Law Commons^™

What Did He Just Say? Did She Really Just Say That?: Vignettes Of Racism In Claudia Rankine’S Citizen: An American Lyric, Susan Ayres

Susan Ayres

No abstract provided.

Claudia Rankine And The Poetry Of Protest, Susan Ayres

Susan Ayres

No abstract provided.

Wigmore's Shadow, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

Riles relates how John H. Wigmore, professor and Dean of the Northwestern Law School, fanned her interest in legal and literary fiction. Wigmore provided dozens of examples of legal fictions bundled together in the singular, and seemingly straightforward technical device of modern collateral. From this premise, she analyzes the difference between a legal fiction and a literary fiction, and examines the factors that make legal fiction distinctively legal.

Memory Of A Racist Past — Yazoo: Integration In A Deep-Southern Town By Willie Morris, Nick J. Sciullo

Nick J. Sciullo

Willie Morris was in many ways larger than life. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, he moved with his family to Yazoo City, Mississippi at the age of six months. He attended and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin where his scathing editorials against racism in the South earned him the hatred of university officials. After graduation, he attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. He would join Harper’s Magazine in 1963, rising to become the youngest editor-in-chief in the magazine’s history. He remained at this post until 1971 when he resigned amid dropping ad sales and a lack of …

It Takes A Team: A Semester Success Story Of Writing, Receiving, And Executing A Grant In One Semester With An English 1110.01 Class, Robert A. Eckhart, Michelle Battista

Robert A. Eckhart

From Natural Law To Natural Inferiority: The Construction Of Racist Jurisprudence In Early Virginia, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Science informed American jurisprudence during the age of the Revolution. Colonials used science and naturalism to navigate the wilderness, define themselves against the British, and forge a new national identity and constitutional order. American legal historians have long noted the influence of science upon the Founding generation, and historians of American slavery have casually noted the influence of science upon early American racism as organized and standardized in slave codes. This article seeks to synthesize the work of American legal historians and historians of American slavery by showing how natural law jurisprudence, anchored in scientific discourse and vocabulary, brought about …

The Law Review Approach: What The Humanities Can Learn, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

This essay describes how the law review process generally works and then discusses what the humanities can learn and borrow from the law review process. It ends by advocating for a hybrid law review/peer review approach to publishing. The law review process is not a panacea for our publishing ills. It has several drawbacks and shortcomings. This essay highlights the positives and notes some of the negatives of the law review publishing process, but a lengthy explanation of all that is good or bad about law reviews is not my aim. Every law review has its idiosyncrasies and methodologies, but …

Turning Wine Into Water: Water As Privileged Signifier In The Grapes Of Wrath, David N. Cassuto

David N Cassuto

I will argue that The Grapes of Wrath represents an indictment of the American myth of the garden and its accompanying myth of the frontier. The lever with which Steinbeck pries apart and ultimately dismantles these fictions is a critique of the agricultural practices that created the Dust Bowl and then metamorphosed into a new set of norms which continued to victimize both the land and its inhabitants. Both nineteenth-century homesteading (based on the Homestead Act of 1862) and agribusiness, its twentieth century descendant (born from the failure of the Homestead Act), relied on the (mis)use of water to accomplish …

Between Catastrophe And Carnival: Creolized Identities, Cityspace, And Life Narratives, Cynthia Dobbs, Daphne Lamothe, Theresa Tensuan

Cynthia Dobbs

My “Country” Lies Over The Ocean: Seasteading And Polycentric Law, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

This essay considers the implications of the Seasteading Institute upon notions of law and sovereignty and argues that seasteading could make possible the implementation or ordering of polycentric legal systems while providing evidence for the viability of private-property anarchism or anarchocapitalism, at least in their nascent forms. This essay follows in the wake of Edward P. Stringham’s edition Anarchy and the Law and treats seasteading and polycentric law as concrete realities that lend credence to certain anarchist theories. Polycentric law in particular allows for institutional diversity that enables a multiplicity of rules to coexist and even compete in the open …

Diasporic Designs Of House, Home, And Haven In Toni Morrison's Paradise, Cynthia Dobbs

Cynthia Dobbs

No abstract provided.

