Brophy on The Jurisprudence of Slavery, Freedom, and Union at Washington College, 1831-1861

Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Law, has published The Jurisprudence of Slavery, Freedom, and Union at Washington College, 1831-1861. Here is the abstract.

In the thirty years leading into Civil War faculty and students at Washington College and the Virginia Military Institute discussed ideas about adherence to Union, the legal justification of slavery, slaves’ claims to freedom, and jurisprudence. Their discussion of jurisprudence included the need for adherence to law, and the roles of morality, sentiment, and utility in law. This article draws upon public addresses, like graduation speeches, at Washington College and VMI, to recover the sophisticated legal ideas in circulation in Lexington. Washington College was a place of Whig values of Union, adherence to law, and concern for utility. Speakers supported common Whig ideas, including the need for republican government to check excesses of democracy and a focus on the ways that a well-ordered society and respect for property and Christianity led to moral and economic progress. It also moved from a place where faculty held Enlightenment ideas about freedom – even if circumscribed by economic reality – to a place where slavery was embraced, partly because it was part of the Constitution. By contrast, at the Virginia Military Institute, pro-slavery and pro-secession ideas were more prevalent. The constitutional visions at moderate Washington College and pro-secession institutions at more radical places, like the University of Virginia, William and Mary, and the College of Charleston, reflected the wide range of Southern ideas about Union, slavery, utility, sentiment, Republicanism, and constitutionalism. Those ideas framed the Southern response to political changes, as Southerners discussed the mandates of jurisprudence and the Constitution in the years leading into War.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A Panel Discussion on Espionage In Life and Art

David Grann moderates a 2013 New Yorker Festival panel on real world espionage and fictional spying. Participants include former C.I.A. agent Tony Mendez, inspiration for the film Argo, Jeff Moss, who founded Def Con, the hacker conference, and Joe Weisberg, a former C.I.A. operative who uses his experience to inform his creation, the FX TV show The Americans.

David Grann is the author of the new book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, as well as prior books The Lost City of Z and The Devil & Sherlock Holmes.

More about the New Yorker Festival 2013 here;  here's information about the 2017 festival.

Spoo on Informal Publishing Norms and the Copyright Vacuum in Nineteenth-Century America @TULaw

Robert E. Spoo, University of Tulsa College of Law, has published Courtesy Paratexts: Informal Publishing Norms and the Copyright Vacuum in Nineteenth-Century America at 69 Stanford Law Review 637 (2017). Here is the abstract.

In response to the failure of U.S. copyright law to protect foreign authors, nineteenth-century American publishers evolved an informal practice called the “courtesy of the trade” as a way to mitigate the public goods problem posed by a large and ever-growing commons of foreign works. Trade courtesy was a shared strategy for regulating potentially destructive competition for these free resources, an informal arrangement among publishers to recognize each other’s wholly synthetic exclusive rights in otherwise unprotected writings and to pay foreign authors legally uncompelled remuneration for the resulting American editions. Courtesy was, in effect, a makeshift copyright regime grounded on unashamed trade collusion and community-based norms. This Article examines a particular feature of this informal system: the courtesy paratext. Typically appearing in the form of letters or statements by foreign authors, courtesy paratexts prefaced numerous American editions of foreign works published from the 1850s to the 1890s. These paratexts — supplements to the text proper — played a prohibitory role (not unlike the standard copyright notice) and also extolled the regulating and remunerating virtues of the courtesy system. Authorial paratexts continued to accompany texts well into the twentieth century — including, notably, American editions of James Joyce’s and J.R.R. Tolkien’s works — and enable us to observe the principles of courtesy as they operated less overtly to govern American publishers’ treatment of unprotected foreign works. A little-examined source for understanding the history of copyright law and informal publishing norms, courtesy paratexts offer insight into a form of private ordering that rendered the American public domain a paying commons.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Frankel on Vulnerable Populations, Social Investigations, and Epistemic Justice in Early Victorian Britain @NSSRNews

Oz Frankel, New School for Social Research, is publishing Vulnerable Populations, Social Investigations, and Epistemic Justice in Early Victorian Britain in volume 7 of Oñati Socio-Legal Series (2017). Here is the abstract (English and Spanish).

