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Law & Humanities Blog

Nasty Popular Culture Attorney Association, General Division
The History of Mandatory Copyright In Palestine and Israel
Rudolph P. Byrd, Paul Fussell Pass From the Scene

Posted: 30 May 2012 11:04 AM PDT

Greedy Associates (Findlaw.com) nominates three fictional lawyers, Tom Hagen ("The Godfather"), John Milton ("The Devil's Advocate"), and Maurice Levy ("The Wire") as the most evil attorneys ever. Criteria? Corruption, immorality, and all-around nastiness (without redeeeming social value, of course). Which lawyers are your candidates for Most Evil Fictional Advocates Of All Time?

The History of Mandatory Copyright In Palestine and Israel

Posted: 30 May 2012 08:08 AM PDT

Michael Birnhack, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law, has published Mandatory Copyright: From Pre-Palestine to Israel, 1910-2007, in A Shifting Empire: 100 Years of the Copyright Act 1911 (Uma Suthersanan & Ysolde Gendreau eds.; Edward Elgar, 2012, forthcoming).

Here is the abstract.

The development of copyright law in Mandate Palestine and then Israel during the past century is a story of gradual absorption of a foreign concept, constantly searching for direction and guidance, slowly distancing itself from the original British roots. Copyright law was imposed first by the Ottomans (1910) and then by the British (1920, 1924), but both foreign transplants were premature for some time. Foreign players and technological developments were instrumental in the initial integration of copyright. Later on and more so in its new status as an Israeli law, the legal (trans)plant took a life of its own: although emerging from British sources, it was affected by international commitments, Continental notions of authors' rights, then by American utilitarian-instrumentalist concepts, and finally by the reconceptionalisation of copyright as a subject of global trade, all mixed up with various original Israeli additions. Thus, current Israeli copyright law is a complex patch-work. Here I retell these developments as a story of an on-going search for theoretical and legal guidance. The discussion offers a case study of legal transplants, by providing a legal-historical discussion of copyright law in one particular region.
The discussion begins with the Ottoman and British copyright laws, and then surveys copyright law since the establishment of Israel (1948). I trace the continental impact on the law and then a growing tendency towards Americanisation, culminating in the Copyright Act 2007, with a fair use regime.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Rudolph P. Byrd, Paul Fussell Pass From the Scene

Posted: 30 May 2012 07:46 AM PDT

Two recent losses in academe. Rudolph P. Byrd of Emory University passed away in October 2011. Audrey Williams focuses on the impact his work and teaching had on students, colleagues, and the larger world here. On May 23, Paul Fussell died. Jay Winter pays tribute here.

Selected Byrd Bibliography

I Call Myself an Artist: Writings By and About Charles Johnson (1999).
Jean Toomer's Years With Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artist (2010).
Traps: African-American Men on Gender and Sexuality (2001).
The World Has Changed: Conversations With Alice Walker (2011).

Selected Fussell Bibliography

Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1982).
Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1992).
The Great War and Modern Memory: 25th anniversary edition (2000).
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1990).

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UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Day of Archaeology 2012

Posted: 30 May 2012 07:26 AM PDT

Posted on behalf of Lorna Richardson. Following on from the success of 2011, we are happy to announce that this year's ‘Day of Archaeology’, the public archaeology mass blogging project, is scheduled for *June 29, 2012*. Last year's event, supported by the Centre for Digital Humanities, the Portable Antiquities Scheme, the Archaeology Data Service and [...]

Law & Humanities Blog

The Origins of Law and Culture

Posted: 29 May 2012 02:14 PM PDT

Robin Bradley Kar, University of Illinois College of Law, has published On the Early Eastern Origins of Western Law and Western Civilization: New Arguments for a Changed Understanding of Our Earliest Legal and Cultural Origins (Part 1) (Part 2) and (Part 3), in the University of Illinois Law Review. Here is the abstract for Part 1.

Western law and Western civilization are often said to be parts of a distinctive tradition, which differentiates them from their counterparts in the "East" and explains many of their special capacities and characteristics. One common version of this story, as propounded by the influential legal scholar Harold Berman, asserts that Western civilization (including its incipient legal traditions) began in the 11th century AD with a return to the texts of three more primordial traditions: those of ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel. The basic story that Western civilization finds its origins in ancient Greek, Roman, and Hebrew culture is, however, so familiar and so pervasive that it has rarely — until recently — been questioned in the West.
This Article develops a novel set of arguments, rooted in recent findings from a broad range of cognate fields, to suggest that this standard story is nevertheless incomplete and even potentially misleading. If we are genuinely interested in understanding our origins in a way that will shed light on why the West has exhibited such distinctive capacities for large-scale human civilization and the rule of law, then the story we commonly tell ourselves starts abruptly in the middle and leaves out some of the most formative (and potentially transformative) dimensions of the truth. Western law and Western civilization are not just the outgrowths of three particularly creative cultures, which straddled the transition from human prehistory into human history and developed in either Southeastern Europe or the Near East. Rather, the West appears to be descended from a much deeper cultural tradition, which extends all the way back to some of our first human forays out of hunter-gatherer modes of subsistence and into settled agricultural living.

