Miscellaneous

Searching For Charlie Chan

Posted on August 19, 2010
The new book out on Charlie Chan, the fictional detective, is getting good reviews. Author Yunte Huang explores the origins, influence and meaning of Chan in Charlie Chan:The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (Norton, 2010)...

Soap, Soap, Soap, Soap, Soap, Soap, Soap, Soap, Soap....

Posted on August 17, 2010
From the Atlantic Monthly: the lingering effects of the soap opera, even as soap operas bite the dust. All those dasterdly evil twins! All those lawsuits! All those plots to murder someone! All that passion! Where did it go? Reality shows. And movies about soap operas--sorry, daytime dramas...

Reasoning From Literature

Posted on August 17, 2010
Jessica M. Silbey, Suffolk University Law School, has published Introduction to Symposium: Reasoning from Literature, at 22 Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 339 (2010). Here is the abstract. The ?literary turn? in legal studies manifests in many ways in our legal discipline and practice...

Archetypes In Legal Storytelling

Posted on August 17, 2010
Linda Edwards, UNLV School of Law, has published Once Upon a Time in Law: Myth, Metaphor, and Authority as UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 10-02. Here is the abstract. We have long accepted the role of narrative in fact statements and jury arguments, but in the inner sanctum of analyzing legal authority? Surely not...

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Leopold and Leob in History and Popular Culture

Posted on August 17, 2010
Edward Larson, Pepperdine University School of Law, has published An American Tragedy: Retelling the Leopold-Loeb Story in Popular Culture, at 50 American Journal of Legal History 119-156 (April 2008/2010). Here is the abstract. This Article scans the cultural history of an American tragedy: the Leopold and Loeb murder case...

Racial Norms and Legal Classifications

Posted on August 16, 2010
SpearIt, Saint Louis University School of Law, has published Enslaved by Words: Limits and Liminalities of 'Post-Racial' Language. Here is the abstract.This article examines racial language in the legal institutions of the United States to show how the law is instrumental in establishing linguistic norms about race...

Shakespeare and Imperfect Justice

Posted on August 11, 2010
Roberta Licniano, University of Salento, has published Musing Upon the Imperfect Justice of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Here is the abstract.Shakespeare?s Measure for Measure can be read as an inquiry into the themes of government and judgement...

And You Thought Pop Culture Wasn't Important...

Posted on August 09, 2010
Walter Dellinger on Mad Men (the show, that is).

Richard Nixon, Watergate and Pop Culture

Posted on August 08, 2010
On this day in 1974, Richard M. Nixon became the first U.S. President to resign, unable to overcome the rather deleterious effects of the Watergate coverup (and the vote to impeach him) on his administration. Mr. Nixon and the Watergate period have been immortalized in popular culture in such films and tv mini-series and books asFrost/Nixon (2008), a film dramatizing the David Frost interviews with Mr...

Hanging Around "Hung"

Posted on August 06, 2010
If you've been wondering what the television drama Hung (HBO) is really about, the New York Times' Ginia Bellafante explains it all for you here. Watch it without shame, and deconstruct it seriously.

A Definition of Critical Legal Studies

Posted on August 04, 2010
Pierre Schalg, University of Colorado Law School, has published Critical Legal Studies, in 295 The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History (Stanley N. Katz ed., 2009). Here is the abstract.This brief encyclopedia entry, written for the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, discusses the origins and implications of critical legal studies as a political movement and an intellectual tendency...

Interpreting the Effects of Jim Crow

Posted on August 04, 2010
Brando Simeo Starkey, Harvard Law School Research Fellow; Equal Justice Society, has published Jim Crow and the Birth of Uncle Tom: Law?s Impact on Black Culture . Here is the abstract.Uncle Tom has grown into the most injurious pejorative that blacks can hurl at one another...

The Villains of "Law and Order"

Posted on August 03, 2010
Stanley Fish on Law and Order: TOS. Cha-Ching to you.

Anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising

Posted on August 02, 2010
A friend at the University of Lodz sent this trailer for a digital film which commemorates the 60th Anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The Warsaw Rising Museum (English description here)commemorates the event, which began against the Soviet Army August 1, 1944 and lasted until October 2, 1944...

The Law in "Deadwood"

Posted on August 02, 2010
Rebecca Johnson, University of Victoria, Faculty of Law, has published "Living Deadwood: Imagination, Affect, and the Persistence of the Past," in volume 42 of the Suffolk University Law Review (2009). Here is the abstract.In this article, I take inspiration from Edward Said's comments that we should look to tales about the past for insight into cultural attitudes of the present...

The Law in "Deadwood"

Posted on July 29, 2010
Rebecca Johnson, University of Victoria Faculty of Law, has published Living Deadwood: Imagination, Affect, and the Persistence of the Past, in the Suffolk University Law Review, volume 42 (2009). Here is the abstract.In this article, I take inspiration from Edward Said's comments that we should look to tales about the past for insight into cultural attitudes of the present...

The Uses of Shakespeare in the Law Curriculum

Posted on July 29, 2010
Allen Mendenhall, West Virginia University, Temple University, and Furman University, has published Shakespeare's Place in Law-and-Literature. Here is the abstract. Nearly every Anglo-American law school offers a course called Law-and-Literature. Nearly all of these courses assign one or more readings from Shakespeare?s oeuvre...