English Abstract: Conducted by royal commissions, select committees and the newly established inspectorates, early Victorian social investigations elaborated formats and procedures of public inquiry that left an enduring impact on modern, liberal public spheres in the English speaking world and beyond. This article revisits a few features of 19th Century official investigations, highlighting the rather diverse and contradictory effects these fact-seeking ventures had on British democratic culture. I argue that even as government inquiries confirmed and strengthen social gradations as well as hierarchies of knowledge and expertise, they nevertheless allowed the British lower classes to participate in official discourse as knowers, not just sufferers, and opened new possibilities for dissent and contestations. I highlight the manner in which the investigation itself rather than any consequent legislation or policy touched upon the administration of justice either by emulating court procedures or in terms of its epistemic labor.

Spanish Abstract: Las investigaciones sociales de principio de la época victoriana dirigidas por comisiones reales, comités selectos y las inspecciones que se estaban creando entonces, elaboraron formatos y procedimientos de investigación pública que dejaron un impacto duradero en las esferas públicas modernas y liberales tanto en el mundo angloparlante como fuera de él. Este artículo revisa algunas características de las investigaciones oficiales del siglo XIX, resaltando los efectos diversos y contradictorios que estas iniciativas de búsqueda de hechos tuvieron en la cultura democrática británica. Se defiende que, a pesar de que las investigaciones gubernamentales confirmaron y reforzaron las escalas sociales y las jerarquías de conocimiento y experiencia, permitieron que las clases bajas británicas participaran en el discurso oficial como conocedores y no sólo víctimas, y abrieron nuevas posibilidades de disensión y lucha. Se destaca la forma en la que las propias investigaciones, más que cualquier legislación o política consiguiente, mencionaron de pasada la administración de justicia, emulando procedimientos judiciales o en su trabajo epistémico.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Klerman on Quantitative Legal History @USCGouldLaw

Daniel M. Klerman, USC Gould School of Law, is publishing Quantitative Legal History in the Oxford Handbook of Historical Legal Research (Oxford, forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Legal historians seldom use statistics, but this is a missed opportunity. Quantitative methods are particularly helpful in understand core legal history issues, including the effect of legal change and the influence of multiple factors on legislation, judicial decisionmaking, and citizen behavior. Recent work by Gavin Wright, Paul Mahoney, and Michele Landis Dauber shows how tables, graphs, and regression analysis can be woven into persuasive historical narrative and analysis. Collaboration between legal historians and quantitative social scientists also provides an untapped avenue to enrich the field.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

A New Book From Hart Publishing: Anthony Arlidge: The Lawyers Who Made America @hartpublishing

Newly published:

Anthony Arlidge, The Lawyers Who Made America (Hart Publishing, 2017). 

No other nation's creation, both politically and socially, owes such a debt to lawyers as the United States of America. This book traces the story of that creation through the human lives of those who played important parts in it: amongst others, of English lawyers who established the form of the original colonies; of the Founding Fathers, who declared independence and created a Constitution; of Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Justices of the Supreme Court and finally Barack Obama. Even Richard Nixon features, if only as a reminder that even the President is subject to the law. The author combines his wide legal experience and engaging writing style to produce a book that will enthral lawyers and laymen alike, giving perhaps a timely reminder of the importance of the rule of law to American democracy.

Stern on The Literary Analysis of Law @ArsScripta @OxUniPress

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, is publishing Literary Analysis of Law in The Oxford Handbook of Historical Legal Research (Markus D. Dubber and Christopher Tomlins, eds., Oxford, --). Here is the abstract.

Legal historians often turn to literary examples to show how doctrines, practices, or institutions were perceived at a certain a time. Imaginative works sometimes serve as representative illustrations of legal phenomena, sometimes as alternatives to dominant legal ideas or assumptions (voicing dissent or presenting figures and perspectives that escape the law’s comprehension), sometimes as evidence for the dissemination of legal thought or folk wisdom about the law, and sometimes as a kind of parallel formation that uses, or reflects on, legal methods and modes of explanation, even if the work does not expressly address legal issues. This chapter focuses primarily on the last two approaches, by way of two case studies. The first case study uses text-mining to show how earlier versions of the Miranda warning appeared in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction, and to ask what we may infer about how these writers understood the warning's purpose and effect. In the second case study, I consider how Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91) reflects on contemporaneous obscenity law. The aim in this section is to show how literary interpretation can inform legal historical inquiry by taking us beyond what the text depicts, focusing attention instead on how the text operates. This kind of inquiry can bring out connections between law and literature that we would miss, if we attended only to what the text explicitly says or describes. The chapter ends with a short bibliography of recent scholarship on law and literature that focuses specifically on the historical dimensions of the inquiry.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Journal of Social History: New Issue on Law and Emotions

