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Law & Humanities Blog

Nasty Popular Culture Attorney Association, General Division

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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