The tradition in question began not in Greece, Rome, or Israel, however, but rather in and around the Indus Valley — which is a region that spans the Northwestern portions of the Indian subcontinent.
From approximately 4500 BC until approximately 1900 BC — and hence long before the rise of ancient Greece, Rome or Israel — the Indus Valley region gave rise to one of the very first large scale civilizations in our natural history as a species: the so-called "Harappan" Civilization. This civilization was also part of a much larger and highly integrated social complex, with strong ties to ancient Bactria and the eastern parts of modern day Iran. (Because this region does not correspond to contemporary political boundaries, I call it the "Eastern-Iran-Bactria-Indus-Valley" Region.) In this Article, I argue that this ancient socio-cultural complex is most likely the actual source of a range of important Western traditions. Through an unbroken chain of cultural transmission that has operated through an immense number of generations, we have likely inherited an important set of traditions from this ancient socio-cultural complex, which have specially equipped us to produce and sustain large-scale civilizations with the rule of law. If this is true, then our failure to understand our deep genealogical relationship to this ancient socio-cultural complex has limited our self-understanding in critical respects. It has also prevented us from realizing useful aspects of our traditions — including, in some cases, those aspects that make our current traditions in the West so capable of supporting large-scale human civilizations with the rule of law.
We live in an era in which it is, moreover, especially important to decipher the deepest origins of Western law and civilization. Scholars within the emerging "legal origins" tradition (e.g., Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny) have now produced an impressive body of empirical work, which suggests that we can explain a broad range of features of modern societies in terms of the origins of their laws. This literature suggests that legal origin variables can have strong effects on issues as diverse as corporate governance structure, labor regulations, the robustness of capital markets, and even literacy and infant mortality rates.
The present Article argues that this literature may nevertheless be working with legal origin variables that fail to track our deepest and most genuine lines of relevant descent. After developing a special methodology to discern the relevant genealogical facts, I use this methodology to propose a new (and fundamentally changed) account of the most plausible phylogenetic structure of the Indo-European legal family (including the socio-cultural traditions needed to support legal systems, along with the special psychological attitudes that animate these traditions). This novel account traces many of the most important developments of this family of traditions deep into human prehistory. A proper understanding of this new family tree should have important empirical implications: this work can, for example, be used to help explain why certain exportations of Western-style legal institutions have worked so well while others have not. Inquiries of this kind should have special urgency today, given the massive exportations of Western law and Western legal institutions to so many other parts of the world and given the increased pressures toward westernization that are being felt around the globe.
The origins story that I develop in this Article should, however, also have broader implications for a much wider range of cognate fields, which have typically presumed a primarily Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian origin for key developments in the West. The revised origins story that I will be telling should therefore be of more general human concern.
Download the articles from SSRN at the links. Read More... Law & Humanities Blog

Law & Humanities Blog

Barthes, Deconstructed

Posted: 27 May 2012 06:35 AM PDT

The New York Times's Sam Anderson on a new, and complete, translation of Roland Barthes's Mythologies.

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Law & Humanities Blog

Henry's Man In Rome

Posted: 26 May 2012 08:17 AM PDT

One of the less known, and less understood, stories about Henry VIII's "great matter" is exactly how the king and his advisors pursued the issue of an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon before the authorities at the Vatican.

Henry could certainly be a tenacious, single-minded, and supremely selfish man, and the way in which he held on, for years, to the idea that he could have both his annulment and continued (fairly) amicable relations with her nephew Charles V, demonstrates all these qualities. How, though, did the actual negotiations proceed? Who carried out the instructions to secure the termination of Henry's relationship to his first wife? Who was Henry's "man in Rome"?

In Henry's Man In Rome (Palgrave, 2012), Catherine Fletcher investigates the identity and the activities of Gregorio Casali,who gets only an occasional mention in the literature of the time. She also illuminates the reasons for the ultimate failure of his delicate mission, which is part of an event that set in motion the establishment of a new church and led to the birth of a great queen. She introduces us not only to the work of a forgotten Italian diplomat of the period, but to the very sensitive activities of an emissary entrusted with a delicate matter such as the disentangling of a royal marriage and a diplomatic alliance. She also depicts life in the Rome of the early to mid 1500s (sometimes none too glamorous or safe, even for the wealthy). Casali's brother, a man "young, virtuous, and lovable, and not little esteemed by His Holiness," according to a member of the Mantuan diplomatic corps, is murdered in 1533.

