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Posted: 05 May 2011 10:55 AM PDT

Adrien K. Wing, University of Iowa College of Law, has published One L Redux at 78 University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review 1119 (2010). Here is the abstract.

This article is the personal story of Adrien Wing's first year at law school and her struggle with prejudice as she tried to shatter the glass ceiling at Stanford Law School. She wrote this article 30 years after graduation while she was at her alma mater preparing for a reunion. It concludes with a commentary on improving legal teaching methods and imparting wisdom to her students.

"When they asked what I thought now about the 1L year, about law school in general, I said, 'Despite the pain and agony, I would do it all again. I have learned that the law can have soul. The law can have heart.

And I hope that in my teaching, I have shown generations of students that this must be so.'"Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Origins of Law

Posted: 05 May 2011 10:51 AM PDT

Jacques DeVille, University of the Western Cape, has published On Law's Origin: Derrida Reading Freud, Kafka and Lévi-Strauss in volume 7 of the Utrecht Law Review (April 2011). Here is the abstract.

This article's main focus is 'Before the Law', a text by Derrida on Kafka's Before the Law, in which Derrida also comments on Freud's Totem and Taboo. Freud, in this text, enquires into the origins of religion, morality, social institutions and law. He contends that this origin is to be found in a crime, the killing of the primal father by a band of brothers, followed by the institution of totemism and the incest prohibition. Freud's psychoanalytical account of the origins of the totem and the prohibition of incest has been challenged from various quarters. The article enquires whether Freud's Totem and Taboo and its theory of the primal horde in relation to the origins of law should be dismissed in light of these challenges, or whether some insight can still be gained from it. The second option is affirmed, with Derrida's 'Before the Law' pointing to the importance of reading Freud in a way analogous to Kafka's Before the Law, and more specifically to the need for a reconsideration of the originary nature of the Oedipus complex, so as to arrive eventually at a kind of 'pre-origin' of law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.