CFP: Law and Justice Through Australian Lenses: Bushrangers, Battlers, and Bastards @GriffLawSchool

From Kieran Tranter, Law Futures Centre, Griffith University, comes this call for contributions for a very interesting collection on Australian law and film.

Law and Justice through Australian Lenses: Bushrangers, Battlers and Bastards

Kim Weinert

Law Futures Centre, Griffith University

Kieran Tranter

Law Futures Centre, Griffith University

Australian film and television occupies a special place in global televisual culture. Australian lenses have captured a nation and a culture seemingly fixated on issues of (out)law and (in)justice, producing films and television of striking landscapes peopled by bushrangers, battlers and bastards. From the several outlaw tales of Ned Kelly, to the fight for justice by the Kerrigans in the Castle, to the antics of the ‘ocker’, Australia has created a lasting legacy (for good or bad) of representations of law and justice ‘down-under’. Further, Australian lenses have had a significant impact on global film and television. Deeply compromised by the violence against the lives and laws of First Australians, Australian films and television has sharply illuminated what it means to live with a ‘rule of law’ that rules with a legacy, and a reality, of deep injustice. In this Australian film and television presents a critical lens through which to analysis Western law, legality and justice in its trans-cultural and global context.

This volume is the first to bring together scholars to reflect on, and critically engage with, the representations and global implications of law and justice captured by Australian film and television. It explores how Australian lenses have provided a cascade of distinctly Australian images and narratives that also provide global insights into the translations and transmogrifications of law and justice.

Contributors are invited to submit chapter proposal and a brief CV for consideration by the editors for inclusion in this edited volume.

Possible questions to respond to but not limited to the following:

·       What do Australian lenses tell us about law and justice?

·       How has law and justice been screened by specific Australian films?

·       Has Australian film transcended the legal narratives of ‘bushrangers, battlers and bastards’?

·       How has Australian film and television redressed or continued the violence of dispossession and colonialism towards First Australians?

·       What impact does technology advances and global forces have on producing and consuming Australian films and television? How has law been responsible for this change? How has representations of law and justice been changed?

·       How has Australian framing of law and justice become global?

·       Does Australian film and television bring a unique perspective to the police, lawyer or prison genres?

·       How Australian are Australian films and television?

Contributors should submit a proposal (300 words) and a brief CV (no longer than one page) to: k.tranter@griffith.edu.au by 31 May 2018.

The editors will advise contributors of inclusion and process by 15 June 2018.

The first draft of chapters (5000-7000 words) for peer review will be due 19 November 2018 with an expected publication date of late 2019.

ICYMI: Constitución poética de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos @jcalvo11

Via Iurisdictio-Lex Malacitana:

Constitución poética de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos: una reescritura en el centenario constitucional (Manuel de J. Jiménez Moreno, ed., Mexico City: Editorial Proyecto Literal, 2017).

Davies, on August 1914: Mycroft Holmes and Pre-War European Diplomacy @GB2d

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School, and The Green Bag, has published August 1914 - Mycroft Holmes and Pre-War European Diplomacy at Trenches: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes 127 (Robert Katz and Andrew Solberg, eds., 2018). Here is the abstract.

What caused World War I? And how was it that the diplomats and their masters failed to avert such an obviously disastrous bloodbath? (Sherlock Holmes once referred to war as a “ridiculous” and “preposterous” “method of settling international questions.”) Scholars cannot agree. Indeed, even among elite European historians (a crowd that specializes in studying the evolution of a complex of complex cultures), the tangled threads that led to the Great War are viewed as an extraordinarily terrible mare’s nest. Nevertheless, there is enough common ground on some main themes to make for a fairly coherent conventional narrative of pre-war European diplomacy. It begins in October 1879 — when Austria-Hungary and Germany formed the Dual Alliance. It ends in August 1914 — when diplomacy failed and the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary and Germany) and the Entente Powers (France, Russia and Great Britain) declared war on each other. That passage of 35 years also marks, roughly, the span of Mycroft Holmes’s career in the British government. His involvement in the maneuverings of the great powers in those times may be invisible to most modern eyes (as it was to his contemporaries), but there are clues. They will crop up from time to time in this narrative, which reviews, briefly and in sequence, the perspectives of each of the five major players in the onset of World War I — Austria-Hungary, Germany, France, Russia and Great Britain — with some emphasis on Austria-Hungary, because that is where the war to end all wars began.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Amann on Writing Truth To Power: Remarks in Celebration of IntLawGrrls' Tenth Birthday @DianeMarie Amann @UGASchoolofLaw

Diane Marie Amnn, University of Georgia School of Law and University of Georgia Dean Rusk International Law Center, is publishing Writing Truth to Power: Remarks in Celebration of IntLawGrrls’ Tenth Birthday in volume 46 of the Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law (2017). Here is the abstract.

These remarks begin with a brief history of the founding and development of IntLawGrrls blog, in order both to open the blog's tenth-anniversary conference and to introduce other conference presentations, three of which appear in this same edition of the Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law. Noting the blog's tradition of honoring departed women as foremothers, the remarks nominates yet another: Sophie Scholl, a German student executed for her part in the White Rose movement that acted in resistance to the Nazi regime.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Will Host 29th World Congress of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy in July 2019 @uniluzern

The Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, University of Lucerne, Switzerland, is hosting the 29th World Congress of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy from July 7 to July 13, 2019. The theme of the conference is "Dignity, Democracy, Diversity." Here is a link to more information about the conference.  Here is a link to the CFP.

The Institute is also seeking applications for its Visiting Fellows Program for 2019. See the post here.

Call For Applications, Visiting Fellows Program, Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, University of Lucerne @UniLuzern

The Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, University of Lucerne, Switzerland, has issued a call for applications for its Visiting Fellows Program, 2019. Here is a link to the call. 

See also my next post about the 29th World Congress of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, being held at the Institute in 2019. Looks like it's a very dynamic place for law and humanities research!

Via Steven Howe, Associate Director and Research Fellow, Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, University of Lucerne, Faculty of Law, Lucerne, Switzerland

A New Book From François Ost: Le droit: objet de passions? @jcalvo11

Via the blog Iurisdictio-Lex Malacitana, news of a new publication from François Ost: Le droit: objet de passions? (Academie royal de Belgique, 2018).

