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Law & Humanities Blog

Law & Humanities Blog

Popular Culture In University Teaching

Posted: 05 Oct 2010 12:31 PM PDT

From the Chronicle of Higher Education's Tweed Blog, professors who use popular culture in their teaching.

Narrative and Truth in the Documentary

Posted: 05 Oct 2010 12:24 PM PDT

Cynthia D. Bond, The John Marshall Law School, has published Documenting Law: Reality & Representation on Trial. Here is the abstract.

Documentary films frequently address issues of social and political injustice; thus, however indirectly, implicating law as their subject. Documentary film and legal process also frequently share formal similarities as they both seek to reconstruct actual events through representational techniques. Thus, notions of the truth are deeply overdetermined in documentary films about law. To most lay spectators, such documentaries are truth-seeking systems (documentary film) depicting a truth-seeking system (law). Thus, it is particularly useful to analyze the impressions of law lay spectators gain (or confirm) from these films since, given the truth claims of documentaries, spectators may more fully trust images of law in them than in fiction film. Documentaries engage different strategies in ignoring, negotiating, or acknowledging the overdetermined sources of truth they contain. First, many documentaries mount a competing narrative of truth, contesting the ability of legal processes to adequately find the truth (a dynamic this article dubs "Film vs. Law"). Alternatively, documentaries may contest law's truth claims without fully supplanting them with their own purportedly superior access to truth ("Film and Law"). These films both critique the truth claims of the legal process while acknowledging the inevitably open-ended and provisional nature of the events they reference. Finally, documentaries may underline the shared representational techniques of law and film to reveal the vexed nature of accessing the truth in both realms ("Film = Law"). These three documentary strategies are defined in part by the stylistic choices the films make, and by the on- and off-screen performance of the filmmaker's relationship with his or her subject.
Yet regardless of a particular documentary film style, the notion of the truth of depicted events is an inescapable element of the documentary narrative.Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

The Nuremberg Trials in Historical and Cultural Context

Posted: 05 Oct 2010 08:44 AM PDT

Christiane Wilke, Carleton University, Department of Law, has published Reconsecrating the Temple of Justice: Invocations of Civilization and Humanity in the Nuremberg Justice Case, at 24 Canadian Journal of Law and Society 181 (2009). Here is the abstract.

The Nuremberg Trials provide the foundation for contemporary international criminal law. Yet these trials are rarely explored in their broader ideational and social context. This article examines the context and role of the concept of "civilization" as used in U.S. v Altstoetter, the 1947 trial of Nazi judges and judicial administrators at Nuremberg. I place the reference to civilization in Altstoetter within a tradition of international law that understood law and civilization as co-constitutive. The Altstoetter Court conceptualized Germany as an essentially civilized country that lapsed into barbaric and therefore lawless violence. This account helped the Court to establish the blameworthiness of the defendants' conduct, blame the Nazi violence on lawlessness, and establish its own authority.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A New Book on Law and the Bible

Posted: 05 Oct 2010 08:27 AM PDT

Recently published by Jonathan Burnside, God, Justice, and Society: Aspects of Law and Legality in the Bible (Oxford, 2010). Here is the abstract.

What is the real meaning of 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth'? Where did the idea for the 'Jubilee 2000' and 'Drop the Debt' campaigns come from? And what, really, are the 'Ten Commandments'? In God, Justice, and Society , Jonathan Burnside looks at aspects of law and legality in the Bible, from the patriarchal narratives in the Hebrew Bible through to the trials of Jesus in the New Testament. He explores the nature of biblical law, legal thinking, and legal institutions by setting the biblical texts in their literary, social, and theological context.



Burnside questions the biblical texts from the perspective of an academic lawyer and criminologist and asks what the biblical materials contribute to our understanding about the nature and character of law. He examines much of biblical law and narrative that has formed the basis of Western civilization, while at the same time exploring differences between biblical law and modern legal concepts and legal assumptions. The resulting book is a cross-disciplinary analysis which recognizes the integration of law and theology.



God, Justice and Society presents biblical law as an integration of instructional genres in the Bible which together express a vision of a society ultimately accountable to God. Burnside seeks to understand both the application of law and legal theory to the Bible and the extent to which biblical law contributes important insights into legal dilemmas in today's world.



A holistic teaching website to support this book, containing downloadable resources, is available at www.seekjustice.co.uk.
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