Home » Archives for August 2012

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Posted: 31 Aug 2012 02:23 AM PDT

Come and join us at the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and be at the heart of the DH action. We’re looking for a highly skilled Co-ordinator to play a key role in the running and administration of UCLDH, providing a public face for the Centre, and aiding in the running of internal and external [...]

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

What will tomorrow’s Web addresses look like?

Posted: 25 Aug 2012 11:24 PM PDT

ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has received over 1,400 applications for new Web extensions (e.g..apple), over 100 of which are in non-Roman scripts. Rules for the existing names containing a-z, 0-9 and the hyphen are complex enough, but imagine setting up rules for addresses for every letter in every world script! I’m [...]

Law & Humanities Blog

A New Book About Legal History, Race, and Identity Before the Civil War

Posted: 24 Aug 2012 12:21 PM PDT

From the University of Pennsylvania Press:

In the Shadow of the Gallows (http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14973.html) reveals how a sense of racialized culpability shaped Americans' understandings of personhood prior to the Civil War. Author Jeanine DeLombard, Associate Professor of English the University of Toronto, draws from legal, literary, and popular texts to address fundamental questions about race, responsibility, and American civic belonging.

To receive a 20% discount on orders from www.pennpress.org, enter P4R3 in the promo code field.

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Presumed Innocent, A Reader Favorite

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 09:29 AM PDT

The August 22nd Diane Rehm show features a segment about Scott Turow's novel Presumed Innocent. Panelists Leslie Maitland, Barry Coburn, and Alafair Burke discuss the book and the film based on it.

A short bibliography about Presumed Innocent and its themes below.

Christine A. Corcos, Presuming Innocence: Alan J. Pakula and Scott Turow Take On the Great American Legal Fiction, 22 Okla. City U. L. Rev. 129 (1997).

Christine A. Corcos, Prosecutors, Prejudices, and Justice: Observations on Presuming Innocence in Popular Culture, 34 U. Toledo L. Rev. 793 (2002/2003).

David R. Papke, The American Courtroom Trial: Pop Culture, Courthouse Realities, and the Dream World of Justice, 40 S. Tex. L. Rev. 919 (1999).

Scott Turow & Kay Bonetti, An Interview with Scott Turow, 13 The Missouri Rev. 101 (1990).

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Music, Murders, and Misdemeanors

Posted: 21 Aug 2012 10:41 AM PDT

Robyn Hagan Cain muses on the intersection of music and law for Findlaw here. Among her examples: Eric Clapton's "I Shot the Sheriff" and Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean."

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Law and Justice On the Small Screen

Posted: 20 Aug 2012 02:58 PM PDT

Peter Robson, University of Strathcylde, Glasgow, School of Law, and Jessica Silbey, Suffolk University Law School, have published Law and Justice on the Small Screen (Introduction) (Hart Publishing, 2012).

Law and Justice on the Small Screen is a wide-ranging collection of essays about law in and on television. In light of the book's innovative taxonomy of the field and its international reach, it makes a novel contribution to the scholarly literature about law and popular culture. Television shows from the US, Canada, France, the UK, Germany, and Spain are discussed. The essays are organized into three sections: (1) methodological questions regarding the analysis of law and popular culture on television, (2) a focus on genre studies within television programming (including a subsection on reality television), and (3) content analysis of individual television shows with attention to big-picture jurisprudential questions of law's efficacy and the promise of justice. The book's content is organized to make it appropriate for undergraduate and graduate classes in the following areas: media studies, law and culture, socio-legal studies, comparative law, jurisprudence, the law of lawyering, alternative dispute resolution, and criminal law.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

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Harry Harrison (1925-2012)

Posted: 18 Aug 2012 08:43 AM PDT

Harry Harrison, the science fiction novelist, has died. He was the author of numerous classics, including "Make Room! Make Room!" which was transformed for the screen as Solyent Green, and those works which featured the con man, the Stainless Steel Rat.

