Law & Humanities Blog

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Upcoming Conference on Law and Literature, October 3-5, Brazil Posted: 25 Sep 2012 12:01 PM PDT Announcement of an upcoming conference: I COLÓQUIO INTERNACIONAL DE DIREITO E LITERATURA Programação DIA 3 DE OUTUBRO DE 2012 (QUARTA-FEIRA) 18h30min – Credenciamento 19h15min – Solenidade de Abertura 19h30min – Conferência de Abertura: "O direito curvo" José Calvo González– Doutor em Direito (Málaga/Espanha). Professor Catedrático de Teoria e Filosofia do Direito da Universidade de Málaga. Magistrado do Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Andalucía. 20h30min – Conversa Cruzada: "Kafka e o Direito" André Karam Trindade– Doutor em Direito  (Roma/Itália). Professor da Escola de Direito da IMED, CESUCA e UNIFRA. Produtor Executivo do Programa "Direito & Literatura" (TV JUSTIÇA). Vera Karam de Chueiri – Doutora em Filosofia (New York/EUA). Mestre em Direito (UFSC). Professora do PPGDireito da UFPR. Vice-diretora da Faculdade de Direito da UFPR Ivânia Campigotto Aquino– Pós-doutorada em Letras (UFRGS). Professora das Faculdades de Letras e de Direito da UPF. DIA 4 DE OUTUBRO DE 2012 (QUINTA-FEIRA) 9h30min  –  Painel: "A literasofia de Luis Alberto Warat" Mauro Gaglietti – Doutor em História (PUCRS). Mestre em Ciência Política(UFRGS). Professor do PPGDireito da URI. Professor da Escola de Direito da IMED. Albano Marcos Bastos Pepe – Doutor em Direito (UFPR). Mestre em Filosofia (UFSM). Professor do PPGDireito da URI. Fernando Tonet– Mestrando em Direito (URI). Professor da Escola de Direito da IMED. Advogado (RS). 14 às 17h – Apresentação de Trabalhos: "O direito na literatura" 19h30min – Conferência: "Seis paradigmáticas narrativas do direito" Lenio Luiz Streck – Pós-doutorado em Direito (Lisboa/Portugal). Professor Titular do PPGDireito da UNISINOS e da UNESA. Apresentador do Programa "Direito & Literatura" (TV JUSTIÇA).

Law & Humanities Blog

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• Langston Hughes, Black Fiction and the Court
• Tolkein and Law
• A New Crime Drama From the BBC

Langston Hughes, Black Fiction and the Court Posted: 24 Sep 2012 03:16 PM PDT Robert L. Tsai, American University College of Law, has published 'Simple' Takes on the Supreme Court as American University WCL Research Paper No. 2012-15. Here is the abstract. This essay excavates how black fiction has served as a medium for working out popular understandings of America's Constitution and laws. Starting in the 1940s, Langston Hughes's fictional character, Jesse K. Semple, began appearing in the prominent black newspaper, the Chicago Defender. Eventually, the stories became syndicated, published in the New York Post, and later compiled in a series of books. As circulation increased, the stories enabled non-blacks to participate vicariously in an ongoing intracommunity debate over issues dear to African Americans. The character affectionately known as "Simple" was undereducated, unsophisticated, and plain spoken — certainly to a fault according to prevailing standards of civility, race relations, and professional attainment. But these very traits, along with a gritty experience under Jim Crow, made him not only a sympathetic figure but also an armchair legal theorist. In a series of barroom conversations, Simple ably critiqued the ongoing project of liberal legal experimentation. In fact, Simple had something to say on many matters of constitutional law during the turbulent decades of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s: the Supreme Court's pronouncements, anti-lynching efforts, the injustice and absurdity of segregation, the pace of integration, and the effectiveness of landmark civil rights laws. Fiction became a two-way legal medium, allowing ordinary citizens to understand the idealism and goals of institutions that acted to enforce the U.S. Constitution, while giving them a way to puncture the lofty, hegemonic, and cramped official visions of law.