To Share Or Not To Share: Cancer And What Teachers Should Tell Students About It, Robert A. Eckhart

Robert A. Eckhart

How much personal information to disclose to students is a fundamental question teachers have been asking themselves for decades. How much should teachers tell their students – a lot or a little? How should they tell them –in class, or face-to-face? Should the teacher only tell their students in a limited manner and then not answer questions, or should they be prepared to answer any and all questions the students might have? These are difficult questions, but if the teacher approaches the disclosure in the right way – avoiding irrelevant, overly negative, or offensive disclosures – it can be a …

'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

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

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 …

Jefferson's "Laws Of Nature": Newtonian Influence And The Dual Valence Of Jurisprudence And Science, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Jefferson appears to have conceived of natural law rather differently from his predecessors - namely, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Richard Hooker, Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, John Locke, and, among others, William Blackstone. This particular pedigree looked to divine decree or moral order to anchor natural law philosophy. But Jefferson’s various writings, most notably the Declaration and Notes on the State of Virginia, champion the thinking of a natural historian, a man who celebrated reason and scientific method, who extolled fact over fancy, material over the immaterial, observation over superstition, and experiment over divine revelation. They reveal, in other words, an …

The Oft-Ignored Mr. Turton: The Role Of District Collector In A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India presents Brahman Hindu jurisprudence as an alternative to British rule of law, a utilitarian jurisprudence that hinges on mercantilism, central planning, and imperialism. Building on John Hasnas’s critiques of rule of law and Murray Rothbard’s critiques of Benthamite utilitarianism, this essay argues that Forster’s depictions of Brahman Hindu in the novel endorse polycentric legal systems. Mr. Turton is the local district collector whose job is to pander to both British and Indian interests; positioned as such, Turton is a site for critique and comparison. Forster uses Turton to show that Brahman Hindu jurisprudence is …

Teaching Pronunciation With Facebook And Photobooth, Robert A. Eckhart

Robert A. Eckhart

This article gives details about how to use Facebook and Photobooth to teach pronunciation to non-native English speakers.

Haunted By History's Ghostly Gaps: A Literary Critique Of The Dred Scott Decision And Its Historical Treatments, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

In his opinion for the majority, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney eliminates Dred Scott the man from the text and divests Scott of a body, thereby transforming him into a sort of incorporeal ghost that signals the traces and tropes of slavery. Subsequent historians, journalists, and politicians have made Scott even more inaccessible by either relying on Taney’s text, which erases Scott, or by failing to recover Scott’s narrative. Taney’s opinion codified “the facts” of the case as official or authoritative despite a lack of reference to their human subject. Later writers relied on this received version despite its obvious …

Audacity: Seeing Is Believing, Robert A. Eckhart

Robert A. Eckhart

Audacity is a powerful--and free--software which is very useful for teaching pronunciation, because it allows student to actually see their speech. Instead of using their ears to recognize distinctions in speech patterns, they use their eyes.

Facebook: What The Heck Is It And Why Should I Care?, Robert A. Eckhart

Robert A. Eckhart

A simple explanation of the educational purposes of Facebook, especially as compared to using blogs from other providers/websites in class.

"No Writer Nor Scholar Need Be Dull": Recollections Of Paul J. Korshin, Ira P. Robbins

Ira P. Robbins

George Orwell: Socialist Or Liberal? Big Brother And The Abuse Of Power, Noel B. Reynolds

Noel B Reynolds

For although he was too strongly independent in his thinking to accept the Marxist or socialist dogmas of his associates, because they did not seem to square with experience, and though he admired the tough resistance of English character and legal institutions to tyranny, Orwell never did tumble to the understanding of man and government which had shaped each over the centuries. Failing to see the constants in human nature as the key to the political problem, he looked around the world both as he perceived it and his literary fellows portrayed it, and concluded that power lust was the …