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Punishing Family Status , Jennifer M. Collins, Ethan J. Leib, Dan Markel

Faculty Scholarship

This Article focuses upon two basic but under-explored questions: when does, and when should, the state use the criminal justice apparatus to burden individuals on account of their familial status? We address the first question in Part I by revealing a variety of laws permeating the criminal justice system that together form a string of family ties burdens, laws that impose punishment upon individuals on account of their familial status. The seven burdens we train our attention upon are omissions liability for failure to rescue, parental responsibility laws, incest, bigamy, adultery, nonpayment of child support, and nonpayment of parental support. …

Liberal Justices' Reliance On Legislative History, James J. Brudney, Corey Distlear

Faculty Scholarship

This Article presents a strong case against the conventional wisdom that legislative history is a "politicized'" resource, invoked opportunistically by federal judges. The premise that judges regularly rely on legislative history to promote their preferred policy positions-if true-should find ample support in the majority opinions of liberal Supreme Court Justices construing liberal (pro-employee) labor and civil rights statutes. By analyzing all 320-plus majority opinions in workplace law authored by eight liberal Justices from 1969-2006, the authors establish that legislative history reliance is actually associated with a constraining set of results. When the eight liberal Justices use legislative history as part …

Editorial

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Notices

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Recent Publications

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

The Dervishes Dance — The Sacred Ritual Of Love, Jale Erzen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In the Sufi Way, the experience of the world and its perception is aesthetic in an ecstatic fashion. The awareness of the overpowering beauty of the world fills the heart with love and opens the mind to cosmic relations. The integration of reason, form-making, and imagining, along with yielding the body and mind to the powers of the earth, is a total aesthetic in Sufism.

In the Islamic world, humans' movement, the way they understand the process of time and space, depends on nature and parallels the cosmic order and the basic underlying forms that are found in nature. They …

A Third System Of The Arts? An Exploration Of Some Ideas From Larry Shiner's The Invention Of Art: A Cultural History, David Clowney

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

I explore some implications of Larry Shiner’s view that fine art is a modern invention. In part I, I briefly summarize Shiner’s main thesis and defend it against some misunderstandings and objections that have appeared in the literature. In part II, I discuss Shiner’s remarks about the possible emergence of what he calls a “third system of the arts.” I ask what such a system might look like, consider some signs that it may indeed be emerging, and venture a suggestion about what would be required for it actually to come about.

Art Imitating Art, Eric Brook

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Using as a contextual reference my experience of seeing the original and copy of Michelangelo's David in Florence, I briefly introduce how the Platonic legacy has affected that discourse. The Western preference in art and aesthetics is typically in favor of the original over the copy, despite whatever indiscernibility may exist between them. Since Arthur Danto has treated this phenomenon in his text The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, his relevant comments are considered and adapted for the purpose of working through how one understands the relationship between the original and copy in terms of a criterion for defining art.

The Friends Of Jones' Paintings: A Case Of Explanation In The Republic Of Art, Graham Mcfee

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

All too often the agenda for discussion of institutional accounts of art has been set by George Dickie's (putative) institutional definition of art. To offer a new beginning, the paper addresses the question of explanation with an institutional framework modeled as Terry Diffey’s Republic of Art. In exploring the argumentative resources here, it meets the objection that institutionalism cannot explore the case of so-called ‘first art’: objects created before the concept art came into being. In particular, the paper uses an example to consider how disputes within the Republic might be resolved through rational means, while still maintaining the institutional …

Can We Get Inside The Aesthetic Sensibility Of The Archaic Past?, Frederic Will

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay is about getting inside the sensibility of the archaic past.[1] Can we get into the creative mind of the painter of The Sorcerer? Can we reconstruct the sensibility of prehistoric humans? Can we recover the humor of the prehistoric artist? Can we do it? After all, sense equipment is the same in men and women of all ages, and though each age inflects its sense usages uniquely, there should remain an underlying continuity among sensibilities. Shouldn't we be able to return into earlier forms of those usages? Can we tell whether we have been successful in accomplishing …

The Aesthetics Of Trademarks, Peter H. Karlen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Trademarks are not just property, they are aesthetic creations that pervade everyday experience. One estimate is that the average person encounters more than 1,000 trademarks per day, many of which influence purchases and product use.

As pervasive aesthetic creations having literary, pictorial, graphic, sculptural, and musical content, trademarks deserve aesthetic analysis. The article discusses the origins, strength, appeal, and effectiveness of trademarks within the context of aesthetic considerations such as meaning, intention, authorship, and mode of creation. Also reviewed are morphemic and phonemic analysis of trademarks, semantic positioning, the dichotomy between creation and discovery of trademarks, and the differences between …

A Silent Rhetoric: The Mechanism Of Propaganda As Persuasion, Ken-Ichi Sasaki

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Under ongoing globalization the particularity of cultures has become a major topic in contemporary aesthetics. Someone insists on the right of national culture against globalism, others wish to bridge cultures.[1] Apparently opposing one another, they share the same gaze on the individual character of every culture. To confirm or transcend our cultural or national affiliation through art there exists the common dimension of aesthetic persuasion: that is the subject of this paper.