Professor Ost is also the author of Raconter la loi (Odile Jacob, 2004), Sade et la loi (Odile Jacob, 2005), and Shakespeare, la comédie de la loi (Michalon, 2012).

Block That Romance Fiction Sports Reference!

In case you missed it, sports team owners need to move quickly if they want to name their franchises something catchy. Otherwise they might find that they've been pre-empted by someone else--say, a romance novel writer.

Seattle is currently contemplating bringing an NHL expansion team to town, and of course that team will need an exciting name. But which one? A number are under consideration,  but might be difficult to use, because they have other connotations. The "Seattle Kraken" sounds pretty fierce, but haven't we heard about Kraken somewhere before? And the "Seattle Sockeye"? Well, as it turns out, there is a Seattle Sockeye hockey team already, but it exists in the pages of writer Pamela Bowerman's romance novels.  Ms. Bowerman has applied for a trademark to protect her fictional team. Goal?

Maybe we'll be hearing about the "Seattle Seafarers"?

Law and Humanities Conference, May 18-19, 2018, Stanford Law School

Stanford Law School is hosting a law and humanities conference, May 18-19.  Here is a link to the agenda, which features, among many other leading scholars, Simon Stern, Bernadette Meyler, Christopher Tomlins, Christopher Warren, Robert Spoo, Bennett Capers, Suzanne Keen, and Nomi Stolzenberg.

Looks like a wonderful event.

Mignanelli on Whether Satan Is a Transactions Attorney @nmignanelli

Nicholas Mignanelli, University of Miami School of Law, has published Is Satan a Transactions Attorney? An Account of Satanic Imagery in Law and Literature. Here is the abstract.

What can the history of satanic imagery in law and literature teach us about the development of humanity’s understanding of its relationship with evil? This wide-ranging account of Satan’s presence across textual mediums uncovers the secret genealogy of contracts with Satan, from the Gospel of Matthew to Mayo v. Satan and His Staff (1971). This ironic lineage recounts how a Christian clergyman was the first to consummate a contract with Satan, how Martin Luther was the first to link Johann Faust to Satan, and how the poet who inspired Charlie Daniel’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” was the first to imagine an attorney litigating against Satan. Yet, these ironies are not so significant as the moral innovations that each stage in the evolution of the diabolical contract motif represents.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Brings to mind The Devil's Advocate by Andrew Neiderman (made into the 1997 film with Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves) and Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger (various editions, on which Kevin Malone based his opera Mysterious 44). 

Star Wars and Law @abalsd

Via ABA For Law Students, some excellent Star Wars and Law mock trial fodder from editor Adam Music. As it's May 4, he notes that a number of law schools and universities, both in the U.S. and Canada, have prepared Star Wars-themed mock trial competitions that investigate issues raised in the films. Among them: Cornell College (Iowa) and Gonzaga Law School (Washington). More here.

Raise a glass of your favorite brew as you toast the litigants, and may the Force be with you.

Thake on The Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage as a Genocidal Act and a Crime Against Humanity

Ann Marie Thake, Government of Malta, Courts of Justice (Superior Jurisdiction), has published The Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage as a Genocidal Act and a Crime Against Humanity, Conference Paper No. 15/2017 given at the European Society of International Law (ESIL), 2017 Annual Conference (Naples). Here is the abstract.

Lemkin originally envisaged the crime of genocide as encompassing not only physical and biological acts of genocide, but also the intentional destruction of cultural heritage. In fact, earlier drafts of the Genocide Convention proposed the criminalisation not only of physical and biological genocide, but also of cultural genocide, with the latter understood as involving the destruction of specific characteristics of the protected group. This was eventually left out of the final draft of the Convention, save for the prohibition of the forcible transfer of the protected group’s children. However, the destruction of a protected group can be brought about not only by physical or biological means, but also by systematically erasing its culture heritage and therefore its group identity, destroying the group from its very core, an act which is described by Chaumont as constituting ‘ethnocide’. In fact, the ad hoc criminal tribunals have considered the systematic and intentional destruction of cultural heritage as evidence of the specific intent to destroy a group. The aim of this paper is to analyse the intentional destruction of cultural heritage from a human perspective, considering it as a crime against persons, not solely against property, and to examine whether it is time to revise the definition of genocide to incorporate the intentional destruction of cultural heritage as a genocidal act, as it was originally conceived by Lemkin.

Download the paper at

CFP: Deception on Social Media, Edited Collection To Be Published by IGI Global @thomgiddens

Via Thom Giddens:

CFP: Deception on Social Media

Contributors are invited to submit abstracts (about 200 words) toward our new edited collection entitled: Social Media and the Production and Spread of Spurious Deceptive Contents, to be published by IGI Global (Hershey, PA), under the series: Advances in Digital Crime, Forensics, and Cyber Terrorism (ADCFCT)

Topics being covered include:

·      History, literature, perspectives and the prevalence of online deception

·      Methods, techniques and approaches to researching digital deception

·      Fake news, misinformation and misleading reports on Facebook and Twitter (case studies are encouraged here)

·      Defamation and character assassination (case studies are encouraged here)

·      Phishing

·      Business falsehood, employment scam and commercial lies

·      Investment/financial scam and Ponzi scheme

·      Deceptive online dating, romance scam and fake marriage

·      Religious deception and political lies (case studies are encouraged here)

·      Deceptive contents by extremist and terrorist groups (other online platforms are inclusive here)

·      Deception detection and behavioral control methods.

·      Etc.

All proposals are to be submitted through the eEditorial Discovery®^TM online submission Manager. Please click on this link to submit an abstract: https://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/3356

Important Dates

June 30, 2018: Proposal Submission Deadline
July 15, 2018: Notification of Acceptance
October 31, 2018: Full Chapter Submission

Inquiries can be forwarded to the editors:

Innocent Chiluwa

Covenant Univeristy, OTA, Nigeria

innocent.chiluwa@covenantuniveristy.edu.ng  or

Sergei Samoilenko

George Mason University, Virginia, USA

ssamoyle@masonlive.gmu.edu

The book will be released in 2019.

Legal Intersections Research Centre, School of Law, University of Wollongong, Issues Call For Applications For Visiting PhD Scholar Program

The Legal Intersections Research Centre, School of Law, University of Wollongong, has issued a call for applications for its Visiting PhD Scholar Program for 2018. The program offers up to AU $1500 for a current PhD student to visit at the LIRC for two weeks. More information here.

