Law Commons^™

Shakespeare And The Supreme Court: How The Justices Reveal Their Ideologies By Referencing His Works, Rachel Anderson

Honors Projects

The works of William Shakespeare have been referenced many times throughout history, even by Supreme Court justices. Building off of an observation of a mock trial by James Shapiro, this project puts the utilization of Shakespeare from three Court opinions in relation to its context within the play and the opinion to examine what the reference reveals about the authoring justices' ideology. In doing so, this project concludes that the justices utilize Shakespeare's works in their opinions for various reasons, including to infuse their beliefs into their argument. This implies that Supreme Court justices do not base their opinions on …

The Dream Of Property: Law And Environment In William T. Vollmann’S Dying Grass And Leslie Marmon Silko’S Almanac Of The Dead, Ted Hamilton

Faculty Journal Articles

This article describes how the law inflects the narration of environmental conflict in William T. Vollmann’s Dying Grass (2015) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991). By focusing on the legal common sense of settler colonialism—its emphasis on private property in land and its subjugation of Indigenous peoples to the guardianship of the state—the article explores the ways in which Vollmann’s and Silko’s novels present counternarratives to the law’s story of justified conquest. Combining a law and literature approach with ecocriticism, this article highlights the importance of the legal imagination in defining human-land relations in the United States. …

Othering In Immigration Laws, Andrea Wright, Quenten Jackson, Cesar Raymundo

Immigration Scholarship: History, Trends and Development in Global Immigration

The ethical wrongs in immigration laws severely impact what it means to be an immigrant American citizen. The Hispanic and Latino groups experience “citizenship” in the United States in a way that portrays them as uneducated and poor criminals, and this paper seeks to understand the reasoning behind this unfair reputation. In order to answer questions of ethics and law, this paper begins with studying the root of othering, regarding immigration in the United States. This research paper investigates the evolution of race-based exclusion laws in immigration and focuses on the relationship between these exclusion laws and race hierarchy in …

_Not That Bad_: Lessons Women Learn In A Rape Culture, Sydney J. Selman

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In 2018, Roxane Gay assembled an anthology that addresses the severity of rape, rejecting the common belief that some sexually violent acts, compared to others, are not that bad. This collection, titled Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, compiles pieces from thirty different authors and sheds light on how the notion of not that bad contributes to a broader structural social problem involving sexual violence. This social problem, known as rape culture, is commonly defined as a culture that normalizes sexual violence and blames victims of sexual assault (“What is Rape Culture?”). In other words, rape culture …

Forbidden Forests: Negotiating Censorship In Children's And Young Adult Literature During A New Era Of Conservatism In 2022 And Beyond, Avila Hendricks

Title III Professional Development Reports

Harambee! In Swahili, “Harambee” means “All pull together!” The impetus for this report grew out of a unifying discussion with other 2022 Children's Literature Association (ChLA) conference attendees.These discussions led to the decision to “pull together” against the rise of “extreme” conservatism and the increase of banned books across the United States.

This report offers insight into some of the issues surrounding the increase in censorship in children's and young adult literature. It includes a brief review of the recently scrutinized book, Dear Martin by Nic Stone, and it concludes with some recommendations for negotiating censorship in conservative communities.

A “Hired Girl” Testifies Against The “Son Of A Prominent Family”: Bastardy And Rape On The Nineteenth-Century Nebraska Plains, Donna Rae Devlin

Department of History: Faculty Publications

In Red Cloud, Nebraska, in 1887, Anna “Annie” Sadilek (later Pavelka) pressed bastardy charges against the “son of a prominent family,” even though she could have, according to her pretrial testimony, pressed charges for rape. To the literary world, Sadilek is better known as Ántonia Shimerda, the powerful protagonist in Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia. However, it is Sadilek’s real-life experience that allows us to better understand life on the Nebraska Plains, specifically through an examination of the state’s rape laws and the ways these laws were subsequently interpreted by the courts. The Nebraska Supreme Court, between 1877 …

Yahweh’S Benevolence Vs. Anat’S Malevolence: A Comparative Analysis Of Judges 4–5 And Col Ii 1–Col Iii 2, Michaela Misantone

Senior Honors Theses

The actions of ancient Near Eastern warrior gods are often depicted as acts of vengeance, greed, and brutality, serving selfish ambition and never-ending power struggles. These gods and their warfare ethic dominated the worldview of the ancient world in which the events of the Old Testament took place. The actions of the Hebrew God are often included, even emphasized, in discussions of ancient divine warfare today. There are supposed similarities between the actions of war gods like Anat from the Ugaritic pantheon and those of Yahweh from ancient Israel. Unfortunately, this has led to the present-day belief that the God …

The Dilemma Of Banned Books: Questioning The Ethics Of Censoring Literature In Schools, Kyle King

Augustana Center for the Study of Ethics Essay Contest

Literature, specifically in the form of novels, has been a vital organ of the public education system within the United States. Not only does reading such works transform us into better close readers and strengthen our vocabulary, but the texts at hand can be very essential to analyze specific contexts or issues that might have existed either throughout history or even in the present day. In today’s country, the issue of banning certain books from school curricula has become as prevalent as ever, where mostly Southern Republican officials are calling for lists of books to be restricted from teaching due …

Boston Discusses The Massacre, Jean C. O'Connor

The Montana English Journal

Teachers may use this chapter from The Remarkable Cause: A Novel of James Lovell and the Crucible of the Revolution as a short story for grades 7 – 12., to explore themes of interpersonal conflict, conflict resolution, and the value of law.

The chapter “Boston Discusses the Massacre” is taken from The Remarkable Cause: A Novel of James Lovell and the Crucible of the Revolution (Knox Press, 2020), and used with permission. James Lovell, teacher at the Boston Latin School, discusses the pivotal events of March 5, 1770. As the conflicts that become the American Revolution begin a group of …

Breaking Free: Detectives Let The Guilty Walk, Cassandra Holcombe

All Master's Theses

In a genre like detective fiction, known for affirming social order, the refusal to enforce rule of law seems like an anomaly. The number of famous detectives who have let a perpetrator go suggests that release of suspects is not a break in genre conventions, but is a wider pattern that needs to be acknowledged. This study investigates that pattern by measuring the complexity of thirteen detectives: eleven of whom release perpetrators and two of whom do not, to serve as a control group. The higher the complexity of the character, the more human the character seems to be. The …