The Aesthetics Of Junkyards And Roadside Clutter, Thomas Leddy

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

A little more than thirty years ago, Allen Carlson argued that although the concept of "Camp" would seem to allow for the aesthetic redemption of roadside clutter and junkyards, it does not.[1] He opposes those who claim that if one takes the right attitude to roadside clutter it can be seen as aesthetic. In this essay I argue that that there is nothing wrong with this, although I will not base my argument on the idea of Camp sensibility.

"The People Are Missing", Maryvonne Saison

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

It is through the ideal of a sensus communis that Aesthetics has offered to Philosophy an articulation to Politics. I will question the idea of an "aesthetic sociability" through the concept of "régime esthétique" (aesthetic regime) proposed by Jacques Rancière to define the 18th century fundamental change carried by Aesthetics in order to think art and sensibility together.

One question will be the central core of my essay, which is how to understand nowadays Deleuze’s assertion that art should be "contributing to the invention of a people."

Consensus and dissensus are two reefs between which art and philosophy navigate at …

Toward A Poeticognosis: Re-Reading Plato's The Republic Via Wallace Stevens' "An Ordinary Evening In New Haven", Dan Disney

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article is a language-based re-reading of Plato's exile of the poets via Wallace Stevens' poem-manifesto, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." I examine how philosophy and poetry use language differently in order to deconstruct an origin of the speech-acts -- wonder -- that I then identify as a phenomenological difference between philosophers and poets. I contend that the thinking-into-language of philosophers is based in theoria, comprehension, and a resulting closure of wonder. I contrast this with the processes of poets, who I show to be moving thought into language via gnosis, apprehension, and a phenomenology opening onto …

Questioning "The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction": A Stroll Around The Louvre After Reading Benjamin0, Jonathan Davis

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this article I claim that Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" merits renewed critical attention. Just as Dada had confronted art with anti-art, so Benjamin hoped his essay would confront aesthetics with an anti-aesthetic. I examine Benjamin's capsule history of the aura and show it to be misleading, criticize the essay's underdeveloped ontology of painting and sketch an alternative, and draw attention to the surprising proximity of Benjamin's notion of value to that of neoliberal thought. I conclude with a critique of Benjamin's cultural politics.

Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, And 9/11, Emmanouil Aretoulakis

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

There have been numerous critical articles on what really happened on the otherwise beautiful morning of 11 September 2001. Beyond doubt, the bulk of the critical responses to the terrorist attacks focused on the ethical and humanitarian, or rather the unethical and inhumane implications of the atrocious act, leaving no room for any philosophical reflection on the potential assessment or reception of the event from the perspective of art and aesthetics. The few years that have gone by since 2001 have provided us with some a sense of emotional detachment from the horror of that day, a detachment that may …

Definition Of Videogames, Grant Tavinor

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Can videogames be defined? The new field of games studies has generated three somewhat competing models of videogaming that characterize games as new forms of gaming, narratives, and interactive fictions. When treated as necessary and sufficient condition definitions, however, each of the three approaches fails to pick out all and only videogames. In this paper I argue that looking more closely at the formal qualities of definition helps to set out the range of definitional options open to the games theorist. A disjunctive definition of videogaming seems the most appropriate of these definitional options. The disjunctive definition I offer here …

Danto And Art Criticism, Cynthia Freeland

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this article I examine the relationship between Arthur Danto's philosophy of art and his practice of art criticism. Danto has said that he included many actual examples of discussions of art in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace because of the feeling that, previously, philosophers had theorized about art in a vacuum. And since the time of publishing that book, he has written on a wide variety of both historical and contemporary artists and art practices. Danto's philosophy of art commits him to an account of the practice of art criticism as interpretation. However, I question whether the Danto-esque interpretive …

Ontology, Criticism, And The Riddle Of Art Versus Non-Art In The Transfiguration Of The Commonplace, Arthur C. Danto

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this "Reply to my Critics," I explain that The Transfiguration of the Commonplace was essentially a contribution to the ontology of art in which two necessary conditions emerge as essential to a real definition of the art work: that an artwork must (a) have meaning and (b) must embody its meaning. Many issues have emerged in the course of art's history that are very much part of its practice but are not part of art's essence. In response to Cynthia Freeland, I argue that though the book does not address art criticism, the two necessary conditions specify a viable …

Symposium Danto's The Transfiguration Of The Commonplace Twenty-Five Years Later, Thomas E. Wartenberg

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Presented at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics

