Singer, Eliot A., The Whodunit as Riddle: Block Elements in Agatha Christie, 43 Western Folklore 157 (July 1984).

Links available if you are a subscriber to Hein Online or JSTOR.

Monti on "Interdisciplinary" Legal Studies and the Emergence of New Academic Teachings: A Research Project on Law Courses in 19th-20th Century Italy

Annamaria Monti, Bocconi University Department of Law, has published 'Interdisciplinary' Legal Studies and the Emergence of New Academic Teachings: A Research Project on Law Courses in 19th-20th Century Italy (Estudios Legales 'Interdisciplinares' y la Aparición de Nuevas Enseñanzas Académicas: Un Proyecto de Investigación Sobre los Cursos de Derecho en Italia en los Siglos XIX y XX) at 19 CIAN: Revista de Historia de las Universidades 91 (2016). Here is the abstract.

English Abstract: The profound change in thinking about the law experienced by European jurists at the turning of the 20th century is well known: they renewed their methods, also through the influence of German legal thought and the impact of new social sciences. Focusing on the Italian experience, the research intends to investigate how this innovative change was linked to the teaching of law. Most certainly, new courses were introduced. Concerning the contents of the teachings, another point to investigate are the connections with the legal thought circulating at a transnational level in those times.

Spanish Abstract: El cambio profundo en la manera en la que se pensaba el derecho que experimentaron los juristas europeos a principios del siglo XX es bien conocido: renovaron sus métodos, en parte bajo la influencia del pensamiento jurídico alemán y el impacto de nuevas ciencias sociales. Nuestra investigación, que se centra en la experiencia italiana busca determinar el modo en que aquella innovación estuvo vinculada a la enseñanza del derecho. Seguramente se introdujeron nuevas asignaturas. En cuanto al contenido de aquella enseñanza, otro aspecto a investigar consiste en su conexión con el pensamiento jurídico que circulaba en aquel entonces a nivel transnacional.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Moyn @samuelmoyn on Legal Theory Among the Ruins: In Search of Contemporary Legal Thought

Samuel Moyn, Harvard University, is publishing Legal Theory among the Ruins in In Search of Contemporary Legal Thought (Justin Desautels-Stein and Christopher Tomlins, eds.; Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

This paper responds to an ongoing discussion initiated by Duncan Kennedy concerning the identity of "contemporary legal thought." This contribution argues that that category is so hard to define or exemplify because the historical conditions for its possibility are lacking. The reason that there is no such thing as contemporary legal thought is the destructive contention of theories in the 1970s-90s, and in particular the contending options that caused the initial failure of critical legal studies. If this is true, no engagement with “contemporary legal thought” can fail to face the harsh truth that it simply may not exist, and hence that our main task is not to identify it but to bring it about.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Of Note: A New Journal, Politics and Poetics

From the mailbox: news of a new peer-reviewed journal, Politics and Poetics, with a focus on philosophy.  Volume 1 (2014/2015), devoted to Tragedy, is now available. The editor is Jonathan Price, University of Leiden.

See the CFP for future volumes here.

Law and Society Association 2017 Annual Meeting Will Be in Mexico City, June 20-23, 2017: The Theme Is Walls, Borders, and Bridges

The Law and Society Association has announced its theme for the 2017 meeting: Walls, Borders, and Bridges: Law and Society in an Inter-Connected World. Mexico City is the site for this, the first International Meeting on Law and Society, which will take place June 20-23, 2017.

Co-sponsors are the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law, and with the participation of the Socio-Legal Studies Association, the Japanese Association of the Sociology of Law, and the Canadian Law and Society Association, and other groups.

The Program Committee includes:

• Lawrence M. Friedman, Professor of Law, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States
• Manuel A. Gomez, Associate Dean of International & Graduate Studies, Florida International University College of Law, Miami, FL, United States
• Masayuki Murayama, Professor, Meiji University, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan, and President of RCSL

The deadline for proposal submission is October 18, 2016. Registration begins in early February, 2017. Here's a link to the website.

Re-Examining the Jon-Benet Ramsey Case

Via THR, CBS is working on a docuseries about the Jon-Benet Ramsey case. The six-year-old was found dead in the basement of her Boulder, Colorado, home on Christmas Day, 1996. Law enforcement has never charged anyone for the crime, although it has considered various suspects. The CBS series will begin airing September 18.

Lifetime has its own Jon-Benet project in the works, a TV movie starring Eoin Bailey. Because this year marks the 20th anniversary of little Jon-Benet's death, it's no surprise that there is renewed interest in this tragic unsolved murder.

