Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons^™

These Are The People In Your Neighborhood, Elliot Regenstein

Michigan Law Review

The 1997 St. Louis Rams media guide contains a glowing description of the team's star rookie from the prior season. The guide highlights his brilliant college career, describes his solid first professional season, and mentions that he grew up in Los Angeles. In a gray box above his football statistics, it notes that he frequently visits the Emergency Children's Home (ECHO) for troubled youth, where he talks to kids and plays basketball with them. The description would all look pretty normal if it wasn't a portrait of Lawrence Phillips. Almost every other sporting publication has written of Phillips not as …

The Rise Of America's Two National Pastimes: Baseball And The Law, Cleta Deatherage Mitchell

Michigan Law Review

Mark McGwire's seventieth home run ball sold at auction in January of this year for $3,005,000. In late 1998, Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos sued a former Orioles manager and his daughter in the circuit court of Cook County, Illinois. Angelos alleged that the original lineup card from the 1995 game when Cal Ripken, Jr., broke Lou Gehrig's consecutive game record belongs to the Orioles, not to the former manager and certainly not to his daughter. There may be no crying in baseball, but there is money. And wherever earthly treasure gathers two or more, a legal system arises. From …

Comment On Steven Lubet, Reconstructing Atticus Finch, Rob Atkinson

Michigan Law Review

Professor Lubet has joined a growing list of revisionists who question Atticus's standing as the paragon of lawyerly virtue.1 But Professor Lubet takes revisionism in a distinctly postmodern direction, if not to a radically new level. Atticus's previous critics have wondered how he could have overlooked, perhaps even condoned, the pervasive racism, sexism, and classism of the Depression-era South. They have even occasionally censured his paternalism toward his pro bono client, the working-class black rape defendant Tom Robinson. But they have never questioned either Tom's claim of innocence or the propriety of Atticus's advocacy of that claim. Professor Lubet questions …

Reconstructing Atticus Finch, Steven Lubet

Michigan Law Review

Atticus Finch. No real-life lawyer has done more for the self-image or public perception of the legal profession than the hero of Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. For nearly four decades, the name of Atticus Finch has been invoked to defend and inspire lawyers, to rebut lawyer jokes, and to justify (and fine-tune) the adversary system. Lawyers are greedy. What about Atticus Finch? Lawyers only serve the rich. Not Atticus Finch. Professionalism is a lost ideal. Remember Atticus Finch. In the unreconstructed Maycomb, Alabama of the 1930s, Atticus was willing to risk his social standing, professional reputation, and …

Response To Steven Lubet: A Reaction: "Stand Up, Your Father [A Lawyer] Is Passing", Burnele V. Powell

Michigan Law Review

Professor Steven Lubet's review examines in the lawyering context the truth of Due de La Rochefoucauld's observation that "[o]ur virtues are mostly but vices in disguise." His question - one going to the very heart of what lawyering is about - asks readers of To Kill a Mockingbird whether they would be equally prepared to accept the fictional Atticus Fmch as the personification of the good lawyer if his black client, defendant Tom Robinson, actually committed the rape of the white woman, Mayella Ewell, for which he was charged. If Robinson was a rapist, how then does one square Atticus's …

Moral Icons: A Comment On Steven Lubet's Reconstructing Atticus Finch, William H. Simon

Michigan Law Review

Atticus Finch's conduct would have been justified by the bar's conventional norms even if he had known Tom Robinson to be guilty. That fact, however, is not the source of the admiration for him that To Kill a Mockingbird has induced in so many readers. That admiration depends on the clear premise of the novel that Finch plausibly believes that Tom Robinson is innocent. Thus, the bar's invocation of Finch as a sympathetic illustration of its norms is misleading. The ethics of the novel are quite different from those of the bar. Steven Lubet does a good job of showing …

Reconstructing Atticus Finch? A Response To Professor Lubet, Ann Althouse

Michigan Law Review

In one of her childishly obtuse moments, Scout, the narrator of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, denies that her father Atticus Finch is any sort of proper example of how a lawyer ought to act when cross-examining a witness. The prosecutor's crossexamination of the accused Tom Robinson has moved her friend Dill to tears: "I couldn't stand . . . [t]hat old Mr. Gilmer doin' him thataway, talking so hateful to him _" Scout, who has taken her friend out of the courtroom, explains: "Dill, that's his job . . . . He's supposed to act that way." Atticus, …

