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Law & Humanities Blog

Posted: 08 Nov 2012 08:13 PM PST

Google has devoted a Google Doodle to you! The Christian Science Monitor discusses the five best Bram Stoker novel film adaptations here. More about Mr. Stoker himself here from the Monitor, a discussion of his effect on pop culture here in the Washington Post. Vampires have come of age: check out this True Blood site here.

A short bibliography of materials on vampires and law:

Bradney, Anthony, "The Morally Ambiguous Crowd": The Image of a Large Law Firm in "Angel," 56 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 21 (2005).

Owen, A.

Susan, Vampires, Postmodernity, and Postfeminism: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 27 Journal of Popular Film and Television 24 (1999).

Sutherland, Sharon, Piercing the Corporate Veil--With a Stake?: Vampire Imagery and the Law, in Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (Peter Day, ed., Rodopi, B.V., NY, 2006).

Websites:

Slayage: The Online Journal of the Whedon Studies Association.

Virginia Woolf's Theory of Harm

Posted: 08 Nov 2012 06:06 PM PST

Honni Van Rijswijk, University of Technology Sydney, has published Neighbourly Injuries: Proximity in Tort Law and Virginia Woolf's Theory of Sufferings in volume 20 of Feminist Legal Studies (2012). Here is the abstract.

2012 marks the 80th anniversary of Donoghue v Stevenson, a case that is frequently cited as the starting-point for a genealogy of negligence. This genealogy starts with the figure of the neighbor, from which, as Jane Stapleton eloquently describes, a "golden thread" of vulnerability runs into the present (Stapleton 2004, 135). This essay examines the harms made visible and invisible through the neighbour figure, and compares the law's framework to Virginia Woolf's subtle re-imagining and theorisation of responsibility in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925). I argue that Woolf critiques and supplements the law's representations of suffering. Woolf was interested in interpreting harms using a framework of neighbourly responsibility, but was also critical of the kinds of proximities recognised by society. Woolf made new harms visible within a framework of proximity: in this way, we might think of Woolf's work as theorizing a feminist aesthetic of justice, and as providing an alternate genealogy of responsibility to Donoghue v Stevenson.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.