Home » Archives for 2012

Law & Humanities Blog

Posted: 31 Dec 2012 10:47 AM PST

What else can you do with a law degree? Check out Comedians at Law, the website of a bunch of recovering lawyers, licensed to make you laugh. (Or try to. Getting up in front of an audience is tough, tougher than teaching). Podcasts here. Speaking of--what is the noun of venery for a bunch of lawyers? A lawsuit of attorneys? A license of lawyers? A jury of mouthpieces? Richard Eisel suggests a "brief of attorneys" and "a gavel of judges."

Speaking of other uses for a law degree, if you still haven't checked out Bloomberg Law's Stealth Lawyers series here, it's still going strong (if the link doesn't work, try searching YouTube for "Bloomberg Law Stealth Lawyers", without the quotation marks). Dare I note(quite modestly) that Bloomberg also credits my research in a video in this series called "History's Stealth Lawyers"? Check it out here.

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The Dred Scott Decision

Posted: 17 Dec 2012 09:23 AM PST

David T. Hardy has published Dred Scott, John San(d)Ford, and the Case for Collusion. Here is the abstract.

Dred Scott profoundly changed American history. Intended to protect slavery, its unforeseen consequences were the election of Abraham Lincoln, the political destruction of Stephen Douglas, and the adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

It was also the Court's first interpretation of freedom of speech and assembly, of the right to arms, and of substantive due process. This article explores the degree to which Dred Scott was collusive -- not in the sense of both sides desiring the same outcome, but in the sense of them manufacturing a false case which each thought they could win. The defendant was John F. A. Sanford, a New York businessman who had no claim to being the Scott family's slaveholder, but who nonetheless stipulated to being such. The real slaveholder was his sister Irene, whom the Scotts initially sued in State court. When the Federal suit was brought, her name was likely omitted, and Sanford substituted, because its known destination was the Supreme Court ... and Irene was now married to Calvin Chaffee, a member of the House of Representatives, and a prominent opponent of slavery. Immediately after the decision was handed down, the Chaffees' role was exposed by the pro-slavery press and a public relations battle ensured, ending with their arranging for the Scott family's manumission. Why the pro-slavery side would have colluded is not hard to understand: given the composition of the Court, they were the likely winners. The motive for Scott's attorneys' collusion is harder to discern. His trial court attorney seems to have thought it worth the gamble because a win would enable sidestepping of the Fugitive Slave Act, a major gain given its almost-complete due process deprivations, while a loss would do limited harm -- the attack on the Missouri Compromise and on Congressional power over slavery in the territories was not an issue at the trial court level. Scott's attorney in the Supreme Court did face that issue, but had never been informed that the defendant had no real standing in the case.Download the paper from SSRN at the link. Read More... Law & Humanities Blog

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

The Bentham Project Research Associate opportunity

Posted: 17 Dec 2012 05:04 AM PST

The Bentham Project is currently advertising for a Research Associate (60% FTE) to work on a newly funded initiative called tranScriptorium. The following text is taken from the advertisement: The Bentham Project, in collaboration with partners from across Europe, has recently received a grant for a project entitled tranScriptorium, which aims to develop [...]

Digital Partnerships: Museums and Digital Humanities Workshop

Posted: 17 Dec 2012 04:36 AM PST

Registration is now open for a workshop, hosted by UCLDH, on 31st January 2013 beginning at 1:30pm About: ‘Digital Partnerships’ will focus on how museums and universities can work together when it comes to digital innovation. A drinks reception will be hosted afterwards at the Grant Museum of Zoology nearby. It will explore digital innovation and the relationships between [...]

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Slade Archive Project

Posted: 13 Dec 2012 08:15 AM PST

We are pleased to announce that UCLDH will be working with the Slade School of Fine Art on a pilot project to see what is held in the Slade Archive and to look at ways in which the information can be made available to a wider audience. The project is funded by a UCL Arts [...]

Law & Humanities Blog

Who Done It?

Posted: 12 Dec 2012 03:22 PM PST

The November 30th quiz at Classical-music.com, the website of BBC Music magazine, offers up some musical mystery fun. Can you identify these fictional and real-life murderers and murder victims? You might have to register (it's free) in order to gain access to the quiz, but the material on the website (including downloads, podcasts, reviews, and essays), is more than worth the price of admission.

