Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Past As A Colonialist Resource, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

Originalism’s critics have failed to block its rise. For many jurists and legal scholars, the question is no longer whether to espouse originalism but how to espouse it. This Article argues that critics have ceded too much ground by focusing on discrediting originalism as either bad history or shoddy linguistics. To disrupt the cycle of endless “methodological” refinements and effectively address originalism’s continued popularity, critics must do two things: identify a better disciplinary analogue for originalist interpretation and advance an argument that moves beyond methods.

Anthropology can assist with both tasks. Both anthropological analysis and originalist interpretation are premised on …

Survey Of Recent Halakhic Literature: Horton Hatches The Egg, Who Raises The Chick?: Maternal Identity, Custody, And The Israeli Courts, J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Military Women In World Cinema: A 20th Century History And Filmography, Introduction, Deborah A. Deacon, Stacy Fowler

Faculty Articles

From British soldier Flora Sandes to the fame World War II Night Witches of the Soviet Air Force, women across the globe stepped up to defend their countries during every major and minor conflict of the twentieth century, and filmmakers have long attempted to capture their stories.

This book analyzes real and fictional military women's portrayals in world cinema, including movies from Israel, the United Kingdom, Italy, China, France, the Soviet Union, and others. It includes theatrical releases, direct-to-video productions, and made-for-television films.

Chapters, organized by decade, address topics including the women's sexuality, maternal and marital status, leadership skills, actual …

Survey Of Recent Halakhic Literature: Above-Ground Burial (Part Ii), J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Supreme Court Interruptions And Interventions: The Changing Role Of The Chief Justice, Tonja Jacobi, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Interruptions at Supreme Court oral argument have received much attention in recent years, particularly the disproportionate number of interruptions directed at the female Justices. The Supreme Court changed the structure of oral argument to try to address this problem. This Article assesses whether the frequency and gender disparity of interruptions of Justices improved in recent years, and whether the structural change in argument helped. It shows that interruptions decreased during the pandemic but then resurged to near-record highs, as has the gender disparity in Justice-to-Justice interruptions. However, although the rate of advocate interruptions of Justices also remains historically high, for …

“The Glorious Liberty Of The Children Of God”: Toward A Christian Defense Of Human Rights, John Witte Jr.

Faculty Articles

It will come as a surprise to some human rights lawyers to learn that Christianity was a deep and enduring source of human rights and liberties in the Western legal tradition. Our elementary textbooks have long taught us that the history of human rights began in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Human rights, many of us were taught, were products of the Western Enlightenment—creations of Grotius and Pufendorf, Locke and Rousseau, Montesquieu and Voltaire, Hume and Smith, Jefferson and Madison. Rights were the mighty new weapons forged by American and French revolutionaries who fought in the name of political …

Response To Professor Dinner, Martha Albertson Fineman

Faculty Articles

I want to thank the Texas A&M Law Review for including my work in this special Issue and express my appreciation to Professor Dinner for her thoughtful comments concerning the evolution of my scholarship. Professor Dinner raises the question of whether that earlier work is relevant to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion, specifically, and to broader issues of reproductive justice, more generally. For me, Dobbs illustrates—once again—how our American obsession with both individual rights and Supreme Court jurisprudence can distort our sense of the possibilities for achieving social (or reproductive) justice. I see my work as an …

Deities’ Rights?, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

A brief commotion arose during the hearings for one of twenty-first-century India’s most widely discussed legal disputes, when a dynamic young attorney suggested that deities, too, had constitutional rights. The suggestion was not absurd. Like a human being or a corporation, Hindu temple deities can participate in litigation, incur financial obligations, and own property. There was nothing to suggest, said the attorney, that the same deity who enjoyed many of the rights and obligations accorded to human persons could not also lay claim to some of their constitutional freedoms. The lone justice to consider this claim blandly and briefly observed …

Contract Law Should Be Faith Neutral: Reverse Entanglement Would Be Stranglement For Religious Arbitration, Michael J. Broyde, Alexa J. Windsor

Faculty Articles

The first section of this Article will outline the ways in which communities—religious and other groups, including the LGBTQ+ community—have used and continue to use private law to achieve meaningful dispute resolution. By diminishing the role of civil courts to review arbitrations, parties may tailor their resolutions to prioritize community values that may be misaligned with secular society. Outside of historical religious usage, private law offers a field ripe for jurisprudential growth. Through alternative dispute resolution, affinity-based minority groups can pave an avenue towards justice which accurately reflects the unique values of their lived experiences.

The second section will provide …

Survey Of Recent Halakhic Literature: Above-Ground Burial (Part I), J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Survey Of Recent Halakhic Literature: Of Tobacco, Snuff And Cannabis (Part Iii): Shemittah, J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Survey Of Recent Halakhic Literature: Of Tobacco, Snuff And Cannabis (Part Ii), J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Survey Of Recent Halakhic Literature: Of Tobacco, Snuff And Cannabis (Part I), J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Equality Offshore, Martin W. Sybblis

Faculty Articles

Global governance architecture, crafted by wealthy nations, has perpetuated the subordination of developing jurisdictions. The Article offers a novel and surprising analysis of governance tools used by wealthy countries and inter-governmental organizations to constrain offshore financial centers (OFCs) by focusing on the tools’ disparate impacts on tax havens whose populations comprise predominantly Black and Brown people. With tax haven issues garnering increasing attention, this Article provides a pathbreaking conceptual framework for examining the international tax, crime, and business discourse on OFCs. It also illuminates how the actions of powerful international actors, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development …

