Digital Commons Network^™

Tempest In A Teapot Or Tidal Wave - Cybersquatting Rights And Remedies Run Amok, H. Brian Holland

Faculty Scholarship

The conflict at the heart of cybersquatting is in many ways conceptual. To most of its early inhabitants, the Internet embodied a separate and distinct environment --a territory unto itself. As such, it was thought the online world would stand separate from existing governmental power structures premised on the idea of territorial sovereignty. This separateness placed online actors theoretically beyond the authority of established legal systems, whose validity appeared limited by territorial boundaries and the sovereign-subject relationships occurring in the off-line world. Indeed, what many envisioned was an opportunity to create a self-regulating community existing within the "territory" of the …

Human-Centric International Law: A Model And A Search For Empirical Indicators, John King Gamble, Charlotte Ku, Chris Strayer

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the result of the authors' application of an explicit model of the evolving international legal situation and an empirical test using multilateral treaties. The authors examine all the multilateral treaties signed over the last 350 years, about 6000 treaties, and discuss the "humanization" of international law.

The Billable Hours Derby: Empirical Data On The Problems And Pressure Points, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

This article considers the consequences of law firm use of the hourly billing method and the recent increase in billable hour requirements. Part I of this article describes the rationale and methodology of an empirical study conducted in 2005 that explored attorney work-life issues and employer efforts to assist attorneys in dealing with work-life conflicts. Part II summarizes select study findings related to billable hours requirements and pressure. Part III concludes by considering what forces and players will change the current course of conduct in which law firm leaders treat increases in billable hours expectations as a necessary evil.

Forging A Multilayered System Of Global Governance, Charlotte Ku

Faculty Scholarship

The world in which we find ourselves today is no longer governable entirely by resort to the classical system of international law. Even more seriously, it would seem that the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter are no longer being served sufficiently in light of new concerns. The text adopted in 1945 does not convey the image of a world tormented by terrorists. Nor does it reflect the most pressing commitments of our time: to democratic governance, to environmental responsibility, and to a freer and more equitable system of world trade. Increasingly, the international law community acknowledges the …

The Dick Whittington Story: Theories Of Poor Relief, Social Ambition, And Possibilities For Class Transformation, Helen Hershkoff

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

The New Yorker cartoon, with its pessimistic emphasis on a child's economic prospects, provides a foil to the Whittington story and its optimistic attitude toward law and social possibility. I suggest in this talk that contemporary children's literature shares with the cartoon a similar lack of confidence in law's capacity to generate advancement and prosperity. My comments rely on Eleanor Updale's award-winning Montmorency series and Philip Pullman's widely acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy to try to glean a better sense of cultural understandings of law and of law's contemporary relation to social mobility. I take these books as my texts, …

Table Of Contents & Masthead

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Handmaid’S Tale Of Fertility Tourism: Passports And Third Parties In The Religious Regulation Of Assisted Conception, Richard F. Storrow

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

Infertility is a devastating global malady triggering worldwide demand for a vast array of reproduction assisting technologies. Infertility is particularly devastating in "pronatalist" societies marked by high rates of infertility and large disparities in access to medical services. Poverty in particular impedes large segments of the population in pronatalist Third World countries from gaining access even to very basic techniques of infertility treatment and consigns them to ineffective traditional remedies. In this Article drawing on both ethnographic work on infertility in the Third World and on Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Professor Storrow examines two starkly class-stratified societies where reproduction …

Article 51 Self-Defense As A Narrative: Spectators And Heroes In International Law, Gina Heathcote

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

The subsequent three parts of this article take the following form. Part II introduces Article 51. Part III considers the manner in which Article 51 produces a narrative of spectatorship for the West. I draw on Al-Radi's narrative to highlight the massive gap between the narratives of Article 51, as it is perceived in mainstream academic accounts of Operation Desert Storm, and the reality of living with the consequential force. I am particularly concerned with the legal features of proportionality, collective self-defense, and the state as a "self" defending. In Part IV, I use the work of Mclnnes, Orford, and …

