Miscellaneous

Performer of the Narcocorrido Murdered

Posted on June 29, 2010
Mexican singer Sergio Vega, known as El Shaka, was assassinated last Saturday. Mr. Vega was known for his performances of the songs known as "narcocorridos" or drug ballads. Notes the Urban Dictionary, "Literally translated it [narcocorrido] means "drug ballad", though not all narcocorridos are about drugs...

Rear Window

Posted on June 29, 2010
Michael Ruse stands up for the Hitchcock classic Rear Window here.

Tolstoy and Spanish Law

Posted on June 23, 2010
José Calvo González has published El alma y la ley. Tolstói entre juristas. España (1890-1928)(Sevilla: Comunicación Social Ediciones y Publicaciones (2010)(Colección Historia y Presente, nº 5). More information from the website, where you can also read an excerpt from the first chapter, "Tolstoi y la cultura literaria del Derecho en Espana (1890-1928)" (Tolstoy and legal literary culture in Spain (1890-1928)...

A Clockwork Orange

Posted on June 23, 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...

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Hollywood and the Rhetoric of Race

Posted on June 23, 2010
Cynthia D. Bond, The 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...

Sonnets and Statutes

Posted on June 22, 2010
Jeffrey G. Sherman, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago-Kent School of Law, has published Scorn Not the Sonnet: In Search of Shakespeare's Law. Here is the abstract.Legal scholars love to use Shakespeare?s works as stimuli and even models for legal analysis...

An Early Taste of "The Defenders"

Posted on June 21, 2010
CBS has posted video clips of its upcoming new legal drama "The Defenders", which stars John Belushi and Jerry O'Connell, here. The show, which is set in Las Vegas, seems to have no relationship to the iconic E.G. Marshall/Robert Reed series of the early 1960s...

Bloomsday

Posted on June 16, 2010
Happy Bloomsday. On December 6, 1933, Judge John Woolsey ruled that James Joyce's Ulysses could be imported into the United States, since it was not, as the United States government maintained, obscene. The Second Circuit affirmed. United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce, 72 F...

DC Bar Foundation Acknowledges Laurence Fishburne For "Thurgood"

Posted on June 14, 2010
From BLT, the blog of Legal Times, a post noting that actor Laurence Fishburne got a thank you from the District of Columbia Bar Foundation for his performances of "Thurgood," a play devoted to the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Here's more about Mr...

Law and Literary Studies Colloquium, Hong Kong University

Posted on June 13, 2010
Announcement of a Law and Literary Studies Colloquium, June 23-25, at Hong Kong University. Here's a link to the website.

Lawyers In Your Living Room

Posted on June 11, 2010
Michael Asimow, University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, has published Lawyers in Your Living Room! Law on Television an introduction, in Lawyers in Your Living Room (Michael Asimow, ed.; ABA Press, 2009). Here is the abstract. From Perry Mason and The Defenders in the 1960?s to L...

The McCarthy Hearings

Posted on June 09, 2010
The New York Times reminds us that on this day in 1954, attorney Joseph Welch faced down Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. On behalf on his young colleague Fred Fisher, whom McCarthy had assailed indirectly as a Communist because he was a member of the National Lawyers Guild, Welch stormed,"[U]ntil this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness...

Law, Language, and the Humanities

Posted on June 08, 2010
Penelope J. Pether, Villanova University School of Law, has published "Language, in the Law and the Humanities: An Introduction", in Law and the Humanities (Sarat, Anderson & Frank eds.; Cambridge University Press, 2010). This chapter from Sarat, Anderson and Frank's Law and the Humanities, An Introduction (Cambridge U...

Law and Semiotics

Posted on June 08, 2010
Anne Wagner, Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale, and Jan M. Broekman, Pennsylvania State University School of Law, have published Prospect of Legal Semiotics (Springer, forthcoming). Here is the abstract. This book examines the progress to date in the many facets ? conceptual, epistemological and methodological - of the field of legal semiotics...

The Use of Images and Law

Posted on June 03, 2010
Jessica M. Silbey, Suffolk University Law School, has published Evidence Verité and the Law of Film, at 31 Cardozo Law Review 1257 (2010). Here is the abstract.This paper explores a puzzle concerning the authority of certain images that increasingly find themselves at the center of legal disputes: surveillance or ?real time? film images that purport to capture an event about which there is a dispute...

Legal Science, Legal Theory, Legal Naming

Posted on June 03, 2010
Hanoch Dagan, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law, and Roy Kreitner, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, and Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law, have published The Character of Legal Theory, in the Cornell Law Review...