In 2000, Kris Kristofferson starred in an adaptation of Lawrence Schiller's Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (HarperCollins, 1998).

Sloan and Starger @ColinStarger on Metaphor and Legal Research

Amy E. Sloan and Colin P. Starger, both of the University of Baltimore School of Law, are publishing New Wine in Old Wineskins: Metaphor and Legal Research in the 2016 Notre Dame Law Review Online. Here is the abstract.

We construct our conceptual world using metaphors. Yet sometimes our concepts are flawed and our metaphors do damage. This Article examines a set of metaphors currently doing damage in law – those for legal research. It shows that while technology has radically altered the material world of legal research, our dominant metaphors have remained static, and thus, become outmoded. Conceptualizing today’s reality using old metaphors fails; it is like pouring new wine in old wineskins. To address this problem, this Article first surfaces unwarranted assumptions buried in the metaphors we use when talking about research and then proposes new metaphors to better serve theory and practice. It concludes by examining how this investigation into “finding law” implicates primary jurisprudential concepts of law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.  

A Film About Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Electricity To Hit the Big Screen

IP nerds take note: Graham Moore's novel The Last Days of Night, which dramatizes Thomas Edison's battle with George Westinghouse and the AC/DC wars (for the younguns, this is before the rock group) will hit the big screen as a film from Black Bear Pictures. Eddie Redmayne has signed on to play Paul Cravath, of Cravath, Swaine, & Moore, who at 26 was hired to represent Edison in the infringement suit.

Mr. Moore is also known for the film The Imitation Game, which was based on his novel. 

More here from NPR, the ABA Journal. 

More here about the IP battle from the Smithsonian Magazine.

Graber on State Constitutions as National Constitutions

Mark Graber, University of Maryland School of Law, is publishing State Constitutions as National Constitutions in the Arkansas Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Practice trumped theory on the precise status of newly independent states when Americans drafted and ratified early state constitutional documents. General agreement appears to exist that the Continental Congress was empowered to conduct the Revolution and make foreign alliances, while the states were empowered to regulate internal police matters. State politicians during the time between the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the federal Constitution, however, consistently undertheorized the basis of the distinction between internal and external affairs, at least when framing official state constitutional documents. 1770s and 1780s pamphleteers and essayists frequently expounded on the proper relationships between the periphery and core, but those responsible for early state constitutions did not adopt any available understanding of federalism in a uniform or clear matter. Broad statements on theory were either ambiguous or conflicting. Some provisions in early state constitutions indicated that the United States was becoming, or was, a confederated union composed of independent, sovereign states. Others evince a more consolidated regime. The best evidence suggests that under the pressure of time and circumstances, those responsible for state constitutions felt little need to reach agreement or even think deeply about the theoretical foundations of the federal-state relationship when they agreed on the immediate practical division of labor before them. The state constitutional response, or lack thereof, to the ratification of the federal Constitution suggests that Americans reached no greater consensus on the location of ultimate sovereignty in 1788, when the Constitution was ratified, or in 1791, when all states ratified the Constitution.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Cameron on Dialogue in Charter Interpretation

Jamie Cameron, Osgoode Hall Law School, has published Collateral Thoughts on Dialogue's Legacy as Metaphor and Theory: A Favourite from Canada as Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper No. 66/2016. Here is the abstract.

“Collateral Thoughts” is part of a special issue edited by Professor James Allan, who invited and challenged a group of scholars to select and discuss a favourite law review article. I chose “The Charter Dialogue Between Courts and Legislatures” because it is the most influential article to date in the Charter of Rights and Freedom’s relatively short history (since 1982). I call this reflection “Collateral Thoughts” because my interest is less in the merits of dialogue theory than in its remarkable impact, at home in Canada as well as abroad, in the broader reaches of comparative constitutionalism and constitutional theory. In the main, this reflection asks how and why “dialogue” became a runaway concept, and considers what that tells us about the nature and formation of constitutional theory. It shows that Dialogue was fundamentally connected to Canada’s catharsis of rights, in 1982 and in the early years of Charter interpretation. That is why its claim that the legitimacy battles which define American judicial review are irrelevant – because Canada’s system of rights protection is based on “dialogue” – was so explosive. Not only did this article command attention in Canada, the concept of dialogue would be “reified”, castigated and deeply analyzed by scholars and Commonwealth jurisdictions who wondered whether weaker or weak-form judicial review was institutionally possible. Much like other theories in the US constitutional tradition, Dialogue responded to controversy by theorizing and attempting to legitimize review. Despite failing in its objective to eliminate legitimacy concerns about review, Dialogue catalyzed a national and international movement in constitutional thought.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Olree on Madison's Vision of Religious Liberty

Andy G. Olree, Faulkner University School of Law, has published A Madisonian Vision of Religious Liberty at 7 Faulkner Law Review 19 (2015). Here is the abstract.

