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.