The LIRC is also hosting the joint conference of the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand (LSAANZ), the Canadian Law and Society Association (CLSA), and the UK Socio-Legal Association at the University of Wollongong from December 12 through December 15, 2018. The theme is "Inclusion, Exclusion, and Democracy."  The Visiting PhD Scholar visit will coincide with the conference.

ICYMI: Charles Ross, Elizabethan Literature and the Law of Fraudulent Conveyance (Routledge, 2003) @routledgepublishing

ICYMI: Charles Ross, Purdue University, Elizabethan Literature and the Law of Fraudulent Conveyance (Routledge, 2003).

This book investigates the origins, impact, and outcome of the Elizabethan obsession with fraudulent conveyancing, the part of debtor-creditor law that determines when a court can void a transfer of assets. Focusing on the years between the passage of a key statute in 1571 and the court case that clarified the statute in 1601, Charles Ross convincingly argues that what might seem a minor matter in the law was in fact part of a wide-spread cultural practice. The legal and literary responses to fraudulent conveyancing expose ethical, practical, and jurisprudential contradictions in sixteenth-century English, as well as modern, society. At least in English Common Law, debt was more pervasive than sex. Ross brings to this discussion a dazzling knowledge of early modern legal practice that takes the conversation out of the universities and Inns of Court and brings it into the early modern courtroom, the site where it had most relevance to Renaissance poets and playwrights. Ross here examines how during the thirty years in which the law developed, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare wrote works that reflect the moral ambiguity of fraudulent conveyancing, which was practiced by unscrupulous debtors but also by those unfairly oppressed by power. The book starts by showing that the language and plot of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor continually refers to this cultural practice that English society came to grips with during the period 1571-1601. The second chapter looks at the social, political, and economic climate in which Parliament in 1571 passed 13 Eliz. 5, and argues that the law, which may have been used to oppress Catholics, was probably passed to promote business. The Sidney chapter shows that Henry Sidney, as governor of Ireland (a site of religious oppression), and his son Philip were, surprisingly, on the side of the fraudulent conveyors, both in practice and imaginatively (Sidney's Arcadia is the first of several works to associate fraudulent conveyancing with the abduction of women). The fourth chapter shows that Edmund Spenser, who as an official in Ireland rails against fraudulent conveyors, nonetheless includes a balanced assessment of several forms of the practice in The Faerie Queene. Chapter five shows how Sir Edward Coke's use of narrative in Twyne's Case (1601) helped settle the issue of intentionality left open by the parliamentary statute. The final chapter reveals how the penalty clause of the Elizabethan law accounts for the punishment Portia imposes on Shylock at the end of The Merchant of Venice. The real strength of the book lies in Ross's provocative readings of individual cases, which will be of great use to literary critics wrestling with the applications of legal theory to the interpretation of individual texts. This study connects a major development in the law to the literature of the period, one that makes a contribution not only to the law but also to literary studies and political and social history.

 

Thomas Giddens, On Comics and Legal Aesthetics (Routledge, 2018) @ThomGiddens @LawDundee @routledgebooks

Thomas Giddens, St. Mary's University, Twickenham, and soon to be at Dundee Law School, has published On Comics and Legal Aesthetics: Multimodality and the Haunted Mask of Knowing (Routledge, 2018). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

What are the implications of comics for law? Tackling this question, On Comics and Legal Aesthetics explores the epistemological dimensions of comics and the way this once-maligned medium can help think about – and reshape – the form of law. Traversing comics, critical, and cultural legal studies, it seeks to enrich the theorisation of comics with a critical aesthetics that expands its value and significance for law, as well as knowledge more generally. It argues that comics’ multimodality – its hybrid structure, which represents a meeting point of text, image, reason, and aesthetics – opens understanding of the limits of law’s rational texts by shifting between multiple frames and modes of presentation. Comics thereby exposes the way all forms of knowledge are shaped out of an unstructured universe, becoming a mask over this chaotic ‘beyond’. This mask of knowing remains haunted – by that which it can never fully capture or represent. Comics thus models knowledge as an infinity of nested frames haunted by the chaos without structure. In such a model, the multiple aspects of law become one region of a vast and bottomless cascade of perspectives – an infinite multiframe that extends far beyond the traditional confines of the comics page, rendering law boundless.

Marmor on What's Left of General Jurisprudence? @Cornell Law

Andrei Marmor, Cornell Law School, has published What's Left of General Jurisprudence? On Law's Ontology and Content as Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper No. 18-26. Here is the abstract.

The aim of this paper is to show that general jurisprudence is in no need of reinvention. The sentiment shared by many contemporary legal philosophers that theories about the nature of law have reached a dead end is challenged here by showing that the debates about the ontology of law and about the determinants of legal contents leave many interesting questions open for serious debate. The paper argues that traditional legal positivism is best seen as a theory about the ontological grounding of legal facts, and that a reductive account of this grounding can be provided with a more sophisticated account of the artifact nature of law, aided by some ideas derived from fictionalism. The paper also acknowledges that such a reductive ontology of law faces serious challenges, particularly from the view point of theories about determinants of legal contents. By explaining these challenges and pointing out how they may be met, the paper aims to show that some the age old debates about the nature or law are very much alive and worthy of serious philosophical inquiry.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance, Edited by Dennis Kezar (published by University of Notre Dame Press, 2007)

ICYMI:

Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance (Dennis Kezar, ed., University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

This volume contains contributions by literary critics and historians who demonstrate that theater and law were not simply relevant to each other in the early modern period; they explore the physical spaces in which early modern law and drama were performed, the social and imaginative practices that energized such spaces, and the rhetorical patterns that make the two institutions far less discrete and far more collaborative than has previously been recognized.

 

Reading and the Law @CRASSHlive

Today at the University of Cambridge, a free event, sponsored by CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) (yes, no Oxford comma):

Reading and the Law, from 5 to 7 p.m.

Jan-Melissa Schramm (University of Cambridge)
Rachel Holmes (University of Cambridge)
In Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall, Thomas Cromwell reflects that ‘[w]hen you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.’ Yet Cromwell must have been aware of the precise practices involved in legal reading to make such a statement. This seminar will consider the ways in which legal documents such as witness statements and constitutions are read, today and in the past, in order to consider what it means to read in a legal setting.

