Academic

File Under: Articles I need to read

By propertyprof

Working on some stuff related to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 tonight.  And so I call up this twenty-year old but still vivid memory, from first year constitutional law.  Then-Professor (now Judge) Lynch was talking about Katzenbach v. McClung and he mentioned a student brought him a jar of Ollie's barbecue sauce.

I think Dreamland has the best ribs ("ain't nothing like 'em, nowhere")--but I know feelings run high on this one and I also believe that reasonable people can differ on this.  So I need to give the Ollie's sauce a try.  (Of course I'm partial to things with Dreamland in the name--Dreamland Theater in Tulsa, Dreamland Ribs in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham.)  And now that I'm doing some looking in Ollie's, I realize that its location as of the Katzenbach case was close to where Dreamland Ribs is now in Birmingham.  My, how the times have changed.

Also, I need to read Mark Wiener's The Semiotics of Civil Rights in Consumer Society: Race, Law, and Food--here's his abstract:

Cooking and constitutionalism. Food and racial equity. I intend the juxtaposition to be jarring, even humorous. I would like to view it as a subtle indication of a historical trend in which central aspects of legal memory have been repressed from contemporary civic practice and important intellectual questions, concerning semiotics in consumer society, have been neglected in mainstream legal scholarship. As I will explain, the story of Ollie''s barbecue suggests not only that cooking and constitutionalism are intricately linked, but also that the expansion of postwar economic life formed a material basis for this hidden bond. Considering the history of Ollie''s thus can both illuminate the deep historical meaning of the Civil Rights Act, and also point the way toward a more general field of research, the development of what might be called a legal semiotics of consumption. 

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on April 20, 2008 (boomark / email).