Law & Humanities Blog |
- Call For Papers--Critical Approaches To International Criminal Law
- A New Book on Nineteenth Century Women, Law, and Literature
- New York University Announces a New Database On the History of Undercover Reporting
- Law On the Stage
| Call For Papers--Critical Approaches To International Criminal Law Posted: 06 Aug 2012 01:22 PM PDT Call for Papers – Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law The first conference on Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law, organised by the University of Liverpool School of Law and Social Justice, will take place on Thursday 6th December and Friday 7th December 2012. The field of International Criminal Law (ICL) has recently experienced a significant surge in scholarship, in institutions, and in the public debate. The contemporary debate is predominantly focussed on ICL's contribution to projects of justice, peace, legality, addressing impunity and accountability. While there are individual sites of critique, they are largely limited to effectiveness arguments: If the International Criminal Court is not functioning as well as it could be, then it must be made more effective; if peace is not yet achieved through tackling impunity, then there must be more accountability. This limited critique has fostered a seemingly self-congratulatory, uncritical, and over-confident area of international law which has marginalised deeper critical approaches. What is missing from the mainstream debate are the possible complicities of ICL in injustice, conflict, exclusions, and biases. Arguably, the numerous conferences this year on the topic of the 10-year anniversary of the coming into force of the Rome Statute are largely a testament to this limited critique. In this conference, we hope to shift the debate towards such complicities and limitations in the contemporary understanding of ICL. We hope to question some of the assumptions which inform the field and which may cause injustice, conflict, exclusion and bias. Tentative sites of critique, which are envisaged as central to an idea of Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law (CAICL), are: 1. ICL and the political 2. ICL and individualism 3. ICL and neo-liberalism 4. ICL and ideology 5. ICL and gender 6. ICL and afrocentricism 7. ICL crowding out other disciplines 8. ICL and the emergence of a judiocracy The first day of the conference is open to all and will take place at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. The second day will be a closed session including a writing workshop and an exchange of ideas on teaching CAICL; participation of this requires an invitation. More information will be online shortly at: http://www.liv.ac.uk/law-and-social-justice/research/human_rights/index.htm Please send abstracts of 500 words (max.) and a short bio (100 words max.) to C.Schwobel@liverpool.ac.uk by 01 September 2012. Selected speakers will be contacted by 28 September 2012. Draft papers will be due by 01 December 2012. A number of papers will be selected for an edited collection and/or a special issue. Completed papers will be due by end January 2013. The manuscript will be sent for consideration by March 2013. A registration fee of £50 for academics and £100 for practitioners will be incurred. The registration fee income will go towards a travel grant for postgraduate students.   |
| A New Book on Nineteenth Century Women, Law, and Literature Posted: 06 Aug 2012 01:15 PM PDT Now available: In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature by Kristin Kalsem Available from Ohio State University Press http://www.ohiostatepress.org/books/book%20pages/kalsem%20in.html In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature explores the legal advocacy performed by nineteenth-century women writers in publications of nonfiction and fiction, as well as in real-life courtrooms and in the legal forum provided by the novel form. The nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented reform in laws affecting women's property, child support and custody, lunacy, divorce, birth control, domestic violence, and women in the legal profession. Women's contributions to these changes in the law, however, have been largely ignored because their work, stories, and perspectives are not recorded in authoritative legal texts; rather, evidence of their arguments and views are recorded in writings of a different kind. This book examines lesser-known works of nonfiction and fiction by legal reformers such as Annie Besant and Georgina Weldon and novelists such as Frances Trollope, Jane Hume Clapperton, George Paston, and Florence Dixie. In Contempt brings to light new connections between Victorian law and literature, not only with its analysis of many "lost" novels but also with its new legal readings of old ones such as Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Rider Haggard's She (1887), and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895). |
This study reexamines the cultural and political roles of the novel in light of "new evidence" that many nineteenth-century novels were "lawless"—showing contempt for, rather than policing, the law.
"Kristin Kalsem's In Contempt makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the history of feminist jurisprudence. She covers thorny legal issues including married women's property, infanticide, and lunacy law, as well as birth control, imperialism, and women's admission to the bar. In her afterword she urges scholars to engage the 'new evidence' she has brought to light—and I have no doubt that this evidence will be welcomed enthusiastically."
Christine L. Krueger, professor of English, Marquette University
Kristin Kalsem received her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and her Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. She is professor of law and co-director of the Center for Race, Gender, and Social Justice at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.
New York University Announces a New Database On the History of Undercover Reporting
Posted: 06 Aug 2012 10:41 AM PDT
From James Devitt, New York University:
NYU Launches History of Undercover Reporting Database
New York University has launched a database chronicling undercover journalism dating back to the 1800s. The archive, "Undercover Reporting," includes an array of stories, ranging from the slave trade in 1850s to efforts to boycott Jewish-owned businesses in the U.S. in the late 1930s to treatment of soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the 21st century.
The database, www.undercoverreporting.org, is a joint endeavor of Professor Brooke Kroeger of NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and the university's Division of Libraries, where the Digital Library Technology Services team developed the online platform that hosts the database, with consultation from the Libraries' Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing and its Collections and Research Services.
"Much of this material has long been buried in microfilm in individual libraries and thus very difficult to retrieve," said Kroeger, who conceived and directed the project. "Most digitized newspaper archives do not go back past the 1980s or 1990s and even for those that do, it's difficult to search without exact details of the piece you are seeking."
The database is designed for scholars, student researchers, and journalists, who can search by writer, publication, story topic, or method (e.g., prison infiltrations, shadowing migrants, impersonation, etc.). It also includes critics' reactions to these tactics—for instance, their response to the use of hidden cameras.
The database coincides with the publication of Kroeger's Undercover Reporting: The Truth about Deception (Northwestern University Press, Aug. 31, 2012), which emerged from this research. In the book, Kroeger posits that this type of journalism is not separate from the profession's conventional practices but, rather, embodies some of its most important tenets—the ability to extract significant information or to create indelible, real-time descriptions of hard-to-penetrate institutions or social situations that deserve the public's attention.
"Researching the book changed my perception of the practice and its role in journalism history, making clear how early reporters were experimenting with the method--notably northern reporters working to expose the slave trade in the south in the years leading up to the Civil War," explained Kroeger.
The project is supported by NYU's Humanities Initiative and the university's Faculty of Arts and Science.
For more on the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, go to
http://journalism.nyu.edu/; for more on NYU's Division of Libraries, go to http://library.nyu.edu/; for more on the Division of Libraries Digital Library Technology Services, go to http://dlib.nyu.edu.
Posted: 06 Aug 2012 10:10 AM PDT
The ABA Journal has posted its August 2012 Law In Popular Culture feature: this year it focuses on the theater's top twelve courtroom dramas. The jury's picks are The Merchant of Venice, Twelve Angry Men, Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg, Witness for the Prosecution, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, A Man For All Seasons (which the feature has listed as The Man For All Seasons), Anatomy of a Murder, A Few Good Men, Chicago, Oedipus the King, and The Man in the Glass Booth.
I like all these choices, although I might have chosen some others in place of one or two of these, for example. What about The Andersonville Trial?
Which are your favorite courtroom plays?
I like all these choices, although I might have chosen some others in place of one or two of these, for example. What about The Andersonville Trial?
Which are your favorite courtroom plays?
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