More in this obituary from the New York Times.

It Is a Fact Universally Acknowledged That Everybody Wants Jane's Vote

Posted: 18 Aug 2012 08:25 AM PDT

The Atlanticwire brings word of a new debate--the fight over Jane Austen's relevance to conservatives. Should they be claiming her as a politico-philosophical progenitor--like Ayn Rand? More here.

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A Special Issue on "Law's Justice" From the Italian Society for Law and Literature

Posted: 17 Aug 2012 08:05 AM PDT

From M. Paola Mittica, Coordinator of the Italian Society for Law and Literature, news of a special issue of No Foundations. This issue, Law's Justice, includes contributions from James Boyd White, Jeanne Gaakeer, François Ost, Marianne Constable, Rebecca Johnson, M. Paola Mittica, Gary Watt, and Ari Hirvone. Download the full issue here.

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A Global Perspective On Women's Legal History

Posted: 16 Aug 2012 09:04 AM PDT

Women's Legal History: A Global Perspective - Symposium Introduction: Making History will be available in volume 87 of the Chicago-Kent Law Review (2012). Here is the abstract.

This essay introduces the Chicago-Kent Symposium on Women's Legal History: A Global Perspective. It seeks to situate the field of women's legal history and to explore what it means to begin writing a transnational women's history which transcends and at times disrupts the nation state.

In doing so, it sets forth some of the fundamental premises of women's legal history and points to new ways of writing such histories.Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

A Look at "Buck v. Bell"

Posted: 16 Aug 2012 09:00 AM PDT

Victoria F. Nourse, Georgetown University Law Center, has published Buck v. Bell: A Constitutional Tragedy from a Lost World at 39 Pepperdine Law review 101 (2011). Here is the abstract.

Some constitutional tragedies are well known: Plessy v. Ferguson and Korematsu v. United States are taught to every first-year law student. Buck v. Bell is not. Decided in 1927 by the Taft Court, the case is known for its shocking remedy -- sterilization -- and Justice Holmes's dramatic rhetoric: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." A mere five paragraphs long, Buck v. Bell could represent the highest ratio of injustice per word ever signed on to by eight Supreme Court Justices, progressive and conservative alike.

Buck v. Bell is not a tragedy as some others might define tragedy: it is not a well-known opinion, nor did it yield wide popular criticism; it sits as a quiet evil, a tragedy of indifference to the Constitution and its most basic principles. To include Buck as a tragic opinion is to recognize what Hannah Arendt once dubbed the "banality of evil." Even if grounded in eugenic assumptions widely held at the time, Buck v. Bell was an utterly lawless decision. Holmes treated Carrie Buck's constitutional claims with contempt. The opinion cites no constitutional text or principle emanating from the text. The only "law" in the opinion must be unearthed from a lost constitutional history embedded in a factual exegesis full of disdain for the Constitution and humanity itself. Few human tragedies can be greater "than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within." A lawless legitimation of such a principle -- one of natural aristocracy -- flies in the face of the very constitutional principles on which our nation was founded.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

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Desmond Manderson on Law and Literature

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 12:25 PM PDT

Desmond Manderson, ANU College of Law; ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences; McGill University Faculty of Law, has published Modernism and the Critique of Law and Literature at 35 Australian Feminist Law Journal 105 (2011). Here is the abstract.

'Law and literature' suffers from two besetting weaknesses: first, a concentration on substance and plot and, second, a salvific belief in the capacity of literature to cure law or perfect its justice. The first fails to question the Platonic ideal that the purpose of art is mimetic. The second fails to question the romantic ideal that the purpose of art is to heal the world's wounds. Too often in opening a dialogue with law we fail to capture the real experience or worth of literature - a worth irreducible to either the morality it 'stands for', or to the coherence or harmony it promises. Indeed, the aesthetic ideals of modernism, which so dramatically altered the landscape of literature, philosophy and politics around the turn of the (twentieth) century, reject just these claims. Modernism - to be more sharply distinguished from 'modernity' than it often is - produced instead a heightened attentiveness to questions of style, form, and language, and to questions of diversity and subjectivity in voice and perspective. Modernism cast off the aesthetic ideologies of mimesis and romanticism and opened up claims of truth, progress, and perfection to the destabilizing subtlety of irony. This essay's focus on modernist irony, with particular attention to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, suggests a very different orientation and defense of 'law and literature'.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

