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Law & Humanities Blog

Law & Humanities Blog

She's Ba-a-a-c-k....

Posted: 22 Jan 2014 03:42 PM PST

Christina Ricci resurrects lead character Lizzie Borden in Lifetime Movie Network's retelling of the famous unsolved murders of Andrew and his second wife in Lizzie Borden Took an Axe on January 25 at 8 p.m., 7 Central time. Clea DuVall plays Emma, Lizzie's older sister, who was away from the Borden home at the time of the murders. Will this tv movie erase memories of the Elizabeth Montgomery version made in 1975, when Christina Ricci was minus 5? Early looks at this entry in the Lizzie videography from Variety, the Los Angeles Times. 

A number of scholars have studied Lizzie's path through law and popular culture. Here's a short and highly selective bibliography.

Filetti, Jean S., From Lizzie Borden to Lorena Bobbitt: Violent Women and Gendered Justice, 35 Journal of Am. Stud. 431 (December 2001).

Langlois, Janet L., Andrew Borden's Little Girl: Fairy- Tale Fragments in Angela Carter's "The Fall River Axe Murders" and "Lizzie's Tiger," 12 Marvels & Tales 192 (1998).

Miller, Stephanie, "How Unbearably Heavy These Skirts Can Be": Popular Feminism in 1970s America and The Legend of Lizzie Borden, 21 Women: A Cultural Review 323 (2010).

Robertson, Cara W., Representing "Miss Lizzie": Cultural Conventions In the Trial of Lizzie Borden, 8 Yale J. L. & Human. 351 (1996).

Roggenkamp, Karen, A Front Seat to Lizzie Borden: Julian Ralph, Literary Journalism, and the Construction of Criminal Fact, in Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers and Fiction 54 (2005).

Schofield, Ann, Lizzie Borden Took an Axe: History, Feminism and American Culture, 34 Am. Stud. 91 (Spring 1993).

Professor Douglas Linder of the University of Missouri (KC) School of Law guides us through the trial, evidence and related materials here.

Sumptuary Laws From Magna Carta to the Constitution

Posted: 22 Jan 2014 08:53 AM PST

Ruthann Robson, CUNY School of Law has published Beyond Sumptuary: Constitutionalism, Clothes, and Bodies in Anglo-American Law, 1215-1789, in volume 2 of the British Journal of American Legal Studies (Fall 2013). Here is the abstract.

Current scholarship is peppered with casual references to "sumptuary laws" whenever regulations of clothing or bodies are at issue. Too often, these references are incorrect, or at best incomplete. This Article is a careful consideration of the various regulations of attire and bodily markings from the Magna Carta in 1215 to the adoption of the United States Constitution in 1789.
This Article situates bodily regulation within Anglo-American constitutionalism, including nascent constitutional Tudor-era struggles between the monarch and Parliament, the status of colonial laws, the American Revolution, pre-constitutional slavery, and the formation of the Constitution, including a proposed "Sumptuary Clause."Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Looking at Postcolonial Law and Literature

Posted: 22 Jan 2014 08:49 AM PST

Dustin A. Zacks has published A Bend in the Law & Literature: Greed, Anarchy and Dictatorship in the African Worlds of V.S. Naipaul and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o in volume 34 of the North Illinois University Law Review (2013). Here is the abstract.
This Article examines two giants of colonial and postcolonial fiction involving African states that heretofore have been largely ignored by the law and literature movement. Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul and East Africa's foremost novelist Ngugi Wa Thiongo'o are worth studying for their vivid descriptions of the challenges postcolonial societies face – challenges such as corruption and authoritarianism that are usually addressed, at least in legal scholarship, in the context of international or human rights law, rather than in the context of narrative fiction.

The Article also critiques traditional academic literary criticism for its disparate treatment of the two authors. Naipaul is attacked as being a snobbish Westerner, whose gloomy pronouncements about the state of the law and the prospect of reform in African states arise from his supposedly racialist opinions. Thiong'o, by contrast, has been heralded for giving an authentic, non-Western view of Kenya's independence and post-independence struggles.

The Article should serve as a reappraisal of the previous criticism of Naipaul's work in light of the precision of his dire descriptions of corrupt African officialdom, which compares favorably with Thiong'o's supposedly more authentic voice.
Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Law and Custom In Legal History

Posted: 22 Jan 2014 08:45 AM PST

P. G. Monateri, Sciences Po, Ecole de Droit; Law School, University of Turin;  has published Law, Language and Custom. (Legge, Linguaggio e Costume.). Here is the abstract (in English and Italian).

English Abstract: The Author investigates the ambiguities of the term Law and Custom, to deepen the relationship they maintain with the language devoted to their presentification. Law always supersede the words that try to capture its meaning, and the opposition between Law and Custom is never the same in Legal History. Peculiarly today old theories are employed to establish a new concept of soft law as a powerful tool of global governance, but they rest on quicksands. These theories point at a 'suspension of disbelief' grounded more on aesthetic metaphors than on scientific premises.
Italian Abstract: L'autore investiga le ambiguità dei termini Legge e Costume, per approfondire la relazione che mantengono con il linguaggio incaricato di presentificarli. La Legge oltrepassa sempre le parole che cercano di catturarne il significato, e l'opposizione tra Legge e Costume non è mai costante nella storia del diritto. In particolare oggi le vecchie teorie sono impiegate per stabilire nuovi concetti come soft law in grado di fungere da potenti strumenti di governo del globale, ma le loro fondamenta giacciono sulle sabbie mobili. Queste teorie puntano invero ad una 'sospensione dell'incredulità' fondata pià su metafore estetiche che su premesse scientifiche.
The full text of the paper is not available from SSRN. 
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