Portia's Conception of Justice

Posted on June 03, 2010
Roberta Linciano, University of Salento, has published 'Is that the Law?': Portia's Mockery of Justice in The Merchant of Venice as an Italian Society for Law and Literature (ISLL) Paper Essay. Here is the abstract.In this paper I examine the role performed by the disguised lawyer Portia during the trial Shylock vs...

Law and Language Scholarship

Posted on June 02, 2010
Penelope J. Pether, Villanova University School of Law, has published Language, in the Law and the Humanities: An Introduction, in Law and the Humanities (Sarat, Anderson and Frank ed.; Cambridge University Press, 2010). Here is the abstract.This chapter from Sarat, Anderson and Frank's Law and the Humanities, An Introduction (Cambridge U...

The Bad Boy of Sherwood Forest

Posted on May 23, 2010
From the May 21 New York Times, a consideration of the image of Robin Hood in the movies via newly released DVDs. Dave Kehr writes about prior Robin Hoods as Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett reimagine the olde, olde story.

Judge Bao In Literature

Posted on May 21, 2010
Wilt Lukas Idema, Harvard University Library, has published Introduction to Judge Bao and the Rule of Law: Eight Ballad-Stories from the Period 1250-1450, in Wilt L. Idema, Judge Bao and the Rule of Law (World Scientific Publishing, 2009). Here is the abstract...

Putting Your Law School Training To Work

Posted on May 20, 2010
Along with Jim Belushi, Jerry O'Connell will star in the new legal drama, The Defenders, on CBS. Mr. O'Connell is learning whereof he speaks. In addition to having been a successful thespian for some time, he's also a law student at Southwestern Law School...

Race and Legal History at the University of Texas

Posted on May 19, 2010
Thomas D. Russell, University of Denver College of Law, has published ?Keep the Negroes Out of Most Classes Where There Are a Large Number of Girls?: The Unseen Power of the Ku Klux Klan and Standardized Testing at The University of Texas, 1899-1999, as University of Denver Legal Studies Research Paper No...

Memoirs, Authenticity, and Fraud

Posted on May 18, 2010
Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published Sentimental Frauds , at 36 Law & Social Inquiry (2011). Here is the abstract.This paper examines the class action against James Frey, alleging fraud because of his falsehoods in A Million Little Pieces...

Law in Shakespeare's Sonnets

Posted on May 18, 2010
Jeffrey G. Sherman, IIT-Chicago-Kent College of Law, has published Scorn Not the Sonnet: In Search of Shakespeare's Law. Here is the abstract. Legal scholars love to use Shakespeare?s works as stimuli and even models for legal analysis. We write about King Lear or Measure for Measure or The Merchant of Venice but rarely about the Sonnets...

CBS' New Legal Drama

Posted on May 17, 2010
CBS has picked up the new legal drama "Defenders," in which Jim Belushi will star as a Las Vegas attorney who fights for the "little guy."

An End To Law & Order?

Posted on May 14, 2010
Will "Law and Order" disappear from the airwaves? Rumors are flying as NBC executives apparently discuss furiously with Dick Wolf over broadcasting a final year of the long-running drama. Keeping the veteran series for the 2010/2011 season would mean L&O would have outlasted legendary oater "Gunsmoke" (1955-1975) as longest running TV drama...

The Alternative Cultural Narrative and Legal Education

Posted on May 11, 2010
Brennan P. Breeland has published I Am Jack's Radical Self-Degradation: A Pedagogical Argument for the Inclusion of the Indigenous Narrative in the Postmodern Legal Education. Here is the abstract. An American legal education begins with a first-year curriculum which is largely uniform across the spectrum of institutions: Contracts, Torts, Constitutional Law, Property, Civil Procedure, and the like are considered the requisite basis for the continued study of law...

Robin Hood-Itry

Posted on May 07, 2010
Nicholas Adam Curott and Alexander Fink, George Mason University, have published Bandit Heroes: Social, Mythical or Rational?. Here is the abstract.Bandits steal from their fellow men. Yet they are regularly subjects of folksongs, novels and movies. In these outlets they are presented as folk heroes despite their crimes...

A Little Light Reading

Posted on May 06, 2010
End of exam grading (or maybe just lazy mid-spring reading): from Malcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker, musings on the story of a man who never was, via a review of a new book on the subject, Ben Macintyre's Operation Mincemeat; buckle that swash! with Allan Massie, as he considers the real value of historical fiction in a piece for Standpoint...

Art and Legal Form

Posted on May 06, 2010
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, The Westminster International Law and Theory Centre, University of Westminster,has published Repetition: Deleuze and Kierkegaard on Law, Justice and Art, in Law and Art (Oren Ben-Dor, ed; London: Routledge, 2010). Here is the abstract...

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