James Madison thought and wrote a great deal about issues of religious liberty. Some of his stances are well-known, while others ought to be better known. His theory of religious liberty resists easy categorization by the partisans in our current debates over church and state. While Madison himself claimed to stand for “total separation” of religion and government, his stances differed in important ways from those of many of today’s “strict separationists.” At the same time, he firmly rejected state attempts to support religious truths and practices — even broad “Judeo-Christian” ones — as well as state attempts to acknowledge the privileged place of religion in our history and culture. This invited essay, written for the 2015 Faulkner Law Review Symposium on “The Meaning of Religious Liberty in the Anglo-American Tradition,” summarizes and documents Madison’s understanding of religious liberty, with specific reference to concepts such as religious toleration, natural rights of conscience, religious exemptions in law, and establishments of religion. Along the way, the essay draws attention to points of agreement and disagreement between Madison and John Locke.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Galic, Timan, and Koops on Bentham, Deleuze, and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories From the Panopticon to Participation

Maša Galič, Tjerk Timan, and Bert-Jaap Koops, all of Tilburg University, Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, have published Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation at Philos. Technol. (2016), DOI: 10.1007/s13347-016-0219-1. Here is the abstract.

This paper aims to provide an overview of surveillance theories and concepts that can help to understand and debate surveillance in its many forms. As scholars from an increasingly wide range of disciplines are discussing surveillance, this literature review can offer much-needed common ground for the debate. We structure surveillance theory in three roughly chronological-thematic phases. The first two conceptualise surveillance through comprehensive theoretical frameworks, which are elaborated in the third phase. The first phase, featuring Bentham and Foucault, offers architectural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is often physical and spatial, involving centralised mechanisms of watching over subjects. Panoptic structures function as architectures of power, not only directly but also through (self-)disciplining of the watched subjects. The second phase offers infrastructural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is networked and relies primarily on digital rather than physical technologies. It involves distributed forms of watching over people, with increasing distance to the watched and often dealing with data doubles rather than physical persons. Deleuze, Haggerty and Ericson, and Zuboff develop different theoretical frameworks than panopticism to conceptualise the power play involved in networked surveillance. The third phase of scholarship refines, combines, or extends the main conceptual frameworks developed earlier. Surveillance theory branches out to conceptualise surveillance through concepts such as dataveillance, access control, social sorting, peer-to-peer surveillance, and resistance. With the datafication of society, surveillance combines the physical with the digital, government with corporate surveillance, and top-down with self-surveillance. 

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A New Blog Devoted To Legal History Makes Its Debut

Three legal historians have launched a new blog devoted to, appropriately enough, legal history: Legal History Miscellany.  Sara M. Butler is the King George III Professor of British History at The Ohio State University.  Krista Kesselring is Professor of British History at Dalhousie University.  Katherine D. Watson is Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University. More about them here.



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Allen on Doctrine as a Disruptive Practice.

Jessie Allen, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, has published Doctrine as a Disruptive Practice as University of Pittsburgh Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2016-21. Here is the abstract.

This article proposes a different way to think about legal reasoning that focuses on its psychological effects rather than its ability to identify legal outcomes. Legal doctrine, such as statutes and case law, is generally thought to contribute to legal decision making only to the extent that it determines legal outcomes, or at least narrows the range of justifiable outcomes. Yet in many cases that come to court, the available authorities are acknowledged to be indeterminate. Over the course of decades, various theories and methods have been proposed to justify judges’ continued reliance on doctrine. Most of this literature focuses on doctrine’s capacity to direct substantive outcomes and ignores other benefits that doctrinal reasoning might provide. Recently, however, some empirical studies have begun to consider the potential cognitive effects of judges’ engagement with doctrine. This article offers another model for how doctrine might influence judges’ perceptions. Drawing on performance theory and recent psychological studies of readers, I argue that judges’ disciplined engagement with formal legal doctrine might have self-disrupting effects akin to those performers experience when they deliberately alter their physical and vocal habits. Investigating doctrine’s disruptive potential might help explain why judges continue to reason doctrinally despite doctrinal indeterminacy. The model of self-disruptive doctrine cannot explain how judges ultimately resolve, or should resolve, legal questions. But disruptive doctrinal effects would be valuable in and of themselves as a way for legal decision makers to set aside their usual subjective biases.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.