Law & Humanities Blog |
- USA Network's Legal Series Return With New Episodes
- The Norman Invasion and the Irish
- Law and Tyranny
- The Lawyer As Trickster
- Buon Compleanno, Gioachino Rossini
| USA Network's Legal Series Return With New Episodes Posted: 29 Feb 2012 09:15 PM PST USA Network's law-related series Fairly Legal returns Friday, March 16th at 9 p.m., 8 p.m. Central time. Sarah Shahi stars as Kate Reid, a lawyer turned mediator at her late father's San Francisco law firm. In addition, the pseudo-psychic detective show Psych returns this week, and the legal dramedy Suits is back this summer. Watch full episodes from its first season here.   |
| The Norman Invasion and the Irish Posted: 29 Feb 2012 08:55 AM PST Katherine Jacob, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, has published Divine Diversion: Divine Retribution as Dispute Resolution and the Norman Invasion of Ireland. Here is the abstract. This essay reevaluates the Anglo-Norman invasion's impact on native Irish culture by analyzing references to divine power in the medieval native Irish annals. This essay posits that native Irish society's destabilization in the wake of the Anglo-Norman invasion may be better understood by analyzing patterns in the native Irish cultural belief in spiritual vengeance. Part I discusses divine retribution's general cultural context, and explores its position in native Irish culture. It briefly compares saints' roles in native Irish culture with their position in Anglo-Norman culture, and describes the Anglo-Norman incursion in Ireland and its wider impacts on native Irish society. Part II analyzes the native Irish annals and presents a process to assess variations in spiritual authority's influence in native Irish culture. It presents statistical results, evaluates their significance in context, and contends that the Anglo-Norman arrival transformed native Irish perception of divine retribution as a legitimate form of dispute resolution. Then, it proposes a results-based model for dissecting divine retribution's role in disputes. Part III discusses spiritual vengeance's function in modern cross-cultural disputes. It then applies the proposed model to suggest that the way the Anglo-Normans avoided spiritual wrath in Ireland might provide a usable framework to suppress an opposition's faith in, and utilization of, divine retribution as dispute resolution.The full text is not available from SSRN.   |
| Posted: 29 Feb 2012 08:41 AM PST Timothy Sandefur, Pacific Legal Foundation, has published Love and Solipsism: Law and Arbitrary Rule in Classical Drama. |
Here is the abstract.
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What distinguishes the rule of law from the lawless, arbitrary rule of brute force — which can almost interchangeably be described as tyranny or as anarchy — is that in a lawful rule the government's coercive power operates according to principles of generality, regularity, fairness, rationality and public-orientation, whereas the arbitrary or lawless ruler wields power in the service of his (or their) own self-interest, or by mere ipse dixit. Law is to arbitrariness as reason is to mere will. In this paper, I explore the dichotomy between lawful and arbitrary rule as it has been represented in literature. I examine first the primal foundation of lawful rule, as depicted in Aeschylus' Oresteia, in which law is generated by domesticating the use of force, through persuasion and willing union. Athena creates lawful order, not by fiat, but by marrying the Furies to "Persuasion": the ambient coercive powers of the people — morally justified, yet dangerously personal urges for vengeance — will now be rationalized in accordance with public, logical, and articulable principles. By contrast, in Shakespeare's Richard III, we witness the subversion and near-destruction of lawful order by a man who will tear apart the newly framed lawful order and make the state serve his own private ends. The contrast of these two dramas reveals that the tyrant is essentially a solipsist: his ultimate goal is to make the real world obey his say-so. And if law is like love, the tyrant is like the rapist: the forced surrender of intimacy is the best facsimile of love the solipsist can create; but it can never actually be love, because the two are separated by the same invisible and impenetrable boundary that separates truth from falsehood, or genuine loyalty from the rule of terror. I conclude with a look at the dissenter living in a lawless order, as depicted in two variations on the story of Antigone — the first by Sophocles and the second by Jean Anouilh. In both, the lawless, arbitrary rule is challenged in the name of law, and in each, the ruler nearly succeeds in substituting his private realm of mere words for the public realm of actual things. What emerges from this study is that the basic premise of all lawful order — the root of all secure liberty — is that there is a gap between the will of the ruler and the genuine law. Whenever such a gap exists — whenever it is meaningful to deliberate over whether the ruler's commands are, in fact, law — the society will, to that extent, become one of lawful order and of (at least some) freedom. The link between tyranny and solipsism is that where the ruler's will is accounted the law, there can be no genuine law, and thus no freedom. The paradox whereby tyranny is lawless is explained by the fact that tyranny is an attempt to impose by convention what does not originate in nature — and in the end, neither physical nature nor the nature of human relationships can be subjected to such commands. The ultimate demand of the lawless ruler(s) is to substitute his (or their) word for the world — to compel the subject to love him (or them). And because that can never be accomplished, arbitrary rule is doomed to eventual collapse.Download the paper from SSRN at the link.
Posted: 29 Feb 2012 08:38 AM PST
John Denvir, University of San Francisco, School of Law, has published Guile is Good: the Lawyer as Trickster. Here is the abstract.
What is the lawyer's genius — the talent that distinguishes us from other professions? Movies and television suggest that it is more than legal knowledge and technical skills; it is the way lawyers use creativity and cunning to outwit their adversaries. Lawyers in films and television act much like the Trickster figure in mythology and folklore. Moreover, study of the professional lives of the best real life lawyers reveals these same trickster talents. The paper argues that lawyers should embrace the trickster identity because it celebrates the valuable contributions lawyers make to the public good.Download the paper from SSRN at the link.
Buon Compleanno, Gioachino Rossini
Posted: 29 Feb 2012 05:19 AM PST
Google celebrates with a Rossini "leap frog doodle!" Rossini makes so many allusions to law in his operas, beginning with his first work, La Cambiale di Matrimonio (The Marriage Contract, or The Bill of Marriage) and continuing through such works as The Barber of Seville (more marriage) to his last, Guillaume Tell (William Tell). Italian censors found this opera particularly objectionable because of its subject matter, which dealt with rebellion against the government.
Short Bibliography
Peter Goodrich, Operatic Hermeneutics:Harmony Euphantasy and Law In Rossini's Semiramis, 20 Cardozo Law Review 1649 (1998-1999).
Daniel Tritter, Dramma Giocosa, at 20 Opera Quarterly 7 (Winter 2004).
Short Bibliography
Peter Goodrich, Operatic Hermeneutics:Harmony Euphantasy and Law In Rossini's Semiramis, 20 Cardozo Law Review 1649 (1998-1999).
Daniel Tritter, Dramma Giocosa, at 20 Opera Quarterly 7 (Winter 2004).
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