Law Commons^™

Dark Justice: Women Legal Actors On Basic Cable, Taunya Banks

Taunya Lovell Banks

No abstract provided.

Law And Justice On The Small Screen, Jessica Silbey

Books

'Law and Justice on the Small Screen' is a wide-ranging collection of essays about law in and on television. In light of the book's innovative taxonomy of the field and its international reach, it will make a novel contribution to the scholarly literature about law and popular culture. Television shows from France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and the United States are discussed. The essays are organised into three sections: (1) methodological questions regarding the analysis of law and popular culture on television; (2) a focus on genre studies within television programming (including a subsection on reality television), and …

January 22, 2012: Jesus Hopped The 'A' Train, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Images In/Of Law, Jessica M. Silbey

Jessica Silbey

The proliferation of images in and of law lends itself to surprisingly complex problems of epistemology and power. Understanding through images is innate; most of us easily understand images without thinking. But arriving at mutually agreeable understandings of images is also difficult. Translating images into shared words leads to multiple problems inherent in translation and that pose problems for justice. Despite our saturated imagistic culture, we have not established methods to pursue that translation process with confidence. This article explains how images are intuitively understood and yet collectively inscrutable, posing unique problems for resolving legal conflicts that demand common and …

A Contrarian View Of Copyright: Hip-Hop, Sampling, And Semiotic Democracy, Thomas Joo

Thomas W Joo

A dominant trend in intellectual property (IP) theory asserts that technologies such as digital copying enable individuals to resist the cultural dominance of the media industry. Under this view, individuals appropriate cultural material and “recode” it by assigning alternative meanings to it. By enabling more people to participate in the making of cultural meanings, recoding supposedly enhances “semiotic democracy.” IP theorists tend to argue that copyright law inhibits recoding, thus stifling semiotic democracy. The use of sampling in hip-hop music is frequently cited as a paradigmatic example of recoding that has been stifled by IP law.

This paper uses history, …