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A New Collection on Legal Aesthetics
Confucius and Chinese Legal Philosophy
Robin West's "Normative Jurisprudence"

A New Collection on Legal Aesthetics

Posted: 11 Dec 2012 11:19 AM PST

Forthcoming from Walter de Gruyter:

Visualizing Law and Authority: Essays on Legal Aesthetics (Lief Dahlberg ed.; 2012) (Law and Literature; 4).

From the publisher's website:

The volume "Visualizing Law and Authority. Essays on Legal Aesthetics" brings together revised papers from the international conference "Law and the Image", held in Stockholm, 24–25 September, 2010. The participants/contributors belong to the disciplines of Art history, Cultural studies, Literary and Media studies, and Law. The contributions discuss the complex relations between law, media and visual phenomena. The common theme of the essays consists in an examination of the scopic field and of regimes of visibility in phenomenological terms, arguing that law constitutes a cognitive and aesthetic field of normative world-making. Rather than merely inverting Shelley's dictum that the "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", the essays argue in different ways for the necessity to develop a legal aesthetics.
The most immediate way of pursuing such a legal aesthetics consists in examining law itself as an aesthetic object, for instance the power of law to produce icons, in the sense of unreadable texts or textiles (Martin Kayman, Gary Watt). Several essays focus on the way that visual art and media can be used to constitute and represent political power, but also to question it and to put it into question (Chiara Battisti, Leif Dahlberg, Elina Druker, Sidia Fiorato, Paul Raffield). Other essays investigate legal structures inherent in the artwork (and the artworld) itself (Ari Hirvonen, Max Liljefors, Christine Poggi, Karen-Margrethe Simonsen). Finally, there are two essays focusing on the use of images and imagery in the legal process, explicity arguing for the need of a legal aesthetics (Daniela Carpi, Richard Sherwin).

Although diverse, the individual essays are interconnected with each other in fruitful and critical ways, making both explicit and implict references to each other.Available in print and as an e-book.

Confucius and Chinese Legal Philosophy

Posted: 11 Dec 2012 11:07 AM PST

Norman P. Ho, Netherlands China Law Centre; Morrison & Foerster (Hong Kong) is publishing Confucian Jurisprudence in Practice: Pre-Tang Dynasty Panwen (Written Legal Judgments) in the Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal. Here is the abstract.

Most scholarship on Chinese legal philosophy has neglected the study of Confucian jurisprudence in practice. As a result of this incomplete portrayal, scholars predominantly view the premodern Chinese Confucian legal tradition as lacking a rule of law system, which has led to blaming Confucianism for much of China's modern and historical rule of law problems. This article seeks to complicate this view by examining Confucian jurisprudence in practice: specifically, the development of pre-Tang dynasty panwen (written legal judgments). Through analysis of specific panwen from various Chinese primary sources — many of which have never been translated into English — this article will show that even in Chinese antiquity the legal system was not solely marked by codification or the lack of the rule of law, but was far more complex and diverse than most scholars have portrayed. For example, elements of case law played an important role in Chinese legal history. Indeed, it is an especially good time to build our understanding of the use of cases and the role of panwen, in China's legal past given the Supreme People's Court's recent emphasis on the role of case law in contemporary Chinese jurisprudence.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Robin West's "Normative Jurisprudence"

Posted: 11 Dec 2012 11:03 AM PST

Hanoch Dagan, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law, is publishing Normative Jurisprudence and Legal Realism in volume 63 of the University of Toronto Law Journal (2013). Here is the abstract.

This review article examines Robin West's provocative new book Normative Jurisprudence: An Introduction. West provides a learned and sophisticated account of the decay of the three major jurisprudential traditions of North American legal theory: natural law, legal positivism, and critical legal studies, which leads to and is motivated by a spirited plea for the reinvigoration of distinctively legal normative scholarship. Her proposed genealogy is valuable and her preliminary blueprint for reform important. But I believe that both fronts can be significantly enriched by a more charitable reading of legal realism than the one she (briefly) provides. Thus, this review offers a competing genealogical account of the three contemporary approaches to law West criticizes, claiming that like critical scholars, promoters of institutional fit and of economic efficiency are also intellectual descendants of legal realism. Legal realism, I insist, provides a subtle conception of law as a set of institutions distinguished by the irreducible cohabitation of power and reason, science and craft, and tradition and progress. This conception, which was torn apart by the realists' heirs, offers the key to a proper cure to the predicament West identifies by pointing out to a robust understanding of legal theory and thus of the distinctive contribution legal scholars can make in normative debates.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

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Law & Humanities Blog

New Issue of Law and Humanities Is Available

Posted: 07 Dec 2012 07:42 AM PST

The new issue of Law and Humanities is available.