Papers are pre-circulated and should be read in advance.Please contact Dr Ruth Jackson (rej34@cam.ac.uk) to sign up and receive the readings by email.

Open to all.  No registration required
Part of Theologies of Reading Research Group Seminar Series
Administrative assistance: gradfac@crassh.cam.ac.uk

Staging Law, Performing Trials: An Event at Cambridge @seanamulcahy @CRASSHlive

Via @Sean Mulcahy, news of an interesting law and humanities event taking place on July 3, 2018 st St. John's College: Staging Law, Performing Trials. 

More about this event below (description taken from the website:

Registration for this event is now open. The event is free to attend but registration is required. Those registering for the associated conference Law and Poetics in Early Modern England and Beyond will automatically be registered for this event. Registration will close on Monday 25th June.A three-part public event embedded in the conference, Law and Poetics in Early Modern England and Beyond (2-4 July, 2018). This event, involving actors, visual artists and legal professionals comprises:

• a professional performance event directed by Adele Thomas. Her previous credits include: Shakespeare's Globe/Sam Wanamaker Theatre, The Oresteia (2015) and The Knight of the Burning Pestle (2014).

• a talk and screening by visual artist Carey Young (The Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London; creator of law-based artistic works including Before the Law, Legal Fictions, and Palais du Justice)

• a widely interdisciplinary, inter-professional Round Table on Law and the Arts featuring: Farah Karim-Cooper (Shakespeare's Globe), Subha Mukherji (University of Cambridge), Nicola Padfield, QC (Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge), Richard K. Sherwin (New York Law School), Adele Thomas (Freelance Director)

This event is part of the research project Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England: the Place of Literature, a five-year project funded by the European Research Council, based at the Faculty of English and CRASSH, University of Cambridge.
For enquiries regarding this event, please contact the project administrator, Rachael Taylor here. 

 

Johnson on Buggery and Parliament, 1533-2017

Paul Johnson, University of York, has published Buggery and Parliament, 1533-2017. Here is the abstract.

Over nearly five centuries the UK Parliament, and its earlier incarnations, frequently legislated to ensure the regulation and punishment of buggery, a form of sexual conduct once generally accepted to constitute one of the most serious criminal offences known to law. In the early twenty-first century, Parliament abolished the offence of buggery and, subsequently, granted pardons to certain individuals previously convicted of it. Whilst some aspects of the history of Parliament’s approach to buggery are well known – particularly in respect of homosexual law reform – much of this history remains obscure. This article provides an in-depth consideration of the making of statute law in Parliament relating to buggery that reveals the dramatically changing attitudes of legislators towards this aspect of sexual conduct and highlights the significance and importance of the pardons granted to those convicted of the offence.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Kaehler on What Constitutes the Concept of Law? Potentialism as a Position Beyond Positivism and Natural Law

Lorenz Kaehler, University of Bremen Faculty of Law, has published What Constitutes the Concept of Law? Potentialism as a Position Beyond Positivism and Natural Law Theory. Here is the abstract.

The dispute about the proper concept of law has long suggested that there is one concept of law that does not change with society or time. In this regard, positivism and natural law theory agree that there is a definite concept of law, although they disagree about its precise content. The paper examines this assumption by looking at the reasons that constitute the concept of law. It argues that this assumption of an unchangeable nature of the concept of law is implausible as normative reasons turn out to be decisive for this formation. The weight of these reasons might, at least, in principle depend on changing circumstances. The same holds if empirical circumstances are constitutive for the concept of law, because they might change as well. Consequently, the concept of law does not have an a priori fixed content. Instead, it takes on a mere potential relationship to morality. This paper outlines this theory of potentialism.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Brady on the Forgotten History of Metes and Bounds @UVALaw

Maureen (Molly) Brady, University of Virginia School of Law, is publishing The Forgotten History of Metes and Bounds in the Yale Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

Since the settling of the American colonies, property boundaries have been described by the “metes and bounds” method, which is a highly customized system dependent on localized knowledge of movable stones, impermanent trees, and transient neighbors. The metes and bounds system has long been the subject of ridicule, and a recent wave of law-and-economics scholarship has argued that land must be easily standardized to facilitate market transactions and yield economic development. However, historians have not yet explored the social and legal context surrounding the metes and bounds system—obscuring the important role that highly customized property played in stimulating growth. Using new archival research from the American colonial period, this Article reconstructs the forgotten history of metes and bounds within recording practice. Importantly, the benefits of metes and bounds were greater—and the associated costs lower—than ahistorical examination of these records would indicate. The rich descriptions of the metes and bounds system transmitted valuable information to American settlers and could be tailored to different types of property interests, permitting simple compliance with recording laws. While standardization is critical for enabling property to be understood by a larger and more distant set of buyers and creditors, customized property practices built upon localized knowledge serve other important social functions that likewise encourage development.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Fletcher on Failed Protectors: The Indian Trust and "Killers of the Flower Moon" @MSULaw @DavidGrann

Matthew L. M. Fletcher, Michigan State University College of Law, is publishing Failed Protectors: The Indian Trust and Killers of the Flower Moon in the Michigan Law Review. Here is the abstract.

This Review uses Killers of the Flower Moon as a jumping off point for highlighting for readers how so many Indian people in Indian country can be so easily victimized by criminals. And yet, for however horrible the Osage Reign of Terror, the reality for too many Indian people today is much much worse. The federal government is absolutely to blame for these conditions. This Review shows how policy choices made by all three branches of the federal government have failed Indian people. Part I establishes the federal-tribal trust relationship that originated with a duty of protection. Part II establishes how the United States failure to fulfill its duties to the Osage Nation and its citizens allowed and even indirectly encouraged the Osage Reign of Terror. Part III offers thoughts on the future of the trust relationship in light of the rise of tribal self-determination. Part IV concludes the Review with a warning about how modern crime rates against Indian women and children are outrageously high in large part because of the continuing failures of the United States.

Download the review from SSRN at the link.

McMahon on "I Lost My Talk": Indian Residential Schools, Copyright, Archives, and Commissions of Inquiry

Thomas McMahon, Independent, has published 'I Lost My Talk': Indian Residential Schools, Copyright, Archives and Commissions of Inquiry. Here is the abstract.

