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The Erotics Of Virtue, Kenneth Anderson

Book Reviews

(Obituary Essay on Dominique Aury/Pauline Reage, Author of Story of O)This essay originally appeared in the LA Times book review as an obituary essay on Dominique Aury, author (under the name Pauline Reage) of the pornographic classic Story of O. The essay argues that Story of O is a fairy tale in which the heroine, O, seeks to escape from modernity's enforced virtues of equality, freedom, and choice into a world of the virtues of hierarchy - the eroticized analogues of religious submission. The novel is driven forward by a downward spiral in which O seeks to surrender herself to …

The Erotics Of Virtue (Obituary Essay On Dominique Aury/Pauline Reage, Author Of Story Of O), Kenneth Anderson

Kenneth Anderson

Critical Of Race Theory: Race, Reason, Merit And Civility, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

A hazard lurks in any but the most careful representation of another's viewpoint. Call it "slippage" or the "essentialist error," the point is that communication rarely does complete justice to its object. The problem is compounded when the communication is mediated. We all know that between a story and its retelling, something will get lost in translation. Consider feminism, gay legal theory, and critical race theory, and their depictions in academic journals and the popular media. Newspapers and news magazines have recently published a spate of academic trash talk accusing critical race theorists of "playing the race card" and indulging …

Crazy Reasons, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Farewell To An Idea? Ideology In Legal Theory, David Charny

Michigan Law Review

In 1956, Morocco inaugurated a constitutional democratic polity on the Western model. Elections were to be held, and political parties formed, with voters to be registered by party. The Berbers, however, did not join the parties as individual voters. Each Berber clan joined their chosen party as a unit. To consecrate (or, perhaps, to accomplish) the clan's choice, a bullock was sacrificed. These sacrificial rites offer a useful parable about the relationship between law and culture. The social order imposed by law depends crucially on the "culture" of the participants in the system - their habits, dispositions, views of the …

The Courage Of Our Convictions, Sherman J. Clark

Michigan Law Review

This article argues that criminal trial juries perform an important but inadequately appreciated social function. I suggest that jury trials serve as a means through which we as a community take responsibility for - own up to - inherently problematic judgments regarding the blameworthiness or culpability of our fellow citizens. This is distinct from saying that jury trials are a method of making judgments about culpability. They are that; but they are also a means through which we confront our own agency in those judgments. The jury is an institution through which we as individuals take a turn acknowledging and …

Separating Equals: Educational Research And The Long Term Consequences Of Sex Segregation, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

The article imports into the legal literature for the first time the full range of single sex education research, from this country and others, and examines sociological research that has been omitted from the debate. Rarely do proponents consider what educational and social effects sex-exclusive schooling will have on boys. Rarer still is any consideration of the effect of educational segregation in a society that is already relentlessly segregated by sex. While the educational research regarding the efficacy of single sex schools is mixed at best, the sociological research is absolutely clear that separation on the basis of identity characteristics …