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Arts and Humanities

Selected Works

Selected Works

2011

Arts and Literature

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Law

Creativity, Improvisation, And Risk: Copyright And Musical Innovation, Olufunmilayo B. Arewa Dec 2010

Creativity, Improvisation, And Risk: Copyright And Musical Innovation, Olufunmilayo B. Arewa

Olufunmilayo B. Arewa

The goals and beneficiaries of copyright frameworks have long been contested in varied contexts. Copyright is often treated as a policy tool that gives creators incentives to create new works. Incentive theories of copyright often emphasize appropriability, which enables copyright owners to ensure that they profit from their copyrighted works by exercising control over uses of, and access to, such works. Although copyright clearly imposes costs in the form of restrictions on access to copyright-protected works and inefficiencies in the form of deadweight loss, the benefits of copyright are thought by many to outweigh the costs. Copyright discussions may at …


'Mass Of Madness': Jurisprudence In E.M. Forster's A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall Dec 2010

'Mass Of Madness': Jurisprudence In E.M. Forster's A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Law-and-literature scholars have paid scant attention to E. M. Forster’s oeuvre, which abounds in legal information and which situates itself in a unique jurisprudential context. Of all his novels, A Passage to India (1924) interrogates the law most rigorously, especially as it implicates massive programs of ‘liberal’ imperialism and ‘humanitarian’ intervention, as well as less grand but equally dubious legal apparatuses – jail, bail, discovery, courtrooms – that police and pervert Chandrapore, the fictional Indian city in which the novel is set. The study of law in Anglo-India is particularly telling, if troubling, because India served as ‘a model for …


Transnational Law: An Essay In Definition With A Polemic Addendum, Allen P. Mendenhall Dec 2010

Transnational Law: An Essay In Definition With A Polemic Addendum, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

What is transnational law? Various procedures and theories have emanated from this slippery signifier, but in general academics and legal practitioners who use the term have settled on certain common meanings for it. My purpose in this article is not to disrupt but to clarify these meanings by turning to literary theory and criticism that regularly address transnationality. Cultural and postcolonial studies are the particular strains of literary theory and criticism to which I will attend. To review “transnational law,” examining its literary inertia and significations, is the objective of this article, which does not purport to settle the matter …


Shakespeare's Place In Law-And-Literature, Allen P. Mendenhall Dec 2010

Shakespeare's Place In Law-And-Literature, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Nearly every Anglo-American law school offers a course called Law-and-Literature. Nearly all of these courses assign one or more readings from Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Why study Shakespeare in law school? That is the question at the heart of these courses. Some law professors answer the question in terms of cultivating moral sensitivity, fine-tuning close-reading skills, or practicing interpretive strategies on literary rather than legal texts. Most of these professors insist on an illuminating nexus between two supposedly autonomous disciplines. The history of how Shakespeare became part of the legal canon is more complicated than these often defensive, syllabus-justifying declarations allow. This …