People give statements to commissions of inquiry, courts, administrative tribunals, police and other government bodies. Who owns the copyright in those statements? What practical value is there in copyright ownership in those contexts? This paper examines in detail the copyright issues relating to the statements that survivors of Indian Residential Schools gave to Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As related background, the paper gives a detailed review of the Supreme Court of Canada's order to destroy statements given by survivors to the Independent Assessment Process. This paper examines copyright cases from Canada, England, the United States and Australia dealing with interviews generally, statements and indigenous peoples. This paper is one of a series by the author examining the many legal issues relating to Indian Residential Schools and the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

NB:  Mr. McMahon was Executive Director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from October 2009 to July 2010, and then served as General Legal Counsel to the Commission for the remainder of the Commission’s mandate. McMahon was previously a long-time Department of Justice Canada lawyer. Before that, McMahon was Executive Secretary of the Manitoba Aboriginal Justice Inquiry

ICYMI: Guerrier on Fictions du droit et espace littéraire

ICYMI: Olivier Guerrier, Fictions du droit et espace littéraire, at Fabula.

RIchard Cohen on Samuel Johnson and the Attractions of the Law @laphamsquart

Here, for Lapham's Quarterly, Richard Cohen examines Samuel Johnson's unfulfilled desire to become a lawyer. Writes Mr. Cohen in part:

He had great respect for the place of law and a reverence for good lawyers, although he could be merciless about bad ones. In the dictionary, he created 178 new legal definitions and took from other sources a further 154, but his definitions are often with a curve to them. Choosing an authority for the word attorney, he quotes Alexander Pope: “vile attorneys, now an useless race”; he defines lawgiver as a “legislator, one who makes laws,” and this time the authority is Jonathan Swift: “A law may be very reasonable in itself, although one does not know the reason of the lawgivers.” He had a sense of humor and a sense of outrage.

New From Wiley/Blackwell: Westworld and Philosophy @WestworldHBO

New from Wiley-Blackwell: Westworld and Philosophy (James B. South and Kimberley S. Engels, eds., 2018). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

“We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next.” —Dr. Robert Ford, Westworld Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? HBO’s Westworld, a high-concept cerebral television series which explores the emergence of artificial consciousness at a futuristic amusement park, raises numerous questions about the nature of consciousness and its bearing on the divide between authentic and artificial life. Are our choices our own? What is the relationship between the mind and the body? Why do violent delights have violent ends? Could machines ever have the moral edge over man? Does consciousness create humanity, or humanity consciousness? In Westworld and Philosophy, philosophers, filmmakers, scientists, activists, and ethicists ask the questions you’re not supposed to ask and suggest the answers you’re not supposed to know. There’s a deeper level to this game, and this book charts a course through the maze of the mind, examining how we think about humans, hosts, and the world around us on a journey toward self-actualization. Essays explore different facets of the show’s philosophical puzzles, including the nature of autonomy as well as the pursuit of liberation and free thought, while levying a critical eye at the human example as Westworld’s hosts ascend to their apotheosis in a world scarred and defined by violent acts. The perfect companion for Westworld fans who want to exit the park and bend their minds around the philosophy behind the scenes, Westworld and Philosophy will enrich the experience of the show for its viewers and shed new light on its enigmatic twists and turns.

ICYMI: Gary T. Marx, Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

ICYMI:



Gary T. Marx, Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Matthew H. Birkhold on Why Judges Cite Jane Austen

Via Electric Literature, this interesting meditation on why judges find Jane Austen so intriguing, and why, when they cite female authors at all, they cite her, as well as Harper Lee and Mary Shelley. Writes Matthew H. Birkhold, Ohio State University,

After reading every available opinion, I’ve come to a rather banal but beautiful conclusion: Jane Austen is cited as an authority on the complexity of life, particularly with regard to the intricacies of relationships. Alternatively, judges cite Austen as a shorthand for erudition and sophistication, to demarcate who is a part of high society (often, lawyers) and who is not (often, defendants), reflecting the novelist’s popular reception....Half of the published legal opinions that cite Jane Austen don’t engage with her work beyond the first line of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife.” This approach relies on the Austen quotation to underscore the legal writer’s intellect and the certainty of his or her claim. For instance, in a medical malpractice case, the court denied the plaintiff’s cause of action because “it is a truth universally acknowledged that she who comes into equity must come with clean hands.”

More here.

Pessach and Shur-Ofry on Copyright and the Holocaust @HujiLawOfficial

Guy Pessach and Michal Shur-Ofry, both of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Faculty of Law, are publishing Copyright and the Holocaust in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. Here is the abstract.

This article explores the interface between copyright law and the Holocaust. The Holocaust’s duration and scope, its occurrence in midst of the twentieth century with photography and film technologies already available, and its setting at the heart of Europe, yielded countless documents, diaries, notes, memoirs, musical works, photographs, films, letters, and additional artifacts. On the victims’ part, many of those items — including secret archives comprised at various ghettos, music composed in concentration camps, and personal diaries — manifest an explicit act of real-time historical documentation for future generations. On the perpetrators’ side, some materials were produced as a result of organized documentation, others — such as Joseph Goebbels’ diaries or Hitler’s Mein Kampf — comprise records of prominent figures in the Nazi regime. Numerous Holocaust-related materials are still subject to copyright protection. Yet, the impact of copyright law on the memory of the Holocaust remains largely unexplored. This article engages in a first systematic exploration of the copyright-Holocaust interface and presents a twofold argument. First, we demonstrate that copyright law plays a heretofore-unnoticed role in shaping the collective memory of the Holocaust. Second, on a normative level, we argue that the prevalent narratives underlying copyright law, as well as ordinary copyright doctrines, do not comfortably apply to Holocaust-related materials, and that this state of affairs yields socially undesirable consequences. The latter include, inter alia, victims’ works created with the explicit goal of documenting the Holocaust that may remain in the file-drawer due to copyright concerns, as well as ordinary copyright protection applying to infamous Nazi materials, thus providing their owners with certain influence over the Holocaust’s narrative. By closely examining various case studies, we analyze the principal tensions between the copyright regime and the Holocaust and offer several concrete recommendations concerning the application of copyright law to Holocaust-related materials. On a more general note, our analysis sheds new light on copyright’s impact on collective and intergenerational memory.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Poon on How a Body Becomes a Boat: The Asylum Seeker in Law and Images @juselk

ICYMI:

Justine Poon, Australian National University College of Law, has published How a Body Becomes a Boat: The Asylum Seeker in Law and Images, at 30 Law & Literature 105 (2018).  Here is the abstract.

Asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat to seek protection have been the catalyst for significant legal reform and the proliferation of political discourses. The paper analyses the metaphor of the boat as being a common trope in the legislative category of the “unauthorized maritime arrival” and in the government images that advertised this legal change. The figure of the boat effaces the asylum-seeker's body from the frame of law and discourse and constructs a myth about sovereignty and borders that enables coercive control over asylum seeker bodies.

Frye on Art in the Shadow of the Law @brianlfrye

Brian L. Frye, University of Kentucky College of Law, has published Art in the Shadow of the Law at Kentucky Bench & Bar Magazine (March 2018), at 8. Here is the abstract.

While precious little law is specific to art, a rich and complex body of social norms and customs effectively governs artworld transactions and informs the resolution of artworld disputes. In any case, a smattering of scholars study art law and a similar number of lawyers practice it. In this essay, I will provide a brief overview of art law from three different perspectives: the artist, the art market, and the art museum.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Calvo on Eduardo Mendoza's La Verdad Sobre el Caso Savolta @jcalvo11

Professor José Calvo of the University of Malaga Faculty of Law gave a lecture on Eduardo Mendoza's La verdad sobre el caso Savolta (Seix Barral, reprint 2011) (English: The Truth About the Savolta Case (1992)) at the University of Navarre on April 23. More here about the lecture.

Mr. Mendoza (born 1943) is also the author of several "anonymous detective" novels, in which the detective is a resident in a mental hospital. These include El misterio de la cripta embrujada (1978), El laberinto de las aceitunas (1982), La aventura del tocador de senoras (2001), El enredo de la bolsa y la vida (2012), and El secreto de la modelo extraviada (2015) (apologies for the omitted diacritical marks). 

Somos on A New Architecture of Justice: Dan Kiley's Design for the Nuremberg Trials' Courtroom @msomos

Mark Somos, Harvard University Safra Center for Ethics; Harvard Law School, has published A New Architecture of Justice: Dan Kiley's Design for the Nuremberg Trials’ Courtroom as Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law & International law (MPIL) Research Paper No. 2018-04.
Here is the abstract.

Courtroom 600 in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice is one of the most iconic sites in the history of international criminal law. Yet the extensive literature on Courtroom 600 neglects the original 1945 drawings of the architect Dan Kiley, now in the archives of the Harvard Design School. This article revises our understanding of Courtroom 600 in light of these drawings. Among other findings it argues that Kiley, rather than Jackson or the OSS, was the main source of design decisions; that the secondary literature overemphasises film at the expense of architecture; and that the design of both Courtroom 600 and the entire reconstructed Palace of Justice offer valuable insights into this key moment in the history of international law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Adamson on The "Blurred Lines" of Marvin Gaye's "Here, My Dear": Music As a Tortious Act, Divorce Narrative, and First Amendment Totem @seattleulaw

Bryan L. Adamson, Seattle University School of Law, is publishing The 'Blurred Lines' of Marvin Gaye's 'Here, My Dear': Music as a Tortious Act, Divorce Narrative and First Amendment Totem in volume 36 of the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal (2018). Here is the abstract.

In 1977, singer Marvin Gaye did an audacious thing: Anna Gordy-Gaye was divorcing him, and asking for $1 million dollars. Despite having a wildly successful career up to that point, Marvin was near financial ruin. His attorney, Curtis Shaw, hit upon an idea: Motown, Marvin’s record label, had given him $305,000 as an advance for his upcoming-but-undeveloped album. Marvin would give Anna the $305,000, and pledge the first $295,000 of the royalties yielded from that recording. Instead of $1 million, Anna agreed to the $600,000, as did Motown’s CEO Berry Gordy, Anna’s brother. The judge wrote up an Order to that effect. Composed, written (with a few exceptions), and vocalized by Marvin alone, he first thought to do “nothing heavy, nothing even good.” Then he changed his mind. The album that resulted? A brilliantly unsettling poison pen to and about Anna, sardonically titled Here, My Dear. Released in December 1978, Here, My Dear laid bare to the world a marriage gone terribly, terribly wrong. From the double album’s jacket illustrations and lyrics, down to the vocal colors and tones Marvin deploys — Anna is portrayed as greedy, vengeful and manipulative. The work was so upsetting to her that Anna publicly threatened to sue Marvin. This Article explores that threat. Here, My Dear is a rich legal document from which to mine the myriad torts Marvin commits against Anna over the course of its seventy three minutes and 10 seconds length. Moreover, given Marvin’s persona as one of the most preeminent celebrity male sex symbols from the 1960s until his death in 1984, Here, My Dear can also be read as a beguiling take on the ways in which masculine perspectives on divorce are constructed and articulated. Here, My Dear is a fascinating artifact also because its analysis impels application of some of the Supreme Court’s seminal constitutional jurisprudence such as New York Times v. Sullivan, Gertz v. Welch and Time v. Firestone. Each, in some form or to some extent, is relevant to the Gaye divorce saga as it raises issues of free speech and artistic expression, who can be considered “media” or a “public figure,” and rights of privacy versus newsworthiness of divorce. Consequently, Here, My Dear serves to illustrate foundational communication and distress torts principles as shaped by First Amendment doctrine.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Chaos Takes Control. What Does That Phrase Remind Me Of?

Westworld's new tagline is "Chaos takes control." Am I the only person who thinks the choice of this particular phrase is vaguely funny? It reminds me of the two spy organizations in the 1960s tv show Get Smart, CONTROL, the patriotic "good guy" group which employed Maxwell Smart, Secret Agent 86 (played by the inimitable Don Adams), and KAOS, the evil "bad guy" organization that battled CONTROL for supremacy. The show was a Mel Brooks-Buck Henry parody of the James Bond films and featured wild plots, weird gadgets, and general craziness. It also featured Hymie the Robot (played by the wonderful Dick Gautier), who began as a KAOS operative, but switched sides and worked for CONTROL. Hymie had at least some emotions (way before Star Trek: TNG's Lieutenant Commander Data).

