Jurisprudence Commons^™

Gatsby And Tort, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Great Gatsby is filled with potential tort claims, from drunken or reckless driving to assault and battery. In a pivotal passage Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, judges Daisy and Tom as “careless people,” who “destroy creatures and leave others to clean up the mess.” The carelessness, negligence, and recklessness portrayed by Fitzgerald’s characters shows an absence of due care, long regarded as the foundation for tort law. Although there are torts, tortfeasors, and tortious behavior aplenty in The Great Gatsby, the novel is void of even a mention of tort law. Why?

The first part of …

Roscoe Pound, Melvin Belli, And The Personal-Injury Bar: The Tale Of An Odd Coupling, Joseph A. Page

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the fourth chapter of Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law, legal historian John Fabian Witt tells the story of a collaboration between storied scholar Roscoe Pound and trial virtuoso Melvin M. Belli, which he calls "among the most startling and yet unremarked-upon relationships in the annals of American law." Witt argues that it both shaped and energized the efforts of personal-injury lawyers to oppose proposals that would shift to the administrative branch of government responsibility for compensating auto-accident victims. Entitled "The King and the Dean," in reference to the media's coronation of Belli as the "King of …

Dignity And Discrimination: Toward A Pluralistic Understanding Of Workplace Harassment, Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Part I of this article briefly examines some of the drawbacks and inconsistencies of Title VII sexual harassment jurisprudence and shows that Title VII does not provide an adequate framework for understanding many common forms of workplace harassment. Title VII is unquestionably a critical means of fighting against workplace discrimination; however, by emphasizing discrimination at the expense of dignity, the Title VII workplace harassment paradigm provides an incomplete understanding of the wrongs of workplace harassment.

Part II of this article asserts the importance of an approach to sexual harassment that distinguishes between the nature of the harm of workplace sexual …

Murdering The Spirit: Racism, Rights, And Commerce, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Patricia Williams' The Alchemy of Race and Rights: The Diary of a Law Professor, is an eloquent, profoundly original, and often brilliant collection of interdisciplinary essays and stories concerning the impact of racism and poverty on the human spirit; the historic and continuing role of law and legal institutions in defining, facilitating, and perpetuating those harms; and the possibilities and dangers imminent in the attempt to use law to effect a remedy for them. This is a book that we should celebrate: it reminds us that books are occasionally very, very important, that reading can be transformative, and that writing …