When Hercules Met The Happy Prince: Re-Imagining The Judge, Erika Rackley

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

Although often dismissed as a myth, the image of the judge as a Herculean superhero whose mission is to apply the law in a straightforward way retains a tenacious grip on our understandings of the judge and judging. The relationship between Oscar Wilde's Happy Prince and Hercules is one of uncomfortable similarity and difference. Like the Happy Prince, the Herculean judge who inhabits the legal imagination stands alone high upon Mount Olympus invisibly clothed with the appearance of neutrality and objectivity, our infatuation with this aesthetic image securing his position and role, his imposed beauty mirroring the golden facade of …

Stories That Make The Law Free: Literature As A Bridge Between The Law And The Culture In Which It Must Exist, Christine Metteer Lorillard

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

In this paper, I will examine how literature, by telling stories and examining their meaning, allows us to make the law free, by seeing it in its cultural context. I take, as a specific example Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Pigs in Heaven, as it explores the cultural dialectic underlying application of the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Why Is There No Russian Atticus Finch? Or Even A Russian Rumpole?, Michael Newcity

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

The purpose of this Article is to examine how the pre- and postreform nineteenth-century Russian legal institutions were reflected in literature of that time and to analyze why the literary theme that has been so common and strong in Anglophonic literature-the lawyer, judge, and jury as hero-never appeared in Russia.

Taking Ian Watt To Court, Or How Do Jurors Read Stories?, Marco Wan

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

In his seminal work, The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt posits an analogy between the readers of a novel and the members of a jury.This comparison has formed the foundation for much subsequent work on law-and-literature. Alexander Welsh, for example, begins his analysis of Tom Jones with Watt's analogy, which he finds "fully warranted." Given its centrality in our field, it is necessary to examine Watt's claim more closely. In this paper, I will test his analogy between reader and juror by bringing it into dialogue with a mid-Victorian novel, William Thackeray's Vanity Fair. I will then argue against …

Harry Potter And The Law, Jeffrey E. Thomas, James Charles Smith, Danaya Wright, Benjamin H. Barton, Aaron Schwabach

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

This collection of essays about the law and Harry Potter explores the intersections between law, culture, and the Harry Potter stories. The collection begins with a group of essays, consistent with some of the previous legal literature, about the limitations of law and legal institutions as depicted in the Harry Potter narratives. The essays by James Charles Smith and Danaya Wright begin by considering the depiction of families in the narratives, and show the limited role of law for family relationships. The essay by Benjamin H. Barton considers a more legalistic institution, the Ministry of Magic, an institution depicted with …

Introduction: The Power Of Stories: Gloucester Tales, Susan Ayres

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

This special symposium issue includes a selection of the almost sixty papers delivered at the conference. As both the number of papers and breadth of topics demonstrate, law and literature is not dead.' Rather, it is alive, kicking, and inspiring scholarly investigation. A general overview of this symposium issue shows all three strands of the law and literature movement. One strand, law in literature, examines legal issues and representations of lawyers that appear in literary works.' Another strand, law as literature, uses the tools of literary theory to analyze judicial decisions and legislative enactments. The third strand, the narrative project, …

The “Extreme Makeover” Effect Of Law School: Students Being Transformed By Stories, Cassandra Sharp

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

The relationship between law and popular culture has caused great interest among scholars over the years. It is a field that invites the merging of disciplinary boundaries and allows for plurality in the ways that law can be viewed. This paper seeks to view this relationship from the vantage point of the first-year law student and to explore the representation and transformation of meaning about law and lawyering within the social and academic context of law school. Situated within the expanding scholarship on law and popular culture, this paper examines how the image of the lawyer is constructed and interpreted …

Where Is Law & Literature Headed? Roundtable Discussion, Susan Ayres, Michael Hyde, Susan Sage Heinzelman, Ian Ward, Melanie Williams

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

This is a roundtable that will discuss the question "Where is Law and Literature Headed?"

