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Law & Humanities Blog

Law & Humanities Blog

Pedro Almodovar's "High Heels"

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 01:11 PM PDT

Monica Lopez Lerma, University of Helsinki Faculty of Law, has published Law in High Heels: Performativity, Alterity, and Aesthetics, at 20 Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 2 (2011). Here is the abstract.

Pedro Almodovar's High Heels (the original Spanish title, Tacones Lejanos, literally means 'distant heels') is a 1991 postmodern film that celebrates performance, fluidity, and fragmentation as ways of being in and understanding the world. In a generic combination of melodrama, comedy, musical, and film noir, High Heels tells the story of a turbulent mother daughter relationship, and a judge's criminal investigation following the murder of the daughter's husband (who also happens to be the mother's former lover). In recent years, Almodovar's film has received the attention of Orit Kamir, a law-and-film feminist scholar who opens up a refreshing line of inquiry. Kamir uses the film as a powerful site and as a means to explore alternative feminist images of law, judgment, and justice. In this Article, I provide new insights into Kamir's feminist jurisprudential reading of the film by placing it within the framework of postmodern jurisprudence, performativity, and queer aesthetics. My aim is to reconceptualize law through an ethics of alterity, and to further theoretical developments in postmodern accounts of judgment, ethics, and justice.
Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

François Hollande On the Holocaust

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 01:07 PM PDT


From Richard Weisberg

The following Israeli editorial aptly summarizes both the excellent recent statement about Vichy by France's new President and some of the debate that, predictably, has followed. The clarity of Pres. Hollande's statement reiterates, at some distance, the findings of scholars such as myself, about France's responsibility for the wrongdoing against Jews. The Commission in Paris that now administers individual restitution for Vichy's victims has also been mentioned in news stories, eg the NYT on 7/16. I have been over-seeing that Commission's work for over a decade.It is much to France's credit that they are, in different ways and after many decades of self-congratulatory denial, coming to grips with this sad history.However, there are voices of revisionism, some from surprising quarters.I look forward to hearing from you if you have views on these developments.Regards, Richard Weisberg 

Subject: today editorial, 7/31 "Haaretz"
 Whose crime is it?

Schoolteachers have long complained about the difficulties of teaching this chapter in French history. 'The Holocaust is not the history of the Jewish people; it is history, our history,' said Hollande.

Adar Primor | Jul.31, 2012

"The truth is that the crime was committed in France, by France." One sentence, a few simple, clear words, but how loaded. And how, it turns out, controversial. Still.
President Francois Hollande, under 100 days in the Elysees and has already notched up one of the most historic, powerful, and resonant speeches ever heard in the French Fifth Republic.
That sentence became the focus of the speech he gave last week at a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Vel d'Hiv roundup. It was the largest Aktion carried out on French soil. In July 1942, more than 13,000 Jews from Paris and its environs were arrested. The Jews were concentrated in the Winter Velodrome and from there, most were sent to their annihilation in Auschwitz.
"The crime was committed in France"? Clearly. "By France"? Absolutely not. So it was claimed, once again, following Hollande's speech. For decades the French looked in the mirror and saw reflected in it a nation of a great revolution, a nation of enlightenment and human rights, a land of refuge and emancipation. When they skipped forward, historically, to World War II, the reflection in the mirror was that of General Charles de Gaulle and Free France, of the Resistance and Righteous Gentiles.
For decades the history of France was blurred, concealed, or even denied, until it was forgotten. But in 1995 President Jacques Chirac decided to shatter the deceitful mirror and put an end to the amnesia. He accepted responsibility for the crimes of the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis. He did it in France's name. Chirac sought "to kill" the old myth.
Hollande, 17 years later, came to verify the kill: France is a country of "anonymous heroes," who are responsible for saving 75 percent of France's Jews, Hollande noted, justly. But France, he added, also initiated the Vel d'Hiv hunt, organized it, and sent its citizens to their deaths.
One cannot, therefore, accept any longer the claim which holds that the Vichy government was nothing but an executive branch of the Nazis that was imposed on France. The horrific crimes were perpetrated by French individuals, in the name of the French people and France. This collective must take responsibility.
Again and again Hollande repeated in his speech the words that in his view comprise historic justice: "truth"(which there is an obligation to state ), "oblivion" (which he vowed to combat ), and "memory" (which he undertook to nurture ). His words take on special meaning in view of a new poll that has found that 42 percent of the French (and 60 percent of young people ) are unaware of the Vel d'Hiv raid.
Schoolteachers have long complained about the difficulties of teaching this chapter in French history. Hollande addressed them in his speech: "The Holocaust is not the history of the Jewish people; it is history, our history. There must not be a single institution in which it is not learned in full."
Hollande vowed to fight "with the greatest determination" against anti-Semitism and "all manner of historical distortion, relativization of the Holocaust and attempts to mar its singularity."
The importance of Hollande's speech is likewise inherent in its message, namely that morality has no political borders.
Hollande created an affinity between himself and the right-wing president Chirac, and dissociated himself from the legacy of his mentor, Francois Mitterrand, who in his youth had joined the Vichy regime.
"The truth never has the power to divide, only to unite," Hollande said in his speech and thereby revealed his naivete. The far right lashed out at him for "besmirching France's image" and demanded that he "stop blaming the French." Similar tunes have also been heard in circles that are considered moderate. Bruno Le Maire, the former agriculture minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, who is running for his party's leadership, attacked "the grave mistake of the president, who confused the French state (Vichy ) with France." Henri Guaino, Sarkozy's senior adviser, announced that he is "shocked" by Hollande's declaration. "His" France, after all, resided in London during the war, not in Vichy.
Hollande's speech is an historic milestone. But as it turns out collective French responsibility still has its work cut out for it.