KAOS never "took" over CONTROL in Get Smart, and the Get Smart robot joins forces with CONTROL rather than the group that created it. The hosts on Westworld are altogether less pliant and less agreeable than Hymie. Would you believe that Westworld seems headed in another direction? And...loving it. (I asked you not to tell me that). 

A New Legal Drama, "The Split," Premieres on BBC One

Writer Abi Morgan discusses the new legal drama The Split (BBC One). The show focuses on female solicitors Ruth, Hannah, and Nina, DeFoe, who handle high profile divorce cases and volatile personal relationships. It stars Nicola Walker (Hannah), Deborah Findlay (Ruth), Annabel Scholey (Nina), Stephen Mangan (Nathan, Hannah's husband), and Barry Atsma (Christie, Hannah's ex).

The Split is the latest in a new series of shows that feature powerful female characters (think Scandal, How To Get Away With Murder, Damages, Madam Secretary, Silk).

"Lord of the Flies" and the Law

William Golding's daughter Judy Golding Carter discusses what her father's novel Lord of the Flies actually means.  She says in part,

The boys in Lord of the Flies make quite a good fist of creating a democratic society, at least to begin with. Ralph, the democratically elected leader, admonishes Jack to stick to "the rules", because "the rules are the only thing we've got." In an interview the author said that the novel was about the importance of the rule of law. It was also about the complexity of human beings.
My father greatly distrusted simply judgements. He was careful to give Jack some good qualities, and to make him attractive. It's possible to imagine that under different circumstances Jack and Ralph would have been friends, would have helped each other's weeknesses, and admired each other's strengths. But the author shows that this cannot happen on the island because the boys in their isolation are suffering unchecked "from the terrible disease of being human".

More from The Guardian's Letter to the Editor column here.

A select bibliography on Lord of the Flies and law below.

A. A. H. Al-Saidi, Savagery and the Heart of Darkness in William Golding's "Lord of the Flies," 4 CSCanada -- (2012). (abstract).

David Spitz, Power and Authority: An Interpretation of Goldings' "Lord of the Flies,  30 The Antioch Review 21 (Spring 1970).

Eric Wilson, Warring Sovereigns and Mimetic Rivals: On Scapegoards and Political Crisis in William Golding's "Lord of the Flies," 8 Law and Humanities 147 (2014).

New From Hart Publishing: Blackstone and His Critics, Edited by Anthony Page and Wilfred Prest @hartpublishing

Newly published: Blackstone and His Critics (Anthony Page and Wilfred Prest, eds., 2018).

William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) is perhaps the most elegant and influential legal text in the history of the common law. By one estimate, Blackstone has been cited well over 10,000 times in American judicial opinions alone. Prominent in recent reassessment of Blackstone and his works, Wilfrid Prest also convened the Adelaide symposia which have now generated two collections of essays: Blackstone and his Commentaries: Biography, Law, History (2009), and Re-Interpreting Blackstone's Commentaries: A Seminal Text in National and International Contexts (2014). This third collection focuses on Blackstone's critics and detractors. Leading scholars examine the initial reception of the Commentaries in the context of debates over law, religion and politics in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. Having shown Blackstone's volumes to be a contested work of the Enlightenment, the remaining chapters assess critical responses to Blackstone on family law, the status of women and legal education in Britain and America. While Blackstone and his Commentaries have been widely lauded and memorialised in marble, this volume highlights the extent to which they have also attracted censure, controversy and disparagement.

 

Feingold and Carter on What Social Science Can Tell Us About the Supreme Court's Use of Social Science @drevvycarter

Jonathan P. Feingold, UCLA, and Evelyn Carter, UCLA, have published Eyes Wide Open: What Social Science Can Tell Us About the Supreme Court's Use of Social Science at 112 Nw. U. L. Rev. Online 236 (2018).

The Northwestern University Law Review’s 2017 Symposium asked whether McCleskey v. Kemp closed the door on social science’s ability to meaningfully contribute to equal protection deliberations. This inquiry is understandable; McCleskey is widely understood to have rendered statistical racial disparities doctrinally irrelevant in the equal protection context. We suggest, however, that this account overstates McCleskey and its doctrinal impact. Roughly fifteen years after McCleskey, Chief Justice Rehnquist — himself part of the McCleskey majority — invoked admissions data to support his conclusion that the University of Michigan Law School unconstitutionally discriminated against White applicants. Chief Justice Rehnquist’s disparate treatment of statistical evidence in McCleskey and Grutter v. Bollinger reveals the doctrine’s underdeterminacy and invites a corresponding inquiry: why do Justices rely on social science in some cases, yet reject it in others? We propose that one answer lies at the intersections of Critical Race Theory and empirical scholarship on motivated social cognition. This “eCRT” lens illuminates how ostensibly neutral biases and heuristics, when informed by socially salient racial stereotypes, will predictably and systematically lead judges to over-value “evidence” that rationalizes existing racial disparities and, as a result, author legal opinions that re-instantiate and legitimize the status quo.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Roz Watkins: The IP Lawyer Turns Mystery Novelist @Ipkat

The IPKat @Ipkat notes the publication of IP attorney turned crime novelist Roz Watkins' novel The Devil's Dice (HarperCollins).

Here's a description of the book's contents.

Detective Inspector Meg Dalton has recently returned to her Peak District roots to pick up the pieces after a breakdown, when a man's body is discovered in a cave. The man's initials and a figure of the Grim Reaper are carved into the cave wall behind his corpse, but bizarrely, the carvings have existed for over one hundred years. The locals talk about a mysterious family curse that started in the times of the witch trials, and Meg finds it increasingly hard to know who to trust. Even her own mother may be implicated. Meg finds her own life at risk as she fights to stop the murderer from killing again. The Literary Review described 'The Devil's Dice' as a 'smart, enjoyable debut', saying that "the setting is dramatic, the characters are convincing and the motive for murder, when eventually uncovered, is interesting."

 

More about Ms. Watkins here.

Would you like to read more mystery or crime fiction featuring IP lawyers? Try out Paul Goldstein's  Errors and Omissions (Random House, 2007),  Havana Requiem (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), and  A Patent Lie (Random House, 2008).

Poetic Crime @CrimeReads

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Crime Reads @CrimeReads offers this list of twenty-six poets who also wrote, or currently write, crime fiction. Included are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Kingsley Amis, Pia Juul, James Sallis, Dorothy Sayers, Erica Wright, Edgar Allan Poe, and Karin Fossum. Enjoy!