In the new issue of the Journal of Social History, articles on law and emotion:
via @maksdelmar @KatieEBarclay

• Emotional Environments and Legal Spaces in Early Modern Russia 

  Marianna Muravyeva

  Published:

   

  3 May 2017

  • Abstract 
   
  • View article

• The Press, the Audience, and Emotions in Italian Courtrooms (1860s–1910s) 

  Gian Marco Vidor

  Published:

   

  3 May 2017

  • Abstract 
   
  • View article

• Performing Emotion and Reading the Male Body in the Irish Court, c. 1800–1845 

  Katie Barclay

  Published:

   

  3 May 2017

  • Abstract 
   
  • View article

• Fighting Words: Anger, Insult, and “Self-Help” in Early Modern German Law 

  Allyson F. Creasman

  Published:

   

  3 May 2017

  • Abstract 
   
  • View article

• Emotions, Mind, and Body on Trial: A Cross-Cultural Perspective 

  Laura Kounine

  Published:

   

  3 May 2017

  • Abstract 
   
  • View article

A Realistic Theory of Law: A New Book From Brian Z. Tamanaha

Brian Z. Tamanaha, Washington University, St. Louis, has published A Realistic Theory of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

This book articulates an empirically grounded theory of law applicable throughout history and across different societies. Unlike natural law theory or analytical jurisprudence, which are narrow, abstract, ahistorical, and detached from society, Tamanaha's theory presents a holistic vision of law within society, evolving in connection with social, cultural, economic, political, ecological, and technological factors. He revives a largely forgotten theoretical perspective on law that runs from Montesquieu through the legal realists to the present. This book explains why the classic question 'what is law?' has never been resolved, and casts doubt on theorists' claims about necessary and universal truths about law. This book develops a theory of law as a social institution with varying forms and functions, tracing law from hunter-gatherer societies to the modern state and beyond. Tamanaha's theory accounts for social influences on law, legal influences on society, law and domination, multifunctional governmental uses of law, legal pluralism, international law, and other legal aspects largely overlooked in jurisprudence.

Presents the only contemporary version of a holistic theory of law within society

An excellent resource to learn a great deal about legal theory from a social scientific perspective

Traces the development of law and society, providing an account of the transformation of modern law.

And For Those of You Who Thought Star Wars Had No More Legal Issues to Consider

Here are some practical questions and answers to mull over during exam-writing/grading time, courtesy of  Ryan Nanni and Spencer Hall's A Review of Star Wars Law.

You might also want to check out Derek R. Sweet, Star Wars In the Public Square: The Clone Wars as Political Dialogue (McFarland, 2016) (Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy; 50).

See also this blog's prior posts here, here, here, and here  and an earlier study by Thomson-Reuters here.

"More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine": Star Wars and the Academy @PacificStand

Max Ufberg notes (in an article dated December 17, 2015) that more than a thousand (more or less) academic articles have come out on the subject of Star Wars. He gives a few examples, but a quick Google Scholar search turns up many more intriguing titles. Scholars (and publishers) show no sign of abandoning their interest in the franchise, or the ideas the films pose. After all, it's reboot time.

Here are some.

Jeanne Cavelos, The Science of Star Wars (St. Martin's Press, 1999).

Andrew Gordon, "Star Wars": A Myth For Our Time, 6 Literature/Film Quarterly 314 (Fall 1978).

Mary S. Henderson, Star Wars: The Magic of Myth (Bantam Books, 1997) (Exhibition catalog).

Nick Jamilla, Sword Fighting in the Star Wars Universe (McFarland, 2008).

Martin Miller and Robert Sprich, The Appeals of "Star Wars": An Archetypal-Psychoanalytic View, 38 American Imago 203 (Summer 1981).

Elana Shefrin, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom: Mapping New Congruencies Between the Internet and Media Entertainment Culture, 21 Critical Studies in Media Communications 261 (2004).

Star Wars and Philosophy: More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine (Kevin S. Decker and Jason T. Eberl, eds., Open Court Publishing, 2005).

Pearce, Winer, and Jenab on A Challenge To Bleached Out Professional Identity: How Jewish Was Justice Louis D. Brandeis? @FordhamLawNYC @LAWMcGill

Russell G. Pearce, Fordham University School of Law, Adam Winer, McGill University, and Emily Jenab, Fordham University, are publishing A Challenge to Bleached out Professional Identity: How Jewish Was Justice Louis D. Brandeis? in volume 33 of the Touro Law Review. Here is the abstract.

