Law & Humanities Blog

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Legal Communication Posted: 10 Apr 2014 01:17 PM PDT Katia Fach Gómez, University of Zaragoza, has published Why Does Legal English Sound Like Gibberish To Many Spanish Law Students? Here is the abstract. Legal English is unfortunately still a rare bird in law faculties in public universities in Spain. However, a command of legal English — the generic term used in this article to refer to both a specific legal subject taught in English and an instrumental "English for Specific Purposes" (ESP) subject in the legal sphere — is one of the assets that the voracious labor market demands of even recent graduates. This article is a personal reflection on the multiple dysfunctional factors in Spain that, together, prevent this gap from closing as quickly and completely as would be desirable. My article also shows that other, more auspicious developments in the legal English teaching and learning field are starting to take root in Spain and that there are also reasons for believing that Spanish lawyers can be relied on to take the lead in the long overdue "degibberization" of legal English. Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Revealing the Links Between Law and Magic: LHI and Thomas Jefferson School of Law Conference on Law and Magic Update Posted: 10 Apr 2014 09:06 AM PDT Here's an update on the Law and Magic Conference, sponsored by the Law and Humanities Institute and the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, which will take place June 6, 2014. Registration and check-in is scheduled to begin at 7:15 a.m. Panels will begin at 8:15. Here is the preliminary schedule of panels. As of now, the Hotel Indigo at 509 9th Avenue, San Diego, is the conference hotel.

Law & Humanities Blog

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A History of the Privacy Profession Posted: 08 Apr 2014 01:31 PM PDT Andrew Clearwater, University of Maine School of Law, and J. Trevor Hughes, International Association of Privacy Professionals, have published In the Beginning...An Early History of the Privacy Profession, at 74 Ohio State Law Journal 897 (2013). Here is the abstract.  Privacy is a concept that has existed in various forms and degrees, for much of human history. However, the origin of information privacy as a compliance, risk management, and operational concern has been much more recent. This new field, and the professionals who work within it — the privacy profession — did not exist broadly until the past decade. From essentially no active professionals in the 1970s and 1980s, the privacy profession has grown to at least 13,000 people working on managing information privacy within their organizations. As the information economy continues to grow — pushed by the breath-taking speed of technological development, cloud computing, big data, and emerging uses for exponentially increasing stores of data — it is reasonable to expect that the privacy profession will grow. The exact trajectory of the privacy profession is difficult to predict. Management of privacy is, today, a well-established and important function, and it is obvious that the professionals who work in this field will grow in number and prominence in the coming years. Without knowing where we've come from, we can't know where we are going and so it is appropriate for us to document the nascent years of the privacy profession. We expect that, at some point in the future, scholars will seek to understand how the field of privacy management emerged, who served as a catalyst for the growth of the field, and what the important milestones for the privacy profession were as the turbulence of the early days of the information economy played out. While this history is most certainly global — the privacy profession has its earliest roots in Germany in the 1970s — we have chosen to investigate this change where we understand it best and where the profession has appeared to grow the most, the United States. We have also limited our focus to the role of the privacy professional and privacy lawyer.

Law & Humanities Blog

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Free Trade Doctrine In Printed Matter: The 1878 Royal Commission on Copyright Posted: 07 Apr 2014 12:11 PM PDT Barbara Lauriat, King's College London, The Dickson Poon School of Law, is publishing Free Trade in Books — The 1878 Royal Commission on Copyright in the Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA (2014). Here is the abstract. The doctrine of free trade dominated Victorian policy discussions for decades — including those about copyright law. But the application of free trade doctrine to copyright policy discussions was not at all straightforward. Professed free trade supporters disagreed profoundly on the question of copyright. Some saw it as an illegitimate restriction on trade, while others viewed it as a mode of enforcing a natural property right.

Law & Humanities Blog

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• Isaiah Berlin and Enlightenment Constitutionalism
• Lawyers and Game of Thrones
• Nelson Mandela: The Lawyer's Lawyer

Isaiah Berlin and Enlightenment Constitutionalism Posted: 02 Apr 2014 08:47 AM PDT Jeremy Waldron, New York University School of Law; University of Oxford, has published Isaiah Berlin's Neglect of Enlightenment Constitutionalism. Here is the abstract. One of the most important achievements of the Enlightenment is what I shall call Enlightenment constitutionalism. It transformed our political thinking out of all recognition; it left, as its legacy, not just the repudiation of monarchy and nobility in France in the 1790s but the unprecedented achievement of the framing, ratification, and establishment of the Constitution of the United States. It comprised the work of Diderot, Kant, Locke, Madison, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Sieyes, and Voltaire. It established the idea of a constitution as an intricate mechanism designed to house the untidiness and pluralism of human politics. Yet Isaiah Berlin, supposedly one of our greatest interpreters of the Enlightenment, said almost nothing about it. The paper develops this claim and it speculates as to why this might be so. Certainly one result of Berlin's sidelining of Enlightenment constitutionalism is to lend spurious credibility to his well-known claim that Enlightenment social design was perfectionist, monastic, and potentially totalitarian.

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

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Visit to the Institute of Making Posted: 01 Apr 2014 03:14 AM PDT We are very lucky to have an Institute of Making at UCL. I often walk past its impressive glass front, peer at the collection of things on shelves that can be seen inside, and wonder what on earth they are and what goes on in there.