Mulligan on Diverse Originalism @MulliganEsq ‏

Christina Mulligan, Brooklyn Law School, is publishing Diverse Originalism in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. Here is the abstract.

Originalism has a difficult relationship with race and gender. People of color and white women were largely absent from the process of drafting and ratifying the Constitution. Today, self-described originalists are overwhelmingly white men. In light of these realities, can originalism solve its “race and gender” problems while continuing to be originalist? This Article argues that originalists can take several actions today to address originalism’s race and gender problems, including debiasing present-day interpretation, looking to historical sources authored by people of color and white women, and severing originalism and the Constitution’s text from their historical associations with racism and sexism. Taking these steps will not only make originalism more inclusive, but also help originalists become better at accessing the original meaning of the Constitution.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Moustaira on Who Needs Comparative Law @emoustai

Elina Moustaira, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, School of Law, is publishing Who Needs Comparative Law?! What a Question! in Comparazione e Diritto Civile (2017). Here is the abstract.

It is argued that in a world of steadily increasing contacts and mutual influences, we need to understand the other people, the other laws. It does not suffice to cite descriptions of law’s function or of various states’ attitudes towards the law. Thus, the comparative perspective is used in order to approach and comprehend a legal culture.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Munshi on Race, Citizenship, and the Visual Archive @GeorgetownLaw

Sherally Munshi, Georgetown University Law Center, is publishing 'You Will See My Family Became so American': Race, Citizenship, and the Visual Archive in Law and the Visual: Representation, Technologies, and Critique (Desmond Manderson, ed., 2018). Here is the abstract.

In 1932, the United States government sought to cancel the citizenship of Dinshah Ghadiali, an immigrant from India, alleging that Ghadiali “by reason of his not being a free white person or a person of African nativity or descent is, and was, ineligible racially for naturalization.” Ghadiali was one of dozens of Indian immigrants targeted for denaturalization in the wake of United States v. Thind (1923), in which the Supreme Court declared that “Hindus,” though capable of cultural assimilation, would remain visually unassimilable. At his denaturalization trial, Ghadiali submitted into evidence a series of photographs, assuring the judge, “You will see my family became so American.” How do these photographs purport to show that Ghadiali and his family had become “so American”? In this essay, through a through a close reading of Ghadiali’s photography, I explore a tension between the visualization of race—a practice at once institutionalized by law and inextricably bound with the medium of photography—and the performance of national belonging.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Zeno-Zencovich on Data Visualization and Legal Epistemology

Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich, University of Rome III-Department of Law, has published Through a Lawyer's Eyes: Data Visualization and Legal Epistemology 459 in Law, Norms, and Freedoms in Cyberspace/Droit, Normes, et Libertes dans le Cybermonde: Liber Amicorum Yves Poulet (Elise Degrave, Cecile de Terwangne, Severine Dusolier, et Robert Querck, eds., Larcier, 2018).

The article aims at investigating the relationship between the law and its visual depiction, in the light of the growing use of vast amounts of data to represent social phenomena. Visual analytics and infographics are part of contemporary forms of representation and knowledge. To what extent can lawyers do - or should do - without them and what profit, instead, might they take from them?

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Green on Legal Monism: An American History @WMLawSchool

Michael S. Green, William & Mary Law School, has published Legal Monism: An American History in Vienna Legal Philosophy 23-48 (Christoph Bezemek, Michael Potacs, and Alexander Somek, eds., Hart Publishing, 2018) (Vienna Lectures on Legal Philosophy).

Legal monism is the view that necessarily one, and only one, legal system exists. The legal norms of all past, present, and possible communities exist only within in an overarching legal system, which does not itself depend upon any community for its existence. Current legal philosophers — including those who might be described as natural law theorists — reject legal monism. They are legal pluralists, who believe that a multiplicity of discrete legal systems is possible (indeed actual). Although philosophers of law are pluralists, it is difficult to determine jurists’ views on the matter, for monism and pluralism are both compatible with most judgments that they make. Only in a few narrow areas do monistic and pluralistic judgments about the law diverge. One such area is the conflict of laws (or, as those outside the United States would call it, private international law) — in particular, judgments concerning what I will call rules of authorization, which distribute lawmaking power among the officials of various jurisdictions. Rules of authorization include rules determining when a court has personal jurisdiction and when a legislature has legislative jurisdiction — the power to extend its laws to a matter. In this essay, I argue that a commitment to legal monism is evident in American jurists’ views on rules of authorization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I offer as examples Justice Story, Joseph Henry Beale, and Justice Field. What is more, the subsequent choice-of-law revolution did not reject monism. What it rejected was a conception of rules of legislative jurisdiction as dividing lawmaking power into exclusive spheres. Such rules were now understood as giving the lawmakers of a number of jurisdictions concurrent lawmaking power. Whether these rules were understood monistically or not was left open. Indeed, it is possible that current jurists, if forced to take a stand between a monistic and a pluralistic understanding of rules of authorization, would choose monism.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Meyer on Sisyphus and the Clockmaker: Two Views of the Rule of Law in Keally McBride's "Mr. Mothercountry: The Man Who Made the Rule of Law

Linda Ross Meyer, Quinnipiac University School of Law, has published Sisyphus and the Clockmaker: Two Views of the Rule of Law in Keally McBride's 'Mr. Mothercountry: The Man Who Made the Rule of Law'. Here is the abstract.

This essay is an engagement with Keally McBride's excellent book, "Mr. Mothercountry: The Man Who Made the Rule of Law," and argues that the rule of law is not a law of rules, but a culture of self-restraint and humility.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Karen Raber, Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018) @BloomsburyBooks @olemissenglish

New from Bloomsbury Publishing: Karen Raber, Professor of English, University of Mississippi, Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory (2018) (The Arden Shakespeare). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory charts challenges in the field of Shakespeare studies to the assumption that the category “human” is real, stable, or worthy of privileging in discussions of the playwright's work. Drawing on a variety of methodologies - cognitive theory, systems theory, animal studies, ecostudies, the new materialisms - the volume investigates the world of Shakespeare's plays and poems in order to represent more thoroughly its variety, its ethics of inclusion, and its resistance to human triumphalism and exceptionalism.