As an exemplar, Justice Louis D. Brandeis challenges the currently dominant conception that requires lawyers to, in Sanford Levinson's term, "bleach out" their personal identity from their professional identity. Under the dominant neutral partisan vision of the lawyer, clients will only receive the equal representation necessary to provide equal justice if lawyers exclude all personal and group identifications from their role. Brandeis, in contrast, asserted that his Jewish identity constructed his understanding of himself as a jurist. His distinguished career thereby provides a counter-narrative to bleaching-out that can serve as a model for all lawyers, whatever their personal and group identities. To develop an understanding of Brandeis, we explore how Brandeis and his biographers have described his Jewish identity. Although Brandeis expressly described his professional commitments to equal justice and the public good as grounded in his Judaism, almost all his biographers focus on the content of Brandeis's Judaism and find it lacking in authenticity. Our focus on professional identity allows us to analyze Brandeis's Judaism without reaching the question of its authenticity. Instead, we highlight how Brandeis expressly acknowledged the determinative influence of Judaism in constructing his professional self and how this approach to identity conflicts with that of the now dominant bleaching-out perspective. We suggest that Brandeis offers a role model for lawyers to who consider incorporating -- rather than bleaching-out -- their personal values and finding in those values resources that reinforce professional commitments. This would extend beyond Jewish lawyers to those who ground their role in moral responsibility, feminism, racial justice, LGBTQ rights, and civics teaching, as well as religious lawyering. In comparison, the bleached-out approach offers at best ambiguous support for professional values beyond the neutral partisan role. Furthermore, it rests on flawed assumptions -- all lawyers are not fungible in skill and all lawyers have idiosyncratic personal values that they exercise within the broad discretion that the ethical rules afford. Indeed, sociological research demonstrates that as a general matter lawyers who take a bleaching out approach are less likely to treat clients and colleagues without bias than lawyers who openly acknowledge their biases at the same time they seek to treat others without bias. We concede, however, that in relatively rarely circumstances lawyers will not be able to integrate their personal and professional values successfully. In those circumstances, lawyers must defer to professional values or risk professional sanction.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Capers on Re-Reading Alafair Burke's "The-Ex" @alafairburke @brooklynlaw

I. Bennett Capers, Brooklyn Law School, is publishing Re-Reading Alafair Burke's The Ex in the New England Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Alafair Burke’s best-selling novel The Ex is certainly entertaining. What enhances its entertainment value several times over is its grounding in the law, which not only contributes to its verisimilitude but also makes it a prime example of law in literature. Although the novel is, on one level, escapist genre fiction, a thriller, and a beach read, on an entirely other level it speaks of and to the law. One could even say that the criminal justice system — the network of constitutional protections, rules of ethics, police regulations and protocol, together with the prosecutors and defense lawyers, judges and the media — functions on the level of a character in the novel. Thus, it is unsurprising that the New England Law Review has devoted a symposium issue to The Ex. My goal in this brief essay is to touch on three things. Part One begins by discussing The Ex as entertainment enhanced by a grounding in the law. Part Two takes up the issue of inequality in criminal justice, as alluded to in The Ex. Part Three takes up a different point entirely, situating The Ex in the context of literary theory, specifically an influential and apropos work of criticism, The Novel and the Police.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Tai on the Rule of Law and Legal Epistemology @TilburgLawNews

Eric Tjong Tjin Tai, Tilburg Law School, has published Rule of Law and Legal Epistemology at Legal Argumentation and Rule of Law 193-204 (E. Feteris, J. Plug, and C. Smith, eds., The Hague: Eleven, 2016).

Against the positivistic conception of law, restricted to sources of law, it is argued that doctrine and other materials are also relevant. Legal argumentation is based on legal knowledge, which is constructed not only with legal authorities but also with epistemic authorities, in line with the epistemological recognition of testimony as source of knowledge. This approach can accommodate the authority of non-binding texts, thereby contributing to a legal method for a multi-level legal order.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Droit vs Super-héros, l’affrontement final: Du Punisher au Lawyer: A Law and Pop Culture Conference at the University of Strasbourg, May 12, 2017 @yannbasire

On May 12, the Faculty of Law, University of Strasbourg will present a conference, Droit vs super-héros, l’affrontement final: Du punisher au lawyer. This conference is the second of two (the first took place in May of last year and was carried  live on France's Canal Plus). Yann Basire, Professor of Law, organized both. Pretty exciting: I don't think a major US network would carry a law and pop culture conference live! Or taped, come to think of it.

