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A June Conference Sponsored by the Law and Humanities Institute and the Thomas Jefferson School of Law

Posted: 19 Feb 2014 11:54 AM PST

News of an Upcoming Conference




Revealing the Links Between Law and Magic
A Conference Sponsored by the Law and Humanities Law Institute and
Thomas Jefferson School of Law
June 6, 2014
Thomas Jefferson School of Law
1155 Island Avenue, San Diego CA 92101
Preliminary Information
This conference, co-sponsored by the Law and Humanities Institute (New York), and Thomas Jefferson School of Law (San Diego, CA), examines the many ways in which law and magic interact. Not only can the law influence the practice of magic, such as in the areas of freedom of speech and religion and intellectual property. Magic can also influence the law, such as in trial tactics and evidence. In addition, magic illuminates the crossroads of other law and humanities fields, such as the emerging area of law and neuroscience, rhetoric, and law and popular culture. Several of our panelists plan to include (magical!) demonstrations as part of their paper presentations.
Attendees will enjoy a full day on June 6 of panel presentations and discussions on IP, evidence, trial tactics, rhetoric, beginning at 8:30 and running until 5 p.m.
Some of our confirmed speakers and moderators include Sydney Beckman, Duncan College Of Law, Christine Corcos, Louisiana State University Law Center, F. Jay Dougherty, Loyola (Los Angeles), Law School, Paul Finkelman, Albany Law School, Pierre Fleury-Legros, Faculté de droit et des affaires internationales, Université du Havre, mentalist Curtis Frye, Jennifer Hagan, Hagan & Hagen, San Francisco, Annette Houlihan, St. Thomas University (Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada), Rob McQueen, Goldsmiths College, University Of London, Rostam Neuwirth, University Of Macao, Richard Weisberg, Cardozo Law School, and Julie Cromer Young, Thomas Jefferson School of Law. More information, including specific information about panels, CLE, and the conference hotel, will be available soon.
Date                June 6, 2014    7:30 a.m. (Registration and breakfast); 8:30 to 5 p.m.
                        Breakfast, snacks, lunch provided.

Place                Thomas Jefferson School of Law,1155 Island Avenue, San Diego CA  92101

Call For Applications

Posted: 19 Feb 2014 09:26 AM PST

Announcement From the Louisiana Bar Foundation

LBF Seeks 2014-16 Scholar-In-Residence
The Louisiana Bar Foundation (LBF) is accepting applications for a Scholar-In-Residence to serve for a two year term beginning in July 1, 2014.  A $7,500 honorarium will be paid to the Scholar-In-Residence as consideration for his/her work product.

Over the term of the appointment, the scholar shall produce for publication a scholarly quality written contribution on a subject and in a form agreed upon with the LBF, such as a law review article, book, booklet, essay, or other legal publication, including film, television projects, etc., suitable for the intended LBF purpose.
The general purpose of the Scholar in Residence appointment is to incorporate an academic and scholarly dimension to the LBF's overall efforts of preserving, honoring, and improving our system of justice by funding and otherwise promoting efforts that enhance the legal profession, increase public understanding of the legal system, and advance the reality of equal justice under the law.  The Scholar in Residence appointment is intended to enrich the academic and intellectual perspective of the LBF's efforts, to enhance the Foundation's overall educational program, and to support legal education in Louisiana by bringing the practicing bar and Louisiana's law schools closer together.
Applicants are asked to submit a specific proposal.  Proposals should include: Topic, prospectus, suggested format, proposed time-line, and applicant's qualifications.  Applications must be received by April 30, 2014 and are to be sent to:
Louisiana Bar FoundationEducation Committee1615 Poydras Street, Ste. 1000New Orleans, LA   70112Fax:  (504) 566-1926E-mail:  dennette@raisingthebar.org
If you have questions, please direct them to: Dennette L.
Young at the Louisiana Bar Foundation by e-mail at dennette@raisingthebar.org or by phone at (504) 561-1046.

