Miscellaneous

Rhetoric, Law, and Religion: Jefferson's "Letter to the Danbury Baptists"

Posted on January 14, 2009
Ian C. Bartrum, Yale Law School & Vermont Law School, has published "Of Historiography and Constitutional Principle: Jefferson's Reply to the Danbury Baptists," in volume 51 of the Journal of Church & State. Here is the abstract. This article examines the ways that the Supreme Court has used Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists ("a wall of separation between church and state") as a rhetorical symbol...

Legal TV

Posted on January 12, 2009
As with nearly every new tv season, new legal series are in development. David E. Kelley has one in the wings, Legally Mad, which will star Charity Wakefield. Now, NBC has agreed to develop Rob Morrow's Barely Legal, based on the true story of Kathleen Holtz, who at 18 passed the California Bar.

Harry Potter the Anglo-Saxon

Posted on January 09, 2009
Susan Liemer, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale School of Law, has published "Bot and Gemots: Anglo-Saxon Legal References in Harry Potter," forthcoming in Harry Potter and the Law (Carolina Academic Press). Here is the abstract.In the popular Harry Potter book series, author J...

English Common Lawyers and Tradition

Posted on January 09, 2009
Cristina Costantini, University of Bergamo, has published "The Keepers of Traditions: The English Common Lawyers and the Presence of Law." Here is the abstract. This paper looks into the subtle frame of the legal traditions, exploring the structural relationship that indissolubly binds history, law and narrative...

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Law, Literature, and Doctor Faustus

Posted on January 09, 2009
Shaina Kovalsky has published "Legally Speaking: State as Community in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus." Here is the abstract. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus appears to have largely neglected by scholars in law and literature, despite its seeming promise in that arena...

Law, Literature and the Holocaust

Posted on January 09, 2009
Richard Weisberg, Cardozo School of Law, has published "Law and Literature as Survivor" as Cardozo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 221. Here is the abstract. While human rights lawyers from Nuremberg on tried to respond to the evils of Hitler's Europe with cautious directness, humanistic theorists in the post-modernist modes of the post-war period resisted all generalizations, including the establishment of legal norms through international codes of law...

Life, Art, and Bernie Madoff

Posted on December 28, 2008
Patricia Allen notes that life seems to have imitated art, at least in the case of the current Bernie Madoff scandal. She seeks out the commentary of a number of critics and writers, who compare it to Harley Granville-Barker's The Voysey Inheritance, which David Mamet has lately adapted...

Some Recently Published Titles In Law and Literature

Posted on December 17, 2008
A round-up of selected titles published in law and literature in the past year or so.br /br /br /Almog, Shulamit, The poetics of the legal system in the digital age: contemporary challenges to traditional concepts of justice (2007).br /br /Atkinson, Logan, and Diana Majury, Law, mystery, and the humanities: collected essays (2008)...

Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought

Posted on December 17, 2008
Lorie Graham and Stephen M. McJohn, Suffolk University Law School, have published "Cognition, Law, Stories," in Minnesota Journal of Law, Science, Technology (Winter 2009). Here is the abstract. br / br /blockquoteThis essay reviews Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought (Penguin 2007), which offers insights from cognitive science just where it overlaps the most with law - how we use basic cognitive categories like intent, space, time, events and causation...

Law and Linguistics

Posted on December 16, 2008
Andrei Marmor, USC Gould School of Law, has published "What Does the Law Say? Semantics and Pragmatics in Statutory Language," forthcoming in Analisi e Diritto. Here is the abstract. The content of communication in a given speech situation often goes beyond what the speaker has explicitly said...

Law, Morality, and Television

Posted on December 15, 2008
MSNBC.com's Susan Young has this story about the interesting moral dilemmas that television dramas pose "for fun." But do viewers take them too seriously? What do adults and children learn from these dramatizations? Commentators trace the evolution of today's ethically complex hero, from Jim Rockford of the Rockford Files to "24"'s Jack Bauer here.

Some Personal Reflections On "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Posted on December 12, 2008
Sherrilyn Ifill, University of Maryland, School of Law, has published "To Kill a Mockingbird Perspectives," at 41 Maryland Bar Journal 54-59 (September/October 2008). Here is the abstract. "To Kill a Mockingbird" is one of the most influential and widely acclaimed legal novels in American history...

Translation as Metaphor

Posted on December 10, 2008
Robert Leckey, McGill University Faculty of Law, has published "Filiation and the Translation of Legal Concepts," in Legal Engineering and Comparative Law (volume 2)(Geneva: Schulthess, 2009). Here is the abstract. The paper argues for the use of the metaphor of translation of legal concepts in comparative law by exploring recent reforms to the law of assisted reproduction by the legislature of Quebec...

21 Grams

Posted on December 10, 2008
Bruce L. Hay, Harvard Law School, has published "The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer," in volume 29 of Cardozo Law Review (2008). Here is the abstract. This paper is part of a symposium issue entitled "Law and Event," whose subject is the work of the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou...

Religious Words, Secular Argument

Posted on December 09, 2008
Jack Lee Sammons, Mercer University School of Law, has published "A Rhetorician's View of Religious Speech in Civic Argument," at 32 Seattle University Law Review 367 (2008).This paper examines the role of religious speech in democratic civic argument by challenging liberal methods of addressing the issue of religious speech with a more rhetorical view of civic argument...

Upcoming Symposium: Women and the Law

Posted on December 09, 2008
From Suzanne Kim, Rutgers School of Law, NewarkRutgers School of Law-Newark is pleased to be celebrating its centennial this year. To honor the law school's tradition of contributing to social justice, we are hosting a day-long symposium on Feb. 13, 2009 entitled "Rutgers School of Law-Newark Celebrates Women Reshaping American Law...

