Miscellaneous

Call For Papers

Posted on November 17, 2008
Posted on behalf of Ruth Ann Robbins, Rutgers-Camden School of LawOnce Upon a Legal Time, Chapter Two: Applied Storytelling in LawLewis & Clark Law School; Portland, Oregon July 22-24, 2009IntroductionWe are pleased to issue this Call for Proposals for the second biennialinternational Applied Storytelling Conference...

Lawyer Ethics In Popular Culture

Posted on November 17, 2008
Michael Asimow, University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, and Richard Weisberg, Yeshiva University, Cardozo School of Law, have published "When the Lawyer Knows the Client is Guilty: Client Confessions in Legal Ethics, Popular Culture, and Literature," forthcoming in the Southern University Interdisciplinary Law Journal...

Call For Papers

Posted on November 16, 2008
From the Stetson Law Review In December 2009 the Stetson Law Review will publish a symposium issue on law, literature, and film. Articles may focus on literature, film, or both; short fiction and poetry will also be considered. Regarding proposed submissions, please contact Robert Batey, the faculty coordinator of the symposium issue, at batey@law...

Lyrics and Law

Posted on November 14, 2008
Camille Nelson, Saint Louis University School of Law, has published "Lyrical Assault: Dancehall Versus the Cultural Imperialism of the North-West," at 17 Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 231 (2008). Here is the abstract. This article examines Jamaican Dancehall music's implications and international perceptions and explores a possible legal remedy for what has been dubbed "Murder Music...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Shakespeare and Sovereignty

Posted on November 12, 2008
P. G. Monateri, University of Turin, School of Law, has published "Sovereign Ambiguity - From Hamlet to Benjamin via Eliot and Schmitt." Here is the abstract. The Author examines how Romantic Ambiguity lies at the heart of the legal notion of Sovereignty, applying a law and literature approach to notions developed by Benjamin and Carl Schmitt...

Robert Tsai's Eloquence and Reason

Posted on November 07, 2008
Professor Robert Tsai (American University, Washington College of Law), who previously guest blogged here in January 2006, has just published Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture (Yale University Press, Nov. 2008). According to the back cover blurb: This provocative book presents a theory of the First Amendment?s development...

Michael Crichton Dies

Posted on November 05, 2008
Author Michael Crichton has died. The physician and author (Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, Coma) was 66.

The CSI Effect

Posted on November 05, 2008
Donald E. Shelton, Eastern Michigan University, has published "The 'CSI Effect': Does it Really Exist?" in volume 259 of the National Institute of Justice Journal (2008). Here is the abstract. Many attorneys, judges, and journalists have claimed that watching television programs like CSI has caused jurors to wrongfully acquit guilty defendants when no scientific evidence has been presented...

A New Edition of Frankenstein

Posted on October 31, 2008
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Charles Robinson, Professor of English at the University of Delaware, has prepared an edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, stripped of Percy Shelley's improvements. We can now see what Mary Shelley actually wrote, and compare it to what we've been reading all these years...

Tony Hillerman, Author of Mysteries Featuring Native American Sleuths, Dies

Posted on October 27, 2008
Tony Hillerman, the author of numerous bestselling mysteries featuring Navajo sleuths Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, has died of pulmonary failure. Here's more from the International Herald Tribune.Mr. Hillerman's first Joe Leaphorn novel was The Blessing Way...

Anti-Semitism and Religion in Kafka

Posted on October 22, 2008
Arnold Heidsieck, University of Southern California, has published "On Judaism, Christianity, Anti-Semitism in Kafka's the Castle, His Letters and Diaries." Here is the abstract. In his writings Kafka scrutinized, encouraged by his friend Max Brod, the early 20th-century German-speaking disputes on the ancient Jewish origins of Christianity and attempted an explication of the Christian-Germanic ideology of anti-Semitism...

You Don't Tread On Superman's Cape

Posted on October 20, 2008
From EvidenceProfBlog: Colin Miller writes cleverly and authoritatively about claims brought against Superman by a victim he rescues in an episode of the show Lois and Clark. So what does this tell us about Good Samaritan laws?

Short Law Review Article, Long Memory?

Posted on October 20, 2008
Erik M. Jensen, Case Western Reserve School of Law, has published "The Intellectual History of 'The Shortest Article in Law Review History'," in volume 59 of the Case Western Reserve Law Review. Here is the abstract. "The Shortest Article in Law Review History" appeared in 2000 to a mixture of acclaim ("Brilliant!"), horror ("Don't you have anything better not to do?"), and indifference ("Huh?")...

A Look at Native American Law Through a Michigan Novelist's Eyes

Posted on October 07, 2008
Matthew L. M. Fletcher, Michigan State University College of Law, has published "Laughing Whitefish: A Tale of Justice and Anishinaabe Custom," as MSU Legal Studies Research Paper 06-16. Here is the abstract. Laughing Whitefish, a novel by Robert Traver, the pen name of former Michigan Supreme Court Justice John Voelker, is the fictionalized story of a case that reached the Michigan Supreme Court three times, culminating in Kobogum v...

Fan Fiction, Harry Potter, and Copyright Law

Posted on October 03, 2008
Aaron Schwabach, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has published "The Harry Potter Lexicon and the World of Fandom: Fan Fiction, Outsider Works, and Copyright," has TJSL Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1274293. Here is the abstract. Fan fiction, long a nearly invisible form of outsider art, has grown exponentially in volume and legal importance in the past decade...

