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Faulkner On Voting Rights

Posted: 11 Oct 2011 03:50 PM PDT


Joel Heller has published Faulkner's Voting Rights Act: The Sound and Fury of Section Five. Here is the abstract.


In its most recent examination of the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court told a story about the South. Although the Court ultimately did not rule on the continued constitutionality of § 5, the VRA provision that singles out certain jurisdictions with a history of racially discriminatory voting practices for additional regulation, its opinion expressed significant doubt that the measure was still justified. In this tale of progress and redemption, the Court concluded that "things have changed in the South."
One body of commentary that was not considered in this story was the region's literature. Yet many of these works, in particular the novels of William Faulkner, address some of the same thematic and sociological concerns that animate § 5. Specifically, Faulkner's novels explore the power of memory in the South and the ongoing influence of the past on present actions and attitudes. In his depiction of the burden of memory, Faulkner suggests a distinct role for § 5 that policymakers and commentators should consider in the debate over its continued necessity. Rather than punishing the sons for the sins of the fathers, the provision can be seen as targeting the independent concern of a past-haunted society and the uncertain results which the unchecked power of memory can produce in the present.
This Article explores how Faulkner's novels can contribute to a better understanding of the role § 5 serves in the modern South and thus inform the debate over whether the law remains constitutional. In doing so, it also considers the role literature can play in legal analysis beyond the uses typically identified by the law and literature movement.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Enter, Pursued By Student Loans

Posted: 11 Oct 2011 03:44 PM PDT

William A.
Chamberlain, assistant dean, Law Career Strategy and Advancement, Northwestern University School of Law, discusses how acting skills can rev up that job search for young attorneys.


Life upon the wicked stage  
Ain't ever what a girl supposes/
Stage door Johnnies aren't raging
Over you with gems and roses/
When you let a feller hold your hand 
(Which means an extra beer or sandwich)
Eve'rybody whispers:  'Ain't her life a whirl?'/
Though you're warned against a roue'  
Ruining your reputation/
I have  played around the  one-night  trade 
Around a great big nation/
Wild old  men who give jewels and sables 
Only live in Aesop's Fables/
Life upon the wicked stage
Ain't nothing for a girl.

"Life Upon the Wicked Stage", Showboat
Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II (1927)


Nineteenth-Century Contract Law

Posted: 11 Oct 2011 03:22 PM PDT

Anat Rosenberg, Radzyner School of Law, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, has published Classical Contract Law, Past and Present. Here is the abstract.

This paper synthesizes and refocuses a wide range of histories of nineteenth-century contract law. It shows how despite significant controversies among historians, a widely shared consensus has it that nineteenth-century contract law embodied an elaborate version of individualism; that the alternatives to its individualism were status and collectivism - but they functioned as external critiques until well into the twentieth century if not ever since, and so left contract's conceptual link with individualism intact; and that the individualism grounded in contract law was in keeping with the individualism of its age. 

The consensus effectively entrenches a questionable historical artifact: the idea of a single meaning of contract at the decisive era for modern contract law's development. This idea's persistence bears implications for present thought as it negotiates visions of contract, and as it explores law's constitutive effects on social consciousness.

Latin in the Law

Posted: 11 Oct 2011 03:17 PM PDT

Teodor Sambrian has published Interpreting Law from the Roman Concept Interpretation to Modern Interpreting, Through the Adages of Juridical Latin in volume 5 of the Romanian Review of Private Law (2011). Here is the abstract.


The work is divided into six sections. In the preliminaries, we precise the sense of certain terms and we enumerate the most frequently used Latin adages that Romanian authors do mention while interpreting law. In the second and third sections, we do discuss the main causes which brought as necessary the development of interpreting law as an institution. The interpreting forms employed in Roman law are evoked. We do approach the methods used for interpreting law (in the fourth section) and we propose the substitution of the designation as "grammatical interpreting" by the designation: "linguistical interpreting", understood as an aggregate of procedures used for analysis – in etymology, semantics and grammar – in order to elucidate the sense of a normative or juridical act. The fifth section, the most extended one, is dedicated to the Roman principles and rules applied in order to interpret law, and to the way through which they were transferred, through juridical Latin, into Romanian law. This process involves as well legislation by itself and the great juridical tomes of doctrine. In the sixth section, where conclusions are drawn, we do launch the proposal of elaborating a dictionary of juridical Latin, which ought to be more panoramic than the dictionaries of this kind published in Romania until now, and which should contain, inter alia, all the Latin words, phrases, adages and quoted passages which should be relevant, as they are actually used by Romanian works in private and public law.
The full text is not available from SSRN.
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