Spoo and Stern Editors of New Oxford University Series In Law and LIterature @ArsScripta @OxUniPress

Oxford University Press is launching a new series, Law and Literature. The editors are Robert Spoo, of the University of Tulsa College of Law, and Simon Stern, of the University of Toronto's Department of English and Faculty of Law. 

This series looks wonderful. I'll be looking forward to seeing what publications these distinguished editors bring forward under this imprint.

Domingo on The Family in Ancient Roman Law

Rafael Domingo, Emory School of Law and University of Navarra, has published The Family in Ancient Roman Law. Here is the abstract.

The family constituted the basic structural framework of Roman society. The Latin term familia means, essentially, household. It can refer to both persons and things It encompasses all persons who are under the power of a single head (the paterfamilias), and, in a broader sense, all relatives connected by blood or marriage. In a still broader sense, the Roman family encompassed all personal property, including slaves and physical objects. Social stratification, sexual inequality, and legal subordination were defining features of the Roman family.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Bazyler on The Holocaust at Nuremberg: What the Record Reveals @MichaelBazyler

Michael J. Bazyler, Chapman University School of Law, is publishing The Holocaust at Nuremberg: What the Record Reveals in volume 39 of the Loyola (L.A.) International and Comparative Law Review (2017). Here is the abstract.

Historians continue to debate how much of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) proceedings at Nuremberg concerned the Holocaust. The official goal of the Allies in Europe was to end the war by militarily defeating Nazi Germany. Stopping the atrocities was of secondary importance. Once the war ended and the top Nazis were put on trial at Nuremberg, they were not tried for the mass murder of the Jews. Chief Nuremberg prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson announced at trial that the supreme crime committed by the twenty-one German defendants on the dock was the crime of waging aggressive war. This article aims to show that during the IMT trial, the genocide of the Jews — today known by the term Holocaust — was a running theme of the trial. To illustrate the significance of the subject of Jewish persecution at the IMT, the article examines actual testimony and other evidence introduced by the prosecution during each stage of the trial. Those who mine the IMT proceedings will find much about the fate of the Jews in territories under Nazi occupation. The historiography of the Holocaust began at Nuremberg.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Shelley on Poets and Legislators

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." A Defence of Poetry (1821).

Workshop on Imagination and Legal Practice, Newcastle Law School, May 10, 2017 @ThomGiddens @NCLLawSchool

From the mailbox:
via @ThomGiddens

Workshop on Imagination and Legal Practice

Newcastle Law School – Conference Room

10 May 2017

14:00 – 18:30 (Registration at 13:45)

Theme

A workshop to explore the relationship between imagination and legal practice, drawing on the insights of disciplines outside of jurisprudence. The workshop is intended as a scoping event to consider the potential for a new research network. As such, we are keen to welcome attendees from any discipline who might be interested in joining such a network, or who simply want to find out more about the work we hope to do on this subject in the coming years.

Speakers include:

Dr Anna Abraham

Neuropsychology, Leeds Beckett University

Tom Bennett

Law, Newcastle University

Dr Meiko O’Halloran

Literature, Newcastle University

Emilia Mickiewicz

Law, Newcastle University

Prof Richard Mullender

Law & Legal Theory, Newcastle University

Dr Kathleen Stock

Philosophy, University of Sussex

If you would like to attend this workshop, please register at: http://forms.ncl.ac.uk/view.php?id=12505

There is no fee for attendance.

Queries please email thomas.bennett@ncl.ac.uk

A Special Issue of the German Law Journal: Law's Pluralities: Arguments for Cultural Approaches To Law @Ger_Law_Journal

Fascinating special issue of the German Law Journal: Law's Pluralities: Arguments For Cultural Approaches To Law.

The issue includes articles by Greta Olson, Franz Reimer, Susanne Baer, Anna-Bettina Kaiser, Andreas von Arnauld, Jeanne Gaakeer, Martin A. Kayman, Franz-Willem Korsten, and Christine Henschel and Susanne Krasmann. Here's a link to a PDF of the entire issue.