Dick Whittington And Creativity: From Trade To Folklore, From Folklore To Trade, Susanna Frederick Fischer

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

In this essay, I consider whether such increased intellectual property protection for stories and folktales is the wisest policy course. While accepting the validity of the two major concerns that underpin the effort to implement greater intellectual property protection, I argue here that greater intellectual property protections risk serious harm to innovation and creativity by narrowing the public domain and are not the best means to achieve these desired ends. To make my argument, I will draw on the Dick Whittington story as both an example of a folktale in danger of overprotection by expanded intellectual property regimes and also …

Narrative Jurisprudence And Trans-National Justice, Ian Ward

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

The purpose of this article is to explore this consonance in greater detail, and then to present two more particular examples of this narrative and poethic "strategy." The first example is given by two attempts to provide some kind of juristic redress for the various atrocities suffered across southeast Europe during the successive Balkan wars of the 1990s. The second approaches the broader, and no less contemporary, experience of trans-national terrorism. In the first instance, the form of narrative, on both occasions, is that of a chronicle-a piece of extended journalism. In the second instance, the narrative is a more …

Imperfect Order: Reflections Of The Law In Two Classic Children’S Novels, Thomas C. Klein

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

Man-made law, or "positive" law, and its related legal institutions are represented in children's novels as complicated, sometimes corrupt, and often arbitrary structures that prevent the protagonists from reaching their desired goals or resolving their difficulties. Rather than presenting positive law and its related institutions as a means to resolve conflicts and provide repose to the characters, children's novels present such law and institutions as aggravating or prolonging conflict, and creating uncertainty about how the protagonist will extricate himself or herself from the legal predicament. Children's novels do not offer the child reader any known points of reference in the …

The Narrative Compels The Result, I.D.F. Callinan

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

Theory has it that the best evidence-that is to say, the best narrative- determines the result. This theory is rarely questioned. But, what determines the narrative? The capacity of litigants for self-justification is almost limitless. That is why independent witnesses are so important. They are innocent, it is said, of self-justification. True, but only partly true: what about their attentiveness at the time; their powers of observation; their desire for relevance, or importance, or even notoriety; their delight in their day in court; their recall and ability to understand the questions and to give an unexaggerated and accurate account of …

Atticus Finch, Boris A. Max, And The Lawyer's Dilemma, Robert Batey

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

For as long as I have taught law and literature, I have held strong opinions about two fictional criminal defense attorneys, the world-famous Atticus Finch of the novel and film To Kill a Mockingbird' and the less celebrated Boris A. Max, Bigger Thomas's attorney in Richard Wright's Native Son.' Atticus and Max, both white, courageously defend black men charged with capital crimes by a racist legal system, both are vilified by the public, and both of them see their clients die at the hands of the state. But despite their courage, my opinion of each was that he failed his …

Sidestepping Copyright: British Fairy Tale Anthologies Of The 19th Century, Megan Richardson, Andrew T. Kenyon

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

One question is how in the golden period of fairy tale anthologising the work of the anthologists escaped the complete influence of copyright law with its paradigm of the individually authored work. The answer, it is suggested, lies, in part, in the early anthologists who formed a folklore society, saw themselves as anthropologists of folk culture, and treated copyright as largely irrelevant for the sake of their perception of the common good, and, in part, in the structure of copyright law itself which does not mandate but simply permits proprietary rights to be asserted.

Lysistrata, Women, & War: International Law’S Treatment Of Women In Conflict And Post-Conflict Situations, Emma Lindsay

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

In Part II, the Author considers the synergies between law (particularly international law), literature, and feminism. In Part III, the Author examines the play and outline the binary oppositions that pervade Aristophanes's text: war/peace, public/private, and masculine/ feminine. The Author then considers the binary oppositions in more detail, by investigating how they are reflected in the position of women in contemporary violent conflicts. Using a single example to explore each opposition, the Author looks at violence against women, women's political participation, and social and economic rights to suggest the unreality of the oppositions for women. In so doing, she seeks …

