Law & Humanities Blog

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Body Talk Posted: 30 Apr 2013 09:46 AM PDT Genevieve Lakier, University of Chicago Law School, is publishing Sport as Speech in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law (forthcoming). Here is the abstract. Sports play a tremendously important role in American public culture, yet games of spectator sport are not generally recognized as expression protected by the First Amendment. This is notwithstanding the extension in recent years of First Amendment protection to a wide variety of other kinds of nonverbal art and entertainment. This Article argues that the denial of free speech protection to spectator sport is wrong both doctrinally and when considered in light of the aims and purposes of the First Amendment. Drawing upon an extensive body of social scientific research examining the practice and cultural significance of spectator sports, it argues that games communicate the sorts of messages to which First Amendment protection extends. In providing viewers dramatic spectacles of victory and defeat, and in offering fans a symbol around which to rally around, spectator sports also reflect and help shape public attitudes and beliefs about individual excellence, political community and identity, race, gender, and sexuality — even competition itself. The Article argues that the same justifications that support the extension of First Amendment protection to art and entertainment therefore support extending protection to spectator sport, and that the exclusion of spectator sports from the category of expressive conduct furthers none of the purposes of the First Amendment.

Law & Humanities Blog

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• New Books On Law and the Humanities From DeGruyter
• Conference On Law and Literature In Diaspora Studies To Take Place in May, 2013
• Busman's Holiday
• Tracking the Rise of Law As a Scholarly Discipline
• Call For Papers

New Books On Law and the Humanities From DeGruyter Posted: 25 Apr 2013 09:05 AM PDT New books available from DeGruyter: Karen-Margrethe Simonsen has edited Law and Justice in Literature, Film and Theatre: Nordic Perspectives (Law & Literature; 5).  Aims and Scope This volume is a Nordic contribution to research on law and humanities. It treats the legal culture of the Nordic countries through intensive analyses of canonical Nordic artworks. Law and justice have always been important issues in Nordic literature, film and theater from the Icelandic sagas through Ludvig Holberg and Henrik Ibsen to Lars Noréns theatre and Lars von Trier's Dogme films of today. This book strives to answer two fundamental questions: Is there a special Nordic justice? And what does the legal and literary/aesthetic culture of the North mean for the concept of law and justice and for the understanding of the interdisciplinary exchange of law and humanities? The concept of law and literature as a research area was originally developed in countries of common law. This book investigates law and humanities from a different legal tradition, and contributes thus both to the discussion of the general and the comparative studies of law and humanities. Table of Contents Karen-Margrethe Simonsen Preface 1 Ian Ward Crossing Borders 5 Ditlev Tamm Law and Literature in a Nordic Legal Perspective 11 Hans Hauge Nordic Sameness and Difference 25 Peter Garde "With Laws Shall Our Land Be Built Up". The Law in the Sagas – Ideal and Failure 45 Toomas Kotkas Two Conceptions of Justice in the Kalevala: A Nietzschean Reading 63 Arild Linneberg From Natural Law To The Nature Of Laws: Ludvig Holberg 77 Karen-Margrethe Simonsen The Confession of a Judge. On Narrative Desire and Law in Steen Steensen Blicher's Early Crime Story "the Pastor of Vejlbye" 85 Bjarne Markussen Contesting Narratives: Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House and Trygve Allister Diesen's Hold My Heart 103 Ari Hirvonen The Subject of the Law 119 Helle Porsdam From 'Law and Literature' to 'Law and Humanities': Transatlantic Dialogues on Film – the Case of Lars von Trier 149 vi Contents List of contributors 167 Daniela Carpi and Jeanne Gaakeer have edited Liminal Discourses: Subliminal Tensions in Law and Literature (Law & Literature; 6). Aims and Scope The past few decades in legal and literary studies have challenged the boundaries raised by the different concepts of law and literature espoused by a great variety of theorists. Law's traditionally assumed disciplinary autonomy has been challenged by those who have pursued interdisciplinary methods of research. In particular, the concept of the sublime has moved out of the strictly philosophical and literary fields and crossed the borders between disciplines, finding an application also in the juridical field. On one hand, this volume proposes that the ethical aspect involved in the legal sublime is to contain the arrogance of the law. On the other hand, the volume draws attention to the "and" of interdisciplinary literary-legal studies and offers new daring comparisons between philosophical fields and between apparently distant historical periods. Table of Contents Daniela Carpi Introduction 1: The Sublime of Law fi 1 Jeanne Gaakeer Introduction 2: On the Threshold and Beyond: An Introductory Observation fi 15 Cristina Costantini Representing Law: Narrative Practices, Poetic Devices, Visual Signs and the Aesthetics of the Common Law Mind fi 27 Maria Aristodemou Bare Law Between Two Lives: José Saramago and Cornelia Vismann on Naming, Filing and Cancelling fi 37 Melanie Williams Liminal Tensions in Public to Private Conceptions of Justice: Nussbaum, Woolf and the Struggle for Identity fi 53 Julián Jiménez Heffernan "Under the Force of the Law": Communal Imagination and the Constitutional Sublime in Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor fi 73 Jeanne Clegg Moll Flanders,Ordinary's Accounts and Old Bailey Proceedings fi 95 Sidia Fiorato Ariel and Caliban as Law-conscious Servants Longing for Legal Personhood fi 113 Laura Apostoli Altered Bodies, Fragmented Selves: Reconstructing the Subject in Fay Weldon's The Cloning of Joanna May fi 129 Jeanne Gaakeer The Business of Law and Literature: to Compose an Order, to Imagine Man fi 149 Daniela Carpi Renaissance into Postmodernism: Anticipations of Legal Unrest fi 177