Law and Humanities

Volume 6. Number 2. 2012

Hart Publishing is very pleased to let you know that the 2^ndissue of the 2012 volume of Law and Humanities is now available online.

Please see below for the table of contents, information about online access and details on how to subscribe.

CONTENTS

Editorial by Paul Raffield and Gary Watt

Free to view – please click on the link below:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/hart/lawhum/2012/00000006/00000002/art00001;jsessionid=1lbxa8ee47oct.alexandra

Articles

Oaths, Credibility and the Legal Process in Early Modern England: Part One

Barbara J Shapiro

'Observe how parts with parts unite / In one harmonious rule of right': William Blackstone's Verses on the Laws of England

Matthew Mauger

Human Rights and Radical Universalism: Aimé Césaire's and CLR James's Representations of the Haitian Revolution

Philip Kaisary

Dickens and the National Interest: On the Representation of Parties in Bleak House

Jan-Melissa Schramm

Truth, Law and Forensic Psychiatry in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

Svein Atle Skålevåg

ONLINE ACCESS

To access this issue online, read the abstracts and purchase individual papers please click here:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/hart/lawhum/2012/00000006/00000002;jsessionid=3kg9ow0cjr8fc.alexandra

SUBSCRIPTIONS

To subscribe and for further information about Law and Humanities, please click here:

http://www.hartjournals.co.uk/lh/subs.html

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Law & Humanities Blog

Judges On Reality TV

Posted: 06 Dec 2012 09:06 AM PST

Cynthia Bond, John Marshall Law School, has published "We, the Judges": The Legalized Subject and Narratives of Adjudication in Reality Television at 81 UMKC Law Review 1 (2012). Here is the abstract.

At first a cultural oddity, reality TV is now a cultural commonplace. These quasi-documentaries proliferate on a wide range of network and cable channels, proving adaptable to any audience demographic.

Across a variety of types of "reality" offerings, narratives of adjudication — replete with "judges," "juries," and "verdicts"— abound. Do these judgment formations simply reflect the often competitive structure or subtext of reality TV? Or is there a deeper, more constitutive connection between reality TV as a genre and narratives of law and adjudication?
This article looks beyond the many "judge shows" popular on reality TV (e.g. Judge Judy, etc.) to examine the law-like operations of the genre itself, and how legal narratives dovetail with the increasingly participatory nature of our "convergence culture." In addition, this article examines the ideologies these shows represent regarding community, and particularly the role of the legalized subject within this community. How does the prevalence of images of judges and judging on reality TV fit into previous notions that media audiences empathize with legal processes by identifying with an "on-screen" jury, embodying shared, democratic decision-making? Do these shows play on pop cultural narratives of conflicts between judges (within the show) and juries (the viewing audience)? Finally, do such shows empower spectators by engaging them in democratic "knowledge collectives," or instead represent a neo-liberal "technology of governmentality"? Ultimately, through its enactment of a range of adjudicatory and quasi-legal narratives, reality TV emerges as a highly regulatory space. Law is a compelling narrative for recirculation in a contemporary media culture marked by contestations of authority and community, as the interrelationships between cultural producer, text, and cultural consumer shift and are redefined.Download the article from SSRN at the link.

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Law & Humanities Blog

Law, Religion, and the Peace of Westphalia

Posted: 04 Dec 2012 01:28 PM PST

Gordon A.

Christenson, University of Cincinnati College of Law, has published 'Liberty of the Exercise of Religion' in the Peace of Westphalia in volume 21 of Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems (2012). Here is the abstract.