Call For Papers

Posted on December 05, 2008
Reinforcing and Resisting Feminist Representations: Spaces, Voices and Identities The 12th Annual Louisiana State University Women's and Gender Studies ConferenceMarch 5 - 6, 2009 Louisiana State UniversityBaton Rouge, LouisianaCall for ProposalsThe theme of this year?s conference, Reinforcing and Resisting Feminist Representations: Spaces, Voices and Identities, addresses the role that women?s and gender studies scholarship has played in challenging, rethinking and expanding repressive and limiting understandings of feminism, gender expression, and identity in the traditional disciplines and society...

Intellectual Property and Rhetoric

Posted on December 05, 2008
Patricia Louise Loughlan, University of Sydney Faculty of Law, has published "'You Wouldn't Steal a Car': Intellectual Property and the Language of Theft," at 29 European Intellectual Property Review 401 (2007). Here is the abstract. It is actually quite easy to tell a good guy from a bad guy when one of the guys is being called a thief...

Rhetoric and Reparations

Posted on December 05, 2008
Lolita Buckner Inniss, Cleveland-Marshall School of Law, has published "A Critical Legal Rhetoric Approach to 'In Re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation'," as Cleveland-Marshall Legal Studies Paper No. 8-155. Here is the abstract.In this paper I apply critical legal rhetoric to the judicial opinion rendered in response to the Defendants' Motion to Dismiss Plaintiffs' Second Amended and Consolidated Complaint in 'In Re African American Slave Descendants', a case concerning the efforts of a group of modern-day descendants of enslaved African-Americans to obtain redress for the harms of slavery...

Patricia Cornwell's "Scarpetta"

Posted on December 04, 2008
CNN.com has this lengthy interview with Patricia Cornwell, author of the Kay Scarpetta novels.

Legal Language

Posted on December 02, 2008
Andre Marmor, USC Gould School of Law, has published "The Pragmatics of Legal Language," as USC Law Legal Studies Paper No. 08-11. Here is the abstract. In most standard cases, the content of the law is tantamount to the content that is communicated by the relevant legal authority...

Law, Philosophy, and the Rhetorical Tradition

Posted on December 02, 2008
Francis Joseph Mootz III, UNLV School of Law, has published "The Irrelevance of Contemporary Academic Philosophy for Law: Recovering the Rhetorical Tradition," in On Philosophy in American Law (F. J. Mootz III, ed.; Cambridge University Press, 2009). Here is the abstract...

James Boyd White On the Links Among Law, Thought, and Language

Posted on December 02, 2008
James Boyd White, University of Michigan Law School, has published "Establishing Relations Between Law and Other Forms of Thought and Language," 1 Erasmus Law Review (2008). Here is the abstract. The law does not, and could not, exist in an intellectual or linguistic vacuum...

Some Gift Suggestions For the Non-Denominational Holidays

Posted on December 02, 2008
Don't know what to give for the holidays? Pierre Bayard's Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles, newly translated into English by Charlotte Mandell, is now available. In this "revisionist view" of the classic Conan Doyle novel, French critic argues that the iconic detective didn't know what he was doing half the time...

Language, Literature, and Constitutional Theories

Posted on December 02, 2008
Ian C. Bartrum, Yale Law School & Vermont Law School, has published "Metaphors and Modalities: Meditations on Bobbitt's Theory of the Constitution," in 17 William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal (2008). Here is the abstract. This article builds on Philip Bobbitt's remarkable work in constitutional theory, which posits a practice-based constitution based in six accepted "modalities" of argument...

Rhetoric in Child Custody Decision Making

Posted on December 02, 2008
Linda L. Berger, Mercer University School of Law, has published "How Embedded Knowledge Structures Affect Judicial Decision Making: An Analysis of Metaphor, Narrative, and Imagination in Child Custody Disputes." Here is the abstract. We live in a time of radically changing conceptions of family and of the relationships possible between children and parents...

Call For Papers

Posted on November 26, 2008
American University Washington College of LawIP/Gender: Mapping the Connections 6th Annual SymposiumApril 24, 2009Special Theme: Female Fan Cultures and Intellectual PropertySponsored by American University Washington College of Law?sProgram on Information Justice and Intellectual PropertyWomen and the Law ProgramJournal of Gender, Social Policy & the LawIn collaboration with American University?s Center for Social Media The Organization for Transformative WorksRebecca Tushnet, Georgetown UniversityFrancesca Coppa, Muhlenberg CollegeDeadline for submission of abstracts: December 19, 2008 The 6th Annual Symposium on ?IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections? seeks papers on female subcultures and their relationship to intellectual property and copyright regimes, with a particular emphasis on fan works and culture...

A Blog On Crime Fiction and Writing

Posted on November 21, 2008
If you like, or are interested in trying to write crime fiction, check out the blog Hey There's a Dead Guy in the Living Room, written by a writer, a publisher, an agent, a book reviewer, a bookshop owner, an editor, and a p.r. person. They're all alive, and in your (virtual) living room, and in your conservatory, and in your library...

A Draft Syllabus For a Course in Law and Literature

Posted on November 20, 2008
Simon Stern, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, has published "Law and Literature Seminar, Draft Syllabus." Here is the abstract. This is a draft syllabus for an introductory seminar on law and literature. Courses in this area tend to focus primarily (often exclusively) on literary texts...

Call For Papers

Posted on November 20, 2008
Call for Papers: Special Issue of Utopian Studies on Law and UtopiaGuest Editor: Peter Sands, University of Wisconsin-MilwaukeeUtopias are prescriptive, normative alternatives to already existing societies. Thomas More, himself a lawyer, envisioned a society free from lawyers and with few positive laws, and that trope has since made frequent appearance in utopias and dystopias...

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