Chapter Report: Southwestern Association Of Law Libraries, Susan T. Phillips

Faculty Scholarship

The membership of the Southwestern Association of Law Libraries converged in Little Rock, Arkansas, for the forty-seventh annual meeting on March 31-April 2, 2005, to discover and discuss issues and the latest innovations in the legal information profession for the twenty-first century. The theme was "Big Ideas Come from Little Rock." The staff of the University of Arkansas Little Rock/Pulaski County Law Library hosted the preconference program, "Basic Legal Research for the Non-Law Librarian," which broke attendance records for outside-Texas meeting locations. Successful marketing of the preconference to the Arkansas library community, including the Arkansas Documents Consortium, resulted in thirty-one …

Malpractice Reform As A Health Policy Problem, William M. Sage

Faculty Scholarship

Calling malpractice reform a "health policy problem" means that we should analyze it in terms of the quality of health care, access to health care, and the cost of health care-the basic health policy triad with which we all are familiar. We immediately recognize patient safety as a health policy problem because it is obviously about quality. We may believe there is so much slack in the health care system that we can make major improvements in patient safety without excessive cost. But ultimately, there are going to be cost-safety tradeoffs, which are also health policy concerns. We tend not …

The Failure Of The International Laws Of War And The Role Of Art And Story-Telling As A Self-Help Remedy For Restorative Justice, Susan Tiefenbrun

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

This Article asks several questions that seem particularly relevant in view of the current state of war that our peace-loving society is engaged in today. What is the role of the laws and customs of war if the warriors don't play by the rules? What is the role of art and music during and after the commission of atrocities? Can art prevent further atrocities, assuage victims of catastrophic events, inspire the collective conscience of perpetrators, and protect victims from the reality of pain caused by war and the violations of the international laws of armed combat? Can a book or …

When Literature Becomes Law: An Example From Ancient Greece, Mark J. Sundahl

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

After a brief introduction to Solon and the Testamentary Law in the next section, Part III of this paper will examine the origin of the phrase "under the influence of a woman" by tracing the evolution of the concept of the "persuasive woman" in the poems of Homer and Hesiod. Part IV will then show that the mythological models of the female enchantress contained in these poems gave rise to a cultural fear of the "persuasive woman" in Greece, which was reflected both in the Testamentary Law as well as in the courtroom speeches of classical Athens. The final part …

Stories Of The Code, Allen Kamp

Texas Wesleyan Law Review

My article is a story about the stories of the Uniform Commercial Code, those told by its drafters and its detractors, especially how it was sold to those it would affect and those who had the power to enact it or not. I think it is an interesting story that not only tells us something about the development of a commercial statute, but also gives insights into the values of the legal and the commercial world in the Twentieth Century.

Still Dissatisfied After All These Years: Intellectual Property, Post-Wto China, And The Avoidable Cycle Of Futility, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Commentators have widely discussed the piracy and counterfeiting problems in China. Every year, the United States is estimated to lose billions of dollars due to piracy and counterfeiting in the country alone. Published as part of the U.S.-China Trade: Opportunities and Challenges Symposium, this Essay focuses on the recent debate about whether the U.S. administration should file a formal complaint against China with the Dispute Settlement Body of the World Trade Organization over inadequate enforcement of intellectual property rights.

The Essay begins by articulating four reasons why the administration should not do so. It then compares the approach recently proposed …

Introduction: The Power Of Stories: Gloucester Tales, Susan Ayres

Faculty Scholarship

For a second year, scholars made a pilgrimage to Gloucester for a three-day academic conference sponsored by Texas Wesleyan Law School, the University of Gloucestershire, and the Central Gloucester Initiative. This year's conference theme, "The Power of Stories: Intersections of Law, Culture and Literature," was inspired by the medieval folktale about Dick Whittington and his cat. While the City of Gloucester planned various events to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the folktale, such as a re-enactment of Dick Whittington's pilgrimage from Gloucester to London, conference organizers in both the United States and England planned a thought-provoking conference.

They did not …