Mary Wollstonecraft's View of Independence

Posted: 19 Feb 2014 09:23 AM PST

Alan M. S. J. Coffee, King's College London School of Law, is publishing Freedom as Independence: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Grand Blessing of Life in Hypatia. Here is the abstract.

Independence is a central and recurring theme in Mary Wollstonecraft's work. Independence should not be understood as an individualistic ideal that is in tension with the value of community but as an essential ingredient in successful and flourishing social relationships. I examine three aspects of this rich and complex concept that Wollstonecraft draws on as she develops her own notion of independence as a powerful feminist tool. First, independence is an egalitarian ideal that requires that all individuals, regardless of sex, be protected to a comparable extent in all areas of social, political, and economic life, no matter whether this is in the public or private sphere. Second, so long as this egalitarian condition is not compromised, independence allows for individuals to perform differentiated social roles, including along gendered lines. Finally, the ongoing and collective input of both women and men is required to ensure that the conditions necessary for social independence are maintained. In Wollstonecraft's hands, then, independence is a powerful ideal that allows her to argue that women must be able to act on their own terms as social and political equals, doing so as women whose perspectives and interests may differ from men's.
Download the text of the article from SSRN at the link. 

Fashion, Form, and Public Order

Posted: 19 Feb 2014 08:26 AM PST

In case you missed it:

Gary Watt, Dress, Law and Naked Truth: A Cultural Study of Fashion and Form(London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).

From the publisher's website:

Why are civil authorities in so-called liberal democracies affronted by public nudity and the Islamic full-face 'veil'? Why are law and civil order so closely associated with robes, gowns, suits, wigs and uniforms? Why is law so concerned with the 'evident' and the need for justice to be 'seen' to be done? Why do we dress and obey dress codes at all? In this, the first ever study devoted to the many deep cultural connections between dress and law, the author addresses these questions and more. His responses flow from the radical thesis that 'law is dress and dress is law'. 
Engaging with sources from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare, Carlyle, Dickens and Damien Hirst, Professor Watt draws a revealing history of dress and civil order and offers challenging conclusions about the nature of truth and the potential for individuals to fit within the forms of civil life.


Adultery and Prostitution In Ottoman and Jewish Law, 1700-1900

Posted: 19 Feb 2014 08:18 AM PST

Leah Bornstein-Makovetsky, Ariel University, is publishing Ottoman and Jewish Authorities Facing Issues of Prostitution and Adultery: 1700-1900, in the International Journal of the Jurisprudence of the Family. Here is the abstract.

