Law & Humanities Blog

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• Rex Stout's "Justice Ends at Home"
• Literary Property and Copyright
• Justice Holmes and Pragmatism

Rex Stout's "Justice Ends at Home" Posted: 30 Jan 2012 03:26 PM PST Ross E. Davies, George Masson University School of Law; The Green Bag, has published Leg, Culp, and the Evil Judge at 2012 Green Bag Almanac and Reader 321. Here is the abstract. Nobody could have known it at the time, but when Rex Stout's novella Justice Ends at Home was published in 1915, it foreshadowed not only the rise of two enduringly popular fictional heroes (Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin), but also the fall of one enduringly objectionable actual villain (Judge Martin T. Manton of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit). Leading scholars of the work of Rex Stout agree that the two main heroic characters in Justice Ends at Home — the flabby, phlegmatic, middle-aged Simon Leg and his sharp, energetic, youthful assistant Dan Culp — prefigured the fat Nero Wolfe and svelte Archie Goodwin who made their first appearance in Stout's 1934 novel, Fer-de-Lance. As Stout biographer John McAleer puts it, "eighteen years before Fer-de-Lance was written, Wolfe and Archie already lived nebulously in the mind of Rex Stout." Unlike Simon Leg and Dan Culp, Judge Fraser Manton — the main villainous character in Justice Ends at Home — has passed largely unnoticed by scholars of Stout and of the law. But the fictional Judge Manton is in fact a prefiguration of the infamous real-life Judge Martin T. Manton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The similarities go beyond the names. Indeed, the two Mantons have enough in common to support an inference that Stout based his fictional Judge Fraser Manton on the real Martin Manton, although the real Manton would not become a judge until 1916 — the year after Justice Ends at Home was published. In other words, Stout's selection of a corrupt Judge Manton for the lead bad-guy role in Justice Ends at Home was intriguingly prescient. Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Literary Property and Copyright Posted: 30 Jan 2012 03:22 PM PST Alina Ng, Mississippi College School of Law, has published Literary Property and Copyright in volume 10 of Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property (May 2012). Here is the abstract. Even when the first subject matter of copyright control was literary works, the specific rights of authors who produce these works had never been clearly articulated. Copyright laws have protected a statutory right to distribute the work to the public that may be broadly owned by both author and publisher while the common-law right of property over the work, which would have protected an author's creative interest in the work, have been dismissed by the courts as a legitimate source of law.

Medical Humanities

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Classics for ethics? Posted: 21 Jan 2012 03:03 AM PST I've been invited to deliver a masterclass in using classical literature to teach ethics at the Institute of Medical Ethics Conference next month. I'm really looking forward to it, not least because three former students are up for the Mark Brenner prize for creative approaches to ethical issues in clinical attachments.

Medical Humanities

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Blog redesign Posted: 15 Jan 2012 10:05 AM PST When this blog was started some eight years ago, it was envisaged as a place where students from the Imperial College Medical Humanities course could share their writing and any medical humanities activities. This worked well for many years, but since then, the websphere has changed, as has the nature of medical education. An explosion in social media means that students no longer need a formal space in which to showcase their writing. Many have blogs of their own or rely on Facebook to raise their profile. Also students have such full timetables that it is unrealistic to expect long-term commitments to writing for a group blog. So, whilst I still envisage inviting posts from students and others associated with the course at Imperial, I'm going to take ownership of the blog and try to write more myself. I'm pretty sure this was the first blog devoted to medical humanities, and it's been nice to see other groups set up their own blogs to tell us about their activities. I'll be posting links to UK medical humanities conferences and events, so please let me know if you would like anything included. I won't be adding or accepting sponsored links. I'm in the process of updating the blog roll, so will be accepting suggestions for relevant sites.

Comics & Medicine: Navigating the Margins Posted: 15 Jan 2012 05:09 AM PST 22-24 July 2012 Toronto, Canada Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto Biomedical Communications Program, University of Toronto, Office of the Vice-Principal, Research, University of Toronto, Mississauga The third international interdisciplinary conference* on comics and medicine will continue to explore the intersection of sequential visual arts and medicine.