Law & Humanities Blog |
- John Grisham Novel Wins First Harper Lee Prize For Legal Fiction
- Was Thomas Jefferson the Father of Sally Hemings' Children?
- "Sampling" Legal Writing? Hip Hop and Legal Ethics
| John Grisham Novel Wins First Harper Lee Prize For Legal Fiction Posted: 02 Sep 2011 10:32 AM PDT John Grisham's latest book, The Confession (Doubleday, 2010) is the inaugural winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, bestowed by the University of Alabama and the ABA Journal. The Confession has received a number of very good reviews (Maureen Corrigan for the Washington Post, Barry Forshow for the Independent). Following the presentation of the award to Mr. Grisham in Washington, D.C. on September 22 at the National Press Club, David Baldacci will moderate a discussion of The Confession and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with panelists Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Linda Fairstein, author of the Alex Cooper mysteries, noted attorney Robert J. Grey, Jr., Dahlia Lithwick of Slate.com and attorney/author Thane Rosenbaum. Here are the criteria for the 2012 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. Entry must be a published book-length work of fiction that exemplifies the roles of lawyers in society, and their power to effect change.   |
| Was Thomas Jefferson the Father of Sally Hemings' Children? Posted: 02 Sep 2011 10:16 AM PDT It's back. The "it" is the debate over Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings and whether he fathered her children. At the Chronicle of Higher Education's blog Innovations, Peter Wood discusses a new publication, The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission, and its conclusions. The thirteen scholars involved have scoured the evidence, and, after one year of study, twelve conclude that "honorable people can and do disagree" about whether Mr. Jefferson fathered Ms. Hemings' children. "The allegation is by no means proven." The twelve scholarly jurors deliver their verdict: from skepticsm about Mr. Jefferson's paternity to "almost certainly" that he was not the father. One scholar contributed a minority report. |
His assessment? "More likely than not."
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy is available from Carolina Academic Press. Here from CAP's website is the abstract describing the book.
In 2000, the newly formed Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society asked a group of more than a dozen senior scholars from across the country to carefully examine all of the evidence for and against the allegations that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by Sally Hemings, one of his slaves, and to issue a public report. In April 2001, after a year of study, the Scholars Commission issued the most detailed report to date on the issue.
With but a single mild dissent, the views of the distinguished panel ranged from "serious skepticism" to a conviction that the allegation was "almost certainly false." This volume, edited by Scholars Commission Chairman Robert F. Turner, includes the "Final Report"—essentially a summary of arguments and conclusions—as it was released to the press on April 12, 2001. However, several of the statements of individual views—which collectively total several hundred carefully footnoted pages and constitute the bulk of the book—have been updated and expanded to reflect new insights or evidence since the report was initially released.
(Full disclosure: I have published several titles with CAP as a contributor and/or editor).
More about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings at these sites:
"Sampling" Legal Writing? Hip Hop and Legal Ethics
Posted: 02 Sep 2011 07:58 AM PDT
Kim D. Chanbonpin, The John Marshall Law School, is publishing Legal Writing, the Remix: Plagiarism and Hip Hop Ethics in the Mercer Law Review (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.
In this Article, I focus on hip hop music and culture as an access point to teach first-year law students about the academic and professional pitfalls of plagiarism. Hip hop provides a good model for comparison because most of our entering students are immersed in a popular culture that is saturated with allusions to hip hop. As a point of reference for incoming law students, hip hop possesses a valuable currency as it represents something real, experienced, and relatable.
Significant parallels exist between the cultures of U.S. legal writing and hip hop, although attempting direct analogies would be absurd. Chief among these similarities is the reliance of both cultures on an archive of knowledge, borrowing from which authors or artists build credibility and authority. Whether it is from case law or musical recordings, the necessary dependence on a finite store of information means that the past work of others will be frequently incorporated into new work. The ethical and professional danger inherent in this type of production is that one who borrows too freely from the past may be merely copying instead of interpreting or innovating. In the academic world, this is plagiarism. Members of the hip hop community call this "biting." In neither culture is this mode of production celebrated.
My goals for this project are two-fold. First, as a professor of legal writing, I want to ameliorate the problem of plagiarism that I have seen growing worse each year. Second, as a scholar, I would like to contribute to the growing body of literature on hip hop and the law. This Article marks the beginning of my attempt to theorize a hip hop ethics and develop its application to the teaching, the academic study, and perhaps eventually, the reform of the law.
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