The Origins of Coke's Common Law Thinking

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 08:21 AM PDT


Ian Williams, Faculty of Laws, University College London, has published The Tudor Genesis of Edward Coke's Immemorial Common Law at 43 Sixteenth Century Journal 103 (2012). Here is the abstract.

Edward Coke is well-known for his unhistorical approach to the common law and the ensuing myth of the ancient constitution. He is often taken as representative of common lawyers, an important group in the intellectual life of early-modern England. This article seeks to investigate Coke's views on legal history, expanding upon Pocock's seminal work in the field by demonstrating that Coke's historical views were not a Jacobean development or a response to external circumstances. His views had been held, and propagated, since the early stages of his career as a lawyer and were shared by other lawyers. The article uses evidence of Coke's reading of law books to demonstrate Coke's historical method, showing how and why he reached unhistorical conclusions about the antiquity of the common law, and why Coke believed those conclusions to be factually accurate. Coke's method was ahistorical, but used an approach to the understanding of texts which was widespread in early-modern England. The article also shows that Coke's approach to historical sources can also be seen in the work of other lawyers.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Origins of Slavery In Early Virginia

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 08:17 AM PDT


David Lyons, Boston University School of Law, has published Slavery and the Rule of Law in Early Virginia, as an APSA 2012 Annual Meeting Paper. Here is the abstract.

Many of us learned that slavery began in the English North American colonies in1619 when twenty Africans were purchased from the crew of a Dutch ship that had stopped at Jamestown for provisions. Colonial records do not tell us the fate of the Africans who arrived in Jamestown's early years. This paper uses legislative and judicial records to reconstruct that history. The institution was not imported from England, under whose laws (which governed its colonies) one person could not own another. Chattel slavery was created by the colonial elite who decided to make their very profitable tobacco industry even more profitable by using slaves instead of contract labor. Colonial records reveal that unlawful enslavement was officially tolerated for decades; that it was incrementally regulated to meet slave owners' felt needs; and that it was not legally authorized until late in the seventeenth or early in the eighteenth century.
Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Literature and Intergenerational Justice

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 08:13 AM PDT

Elizabeth Markovits, Mount Holyoke College, has published Doddering Dotards and Brazen Ingrates: Archê and Finitude in Aristophanes, as an APSA 2012 Annual Meeting Paper. Here is the abstract.

Intergenerational justice has recently arrived (or resurfaced?) on the political theory scene in a big way. A number of scholars are trying to work out what we owe future generations in a general sense, while others are figuring out exactly what political rights children and not-yet-existing people may have. Yet almost all this work looks at the problem as a question of future generations, moving forward temporally to the generations after us, whether already born or not yet existing. In this paper, I want to engage in some looking backward: what are the demands of intergenerational justice when it comes to previous generations? While work on memory and historical injustice address some of the concerns here, I am specifically interested in still-existing generations, citizens who remain with us, but who are "past their prime" — that is, power has shifted to younger citizens. What does it mean to live in a temporal continuum, ceding power over what we have created to those who come after? How does our mortality figure into democratic freedom? While questions about old age obviously have moral import, there is also a political dimension. These are questions about power, how it circulates in a shared world, and how we can best temper its potentially destructive edges. To begin this exploration, I turn to Aristophanes and his use of the old man figure in Knights. In this work, Aristophanes presents a particular notion of old age, one that highlights its difficulties in a polity that demands youthful vigor. The essay then moves to Aristophanes' portrayal of intergenerational dynamics in Clouds to probe the nature of these difficulties and what meaning they hold for democracy more generally. Because he so consistently draws upon the elderly figure, and because his work directly engages with the democratic life of Athens, Aristophanes provides readers with a wealth of material for thinking about the relationship between aging, democratic politics, and a robust sense of intergenerational justice.
Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 
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