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A Nineteenth Century Crime Drama From BBC America

Posted: 13 Aug 2012 06:03 PM PDT

BBC America launches its first scripted show, Copper, on August 19th.

The show, set in New York's Five Points in 1863,features a police officer named Kevin Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones). The series, created by Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, is on every Sunday at 10 p.m., 9 Central time.

More here from Richard Morgan (Wall Street Journal online).

Marlowe's Return

Posted: 13 Aug 2012 10:31 AM PDT

The Chandler estate has asked John Banville to bring Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe back in a new novel. Mr. Banville will be using the pseudonym Benjamin Black, the name he uses for his own detective series. More here from the New York Times.

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Justice Ginsburg, Music, and Law
Law and Justice On the Small Screen
It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's a Client!

Justice Ginsburg, Music, and Law

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 03:06 PM PDT

Justice Ginsburg on music and law, here from FindLaw. More here from the Wall Street Journal.

Law and Justice On the Small Screen

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 07:35 AM PDT

NOW PUBLISHED

Law and Justice on the Small Screen

Edited by Peter Robson and Jessica Silbey

'Law and Justice on the Small Screen' is a wide-ranging collection of essays about law in and on television. In light of the book's innovative taxonomy of the field and its international reach, it will make a novel contribution to the scholarly literature about law and popular culture. Television shows from France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and the United States are discussed. The essays are organised into three sections: (1) methodological questions regarding the analysis of law and popular culture on television; (2) a focus on genre studies within television programming (including a subsection on reality television), and (3) content analysis of individual television shows with attention to big-picture jurisprudential questions of law's efficacy and the promise of justice. The book's content is organised to make it appropriate for undergraduate and graduate classes in the following areas: media studies, law and culture, socio-legal studies, comparative law, jurisprudence, the law of lawyering, alternative dispute resolution and criminal law.

Please click on the links below to read the introduction and the table of contents:

Introduction: http://www.hartpub.co.uk/pdf/samples/9781849462693sample.pdf

Contents: http://www.hartpub.co.uk/pdf/9781849462693.pdf

Contributors

Taunya Lovell Banks, Paul Bergman, Lief H Carter, Christine A Corcos, Dr Annette Houlihan, Rebecca Johnson, Ummni Khan, Freya Kodar, Anita Lam, Anja Louis, Stefan Machura, Nancy S Marder, Michael McCann, Dr Angus Nurse, Kimberlianne Podlas, Dr Sara Ramshaw, Peter Robson, Susan Dente Ross, Dr Jennifer L Schulz, Cassandra Sharp, Jessica Silbey, Marilyn Terzic, Ryan J Thomas, Mark Tunick, Tung Yin

Editors

Peter Robson is a Professor of Law at the University of Strathclyde.

Jessica Silbey is Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School, Boston, Massachusetts.

Aug 2012 488pp Pbk 9781849462693 £35 / €45.50 / US$55 / CDN$55

Order Online:

UK, EU, and ROW orders: http://www.hartpub.co.uk/books/details.asp?isbn=9781849462693

USA orders: http://www.hartpublishingusa.com/books/details.asp?isbn=9781849462693

If you have any enquiries please contact Hart Publishing Ltd, 16C Worcester Place, Oxford, OX1 2JW, UK Telephone Number: 01865 517530; Fax Number: 01865 510710; Website: www.hartpub.co.uk; E-mail: mail@hartpub.co.uk

Hart Publishing Ltd. is registered in England No. 3307205

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's a Client!