Law & Humanities Blog

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The Development of the Theory of Enterprise Liability From the Late Nineteenth Century through the 1970s Posted: 31 Mar 2014 02:24 PM PDT Edmund Ursin, University of San Diego School of Law, has published Holmes, Cardozo, and the Legal Realists: Early Incarnations of Legal Pragmatism and Enterprise Liability in volume 50 of the San Diego Law Review (Summer 2013).

Law & Humanities Blog

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Inviting In the Social Sciences Posted: 27 Mar 2014 09:14 AM PDT Nicolette M. Priaulx, Cardiff University, University of Wales System, Cardiff Law School, and Martin Weinel, Cardiff School of Social Sciences, are publishing Behavior on a Beer Mat: Law, Interdisciplinarity & Expertise, in the Journal of Law, Technology and Policy. Here is the abstract. In this paper we seek to offer an original theoretical platform for thinking about the nature of legal knowledge produced through 'legal interdisciplinarity.' The context for our discussion is the emergence of a 'behavioural boom' in the field of law where researchers increasingly turn to fields like behavioural economics to encourage shifts in legal and social governance architecture. Using a case study which explores the application of a sub-branch of psychology to civil law, we highlight serious concerns attending the capacity of lone legal researchers to meaningfully navigate non-legal domains. Central to our analysis, is the sociology of expertise and experience, and it is from this perspective that we explore the interdisciplinary process. Drawing attention to the extent to which largely "unwritten" practices and conventions inhabit disciplines and how these govern knowledge, we point to the insurmountable barriers confronting lone legal interdisciplinarians.

Law & Humanities Blog

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Call For Papers, Special Issue: International Journal for the Semiotics of Law Posted: 25 Mar 2014 07:23 AM PDT From Anne Wagner, Editor-in-Chief, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law Special Issue Call for Papers "Marginalised Bodies (Re)imagining the Law" When the law regulates, it also marginalises. Indigenous people, the GLBTI community, women, children, the homeless and others are all victimised by the force of this regulation. For many people belonging to these communities, the law has left them with a sense of abandonment – the law does not recognise the realities that they live out on a day to day basis. In so doing, sites of contest are opened up in which marginalised bodies attempt to challenge law makers and law enforcers. Semiotics allows us useful methods for exploring these interactions. For instance, the signs of both groups (literal and metaphorical), the language employed by groups (how they complement and contrast each other in differing legal and social realities) and acts deterrence and defiance are all possible areas of inquiry.

Law & Humanities Blog

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Call For Fiction! Posted: 24 Mar 2014 02:34 PM PDT From Alafair Burke, Professor of Law, Hofstra University School of Law, comes news of a competition: Mystery Writing Competition Have you ever thought about writing crime fiction? Hofstra Law, along with Professor Alafair Burke and Mulholland Books, is offering you the unique opportunity to have your short story read by best-selling crime novelists and published online. See below for the official rules and regulations. View the competition flyer. RULES 1. Your story must feature a lawyer as a main character. 2. Your story must be original, unpublished, and less than 3,500 words. 3. Submissions must be in Microsoft Word, using a 12-point font and double-spaced. The document must be emailed as an attachment to lawasb@hofstra.edu by May 1, 2014, with the subject line "mystery writing competition." 4. The first-place story will be published on the website of Mulholland Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company devoted to publishing the best in suspense fiction. All authors will retain copyright. PRIZES FIRST PRIZE: $500 and Online publication and promotion by Mulholland Books SECOND PRIZE: $200 THIRD PRIZE: $100 JUDGES LEE CHILD is the No. 1 internationally best-selling author of 18 Jack Reacher thrillers. He went to law school in Sheffield, England, and had a long career in television production before deciding to write his first novel.

Law & Humanities Blog

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Call for Papers: International Journal for the Semiotics of Law Posted: 20 Mar 2014 09:25 AM PDT Call for Papers from Anne Wagner, Editor in Chief, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law Special Issue Call for Papers "Signs in and of place: Indigenous issues in legal semiotics" Colonization is both a contest of force and a struggle over semiotics. Signs of possession (such as cultivation or fences), representations of entitlement (savages and empty maps) and linguistic replacement (naming places, people and things, enforcing education in colonial languages) were part of the arsenal of colonial law. Semiotics is also central in the modern era of the recognition of Indigenous rights, through translation of Indigenous relationships to territories and social and political organization into the language of property and self-government, as well as in the resignification of the place of law (and the law of places) in the discourses of nationhood, resource development and environmental justice. This special issue for the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law invites high quality contributions from scholars of all disciplines, in English or French, that undertake rhetorical, hermeneutic, sociolinguistic, discourse or semiotic analyses of Indigenous issues. Of particular interest are papers discussing Indigenous law, philosophy, art, music, narrative, ceremony, languages and acts of care for the land. Guest Editor: Kirsten Anker (Faculty of Law, McGill University, Canada) Submissions: send paper proposal (max. 400 words) by 30 June 2014 to kirsten.anker@mcgill.ca Selection: selected authors will be invited by 31 July 2014 to submit a full paper Final submissions: papers (max.