Law Commons^™

Art Actually! The Courts And The Imposition Of Taste, Marett Leiboff

Marett Leiboff

How do we read art, at least in law? The traditional approach of the courts has been to disavow, or at least avoid any discussion on matters of aesthetics or connoisseurship, or more accurately assert such a disavowal. Because whether the courts acknowledge it or not, they actively judge art, even when they say they don't. Judging art by judges, as we will see, is not a particularly edifying spectacle, but is it better for the courts to avoid judging art? In this article, I will explore what happens when the courts grapple with the problem of judging art, but …

Community For Creative Non-Violence V. Reid: New Certainty For The Copyright Work For Hire Doctrine , Katherine B. Marik

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

The United States-Canada Free Trade Agreement: Exporting Art By The Numbers, James A.R. Nafziger, Mary P. Rooklidge

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is Culture A Justiciable Issue? , Jessica L. Darraby

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Graffiti Museum: A First Amendment Argument For Protecting Uncommissioned Art On Private Property, Margaret L. Mettler

Michigan Law Review

Graffiti has long been a target of municipal legislation that aims to preserve property values, public safety, and aesthetic integrity in the community. Not only are graffitists at risk of criminal prosecution but property owners are subject to civil and criminal penalties for harboring graffiti on their land. Since the 1990s, most U.S. cities have promulgated graffiti abatement ordinances that require private property owners to remove graffiti from their land, often at their own expense. These ordinances define graffiti broadly to include essentially any surface marking applied without advance authorization from the property owner. Meanwhile, graffiti has risen in prominence …

Many Voices, David D. Butler

David D. Butler

This brief article is 1,500 words, including its two intriguing footnotes. Read it in its entirety. Read it before the 2012 presidential election.

Aesthetics And Human Rights, Winston Nagan, Aitza Haddad

Winston P Nagan

This article seeks to contribute to a better understating of the relationship between aesthetics and fundamental human rights. The initial challenge was to develop a more clarified conception of aesthetics as a social process in order to better mark those aspects of aesthetics that have clear human rights implications. This required us to contextualize the aesthetics process in terms of the generally accepted model of communications theory, and then to deepened the inquiry using this model as the broad architectural foundation for unpacking the social process of aesthetics. These ideas were put into the context of significant contributions from the …

The Next Battleground? Personhood, Privacy, And Assisted Reproductive Technologies, Mark Strasser

Mark Strasser

Personhood statutes and amendments have been proposed in several states. As a general matter, they establish as a matter of state law that legal personhood begins at conception. Such laws may have implications for state policies concerning abortion and contraception, and will have implications for other areas of law including state policies related to assisted reproductive technologies. Yet, some of the ways in which these different areas of law might be affected are not well understood and thus are explored here.

The Art Of Transformation, Sarah B. Miller

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

No abstract provided.

Re-Enacting Performance Art, Lucas M. Ihlein, Chris Hewitt, Andrea Saemann

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Lucas Ihlein’s re-enactment work has primarily revolved around Expanded Cinema from British artists of the 1970s. Working with Louise Curham as “Teaching and Learning Cinema”, Ihlein’s approach involves a carefully annotated and documented re-invention of the original works, paying particular attention to the technological specificity of film, video and digital media.

Engaging Aboriginal Art From The Idea Of Australia, Ian A. Mclean

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

In writing the first national history of Australian art Bernard Smith was instrumental in inventing the idea of an Australian national culture. In this respect his histories should be understood in the context of a wider postcolonial – or at least post-empire – discourse that shaped the idea of Australia after the world wars. Galvanizing the many threads of this discourse was the idea of an independent nation state. What role did Aboriginal art have in this discourse? As a committed Marxist Smith had a great deal of sympathy for the downtrodden, including Aborigines. However the idea of the nation …

Museum Policies And Art Images: Conflicting Objectives And Copyright Overreaching, Kenneth D. Crews

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Museums face steady demand for images of artworks from their collections, and they typically provide a service of making and delivering high-resolution images of art. The images are often intellectually essential for scholarly study and teaching, and they are sometimes economically valuable for production of the coffee mugs and note cards sold in museum shops and elsewhere. Though the law is unclear regarding copyright protection afforded to such images, many museum policies and licenses encumber the use of art images with contractual terms and license restrictions often aimed at raising revenue or protecting the integrity of the art. This article …

The Dialectic Of Obscenity, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Until the 1960s, pornography was obscene, and obscenity prosecutions were relatively common. And until the 1970s, obscenity prosecutions targeted art, as well as pornography. But today, obscenity prosecutions are rare and limited to the most extreme forms of pornography.

So why did obscenity largely disappear? The conventional history of obscenity is doctrinal, holding that the Supreme Court’s redefinition of obscenity in order to protect art inevitably required the protection of pornography as well. In other words, art and literature were the vanguard of pornography.

But the conventional history of obscenity is incomplete. While it accounts for the development of obscenity …

Appropriate Testing And Resolution: How To Determine Whether Appropriation Art Is Transformative Fair Use Or Merely In Unauthorized Derivative., Eric D. Gorman

St. Mary's Law Journal

This Article addresses the copyright concerns in appropriation art today and concludes that copyright law should be amended to address the complex issues found in this area of the law. Part II provides a background on appropriation art and the different facets of copyright law, including the doctrine of fair use. Part III analyzes whether appropriation art can even be considered “fair use” under the current exceptions of copyright infringement. Part IV discusses various legal tests to determine whether appropriation art that utilizes copyrighted material can exercise the doctrine of fair use against alleged copyright infringement. It also proposes a …