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Law & Humanities Blog

Law & Humanities Blog

New Issue of Nineteenth Century Gender Studies Devoted To Law and Gender

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 03:44 PM PDT

The new issue of the journal Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (Summer 2012) centers on law and gender. It includes many interesting articles and book reviews, including Christine L. Krueger's "The Queer Heroism of a Man of Law in "A Tale of Two Cities" and Catherine Siemann's "Appellate Lawyers in Petticoats: Access to Justice in Wilkie Collins's "The Law and the Lady."

Thanks to Simon Stern of the University of Toronto School of Law and Department of English for alerting me to this very interesting issue.

Evidentiary Rules and "The Crucible"

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 09:57 AM PDT

Martin H. Pritikin, Whittier Law School, is publishing Can Law and Literature Be Practical? The Crucible and the Federal Rules of Evidence in the West Virginia Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Counter-intuitively, one of the best ways to learn the practice-oriented topic of evidence may be by studying a work of fiction — specifically, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which dramatizes the 17th century Salem witch trials. The play puts the reader in the position of legal advocate, and invites strategic analysis of evidentiary issues. A close analysis of the dialogue presents an opportunity to explore both the doctrinal nuances of and policy considerations underlying the most important topics covered by the Federal Rules of Evidence, including relevance, character evidence and impeachment, opinion testimony, hearsay, and the mode and order of interrogation.
Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Women's Citizenship and Marriage In the Nineteenth Century

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 03:36 PM PDT

Helen Irving, University of Sydney Faculty of Law, has published When Women Were Aliens: The Neglected History of Derivative Marital Citizenship as Sydney Law School Research Paper No. 12/47. Here is the abstract.
Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, in virtually every country in the world, women who married foreign men were stripped of their citizenship, and turned into aliens in their own country. Marital denaturalization laws were supported by the international community until well after the Second World War: single citizenship, family unity, diplomatic convenience, and inter-state comity, were treated as imperatives that overrode women's independent personal status. Such laws, which expanded at the very time when women were gaining legal and political rights, impacted radically, sometimes tragically, on individual lives, including rendering many thousands of women stateless. This essay gives an account of the emergence and evolution of such laws, with particular reference to Britain and the United States. It provides a 'snapshot' of individual cases, and an overview of the international community's response.
Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Reality Show Judging On TV

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 07:51 AM PDT

Cynthia D. Bond, The John Marshall Law School (Chicago), is publishing "'We, the Judge(s)': The Legalized Subject and Narratives of Adjudication in Reality T.V., in the UMKC Law Review. 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 deeply regulatory space.
The full text is not available from SSRN. 
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