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Pacificism In Popular Culture

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 10:50 AM PDT

Hannibal Travis, Florida International University College of Law, has published Postmodern Censorship of Pacifist Content on Television and the Internet, in volume 25 of the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy (2011). Here is the abstract.


This Essay, a contribution to a symposium on censorship and the media, explores the legal history of the censorship of antiwar speech. It devotes particular attention to postmodern techniques for chilling the production of pacifist content, or reducing the total output of it. Pacifist speech is defined broadly, as speech advocating peaceful alternatives to war or militarism, articulating doctrines or principles which urge forswearing war or violence in international disputes, or expressing reasons to oppose specific military episodes or entire wars.



A fundamental assumption of democratic governance is that the public keeps informed of important news and points of view by exposure in the press, whether print or electronic. Yet the public is often denied complete information by governments and private media conglomerates acting in close concert. While legal scholars frequently condemn direct censorship by the federal government, they too often neglect the extent to which private parties may be mobilized by the government to foment false beliefs and propagate misleading portraits of vital public policy issues.



This Essay explores postmodern censorship of pacifist expression. Postmodern censorship is distinguishable from its pre-modern or modern counterparts by its immaterial, seemingly nonviolent ways of watching and influencing apparently private activity, in contrast to a modern way of censoring speech by using violence as an ostentatious tyrant would. While still sculpting citizens' beliefs and behaviors, postmodern power applies itself to private technologies and the enjoyment of what seems to be leisure time or tools such as television or radio. Postmodern regulation directs itself at privatized implementation of governmental objectives, including the lies and crimes of governments. It simulates real events in spectacles of illusion and artifice. In the postmodern era, everything is increasingly artificial, real events are excluded from the public spectacle, and the meaning of words and concepts is lost.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Adam Smith's Views on International Law and International Relations

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 08:09 AM PDT

Nicolas Hachez, Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, has published Views on International Law and International Relations in Adam Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence. Here is the abstract.


This article aims to analyze and interpret the views on international relations and international law expressed in Adam Smith's little studied Lectures on Jurisprudence, in connection with the works of Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf. In order to do so, the article first tries to unravel Smith's account of the formation of society and government in domestic orders, understood as a complex intertwinement of human and economic factors. The article then goes on to analyze Smith's stated reasons why the seemingly universal human and economic processes leading to the formation of domestic societies and governments are failing when they are to apply in the international order. Finally, this article explores Smith's views on the idiosyncratic rules governing international relations, i.e. the Law of Nations.
The conclusion of the article then attempts to formulate insights for a more harmonious international society based on Smith's premises.Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Schauer On Mill's "On Liberty"

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 08:06 AM PDT

Frederick Schauer, University of Virginia School of Law, is publishing On the Relationship between Chapters One and Two of John Stuart Mill's on Liberty in the Capital University Law Review. Here is the abstract.



An important question in free speech theory and in Millian scholarship is the relationship between Chapters One and Two of Mill's On Liberty. This essay, prepared on the occasion of and as a comment on Vincent Blasi's Sullivan Lecture at the Capital University Law School, argues that Chapter Two, dealing with the "Liberty of Thought and Discussion," is best understood as an exception to the general libertarian themes of Chapter One Iand, indeed, the balance of the book), rather than as an instantiation of them. Only by undervaluing Mill's views about the potential harms of speech, by making Mill less of a utilitarian than he claimed to be, and by slighting the social epistemic claims in Chapter Two can that Chapter be made compatible with Mill's presentation of the Harm Principle in Chapter One and the rest of the book. But if we take Mill's epistemic claims seriously (which is decidedly not the same as believing that they are empirically sound), then Chapter One can be understood as largely about actions that do not cause harms to agents other than the actor, and Chapter Two can be seen as an argument for why some other-regarding and harm-producing speech acts may, in the aggregate, produce sufficient social epistemic benefits as to be deserving of a special immunity from state control. It is true, as Blasi argues, that a concern for the character-building nature of both autonomy and confrontation with harmful speech may render Chapters One and Two compatible with each other, but that compatibility requires relegating Mill's famous epistemic arguments to a secondary role, and requires seeing Mill in less utilitarian and more individualistic terms than he himself professed.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Representations of Law in "Deadwood" and "Serenity"

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 07:39 AM PDT

Naomi Mezey, Georgetown University Law Center, has published Law's Visual Afterlife: Violence, Popular Culture, and Translation Theory in Imagining Legality: Where Law Meets Popular Culture 65 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2011). Here is the abstract.



In Walter Benjamin's essay, "The Task of the Translator," Benjamin argues that translations enable a work's afterlife. Afterlife is not what happens after death but what allows a work (or event or idea) to go on living and to evolve over time and place and iteration. In its afterlife, the original is transformed and renewed. In this piece I explore film's visual translation of law and the role film plays in law's afterlife. Film translates law not by translating from one language to another, but by translating between media and discourses. The cultural-critical lens of translation highlights the discursive similarities and dissonances between law and film; it allows us to see the legal in the aesthetic and the aesthetic in the legal; and it gives us new purchase on thinking about the ways that word, image, power and justice operate in and through different media. I take up the western HBO series Deadwood and the science fiction film Serenity to explore the representations of law, state and violence at the borderlands of time, place and authority in order to illustrate the layers of legal translation that film can occasion.



My argument focuses on how a few specific scenes translate the dilemmas of state authority, violence and law into the visual, and explores how the visual translations allow a different retelling of legal concerns. I also re-read the film genres in which these specific legal preoccupations most often circulate as legal genres. Both the western and science fiction, as genres, offer two parallel narratives about a foundational problem in law - the relationship of the state to violence. The narratives of the western tend to be progressive yet nostalgic; they are stories about the coming of civilization and the largely successful efforts of the state to reign in excessive private violence by exercising a monopoly on violence. But they are nostalgic for the kind of men - moral individualists - who were the precursors to the state but whose existence is incompatible with state power. The narratives of science fiction are more often dystopic and its stories about law and violence come in two versions. In one version, science fiction portrays the state as perfecting its monopoly on violence to the point of abuse. The state itself becomes the perpetrator of excessive violence. Another version of the science fiction genre narrates the future breakdown of the state, the dissolution of its monopoly on force and the return to private violence. This second version is a marriage of the two genres - the futuristic western. These two film genres in particular often translate the legal anxiety over the state's unstable relationship to violence in such a way as to give visual life to its instability, an instability that is both suppressed in and central to legal discourse.
Download the essay from SSRN at the link.
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