Law & Humanities Blog |
- Summer Reading: The Academic Novel
- Legal Interpretation In the New Century
- Civilian Uprisings and Foreign Invasions
| Summer Reading: The Academic Novel Posted: 06 Jun 2011 09:57 AM PDT Ms. Mentor (the alter ego of Emily Toth, Professor of English at Louisiana State University), gives sage advice on academic novels for summer reading here in a Chronicle of Higher Education column, and offers the chance to vote early and often on the best title listed. If you want more suggestions on higher reading, check here. Here's another list, compiled by Bill Brewer. Search Google with the phrase "academic novel" and you'll discover that making lists of academic novels is a pasttime all by itself. For more about the academic novel, and in case you want to understand the MEANING of it all, check out The Academic Novel: New and Classic Essays (Merritt Moseley, ed., 2007), Mark Bosco and Kimberly Conner, Academic Novels as Satire (2007), Ian Carter's Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-War Years (Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1990), Elaine Showalter's Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (2005), and Kenneth Womack's Academic Satire: The Campus Novel in Context in A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000 (Blackwell Publishing, 2005). Some of my favorites (I have a bias toward academic mysteries): Malcolm Bradbury, Eating People Is Wrong (1959). Amanda Cross, An Imperfect Spy (1995). Colin Dexter, Death Is Now My Neighbor (1996). Oxford is the setting for a lot of films and books. Michael G. Levin, The Socratic Method (1987). Guillermo Martinez, The Oxford Murders (2005). Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (1935). Pamela Thomas-Graham, A Darker Shade of Crimson (1998).   |
| Legal Interpretation In the New Century Posted: 06 Jun 2011 08:45 AM PDT Yishai Blank, Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law, has published The Reenchantment of Law at 96 Cornell Law Review 633 (2011). |
Here is the abstract.
The religious revival observed throughout the world since the 1980s is making its mark on legal theory, threatening to shift the jurisprudential battleground from debates over law's indeterminacy and power to conflicts over law's grounds, meaning, unity, coherence, and metaphysical underpinnings. Following the immense impact of the legal-realist movement on American jurisprudence, the major jurisprudential conflicts in the United States throughout the twentieth century revolved around the themes of the indeterminacy and power inherent in adjudication (and the resulting delegitimization of it), pitting theories that emphasized these critical themes against schools of thought that tried to reconstruct and reconstitute the determinacy and legitimacy of adjudication. Over the past couple of decades, however, a new jurisprudential dividing line has emerged without attracting much notice or attention. This new divide, which I draw in this Essay, is between thinkers who adhere to a disenchanted, instrumentalist, and secularized view of the law and theoreticians who try to reenchant it by reintroducing a degree of magic, sacredness, and mystery into the law; by reconnecting it to a transcendental or even divine sphere; by finding unity and coherence in the entirety of the legal field; and by bringing metaphysics "back" into the study of law.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
Thus a new stage in the evolution of modern legal theory is emerging in which formal legal rationality is no longer the high point of legal disenchantment (as Max Weber saw it) but a model for law's reenchantment as against the almost universally accepted disenchanting legal theories. And although the question of legal interpretation - and the possibility of objective and legitimate adjudication - is still motivating some of these theories, the reenchanting theories aim to shift the jurisprudential debates from questions of the consequences of legal principles and rules to fundamental questions concerning the grounds of law. This ground shifting might invoke new jurisprudential conflicts between secularism and religiosity, between pragmatism and metaphysics, and between critical and magical thinking. In order to evaluate and demonstrate my claim I analyze four exemplary (though not exhaustive) modes of legal reenchantment that have emerged over the last thirty years: the reenchantment of legal formalism, the reenchantment of virtue, the reenchantment of law as art, and the reenchantment of legal authorities.
Civilian Uprisings and Foreign Invasions
Posted: 06 Jun 2011 08:38 AM PDT
Emily Crawford, University of Sydney Faculty of Law, has published Levée En Masse – A Nineteenth Century Concept in a Twenty-First Century World, as Sydney Law School Research Paper No. 11/31. Here is the abstract.
Levée en masse – the spontaneous uprising of the civilian population against an invading force – has long been a part of the modern law of armed conflict with regards to determining who may legitimately participate in armed conflict. The concept originated during the French Revolution, and was internationalized with its inclusion in the rules of armed conflict adopted by the Union Army during the American Civil War. Levée en masse continued to be included in the major international law of armed conflict documents from that time on, including The Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Geneva Conventions of 1949. However, since that time, there have been few, if any, instances of levée en masse. This article examines the historical and legal development of the concept of levée en masse, charting its evolution from a general and sustained call to arms to the civilian population to the more strict 19th and 20th century legal categorization of civilians attempting to fend off an invading force. This article also examines the few instances of levee en masse in State practice, and, in doing so, assesses whether the concept retains any utility in 21st century armed conflict.Download the paper from SSRN at the link.
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