This essay takes a fresh look at the backdrop and structure of toleration and religious freedom in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and in the American Constitution, with special focus on a recent unanimous Supreme Court decision of first impression. That important decision protects inner church freedoms in ecclesiastical employment, the so-called "Ministerial Exception" to federal and state employment discrimination laws.
The Westphalian system of sovereign states spread widely after ending the Christian wars in Europe, beginning with the American Declaration of Independence. I ask whether there is any link between provisions for free exercise of religion in the Treaty and the Religion Clauses of the American Constitution and compare them structurally. The roots of religious tolerance worked out in the structure and practice of the Peace of Westphalia might have special relevance within the global community today, when ubiquitous tensions between liberty of conscience, secular ideology, and religion are faced by most sovereign states, certainly in the United States.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

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Law & Humanities Blog

Law In Modernity: A New Book From Routledge

Posted: 03 Dec 2012 01:25 PM PST

Reading Modern Law: Critical Methodogies and Sovereign Formations
Edited by Ruth Buchanan, Stewart Motha, and Sundhya Pahuja

Published May 3, 2012 by Routledge-Cavendish.

Reading Modern Law identifies and elaborates upon key critical methodologies for reading and writing about law in modernity. The force of law rests on determinate and localizable authorizations, as well as an expansive capacity to encompass what has not been pre-figured by an order of rules. The key question this dynamic of law raises is how legal forms might be deployed to confront and disrupt injustice. The urgency of this question must not eclipse the care its complexity demands. This book offers a critical methodology for addressing the many challenges thrown up by that question, whilst testifying to its complexity. The essays in this volume - engagements direct or oblique, with the work of Peter Fitzpatrick - chart a mode of resisting the proliferation of social scientific methods, as much as geo-political empire.

The authors elaborate a critical and interdisciplinary treatment of law and modernity, and outline the pivotal role of sovereignty in contemporary formations of power, both national and international. From various overlapping vantage points, therefore, Reading Modern Law interrogates law's relationship to power, as well as its relationship to the critical work of reading and writing about law in modernity.

A Conference on Eighteenth Century Portuguese Studies

Posted: 03 Dec 2012 01:13 PM PST

From Jose Calvo Gonzalez, news of another interesting conference: this one beginning today in Lisbon and running through the 5th of December. It's the Sociedade Portuguesa de Estudos do Século XVIII. COLÓQUIO INTERNACIONAL (Lisboa, 3-5 de Dezembro de 2012). More here at Professor Calvo's blog, Iusrisdictio-Lex Malacitana.

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Law & Humanities Blog

Box Scores

Posted: 29 Nov 2012 11:42 AM PST

When I see a blog like Overthinking It, I know I'm not alone. Excellent. Courtesy of Lowering the Bar, I bring you Overthinking It's graph on wins and losses (that is, convictions, plea bargains, and The Dreaded Acquittals) on Law and Order. The post, aptly named "The Law and Order Database: Cracking the Code," is devoted to Logged and Ordered: The Complete Series, and breaks down the results of the TV gang's 20 years of chasing felons.

Enjoy.

Hollywood and the Death Penalty

Posted: 29 Nov 2012 08:19 AM PST

David Ray Papke, Marquette Law School, has published Muted Message: Capital Punishment in the Hollywood Cinema as Marquette Law School Legal Studies Paper No. 12-25. Here is the abstract.

Contemporary Hollywood films seem at first glance to be opposed to capital punishment. However, this article's consideration of five surprisingly similar films (Dead Man Walking, The Chamber, Last Dance, True Crime, and The Life of David Gale) finds they do not truly and consistently condemn capital punishment. Instead of suggesting that the practice of capital punishment is fundamentally immoral and should in general be ended, the films champion only worthy individuals on death row and delight primarily in the personal growth of other characters who attempt to aid the condemned. In the end, Hollywood offers only a muted message regarding the on-going use of capital punishment.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

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Law & Humanities Blog

Studying Injustice

Posted: 28 Nov 2012 12:39 PM PST

A new book from Eric Heinze, Queen Mary, University of London. Here is the description from the publisher's website.

The Concept of Injustice challenges traditional Western justice theory. Thinkers from Plato and Aristotle through to Kant, Hegel, Marx and Rawls have subordinated the idea of injustice to the idea of justice. Misled by the word's etymology, political theorists have assumed injustice to be the sheer, logical opposite of justice.

Heinze summons ancient and early modern texts, philosophical and literary, with special attention to Shakespeare, to argue that injustice is not primarily the negation, failure or absence of justice. It is the constant product of regimes and norms of justice. Justice is not always the cure for injustice, and is often its cause.