ICYMI: Comics, The Holocaust, and Hiroshima: A Book From Jane L. Chapman, Dan Ellin, and Adam Sherif (from Palgrave Macmillan)

ICYMI: Jane L. Chapman, Dan Ellin, and Adam Sherif, Comics, the Holocaust and Hiroshima (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Comics, the Holocaust and Hiroshima breaks new ground for history by exploring the relationship between comics as a cultural record, historiography, memory and trauma studies. Comics have a dual role as sources: for gauging awareness of the Holocaust and through close analysis, as testimonies and narratives of childhood emotions and experiences.

Graphic Justice Discussions 2017: Directions and Distractions, July 4-5, 2017: Call For Papers Extended Until May 14, 2017

From Thom Giddens, St. Mary's University,

Call For Papers: Extended until May 14, 2017

Graphic Justice Discussions 2017Directions and Distractions4-5 July, St Mary’s University The intersections of comics and legality represent a burgeoning area of concern within, without, and between legal, cultural, and comics communities. But what directions or distractions do comics bring to the project of justice? Are comics a valuable and important resource, or are they mere entertainment and intellectual amusement? Are comics for fun, rather than for rigorous analysis as part of the serious task of law and justice? Does visual storytelling inevitably distract us from the judicial project?

 Engaging with these provocative questions, and the intersection of comics and law more generally, Graphic Justice Discussions 2017 seeks to explore the potential, possible, and plural value of comics for the understanding and practice of justice, morality, and the regulation of human life.

 Please see further details here: http://graphicjustice.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/graphic-justice-discussions-2017-call.html 

Drawing Justice, A New Exhibit of Courtroom Illustrations, Opens At the Law Library of Congress @LibnofCongress @LawLibCongress

A new exhibit, Drawing Justice: The Art of Courtroom Illustration, has opened at the Library of Congress. It will run through October 28 of this year. It's free and open to the public, and includes 95 images by some amazing courtroom artists, including Aggie Kenny, Bill Robles, and Elizabeth Williams. More here, including information about Thomas Girardi, who is helping to underwrite the exhibit.

Reminder: Call For Papers, AALS Section of Law and the Humanities Panel on Robots and AI in the Humanities, 2018 Annual Meeting

 Reminder:

 

Call for papers for an AALS Section of Law and the Humanities panel at the 2018 Annual Meeting, San Diego, January 3-January 6, 2018,  on the theme of the image of robots and AI in the humanities, communication, film, tv, art, commercials, philosophy, and related disciplines. Should robots and AI have rights? If so what rights? 

Intrigued by the image of robots in film? Have you thought about what norms or law should govern the behavior of AI in society? Input your thoughts into a laptop, or on paper,  or get an android to co-author something with you and send your expression of interest, affiliation, and a short description (100-250 words) of  your proposed paper by May 15, 2017 to

Christine Corcos (christine.corcos@law.lsu.edu) at LSU Law Center. See you in San Diego!

Tilburg University Seeks Applicants For Postdoctoral Research Position in Criminal Law and Privacy @TilburgU

Tilburg University is advertising a post-doctoral position in criminal law and privacy, starting date September 1, 2017. More details here.

How Writers Imagine the Future @LaphamsQuart

From Lapham's Quarterly, a piece by Darran Anderson on images of utopian and dystopian futures.

A Book on Using the Reality TV Genre In Education @LSUwgs

ICYMI:

Jacqueline Bach, Reel Education: Documentaries, Biopics, and Reality Television (Peter Lang, 2016)(Minding the Media). 

Reel Education is the first single-authored book to bring together the theoretical and practical considerations of teaching cinematic texts about education that claim a degree of verisimilitude. Given the recent influx of documentaries, biopics, and reality television shows about education, new theoretical frameworks are required to understand how these productions shape public conversations about educational issues. Such texts, with their claims to represent real-life experiences, have a particular power to sway audiences who may uncritically accept these stories as offering “the truth” about what happens in schools. Since all texts, whatever their truth-claims may be, are grounded in specific ideologies, those in the fields of humanities, education, and media and communication studies must pay attention to how these films and television shows are constructed and for what purposes. This book provides an analysis of documentaries, biopics, and reality television, examining the construction of the genres, the explicit and latent ideologies they contain, and the ways in which students and faculty might critically engage with them in classrooms.

Professor Bach is currently Elena & Albert LeBlanc Associate Professor of English Education at LSU and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program.

Swanson on Rubbing Elbows and Blowing Smoke: Gender, Class, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Patent Office @KaraWSwanson

Kara W. Swanson, Northeastern University School of Law, has published Rubbing Elbows and Blowing Smoke: Gender, Class, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Patent Office at 108 Isis: A Journal of Science 1 (2017). Here is the abstract.