Yet Who Would Have Thought The Old Man To Have Had So Much Blood In Him...

Posted on July 22, 2010
And academics, their readers, and viewers to have had so much interest in the horror film. Well, apparently they do, according to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which documents the continuing stream of titles on the genre. What's in the pipeline? Steffen Hantke's American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (University Press of Mississippi), Thomas Fahy's collection The Philosophy of Horror (University Press of Kentucky), Wheeler Winston Dixon's A History of Horror (Rutgers University Press) and much, much, more...

Roman Law and European Culture

Posted on July 20, 2010
Reinhard Zimmermann, Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, has published Roman Law and European Culture (Derecho Romano y Cultura Europea), at Revista de Derecho Privado no. 18, 5-35 (2010). Here is the abstract.The European legal tradition takes its distinctive feature of the ius commune, which is rooted primarily in Roman law...

Susan Sage Heinzelmann's "Riding the Black Ram" Is Published

Posted on July 19, 2010
From Stanford University Press:Stanford University Press is pleased to announce the publication of Riding the Black Ram: Law, Literature, and Gender, by Susan Sage Heinzelman. Susan Sage Heinzelman is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin...

Gender, Evidence, and Language Usage

Posted on July 19, 2010
Janet Ainsworth, Seattle University School of Law, has published The Performance of Gender as Reflected in American Evidence Rules: Language, Power, and the Legal Construction of Liability as part of the proceedings of the International Gender and Language Association (Victoria University Press, 2009)...

Literature, Sexuality, and Law

Posted on July 19, 2010
Timothy Stewart-Winter, Yale University, and Simon Stern, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, have published Picturing Same-Sex Marriage in the Antebellum United States: The Union of 'Two Most Excellent Men' in Longstreet's 'A Sage Conversation', at 19 Journal of the History of Sexuality 197-222(May 2010)...

Racial Representation in Film

Posted on July 15, 2010
Cynthia D. Bond, John Marshall Law School, has published Laws of Race/Laws of Representation: The Construction of Race and Law in Contemporary American Film , at 11 Texas Review of Entertainment & Sports Law 219 (2010). Here is the abstract.Within hours of the soul-stirring and nation-lifting election of Barack Obama as president, journalists and pundits were announcing the demise of all prior notions of race in America...

Native Americans in Popular Culture and the Law

Posted on July 14, 2010
andré douglas pond cummings, University of Iowa College of Law, University of Utah College of Law, and West Virginia University College of Law, has published A Shifting Wind?: Media Stereotyping of American Indians and the Law. Here is the abstract. An accurate historical narrative of the treatment imposed upon American Indians at the hands of the United States Government reveals a sordid tale...

Roman Sumptuary Laws

Posted on July 14, 2010
Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics, and Centre for the Study of European Contract Law; Tinbergen Institute, and Anna E. Plisecka, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics, have published Luxury in Ancient Rome: Scope, Timing and Enforcement of Sumptuary Laws as Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics Working Paper No...

The Legal History of Citizenship

Posted on July 13, 2010
Elizabeth F. Cohen, Syracuse University, has published Jus Tempus in the Magna Carta: The Sovereignty of Time in Modern Politics and Citizenship , in PS: Political Science and Politics (2010). Here is the abstract.A genealogy of early modern British subjecthood reveals that law based on dates and temporal durations - what I will call collectively jus tempus - creates sovereign boundaries as powerful as territorial borders or bloodlines...

A Legal Analysis of "A Clockwork Orange"

Posted on July 13, 2010
Daniel Albahary has published A Legal Analysis of Stanley Kubrick?s ?A Clockwork Orange? and What it Means to Modern America. Here is the abstract.Stanley Kubrick?s 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess?s 1962 novel, ?A Clockwork Orange,? is a shocking and fascinating film...

The Consequences of Imagery

Posted on July 12, 2010
Gregory Scott Parks, District of Columbia Court of Appeals, and Danielle C. Heard, Stanford University School of Humanities & Sciences, have published 'Assassinate the Nigger Apes' [1]: Obama, Implicit Imagery, and the Dire Consequences of Racist Jokes ...

Some Recent Publications In Law and Literature

Posted on July 12, 2010
Some recent publications in law and literature:Conter, Claude, Justitiabilität und Rechtmässigkeit : Verrechtlichungsprozesse von Literatur und Film in der Moderne (Rodopi, 2010).Conter, Claude, Literatur und Recht im Vormärz (Aisthesis, 2010).Darnton, Robert, The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander From Louis XIV to Napoleon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)...

Play That Funky Music, Your Honor

Posted on July 01, 2010
New York's Committee on Judicial Ethics says that Acting Supreme Court Judge Matthew D'Emic can play with his band after hours if potential parties aren't likely to appear before him, so Judge D'Emic, and other judges are free to rock to house, saying, ""The judge who wishes to pursue part-time employment as a solo musician may do so only occasionally, for a fee, for family, friends, neighbors and others who are unlikely to appear in the judge's court...

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