A meticulously written and exciting look behind the scenes of Henry VIII's attempt to obtain that dissolution of his fateful marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and a worthy addition to the shelf of Renaissance biography and history.

[Based on an advance review copy of Catherine Fletcher, Henry's Man in Rome, Palgrave, 2012. British title: The Divorce of Henry VIII. Copy courtesy of the publisher]. Read More... Law & Humanities Blog

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Digital Classicist & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar, Summer 2012

Posted: 25 May 2012 06:58 AM PDT

The full programme for the annual Digital Classicist & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar series is available on our 2012 seminar page. As always, abstracts are there in advance and the slides and audiocast will appear soon after each seminar. Previous seminars and other Digital Classicist events (conference panels etc) are on the main [...]

Law & Humanities Blog

George V, Come Into the Court!

Posted: 24 May 2012 02:45 PM PDT

Robin Callender Smith, University of London, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Law, has published The Missing Witness? George V, Competence and Compellability and the Criminal Libel Trial of Edward Frederick Mylius. Here is the abstract.

A criminal libel trial in 1911 set the monarch against one of his subjects. Edward Mylius repeated a rumour that accused King George V of marrying Queen Mary when – secretly – the King had already married someone else and had three children. The criminal charge, the process used to bring the issue to court, the advice to the King of the relevant Ministers (including Winston Churchill as Home Secretary) and the trial itself stretched the boundaries of fairness. The legacy of the trial created a lingering problem.

Can the monarch ever be required to face the direct scrutiny of examination by being required to appear as a witness in his or her own court to support a personal complaint?Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Nineteenth Century Novelists and Crime

Posted: 24 May 2012 01:36 PM PDT

Elizabeth Burney, University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology, has published Crime and Criminology in the Eye of the Novelist: Trends in Nineteenth Century Literature at 51 Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 160 (2012). Here is the abstract.

Many leading novelists of the 19th Century were deeply concerned with crime and its causes, reflecting concerns of the period and often raising ideas which find resonance with modern criminological theories. The structural causes of crime; the negative effect of ill‐treatment and harsh punishment; labelling theory; the possibility of redemption and desistance; the ingrained flaws in individual characters which result in a propensity to crime and deviance, enhanced by bad influences and criminogenic environments; the social pressures (labelled 'strain theory' by criminologists) which drive outsiders to gain wealth and status by illegitimate means – all these can be found in fiction of the period. This article takes examples from English, French and Russian literature to illustrate these themes. The article also links fiction to the development of perceptions about crime and criminals as the century progressed.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

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Law & Humanities Blog

The Lawyer As Trickster 2.0

Posted: 23 May 2012 01:53 PM PDT

John Denvir, University of San Francisco School of Law, has revised his work "Guile is Good: The Lawyer as Trickster." The original was a top ten download in several categories. The revision is available here from SSRN. Here is the original 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.

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Law & Humanities Blog

Interpreting Nat Turner's "Confessions"

Posted: 21 May 2012 01:37 PM PDT

Christopher L.

Tomlins, University of California, Irvine School of Law, has published Demonic Ambiguities: Enchantment and Disenchantment in Nathaniel Turner's Virginia as IC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2012-22. Here is the abstract.

This paper conjoins three texts – the "Confessions of Nat Turner," Walter Benjamin's "Capitalism as Religion," and Max Weber's "Science as a Vocation." Benjamin and Weber provide interpretive prisms through which to examine Turner's confession. Though quite unlike each other, each glances at the demonic – a matter of some significance when one considers the meaning of the "full faith and credit" held due the decision of the Southampton (Virginia) County Court to hang Turner for his attempted 1831 slave rebellion. Like guilt/debt, the dual meanings of Schuld that, for Benjamin, confirmed the existence of a religious – specifically a Christian – structure in capitalism, the conjunction of faith and credit has its own demonic ambiguity, simultaneously sacralizing (faith) and secularizing (credit) the authority of the law. In capitalism as religion and as law, these demonic ambiguities fuse together in an overwhelming simultaneity that is at once economic and juridical, moral and psychological, profane and sacral. This simultaneity – and Turner's attempt to disrupt it – is the paper's chief concern.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. Read More... Law & Humanities Blog

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Digital Humanities on YouTube

Posted: 21 May 2012 10:39 AM PDT

One of our PhD students, Greta Franzini, has put together this YouTube playlist of DH videos and made it available. I’ve been looking through and see there are some familiar names there! This is a good way of collecting together resources – thanks Greta. Do we have any other examples?