Selected Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Nietzsche's Echo; PART ONE: Classical Understandings; 2. Injustice as the Negation of Justice; 3.Injustice as Disunity; 4. Injustice as Mismeasurement; PART TWO: Post-Classical Understandings; 5.Injustice as Unity; 6. Injustice as Measurement; 7. Measurement and Modernity; Works Cited.

About the Author

Eric Heinze is Professor of Law and Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London.

His most recent publications on legal theory have appeared in Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Ratio Juris, International Journal of Law in Context, Legal Studies, Journal of Social & Legal Studies, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, Law & Critique, Law & Literature, and Law & Humanities.

Published October 2012| 232 pages | Hardback: 978-0-415-52441-4| ~~$120.00~~ $96.00

For more information, please visit: www.routledge.com/9780415634793

Use discount code ERJ94 to save 20% off when you order online.

Rob.Kistler@taylorandfrancis.com

* discount valid on hardback and paperback formats only orders@taylorandfrancis.com

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Women In Nineteenth Century English Literature: A New Book

Posted: 27 Nov 2012 02:09 PM PST

New from Oxford University Press:

Hilary M. Schor, Curious Subjects: Women and the Trials of Realism (December, 2012). $65.00.

Below is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

While nineteenth-century literary scholars have long been interested in women's agency in the context of their legal status as objects, Curious Subjects makes the striking and original argument that what we find at the intersection between women subjects (who choose and enter into contracts) and women objects (owned and defined by fathers, husbands, and the law) is curiosity. Women protagonists in the novel are always both curiosities: strange objects worthy of our interest and actors who are themselves actively curious--relentless askers of questions, even (and perhaps especially) when they are commanded to be content and passive. What kinds of curiosity are possible and desirable, and what different kinds of knowledge do they yield? What sort of subject asks questions, seeks, chooses? Can a curious woman turn her curiosity on herself?" Curious Subjects takes seriously the persuasive force of the novel as a form that intervenes in our sense of what women want to know and how they can and should choose to act on that knowledge.

And it shows an astonishingly wide and subtly various range of answers to these questions in the British novel, which far from simply punishing women for their curiosity, theorized it, shaped it, and reworked it to give us characters as different as Alice in Wonderland and Dorothea Brooke, Clarissa Harlowe and Louisa Gradgrind. Schor's study provides thought-provoking new readings of the most canonical novels of the nineteenth century-- Hard Times, Bleak House, Vanity Fair, Daniel Deronda, among others--and pushes well beyond commonplace historicist accounts of British culture in the period as a monolithic ideological formation. It will interest scholars of law and literature, narratology, and feminist theory as well as literary history more generally.
Thanks to Simon Stern of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and Department of English for alerting me to this title.

Early American Lawyers and Their Books

Posted: 27 Nov 2012 07:55 AM PST

Alison L. LaCrois, University of Chicago Law School, has published The Lawyer's Library in the Early American Republic in Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law, and the British Novel in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Martha C. Nussbaum and Alison L. LaCroix, eds., Oxford University Press, 2013).

This essay appears in a volume titled Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law, and the British Novel in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Martha C. Nussbaum and Alison L. LaCroix, eds.) (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2013). The essay explores the role that fiction played in the early republican project of building American nationhood. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American statesmen and jurists – including such prominent thinkers as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Joseph Story – were avid readers of fiction. The vast majority of the novels they read were written by English authors; moreover, many of those authors were women. For example, among Marshall's surviving papers is a letter in which he chided Story for not including Jane Austen among the great novelists that Story listed in an 1826 address to Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Story had, however, cited Maria Edgeworth, Fanny Burney, and Ann Radcliffe in his address, and his son later recalled that his father had enjoyed Austen's novels. "This is emphatically the age of reading," Story told his Phi Beta Kappa audience. And, he added, "[m]an no longer aspires to an exclusive dominion in authorship." For founding-era thinkers such as Adams and Jefferson, novel-reading provided a way for Americans to participate in transatlantic culture and to hone a republican moral sensibility. For the early-nineteenth-century jurists Marshall and Story, fiction offered an opportunity to engage with emotions such as sympathy and to participate in a public sphere that brought men and women together, as both authors and readers, in a conversation that connected politics, law, and literary culture. These producers of legal theory were also consumers of fiction, gentlemen of letters who immersed themselves in female novelists' work not as a means of escape, but because those novels offered insights into what they regarded as crucial political questions of individual sentiment and national character.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

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