Law & Humanities Blog

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• Shakespeare, Milton, Theology, and Inheritance
• Holmesian Constructions
• Marcel Ayme and "Magical Legalism"

Shakespeare, Milton, Theology, and Inheritance Posted: 21 Sep 2012 01:46 PM PDT New in the Ashgate catalog: Joseph S. Jenkins, Inheritance Law and Political Theology in Shakespeare and Milton: Election and Grace as Constitutional in Early Modern Literature and Beyond (forthcoming February 2013). From the catalog: Reading God's will and a man's Last Will as ideas that reinforce one another, this study shows the relevance of England's early modern crisis, regarding faith in the will of God, to current debates by legal academics on the theory of property and its succession. The increasing power of the dead under law in the US, the UK, and beyond—a concern of recent volumes in law and social sciences—is here addressed through a distinctive approach based on law and humanities. Vividly treating literary and biblical battles of will, the book suggests approaches to legal constitution informed by these dramas and by English legal history. This study investigates correlations between the will of God in Judeo-Christian traditions and the Last Wills of humans, especially dominant males, in cultures where these traditions have developed. It is interdisciplinary, in the sense that it engages with the limits of several fields: it is informed by humanities critical theory, especially Benjaminian historical materialism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, but refrains from detailed theoretical considerations. Dramatic narratives from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton are read as suggesting real possibilities for alternative inheritance (i.e., constitutional) regimes.

Law & Humanities Blog

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George Takei In a Musical About Loyalty, Rights, and Family Posted: 20 Sep 2012 12:22 PM PDT George Takei (Star Trek: TOS) stars in a new musical, Allegiance, at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. The musical  "is an epic story of family, love and patriotism set during the Japanese American internment of World War II. Sixty years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a chance meeting forces WWII veteran Sam Kimura ...

Law & Humanities Blog

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• Feminism Here and There
• Graphically Stated
• Science Fiction as a Spur to Law
• Supernatural Law

Feminism Here and There Posted: 11 Sep 2012 03:21 PM PDT Yxta Maya Murray, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, has published 'Creating New Categories': Anglo-American Radical Feminism's Constitutionalism in the Streets, at 9 Hastings Race & Poverty Law Journal 454 (2012). Here is the abstract. In 1968 and 1970, U.S. and British radical feminists organized provocative protests at the Miss America and Miss World beauty pageants. While the American New York Radical Women expressed their outrage at women's objectification by picketing, engaging in street theater antics, and organizing a brief if peaceable outburst, British feminists raised a panic in London by throwing flour bombs and rotten produce at audience members and celebrity MC's, scattering plastic mice, spraying ink-filled squirt guns, and even snubbing out a cigarette on a policeman. Why were the U.S. radical feminists so much more decorous than their British sisters? In this article, I analyze how each of these radical feminist camps employed the strategies of outrage, law-breaking, and violence, noting that U.S. beauty pageant protesters were outrageous, but avoided the scandalous scofflawing and aggression of the London rebels. Investigating the historical and contemporary political worlds in which these two revolutionary groups worked, I show that U.S. and British attitudes toward law-breaking and violence were shaped by their native, early 20th century histories of feminism, as well as the American and European tumults and tragedies that characterized the age. Drawing on the work of Reva Siegel, Jack M. Balkin, and Lynda G. Dodd, I will then consider how the U.S. and British protesters influenced their countries' respective constitutional cultures and future feminist legal theories. Each camp's approach to outrage, law-breaking, and violence in street protest would later be felt in successes and failures on the constitutional front, and also resound in a law-faithful U.S.

Law & Humanities Blog

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Forty-Six Years of a Wagon Train To the Stars Posted: 07 Sep 2012 04:08 PM PDT Google's home page for today, September 7, 2012, features an adorable tribute to Star Trek: The Original Series (ST:TOS), which debuted on September 7, 1969. Click on the figures--sound effects! Star Trek, and its spin-off shows have had a profound impact on popular culture.

Law & Humanities Blog

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A New Book From Jose Calvo Gonzalez Posted: 06 Sep 2012 07:38 AM PDT José Calvo González, Professor of Philosophy of Law, University of Malaga, sends word of a new publication, and provides the Table of Contents. José CALVO GONZÁLEZ Occasio iuris. Estuche de miniaturas y extravagantes Prefacio de Luis Cancellier de Olivo Fundaçao Boiteux, Florianópolis (Brasil), 2012, 232 pp. ISBN: 978-85-7840-075-0.  Sumário Prefacio Luis Cancellier de Olivo  Presentación  Miniaturas La vida a pie de muro Esos maravillosos 'Frikis' Morir en paz ¿Ruidos? No sólo "il dito in bocca" Sobre las vísperas de un Idus de Marzo Las aceitunas de la ira La Justicia por televisión Spam, el cartero incesante La paloma acuchillada Justicia de proximidad Europa y los Derechos Revolución judicial neocon Derecho cultural de la Comunicación Jueces de Paz Escolares Teoría pop del Preámbulo Ironías de la libertad de expresión Tráfico y expansión punitiva ¿Alta velocidad civil del desamor? La Justicia, entre los juncos Que aunque neglo, gente somo  Extravagantes Fiscalía instructora y Derechos fundamentales Caso "bebe Wyatt" Exigencias ético-jurídicas decisivas Harmonías jurídicas.