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'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 …

Out Of The Big Smoke: Crime Fiction In 2013, Sue Turnbull

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

Oddly enough and against trend – all those Scandinavian crime novels bobbing up in translation – I spent most of the year travelling Australia in crime fiction.

From East (Peter Cotton’s Canberra in Dead Cat Bounce) to West (Alan Carter’s Perth in Getting Warmer) with many intriguing side trips in between; a trip to Thailand with Angela Savage (The Dying Beach), and a retreat to rural South East New South Wales with Stuart Littlemore (Harry Curry: Rats and Mice).

Reviewing the route taken simply confirms my suspicion that Australian crime fiction has become emphatically “regional”. The city is no longer …

"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 …