The purpose of the present paper is to discuss the ways in which the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ottoman authorities, on the one hand, and Jewish community leaders (secular leaders) and Jewish legal authorities (dayanim), on the other, handled cases of adultery and fornication among Jews. 
Ottoman society between 1700-1900 was a religious society, and therefore all members of the Jewish communities were subject to the Jewish communal organization and committed to the observance of Jewish law. Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire had ways to force their members to obey Jewish sexual morality laws. Jewish communities had to address in the Jewish courts, most of the problems of Jewish society, including moral issues, both serious and minor.
They used for this purpose all means available to them, including turning to the Ottoman authorities. Jewish law, in contrast to Islamic law, differentiates between the concepts of "adultery" and "fornication". For this and other reasons, the Jewish authorities preferred to resolve such cases on their own, and only when there was no alternative would they turn over those accused to the Ottoman authorities -- Muslim courts and governors. Most Jewish women in the Ottoman Empire suspected of adultery during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not denounced by the Jewish courts ( as adulterers. In cases in which adultery by the wife was certain, Jewish dayanim and community leaders insisted that the husband divorce his wife, without submitting the woman to any other form of punishment. In extreme cases when the husband insisted on staying with his adulterous wife, the dayanim and the community leaders turned him over to Muslim courts or to Ottoman authorities. In such cases the Jewish courts did not keep the matter secret. The handing over of adulterers to Ottoman authorities took place also when the accused couple refused to comply with the orders of the Jewish court, or when a report from the Jewish community came to the attention of the non-Jews. In some cases, individuals appealed directly to the Ottoman authorities with the request that Jewish adulterers be punished. When they were turned over, Jewish adulterers, men and women, were frequently punished by a Muslim court or by Ottoman governors and their subordinates according to Islamic law. The regular punishments were brutal lashes, exile and fine. The overall incidence of sexual offenses as a basis for divorce was quite low in Jewish communities throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It appears that among the reasons adduced for divorce, adultery, prostitution and ill repute accounted for only 2-5% of the cases. It appears that sexual relations between unmarried men and women was more common than adultery. The Jewish authorities were asked to intervene only in problematic cases, such as those involving a man's refusal to marry the mother of his future child, or instances in which someone complained in the Jewish court or before the commissioners of offences that the woman was a fornicator.
Extant sources inform us that problems of low-level sexual immorality came up even in the most conservative communities, such as Aleppo. Under these circumstances, some communities enacted modesty rules and regulations. Jewish legal authorities -- dayanim and Jewish law deciders (posekim) were called upon to address the issue of the status of children born as a result of extramarital relations. In general, children begotten by unmarried couples did not pose a Halakhic problem because they were considered legal according to Jewish law and were not considered bastards (Mamzer) Very few cases are attested in which the father's name was not available. Once born, the child in such a case would be referred to as "shtoki" among the Jews and was only permitted to marry a convert or a slave who had been freed from bondage. Extramarital pregnancy did not necessarily lead to punishment for unmarried women in Jewish society. Cases of this type were typically not turned over to the Ottoman authorities; rarely were children born of adulterous unions declared bastards in Jewish society.
The full text is not available for download from SSRN.

Legal Theory and Political Philosophy

Posted: 19 Feb 2014 08:12 AM PST

William A. Edmundson, Georgia State University College of Law, has published Why Legal Theory is Political Philosophy at 19 Legal Theory 1 (2014).

This article is part of a symposium issue on Scott Shapiro's book, Legality. It explores the question whether Shapiro's "moral aim" functionalism about the nature of law brings him into conflict with his own commitment to legal positivism. The article points out the role "framing judgments" must play in working out moral-aim functionalism. Framing judgments state the necessary conditions of pursuing a moral aim, as contrasted to perhaps simply pretending to. As such, framing judgments determine whether an institution structured as a "self-certifying, compulsory, comprehensive planning institution" also in fact pursues a moral aim. Determining whether an institution pursues a moral aim, or not, does not require delivering a verdict on its moral worth. But it does require setting out at least the rudiments of a theory of political legitimacy, and a theory of political legitimacy belongs to political philosophy. Thus, in this crucial respect, legal theory is political philosophy.
The article also explores the relation between the concept of a legal institution, and the concept of legal content. Drawing upon, but also critiquing, recent work by David Plunkett, the article challenges the widely assumed primacy of the concept of legal institution over that of legal content. If this challenge is successful, it makes trouble for those, like Shapiro, who want to be moral-aim functionalists about the concept of legal institution, while remaining legal positivists about the concept of legal content. If a moral aim certifies an otherwise-qualified institution as legal, it is conceivable that the legality of the norms it generates is to be certified solely by reference to their institutional source. A norm might be a legal norm regardless of any aim it could be said to have in itself. What, then, of customary law? That is, norms that count as legal despite lacking an institutional source? A moral-aim functionalist about legal institutions, who insists on a source-based test of legal content, has either to deny that there are customary laws, strictly speaking, or to face the question: how to distinguish mere custom from customary law? If (by parallel) a moral-aim differentiam of customary legal norm is admitted, then the theory is no longer a legal positivism about legal norms.
The full text is not available from SSRN.
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