Thinking About Leaving? The Ethics Of Departing One Firm For Another, John P. Sahl

Akron Law Faculty Publications

This article examines the ethical and professional responsibilities of lawyers who are considering leaving one law firm to join another. John P. Sahl explores the legal and ethical implications surrounding client notification, client choice, conflicts of interest, and the handling of firm property and confidential information. The piece offers guidance on how to navigate the delicate balance between the departing lawyer’s rights and duties, the interests of the law firm, and the paramount concern for clients’ rights. Drawing from case law, ethics opinions, and professional conduct rules, the article highlights best practices for minimizing disputes and protecting all parties during …

Stone Soup: Thoughts On Balancing A Deanship And Family Life After Twelve Years As Dean, Richard L. Aynes

Akron Law Faculty Publications

JUNE 30, 2007 marked the conclusion of my twelve-year service as Dean of the University of Akron School of Law. During that time the University of Toledo Law Review initiated its very successful “Leadership in Legal Education Symposium” and I benefited from reading articles in the prior symposia. It was inspiring to read about the efforts, thoughts, concerns, and accomplishments of fellow deans. Sometimes those essays gave me reassurance, raised my curiosity, provided new ideas, gave me an opportunity to think about old matters from a different perspective, and even prompted healthy disagreement.

Having benefited from the contributions of other …

Analyzing The Schizoid Agency: Achieving The Proper Balance In Enforcing The Internal Revenue Code, Richard L. Lavoie

Akron Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ebay's Practical Effect: Two Differing Visions, Jay Dratler

Akron Law Faculty Publications

This short paper examines the likely effect of the Court's three opinions on the actual practice of intellectual property cases in their remedial phase. The first part briefly discusses the unanimous opinion and its likely economic effect in increasing the already daunting complexity-and therefore the already considerable cost-of intellectual property litigation. The second part examines the first concurring opinion and the effect of its implicit suggestion that nothing much has really changed. The third part examines the possible practical effect of the second concurring opinion. The conclusion then offers a few general observations on where remedial practice in patent cases …

Thinking About Leaving? The Ethics Of Departing One Firm For Another, John Sahl

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Lawyers today increasingly change jobs, suggesting to some that lawyer movement is becoming the norm. For example, one study reported that an average of 15 out of 100 associates annually depart a law firm. Today's mobility is in stark contrast to a half-century ago when lawyers might reasonably expect to remain with the same firm for their entire careers.

Occupational movement in the legal profession is likely to continue for several reasons. First, many law students graduate with substantial educational debt. As a result, some graduates accept jobs that are not their “real” first choice but that pay well with …

Ebay Rx, Tracy A. Thomas

Akron Law Faculty Publications

From a remedial perspective, the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C reopened the age-old question of what it means to award equitable relief. In eBay, the Court rejected a permanent injunction issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to protect a business-method patent that defendant eBay had infringed on its successful auction website. This essay diagnoses the remedial problem in eBay as the improper use of presumptions for equitable relief that effectively prioritizes selected legal rights. It offers a prescriptive cure for the problem in the traditional balancing of the …

The New Face Of Women's Legal History: An Introduction To The Symposium, Tracy A. Thomas

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Women’s legal history is developing as a new and exciting field that provides alternative perspectives on legal issues both past and present. Feminist legal history seeks to examine the ways in which law historically has informed women’s rights and how feminist discourse has shaped the law. This short essay quickly traces the development of women's legal history as a field, and then introduces the papers from a symposium at the University of Akron School of Law. The Akron Constitutional Law Center oranized a conference in October 2007 entitled “The New Face of Women’s Legal History” to showcase many of the …

On Corners Of Objects Built From Parallelepiped Bricks, Mirela Damian, Joseph O'Rourke

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We investigate a question initiated in the work of Sibley and Wagon, who proved that 3 colors suffice to color any collection of 2D parallelograms glued edge-to-edge. Their proof relied on the existence of an "elbow" parallelogram. We explore the existence of analogous "corner" parallelepipeds in 3D objects. Our results are twofold. First, we refine the 2D proof to render information on the number and location of the 2D elbows. Second, we prove that not all of the 2D refinements extend to 3D.

Edge-Unfolding Nested Polyhedral Bands, Greg Aloupis, Erik D. Demaine, Stefan Langerman, Pat Morin, Joseph O'Rourke, Ileana Streinu, Godfried Toussaint

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

A band is the intersection of the surface of a convex polyhedron with the space between two parallel planes, as long as this space does not contain any vertices of the polyhedron. The intersection of the planes and the polyhedron produces two convex polygons. If one of these polygons contains the other in the projection orthogonal to the parallel planes, then the band is nested. We prove that all nested bands can be unfolded, by cutting along exactly one edge and folding continuously to place all faces of the band into a plane, without intersection. © 2007 Elsevier B.V.