Kafka's POV

Posted on October 01, 2008
Arnold Heidsieck, University of Southern California, has published "Kafka's Narrative Innovation and Ethical Intuitions." Here is the abstract. In his fictions Kafka develops an innovative narrative POV (uni-polar 'self-narration') and a penetrating (near-psychoanalytic) scrutiny of motives...

New Book on Shakespeare and the Law

Posted on October 01, 2008
Hart Publishing is offering a new title called Shakespeare and the Law, edited by Paul Raffield and Gary Watt. It collects the proceedings of a July 2007 conference held at the University of Warwick School of Law. Here's further information provided by the publisher...

Law and Lyrics

Posted on September 26, 2008
Alex B. Long, University of Tennessee College of Law, has published "[Insert Song Lyrics Here]: The Uses and Misuses of Popular Music Lyrics In Legal Writing," in volume 64 of the Washington and Lee Law Review (2007). Legal writers frequently utilize the lyrics of popular music artists to help advance a particular theme or argument in legal writing...

Call For Papers

Posted on September 26, 2008
Georgetown University Law Center, Columbia Law School, University of Southern California Center for Law, History & Culture, and UCLA School of Law invite submissions for the seventh meeting of the Law & Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop to be held at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D...

Antigone and the Politics of Lamentation

Posted on September 26, 2008
Bonnie Honig, American Bar Foundation, has published "Antigone's Laments, Creon's Grief: Mourning, Membership and the Politics of Exception," as American Bar Foundation Research Paper 08-02. Here is the abstract.This paper develops a historically situated reading of Sophocles' Antigone as an exploration of the politics of lamentation and the larger ideological conflicts these stand for...

Rousseau's Emile

Posted on September 24, 2008
Eric Engle, University of Bremen, has published "Law and Literature: Instilling Norms by Fable in Rousseau's Emile." Here is the abstract. The Law and Literature movement proposes that legal interpretation can be improved by borrowing methods from literary interpretation, by seeing legal decisions as stories, and by examining literature from a legal perspective...

Bells Are Ringing

Posted on September 19, 2008
Via On the Media, a piece by Zachary Pincus-Roth about how phones are vital to the plots of so many Hollywood films.

A Tragic Murder, Ten Years Later

Posted on September 17, 2008
The New York Times has this feature article about The Laramie Project, a docuplay about the Matthew Shepard murder, which took place ten years ago.

Upcoming Symposium On Acquiring and Maintaining Collections of Cultural Objects: Challenges Confronting American Museums in the 21st Century

Posted on September 16, 2008
DePaul College of Law Announces:8th Annual SymposiumAcquiring and Maintaining Collections of Cultural Objects: Challenges Confronting American Museums in the 21st CenturyMuseums face increasingly difficult challenges in collecting cultural objects-challenges that must be dealt with in ways that are consistent with best practices...

In Agatha Christie's Own Voice, a Window On the Last Third of Her Life

Posted on September 15, 2008
Julie Bosman writes in the New York Times about a cache of tapes found recently featuring Agatha Christie's own voice and discussing a number of issues close to her heart, including whether Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot were ever likely to meet. Her grandson Mathew Prichard discovered the recordings in one of his grandmother's former homes...

Legal Briefs, and More

Posted on September 07, 2008
The New York Times' John Eligon plays "What Not To Wear" in this article about fashion flair among legal eagles. Says Mr. Eligon, "For a visitor to the court, a judge without a black robe might prompt a double take. But on any given day in New York City?s courthouses, it is common to see judges on the bench with unzipped or unbuttoned robes; accessories like scarves, jewelry or collars hanging outside of a robe; and, in some cases, no robe at all...

Franz Kafka's Last Wishes and the Kafka Myths

Posted on September 02, 2008
Professor Lior Strahilevitz (U. Chicago Law School) has an interesting post about Franz Kafka's papers. The famous story about Kafka's papers is that Kafka asked his friend, Max Brod, to burn them after his death. Although Kafka had published a few works during his lifetime, a great many stories, parables, letters, and diary entries were unpublished, as were Kafka's two great book masterpieces, The Trial and The Castle...

Steven Bochco's New Legal Drama Debuts

Posted on August 29, 2008
Some early reviews are in for Steven Bochco's new legal drama Raising the Bar. Barry Garron of the Hollywood Reporter finds the series, slated to run on TNT, looking like "it had been developed for the CW network. Most of the characters are young lawyers, either public defenders under the tutelage of mother hen Roz Whitman (Gloria Reuben) or fledgling prosecutors under the harsh, cynical thumb of Nick Balco (Currie Graham)...

Women Lawyers on TV

Posted on August 28, 2008
Christine A. Corcos, Louisiana State University Law Center, has published "Damages: The Truth is Out There," forthcoming in Lawyers in Your Living Room, edited by Michael Asimow (ABA Press, 2008). Here is the abstract. In this essay, part of Michael Asimow's forthcoming collection on lawyers on TV, I discuss the television show Damages and its portrayal of powerful lawyers, and whether their exercise of their power "damages" them...

Larry Friedman and Popular Culture

Posted on August 28, 2008
Jo J. Carrillo, Hastings College of the Law, has published "Links and Choices: Popular Legal Culture in the Work of Lawrence M. Friedman," in volume 17 of Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal (2007). Here is the abstract. Based in part on James Willard Hurst's idea that markets create a social aggregate of behavior that shapes law, Lawrence M...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.