DDHL: The Residue of Uniqueness

Posted: 21 May 2012 09:42 AM PDT

Received from the Decoding Digital Humanities London mailing list: DDH London will be meeting again on * Wednesday 30 May 18:00 * at The Plough, 27 Museum Street, London, WC1A 1LH This month we will be reading: McCarty, Willard (forthcoming). “The residue of uniqueness”. The Cologne Dialogue on Digital Humanities @ Wahn Manor House, 2012. Historical Social Research – Historische Sozialforschung. [pre-print pdf] Please [...]

Law & Humanities Blog

Harry's Law Cancelled

Posted: 19 May 2012 12:20 PM PDT

NBC has cancelled the David E.

Kelley legal drama "Harry's Law," starring Kathy Bates as former corporate attorney turned street lawyer Harriet Korn. The series ran for two seasons.

A Law and Pop Culture Research Guide

Posted: 19 May 2012 12:11 PM PDT

The Law Library staff at IIT's Chicago-Kent College of Law maintains a Law and Popular Research Guide, and updates it regularly. Check it out here.

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UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Award for QRator and the Grant Museum

Posted: 17 May 2012 04:13 AM PDT

Last night a contingent from UCLDH, CASA and Museums and Public Engagement, headed down to the 10th Anniversary Museums and Heritage Awards. There were 11 awards in total UCL, were up for three: The move of the Grant Museum for Project on A Limited Budget, the Grant Museum's QRator project for Innovations and Heritage Without Borders for The International Award. We are proud [...]

Medical Humanities

Posted: 17 May 2012 12:22 AM PDT

It's time for the annual Medical Humanities art exhibition at Imperial.

There is a really high standard of work this year (as always!), dealing with a range of interesting ideas.

Retelling tales of Pregnancy and Birth conference update

Posted: 17 May 2012 12:18 AM PDT

There is now a full programme for this conference here. Helen King, conference organiser, has also let me know that thanks to generous funding from the Wellcome (love them!), the registration fee is very low, especially for post-graduates.

Law & Humanities Blog

The Finalists In the Harper Lee Prize Winner Contest
Baby, Esquire
Feminism and the Museum

The Finalists In the Harper Lee Prize Winner Contest

Posted: 16 May 2012 04:26 PM PDT

Vote for this year's Harper Lee Prize winner here. (From the ABA's Journal's blog). In the running: Michael Connelly's The Fifth Witness; Robert Dugoni's Murder One; David Ellis's Breach of Trust.

Baby, Esquire

Posted: 16 May 2012 04:18 PM PDT

Alyssa A. DiRusso, Samford University Cumberland School of Law, and Letitia Van Campen have published Law and Literature Junior: Lawyers in Books for Young Children at 11 Whittier Journal of Child & Family Advocacy 39 (2012). Here is the abstract.

Are children's perceptions of lawyers an open book? The genre of law and literature has demonstrated the power that popular texts hold in shaping societal perceptions of law, but little attention has been given to little readers.

This Article explores the perspectives children have of lawyers and how books for young children may reflect or affect those perspectives. A unique collaboration between a law professor and a children's librarian, this Article reviews a variety of books intended for preschool and early elementary readers. Several themes and narratives emerge from these texts, telling stories of lawyers as historical heroes or workaday joes. The books promote ideals – realistic or unrealistic – relating to the transience of legal practice, the motivation and character of lawyers, and the diversity of the legal profession. The relative absence of relatable fictional lawyers in books for young children is also notable. Outside of books, the relationships between lawyers and children are too often less than positive. Lending greater attention to the books that shape perspectives of lawyers may foster happier endings to these real-life stories. Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Feminism and the Museum

Posted: 16 May 2012 08:25 AM PDT

Yxta Maya Murray, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, has published Feminist Engagement and the Museum in volume 1 of the British Journal of American Legal Studies (2012). Here is the abstract.

One day in the summer of 2011, Los Angeles law professor Yxta Maya Murray visited the Tate Britain and was shocked to see there Cathy Wilkes' installation (We are) pro-choice, a phantasmagoria involving a "weeping" naked mannequin sitting on a toilet, as well as a ladder and some banged up kitchenware. Murray gleaned that something feminist was in the offing, but couldn't tell quite what that might be. It seemed evident that Wilkes was making a case that women are miserable in today's brutalist western-capitalist society. However (she wondered), were there any other, more hopeful, conclusions to draw from the work? Pro-choice sent her off on a six-months long adventure of trying to understand this amazing art – intellectual travels that drew her to the lands of French/Bulgarian feminist Julia Kristeva, U.S. legal theorist Drucilla Cornell, and to the strange ways of Irish Wilkes herself. In the resulting essay, Murray asks the following questions: What is this suffering that Wilkes' describes in (We are) pro-choice? How does art help us understand subordination that might be reversed through legal reform? And what kinds of radical changes have to be made to museum law and policy that would allow art institutions to help us liberate the oppressed?

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

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