"With All The Majesty Of The Law": Systemic Racism, Punitive Sentiment, And Equal Protection, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

United States criminal justice policies have played a central role in the subjugation of persons of color. Under slavery, criminal law explicitly provided a means to ensure White dominion over Blacks and require Black submission to White authority. During Reconstruction, anticrime policies served to maintain White supremacy and re-enslave Blacks, both through explicit discrimination and facially neutral policies. Similar practices maintained racial hierarchy with respect to White, Latinx, and Asian-American populations in the western United States. While most state action no longer explicitly discriminates on the basis of race, anticrime policy remains a powerful instrument of racial subordination. Indeed, social …

Back To The Sources? What’S Clear And Not So Clear About The Original Intent Of The First Amendment, John Witte Jr.

Faculty Articles

This Article peels through these layers of founding documents before exploring the final sixteen words of the First Amendment religion clauses. Part I explores the founding generation’s main teachings on religious freedom, identifying the major principles that they held in common. Part II sets out a few representative state constitutional provisions on religious freedom created from 1776 to 1784. Part III reviews briefly the actions by the Continental Congress on religion and religious freedom issued between 1774 and 1789. Part IV touches on the deprecated place of religious freedom in the drafting of the 1787 United States Constitution. Part V …

Survey Of Recent Halakhic Literature: Coronavirus Queries (4): Assignment Of Ventilators, J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Survey Of Recent Halakhic Literature - Coronavirus Queries (3): Priorities In Allocation Of Medical Resources, J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Survey Of Recent Halakhic Literature: Trees And Plants: The Case Of The Pineapple, J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Regulatory Competition And State Capacity, Martin W. Sybblis

Faculty Articles

This Article explores an underlying tension in the regulatory competition literature regarding why some jurisdictions are more attractive to firms than others. It pays special attention to offshore financial centers (OFCs). OFCs court the business of nonresidents, offer business friendly regulatory environments, and provide for minimal, if any, taxation on their customers. On the one extreme, OFCs are theorized as merely products of legislative capture— thereby lacking any meaningful agency of their own. On the other hand, OFCs are conceptualized as well-governed jurisdictions that attract investment because of the high quality of their laws and legal institutions—indicating some ability to …

(Im)Mutable Race?, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

Courts rarely question the racial identity claims made by parties litigating employment discrimination disputes. But what if this kind of identity claim is itself at the core of a dispute? A recent cluster of “reverse passing” scandals featured individuals—Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug among them—who were born white, yet who were revealed to have lived as members of Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color (BIPOC) communities. These incidents suggest that courts will soon have to make determinations of racial identity as a threshold matter in disputes over employment discrimination and contract termination. More specifically, courts will have to decide whether …

Ostracism And Democracy, Alex Zhang

Faculty Articles

The 2020 Presidential Election featured an unprecedented attempt to undermine our democratic institutions: allegations of voter fraud and litigation about mail-in ballots culminated in a mob storming of the Capitol as Congress certified President Biden’s victory. Former President Trump now faces social-media bans and potential disqualification from future federal office, but his allies have criticized those efforts as the witch-hunt of a cancel culture that is symptomatic of the unique ills of contemporary liberal politics.

This Article defends recent efforts to remove Trump from the public eye, with reference to an ancient Greek electoral mechanism: ostracism. In the world’s first …

Religious Alternative Dispute Resolution In Israel And Other Nations With State-Sponsored Religious Courts: Crafting A More Efficient And Better Relationship Between Rabbinical Courts And Arbitration Law In Israel, Michael J. Broyde, Ezra Ives

Faculty Articles

This paper proposes the expansion of both private and public options regarding religious arbitration in Israel, broadening both the choice of law and the choice of forum available to Israeli citizens in cases of either commercial law or issues of status (such as divorce, marriage, and conversion). The current law in Israel prohibits citizens from adjudicating their monetary disputes in state religious courts and treats private religious courts as no different from any other arbitration tribunal, precluding these private religious courts from marriage, divorce and conversion matters. We propose that both of these restrictions be lifted, while the role of …

Coronavirus Queries (Part 2): Tuition Payment During A Pandemic; Gloves And Masks, J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Survey Of Recent Halakhic Literature: Coronavirus Queries (Part 1): Communal Prayer, Porch Minyan, A Missed Bar Mitzva, J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Non Conviene Ma Conviene: Ogni Museo Decide Per Sé, Maria Sancho-Arroyo

Faculty Articles

This article discusses the museum industry in the United States plans to reopen their institution's in the wake of COVID-19.

Validity Of Dna Evidence For Halakhic Purposes (Part 4): The “Jewish” Gene, J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Moratoria Antibirus: Un Grande Passo Verso La Sopravvivenza Dei Musei Americani, Maria Sancho-Arroyo

Faculty Articles

This article investigates the economic impact of COVID-19 and related policy decisions of the museum industry in the United States.

Validity Of Dna Evidence For Halakhic Purposes (Part 3), J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

La Prevalenza Delle Donne: I Problemi Di Una Professione Femminile, Maria Sancho-Arroyo

Faculty Articles

This article investigates the problems associated with the fact that the museum industry in the United States is one that is dominated by women in its workforce.