Conference On Law and Literature In Diaspora Studies To Take Place in May, 2013 Posted: 25 Apr 2013 08:48 AM PDT Dr. Daniela Carpi, University of Verona, and President of the Associazione Italiana Diretto e Letteratura announces a Conference on Law and Literature in Diaspora Studies, May 6-9, 2013. Details below. More information available by clicking on the link here. CENTRO ITALO-TEDESCO DEUTSCH-ITALIENISCHES ZENTRUM Law and Literature in Diaspora Studies Villa Vigoni-Gespräche Villa Vigoni, 6-9 MAY 2013 programme Programm und Teilnehmerliste / Programme and Participants: Monday, 06 May 2013 19.00 Welcome Reception, Aperitif 19.30 Dinner Tuesday, 07 May 2013 9.30   Opening addresses Prof. Dr.

Law & Humanities Blog

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Law and Trauma in the Work of Art Spiegelman Posted: 23 Apr 2013 08:03 AM PDT Karen Crawley, Griffith Law School, and Honni Van Rijswijk, University of Technology, Sydney, have published Justice in the Gutter: Representing Everyday Trauma in the Graphic Novels of Art Spiegelman. Here is the abstract. Scholars working at the intersection of law and trauma have often turned to literature to supplement the law's version of justice. In this article, we consider what the unique formal properties of comics – which we refer to here as graphic novels – might bring to this pursuit, by reference to Art Spiegelman's Maus (1996) and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). We suggest that these two works offer a critique of the underlying model of trauma upon which law relies, suggesting alternative understandings of trauma in a mode which is particularly instructive for law.

Law & Humanities Blog

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Original Interpretation Posted: 22 Apr 2013 03:08 PM PDT Jack M. Balkin, Yale University Law School, is publishing Verdi's High C in the Texas Law Review (forthcoming). Here is the abstract. This article continues the discussion that Sanford Levinson and I began over twenty years ago about the relationships between law, music, and other performing arts. It uses as its central example an actual controversy that occurred at the La Scala Opera house in December 2000, when a tenor failed to sing a high C in Verdi's Il Trovatore and the audience erupted in boos, blaming the conductor for a failure of interpretation. Maestro Riccardo Muti defended his choice on the ground that the C does not appear in Verdi's original score; however there is a long tradition of Italian tenors displaying their abilities by signing the high C, and audiences have come to expect it. In fact, one Italian music critic argued that even if Verdi had not written the high C, "it was a gift that the people had given to Verdi" -- an assertion that sounds remarkably like democratic constitutionalism. The article proceeds through the many arguments that have been offered for and against Maestro Muti's interpretive position. They turn out to be virtually the same as the arguments that lawyers make about constitutional interpretation. This similarity is not accidental. Like (certain genres of) music and drama, law involves a text that has to be put into action by interpreters before an audience.

Law & Humanities Blog

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Henry at Canossa Posted: 19 Apr 2013 12:10 PM PDT Frederick Mark Gedicks, Brigham Young University Law School, is publishing True Lies: Canossa as Myth in the San Diego Law Review.