Law Commons^™

Quasi Governments And Inchoate Law: Berle’S Vision Of Limits On Corporate Power, Elizabeth Pollman

Seattle University Law Review

This Berle X Symposium essay gives prominence to distinguished corporate law scholar Adolf A. Berle, Jr. and his key writings of the 1950s and 1960s. Berle is most famous for his work decades earlier, in the 1930s, with Gardiner Means on the topic of the separation of ownership and control, and for his great debate of corporate social responsibility with E. Merrick Dodd. Yet the world was inching closer to our contemporary one in terms of both business and technology in Berle’s later years and his work from this period deserves attention.

Law As Interpretation, Charles W. Collier

Charles W. Collier

In this Article, I shall trace out separate professional narratives in common law, constitutional law, and in legal cases turning on the distinction between community and society (Part III). But first I should like to situate these legal-professional narratives within a broader interdisciplinary framework (Part II).

Common Sense, Contracts, And Law And Literature: Why Lawyers Should Read Henry James, Lenora Ledwon

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property And Gender: Reflections On Accomplishments And Methodology, Kara W. Swanson

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Rediscovering Cumulative Creativity From The Oral Formulaic Tradition To Digital Remix: Can I Get A Witness?, Giancarlo Francesco Frosio

Giancarlo Francesco Frosio

For most of human history the essential nature of creativity was understood to be cumulative and collective. This notion has been largely forgotten by modern policies regulating creativity and speech. As hard as it may be to believe, the most valuable components of our immortal culture were created under a fully open regime with regard to access to pre-existing expressions and reuse. From the Platonic mimēsis to the Roman imitatio, from Macrobius’ Saturnalia to the imitatio Vergili, from medieval auctoritas and Chaucer the compilator to Anon the singer and social textuality, from Chrétien’s art of rewriting to Shakespeare’s “borrowed feathers,” …

'Simple' Takes On The Supreme Court, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This essay assesses black literature as a medium for working out popular understandings of America’s Constitution and laws. Starting in the 1940s, Langston Hughes’s fictional character, Jesse B. Semple, began appearing in the prominent black newspaper, the Chicago Defender. The figure affectionately known as “Simple” was undereducated, unsophisticated, and plain spoken - certainly to a fault according to prevailing standards of civility, race relations, and professional attainment. Butthese very traits, along with a gritty experience under Jim Crow, made him not only a sympathetic figure but also an armchair legal theorist. In a series of barroom conversations, Simple ably critiqued …

"Simple" Takes On The Supreme Court, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This essay assesses black literature as a medium for working out popular understandings of America’s Constitution and laws. Starting in the 1940s, Langston Hughes’s fictional character, Jesse B. Semple, began appearing in the prominent black newspaper, the Chicago Defender. The figure affectionately known as “Simple” was undereducated, unsophisticated, and plain spoken - certainly to a fault according to prevailing standards of civility, race relations, and professional attainment. Butthese very traits, along with a gritty experience under Jim Crow, made him not only a sympathetic figure but also an armchair legal theorist. In a series of barroom conversations, Simple ably critiqued …

The Law: An Art Or A Science?, Alda Facio

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Law, Literature, And Libel: Victorian Censorship Of Dirty Filthy Books On Birth Control, Kristin (Brandser) Kalsem

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This article presents a case study of the feminist jurisprudence performed by three early birth control advocates: Annie Besant, Jane Hume Clapperton, and Marie Stopes. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the subject of birth control was so taboo that serious efforts were made to keep John Stuart Mill from being buried in Westminster Abbey because of his sympathies with the idea of family limitation. The threat of being charged with obscenity and immorality, whether in a legal indictment, in a literary review, or in the court of public opinion, effectively silenced much public discourse on this important …

Looking For Law In All The Wrong Places: Outlaw Texts And Early Women's Advocacy, Kristin (Brandser) Kalsem

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Recent Supreme Court decisions such as Atkins v. Virginia and Lawrence v. Texas specifically address the linkages between shifting cultural attitudes and the evolution of law. In this Article, I examine the mutually constitutive relationship between legal and cultural developments from a historical perspective and illustrate the necessity of looking to sources that I define as outlaw texts in order to access invaluable information about the process of legal change.