Posted: 09 Aug 2012 07:25 AM PDT

James Daily and Ryan Davidson have turned their blog, Law and the Multiverse, into a book, The Law of Superheroes (Gotham Books, a division of Penguin, forthcoming). More here from The National Law Journal.

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New Sherlock Holmes Series Premieres September 27
A New Book on U.S. Legal and Religious History
Obama's Campaign Rhetoric
Women's Speech

New Sherlock Holmes Series Premieres September 27

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 10:35 AM PDT

CBS is launching a new Sherlock Holmes series, Elementary, on September 27 at 10 p.m. (9 Central time). The newest incarnation of Holmes and Watson is set in today's New York City and stars Johnny Lee Miller (Trainspotting) as Holmes and Lucy Liu (Ally McBeal, Charlie's Angels, Kill Bill) as Joan Watson. While CBS considers the show an adaptation (and a reboot), BBC execs seem to be somewhat miffed about elements contained in the new series. The producer of the current BBC show that stars Benedict Cumberbatch has said, "Johnny is a very fine actor, who I saw recently in the theatre when he and Benedict played alternating roles in Frankenstein. Let's hope their pilot script has stayed further away from our Sherlock than their casting choice." Mr. Miller had shared the lead in a National Theatre production of Frankenstein with Mr. Cumberbatch. More discussion in the Washington Post here.

Meanwhile, the BBC's phenomenally successful reimagined Holmes series Sherlock, set in contemporary London, and now in its second season in the US, is trundling along.

A New Book on U.S. Legal and Religious History

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 10:16 AM PDT

Susan Sage Heinzelman, Director, Center for Women's and Gender Studies, University of Texas at Austin, tells us about this new publication by Nan Goodman from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

The University of Pennsylvania Press is pleased to announce the release of Banished: Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England by Nan Goodman. Nan Goodman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she also teaches law.Banished investigates Puritan practices of social exclusion through the lens of seventeenth-century New England common law.

From religious dissident Anne Hutchinson to the Deer Island Indians, cases of banishment reveal the impact of legal rhetoric on our conceptualization, past and present, of community boundaries and belonging.
To receive a 20% discount on orders from www.pennpress.org, enter P4R4 in the promo code field.

Obama's Campaign Rhetoric

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 09:12 AM PDT

K. C. Morrison, Timothy Fair, and Aaron Rollins, all of Mississippi State University, have published Expanding the Myth of the American Republic: The Campaign Rhetoric of Barack Obama as an NCOBPS 43rd Meeting Paper. Here is the abstract.

This research is based on the analysis of presidential campaign speeches of Barack Obama to understand how he used rhetoric to create favorable opinion in a majority white voting constituency. Our argument is that Obama used rhetoric in a way that appropriated patriotic and multicultural elements associated with the American republic to redefine the myth of national identity. Speeches are analyzed in a variety of settings from which we are able to generate a set of clear and recurring patterns that compose a refashioned mythology.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Women's Speech

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 09:12 AM PDT

Eileen Hunt Botting, University of Notre Dame, is publishing Ascending the Rostrum: Hannah Mather Crocker and Women's Political Oratory in the Journal of Politics. Here is the abstract.

Although Hannah Mather Crocker (1752-1829) apparently presented a prescription against women's political oratory in her Observations on the Real Rights of Women (1818), she provided philosophical and historical challenges to this conventional rule of early nineteenth-century feminine propriety elsewhere in the first American treatise on women's rights. By analyzing new archival findings of two of her oratorical works from the early 1810s — her 1813 "Fast Sermon" against the War of 1812 and her 1814 "Address" to the advisory board of the School of Industry for poor girls in Boston's North End — I argue that Crocker also provided a personal challenge to this conventional rule. In philosophically, historically, and personally redefining women's political oratory as compatible with feminine propriety — during the post-revolutionary backlash against women's rights — Crocker helped pave the way for the strategic use of the constitutional rights of speech and association in the nineteenth-century American women's rights movement and beyond.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

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