Legal Commentary

I am writing from the Law, Culture & Humanities conference being held in Berkeley this year. First of all, anyone interested in interdisciplinary work at the intersection of law, literature, history, philosophy, cultural studies, visual studies, etc., should watch for the call for papers for next year?s meeting. This conference is quite collegial, providing a great opportunity to get to know other people working across disciplines.

I?ve seen some excellent presentations on Kafka, Hannah Arendt?s jurisprudence, film, and the relation between imagination and justice, among others. What is particularly refreshing about the presentations here is the breadth of scholarly inquiry devoted to understanding law, its cultural production, and its effects that does not always have to start with a set of legal cases and a problem in legal doctrine. Not to suggest that there is anything wrong with cases and doctrine ? and critics of the legal academy would certainly assert that law professors are far too enamored with legal theories to pay sufficient attention to doctrinal analysis and exposition ? but it exhibits the richness of law as a scholarly field of study, something which too much emphasis on doctrine tends to obscure. In so doing, the discussion both creates and presupposes common texts and vocabularies across the humanities that helps us understand law in the richness of its human settings, without feeling it always necessary to engage in law reform proposals. To borrow a phrase from Larry Solum: Highly Recommended!