To demonstrate how a study of outlaw texts can enrich our understanding and critical consideration of law and legal history, this Article presents detailed analyses of specific examples of nineteenth-century …

Alice In Legal Wonderland: A Cross-Examination Of Gender, Race And Empire In Victorian Law And Literature, Kristin (Brandser) Kalsem

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Lewis Carroll's 1865 scene of a recalcitrant Alice in the courtroom, defying the court's authority as she grows (literally) into a large and threatening presence, dramatizes what was becoming an increasingly common Victorian spectacle: a woman questioning and critiquing the law and claiming a place for herself within its institutions. Women have played a significant (but much overlooked) role in legal history and, in this paper, I argue for the importance of examining various narratives of the past (including literary accounts) that explored women's relationship to the law.

Against the backdrop of several legal cases in which women sought entry …

Franco's Spain, Queer Nation?, Gema Pérez-Sánchez

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article discusses how, through its juridical apparatus, the Spanish dictatorship of Francisco Franco sought to define and to contain homosexuality, followed by examples of how underground queer activism contested homophobic laws. The Article concludes by analyzing a literary work to illustrate the social impact of Francoism's homophobic law against homosexuality.

Hegemony, Coercion, And Their Teeth-Gritting Harmony: A Commentary On Power, Culture, And Sexuality In Franco's Spain, Ratna Kapur, Tayyab Mahmud

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Professor Gema Pérez-Sánchez's article, Franco's Spain, Queer Nation? focuses on the last years of Francisco Franco's fascist dictatorship and the early years of the young Spanish democracy, roughly from the late 1960's to the early 1980's. The centerpiece of her article looks at how, through law, Franco's regime sought to define and contain what it considered dangerous social behavior, particularly homosexuality. She traces how the state not only exercised hegemonic control over definitions of gender and sexuality, but also established well-defined roles for women and drew clear lines between what constituted legitimate and illegitimate sexualities, namely, the line between heterosexuality …

Querying A Queer Spain Under Franco, Peter Kwan

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

There should be more articles in the legal journals such as Professor Gema Pérez-Sánchez's. In Franco's Spain, Queer Nation?, Professor Pérez-Sánchez has done a great service to legal scholarship in four respects. Firstly, she has written an appropriately far-ranging piece. In a discipline that has as one of its central missions the broadening of critical legal discourse, LatCrit can sometimes appear to suffer from symptoms of parochialism in its understandable emphasis on the Latina/o experience within American borders, or on the experience of its Latina/o immigrants once they have reached these shores. To be sure, this is not a problem …

Law As Interpretation, Charles W. Collier

UF Law Faculty Publications

In this Article, I shall trace out separate professional narratives in common law, constitutional law, and in legal cases turning on the distinction between community and society (Part III). But first I should like to situate these legal-professional narratives within a broader interdisciplinary framework (Part II).

Chapter 7 - Reflections On The Scholarship Of Elizabeth B. Clark, Kristin Olbertson, Carol Weisbrod, Christine Stansell, Martha Minow

Manuscript of Women, Church, and State: Religion and the Culture of Individual Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

Elizabeth Clark's essays on early nineteenth-century reform movements make a compelling case that abolitionists and feminists alike understood individual rights from a profoundly religious perspective. Clark also demonstrates how these reformers advocated the protection of so-called "natural rights" for enslaved African-Americans and white women in the vivid and fervently emotional language of evangelical revivalism. Broader cultural and intellectual trends of resistance to governmental and clerical authority, trends rooted in liberal and evangelical Protestantism, Clark argues, helped fuel attacks on slavery and gender inequality. Rejecting other historians' portrayals of the antebellum reformers as primarily secular in orientation, Clark makes the arresting, …

Never Mind The Manner Of My Speech: The Dilemma Of Socrates' Defense In The Apology, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

What might we learn from reading Plato's Apology? Socrates, the foremost teacher in Western culture, is on trial for his life, and he defends the way he has lived by describing how he has conducted himself; this means describing how he has taught and what he has taught and why he teaches as he does. The charge against Socrates is that he does not believe in the traditional deities of Athens and instead has introduced new deities (an apparent reference to his inner voice, his daimonion).This impiety on his part has led him to corrupt Athenian youths influenced by his …

Agenda: External Development Affecting The National Parks: Preserving "The Best Idea We Ever Had", University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

External Development Affecting the National Parks: Preserving "The Best Idea We Ever Had" (September 14-16)

Conference organizers and/or faculty included University of Colorado School of Law professors Lawrence J. MacDonnell and Daniel Magraw.

The conference will be held at the Aspen Lodge, adjacent to Rocky Mountain National Park near Estes Park, Colorado.

It was Wallace Stegner who called the national parks "the best idea we ever had." The continuing increases in usage attest to their popularity. National parks are created to preserve areas of special scenic and cultural value for enjoyment and use. Managing the parks in a manner that protects the important values and purposes for which they were created presents important and difficult …