The United States Patent Office of the 1850s offers a rare opportunity to analyze the early gendering of science. In its crowded rooms, would-be scientists shared a workplace with women earning equal pay for equal work. Scientific men worked as patent examiners, claiming this new occupation as scientific in opposition to those seeking to separate science and technology. At the same time, in an unprecedented and ultimately unsuccessful experiment, female clerks were hired to work alongside male clerks. This article examines the controversies surrounding these workers through the lens of manners and deportment. In the unique context of a workplace combining scientific men and working ladies, office behavior revealed the deep assumption that the emerging American scientist was male and middle class.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Legal Conversations As Signifier: A New Book From Elgar Publishing @ElgarPublishing

Forthcoming from Elgar Publishing:

Legal Conversation as Signifier (Jan M. Broekman and Frank Fleerackers, ed., September 2017) (Elgar Studies in Legal Theory). Here is a description of the book's contents.

Conversation and argument concerning laws and legal situations take place throughout society and at all levels, yet the language of these conversations differs greatly from that of the courtroom. This insightful book considers the gap between everyday discussion about law and the artificial, technical language developed by lawyers, judges and other legal specialists. In doing so, it explores the intriguing possibilities for future synthesis, a problem often neglected by legal theory.

Analysing the major components of law and legal procedure across both common and civil law, this book reveals how legal conversation on the ‘street’ contributes to our understanding of law as well as our democratic citizenship. Jan M. Broekman and Frank Fleerackers consider the impact of multiculturalism and the threat of terror on our impressions of legal conversation and the importance we place upon it, arguing that anarchism and legalism are hostile neighbours sharing many themes and motives. Exploring the meaning and sense of the concept of ‘street’ in ancient and modern times, the authors pose the question: is law just a discourse or should it be classified as one of the major narratives in human life?

Unique and discerning, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the language of law. Legal educators will find their scope broadened whilst researchers, activists and politicians will find themselves captivated by the focus on social activism and citizen motivation.

A New Book From Philip Allott on Philosophy and Law (Elgar Publishing) @ElgarPublishing

New from Elgar Publishing:

Philip Allott, Professor Emeritus of International Public Law and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, has published Eutopia: New Philosophy and New Law for a Troubled World.  Here is a description of the book's contents.

The human world is in a mess. The human mind is in a mess. And now the human species is threatening its own survival by its own inventions and by war. For thousands of years, human beings conducted a great debate about the human condition and human possibilities, about philosophy and society and law.

In 1516, Thomas More, in his book Utopia, contributed to the ancient debate, at another time of profound transformation in the human world. In our own time, we have witnessed a collapse in intellectual life, and a collapse in the theory and practice of education. The old debate is, for all practical purposes, dead.

In 2016, Philip Allott’s Eutopia resumes the debate about the role of philosophy and society and law in making a better human future, responding to a human world that More could not have imagined. And he lets us hear the voices of some of those who contributed to the great debate in the past, voices that still resonate today.

 

Kopel on The Right To Arms in Nineteenth Century Colorado @SturmCOL

David B. Kopel, Independence Institute and University of Denver College of Law, has published The Right to Arms in Nineteenth Century Colorado as University of Denver Legal Studies Research Paper No. 17-14. Here is the abstract.

