Law & Humanities Blog

The Blood Libel Legend
Love As a Contract
More On the LHI/Cardozo Blood Libel Conference
More On Law and Poetry

Posted: 08 Oct 2013 03:38 PM PDT

John Obi Ifediora, University of Wisconsin, has published The Blood Libel Legend: Its Longevity and Popularity. Here is the abstract.

Jewish ritual murder accusations, in their common apprehension, refer to alleged killing of Christians by Jews in furtherance of religious rites, or specifically Jewish practice. The blood libel, however, is a special variant, and a subset of the broader ritual murder accusation, and came much later into the panoply of accusations leveled at the Jews in the Middle Ages. This essay seeks to address the explanations given by scholars for the popularity and longevity of the blood libel as it touches on the following aspects of the legend: what gave rise to the blood accusations in the Middle Ages when the consequences were so horrific and brutal? Who "first" made the accusations against the Jews in medieval times, and who stood to benefit from such charges, or were they occasioned by economic, social, and religious circumstances that defined medieval Europe? But most importantly, what sustained and popularized it from the twelfth to the twentieth century?

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Love As a Contract

Posted: 08 Oct 2013 10:10 AM PDT

Martha M. Ertman, University of Maryland School of Law, has published Love and Contracts in Don Quixote in Don Quixote: Interdisciplinary Connections 251 (Matthew D. Warshawsky and James A. Parr, eds.; Newark, NJ: Juan de la Cuesta, 2013). Here is the abstract.

Viewing love as a contract seems, initially, like mistaking windmills for giants, or a peasant girl for a grand lady. This chapter seeks, like Don Quixote, to convince readers to suspend their practiced views of everyday relationships in order to see them in a new light. What seems crazy at first glance may come to look as good, and sometimes better, than the more conventional view.

Lawrence Joseph, the poet, has been the subject of a symposium published by the University of Cincinnati Law Review. Lawrence Joseph, the nonfiction novelist, has been similarly honored by the Columbia Law Review. With the publication of The Game Changed, his work should be so recognized and he should be given scholarly attention as a critic/essayist. Joseph the lawyer/poet/scholar has developed a jurisprudence of his own. Joseph's jurisprudence, however (and to the good), cannot be reduced to a single word like originalism, or even a label like liberal democratic (though he may be in fact). Rather, the resultant jurisprudence refracts off a multitude of ideas and attitudes contained within the book's various prose pieces. In this Essay, I will first describe the mechanics of The Game Changed, and will then identify and briefly comment upon several of those ideas and attitudes that comprise Joseph's jurisprudence that go Into It.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.