This Article examines the Colorado right to keep and bear arms, in the nineteenth century. Part I describes one the arms of early Coloradans, including Indians, mountain men, and gold rush immigrants. Part I also covers the dramatic improvements in firearms technology that took place in the quarter-century before 1876. Part I then explains some of the conditions that made Colorado’s arms culture different from neighboring territories. Because settlers were remote from any functioning government, they initially had to make their own governments. They created a Colorado tradition of popular self-government that still thrives today. Collectively, the settlers used their arms to defend Colorado from Confederate aggression during the Civil War. Soon after, war with the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes wiped out trade routes from the states, leaving Coloradans near starvation. The settlers survived because they had the arms to fight for survival. The pre-statehood period is one reason the 1876 Colorado Constitution affirms the importance of the individual right to arms for personal defense and for collective defense. Finally, Part I surveys some of the leading firearms businesses of early Colorado — businesses that helped make Denver the “emporium” of the Rocky Mountains. Part II examines the structure of the Colorado Constitution. It begins with the 1875-76 Colorado Convention. It then examines structure of the Colorado Constitution that relate to the right to arms, including the principles of government at the beginning of the Constitution: that inherent rights precede government; that the people have the right to alter the government; and that fundamental human rights, including self-defense, are inalienable. Part III analyzes the arms rights language chosen by the Convention and then adopted by the people. Each phrase in Colorado provision is examined, showing how Colorado sometimes followed or differed from other states. Coloradans chose the strongest language available to secure the right to arms. Immigrant-friendly, Colorado specified that the right belongs to every “person,” not solely to the “citizen.” Personal defense and collective defense were both of fundamental importance, and each was expressly included in the constitutional right. The most important means of collective self-defense are the state militia (article XVII) and the posse comitatus of able-bodied males, who may be summoned by elected County Sheriffs or other appropriate officials (article XIV). Notwithstanding the broad general language, Coloradans did favor one type of gun control — restricting the concealed carrying of arms. That was the only gun control expressly authorized by the constitutional text, which removed concealed carry from the right to bear arms. Part IV examines several interpretive issues. First, what types of arms are implicated by the text of the Colorado guarantee? Second, should this understanding by modified by an idea in the personal notes of Territorial Justice E.T. Wells, a distinguished Colorado Founder? Third, how did arms change in the years following the 1876 Colorado Constitution, and did the changes affect Coloradans’ views of what types of arms laws were permissible? Finally, what types of gun control laws were enacted in Colorado in the nineteenth century?

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

van Rossum on Dutch Legal Culture @wibovanrossum

Wibo M. van Rossum, Erasmus School of Law, has published Dutch Legal Culture in Introduction to Dutch Law, 5th ed. (Jeroen Chorus, Ewoud Hondius, and Wim Voermans, 2017). Here is the abstract.

The chapter argues for a specific concept of legal culture that includes legal ideals, law, legal practice and cultural values. Based on this concept, I characterise dominant traits in Dutch legal culture.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Bodrova and Zubkov on Nikitenko's Diary and the History of Censorship

Alina Bodrova and Kirill Zubkov, both of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, have published From A Historical Source To a Narrative Form: A. V. Nikitenko’s Diary and the History of Censorship as Research Paper No. WP BRP 23/LS/2017. Here is the abstract.

The study explores the narrative structure of Alexandr Nikitenko’s diary, one of the core sources for the history of Russian censorship, and on the role of the genre of anecdote in particular. Through an analysis of the ‘anecdotal’ entries about censorship in Nikitenko’s diary and their evolution (their number peaks during the years of Nicholas I’s reign, and plummets in the parts of the account dealing with Alexander II, particularly in the period of 1860-ies), the authors demonstrate the peculiarities of the ‘anecdotal’ frame in picturing the interactions between literary circles and censorship. The literary form of anecdote, whose strength is in picturing singular oddities and excesses, fails to account for the everyday quality of routine practices, the day-to-day modes of interaction between authors and censors, so that the ‘anecdotal’ narrative can only work as a segment of a more complex and multidimensional vision of how literary agency and censoring authorities interacted.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Chin and Ormonde on The War Against Chinese Restaurants

Gabriel "Jack" Chin, University of California, Davis, School of Law, and John Ormonde are publishing The War against Chinese Restaurants in volume 67 of the Duke Law Journal (2017). Here is the abstract.

Chinese restaurants are now a cultural fixture, as American as cherry pie. Startlingly, however, there was once a national movement to eliminate Chinese restaurants, using innovative legal methods to drive them out. Chinese restaurants were objectionable for two reasons. First, they threatened white women, who were subject to seduction by Chinese men, through intrinsic female weakness, or employment of nefarious techniques such as opium addiction. In addition, Chinese restaurants competed with “American” restaurants, thus threatening the livelihoods of white owners, cooks and servers; unions were the driving force behind the movement. The effort was creative; Chicago used anti-Chinese zoning, Los Angeles restricted restaurant jobs to citizens, Boston authorities decreed Chinese restaurants would be denied licenses, the New York Police Department simply ordered whites out of Chinatown. Perhaps the most interesting technique was a law, endorsed by the American Federation of Labor for adoption in all jurisdictions, prohibiting white women from working in Asian restaurants. Most measures failed or were struck down. However, Asians still lost; the unions did not eliminate Chinese restaurants, but they achieved their more important goal, extending the federal policy of racial exclusion in immigration from Chinese to all Asians. The campaign is of more than historical interest. As current anti-immigration sentiments and efforts show, even today the idea that white Americans should have a privileged place in the economy, or that non-whites are culturally incongruous, persists among some. 

Download the article from SSRN at the link.