When It’S Ok To Sell The Monet: A Trustee-Fiduciary-Duty Framework For Analyzing The Deaccessioning Of Art To Meet Museum Operating Expenses, Jennifer L. White

Michigan Law Review

Contrary to the view adopted by current codes of ethics, this Note argues that courts should approve a museum director's use of proceeds from the sale of deaccessioned art to meet operating expenses if the director's conduct comports with the duties of trustees under the law of trusts. Part I explores possible organizational structures for museums, including the charitable trust and the nonprofit corporation. Part I also compares the fiduciary duties of museum managers under trust and corporate law. Part II argues that courts should apply trust-law principles both to trustees of charitable trusts and directors of charitable corporations26 because …

Fictionalizing Harassment—Disclosing The Truth, Maria L. Ontiveros

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Disclosure by Michael Crichton, and Bearing Witness: Sexual Harassment and Beyond—Everywoman's Story by Celia Morris

Kill All The Lawyers?: Shakespeare's Legal Appeal, Kevin T. Traskos

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Kill All the Lawyers?: Shakespeare's Legal Appeal by Daniel J. Kornstein

The Last Butskellite, John D. Ayer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Acts of Hope: Creating Authority in Literature, Law, and Politics by James B. White

Strings Attached--Violin Fraud And Other Deceptions, Carla J. Shapreau

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Violin Fraud: Deception, Forgery, Theft, and the Law by Brian W. Harvey

In Search Of Faulkner's Law, Richard Weisberg

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner by Jay Watson

Practicing Poetry, Teaching Law, David A. Skeel Jr.

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Before Our Eyes by Lawrence Joseph

The Adventures Of Eric Blair, George P. Fletcher

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Brothel Boy and Other Parables of the Law by Norval Morris

Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law Of Obscenity And The Assault On Genius, Anne E. Gilson

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius by Edward de Grazia

The Great Gatsby, The Black Sox, High Finance, And American Law, Allen Boyer

Michigan Law Review

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is the great novel of America in the 1920s. It is about someone pursuing a girl, and, more than that, it is about someone pursuing a dream. Jay Gatsby is someone who believes in the American dream of success. His life plays out the most famous piece of repartee between Fitzgerald and Hemingway - that the rich are very different from you and me, because they have more money. Gatsby is a man who thought that if he had the money, he would be rich, and could therefore be different.

After reading …

Jean-Luc Godard And Critical Legal Studies (Because We Need The Eggs), Jeffrey L. Harrison, Amy R. Mashburn

Michigan Law Review

The New Wave in filmmaking is now thirty years old. Critical Legal Studies (CLS) has been around in one form or another for approximately a third of that time. We believe that by examining the avant-garde movement in film we may be able to anticipate what is in store for the avant-garde movement in law. Our conclusion is that just as New Wave film methodology has had only a limited impact on the film industry generally, CLS is likely to have a limited - perhaps only stylistic - effect on jurisprudential development.

The reason for the shortfall is that Godard …

Seasoned To The Use, Carol Sanger

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow, and by Sue Miller

The Very Idea Of "Law And Literature", John D. Ayer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction by Richard Weisberg

Posner On Literature, L. H. Larue

Michigan Law Review

Judge Richard A. Posner has expanded the scope of his writing. We have previously known him as one of the leaders in law and economics. He is now moving into the field of law and literature. His offering is an article, Law and Literature: A Relation Reargued, which has been published in the Virginia Law Review.

As one might expect, he performs intelligently. Posner is well read in literature; he displays a genuine love for that which he has read; and he writes with wit and grace. In short, in law and literature, as in law and economics, Posner …

Legal Modernism, David Luban

Michigan Law Review

What are the roots of Critical Legal Studies? "The immediate intellectual background . . . is the . . . achievement of early twentieth century modernism ... ," writes Roberto Unger in his CLS manifesto; he elaborates this modernist connection in his deep and subtle book Passion. Other CLS members also draw parallels between their endeavor and artistic modernism.

Obviously, CLS is first and foremost a movement of left-leaning legal scholars; it is also associated with distinctive theoretical claims about law. But it should be equally obvious that CLS involves sensibilities and affinities that are strikingly similar to those …

The Failure Of The Word: The Protagonist As Lawyer In Modern Fiction, Nancy T. Hammar

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction by Richard H. Weisberg

Thinking About The Elgin Marbles, John Henry Merryman

Michigan Law Review

In the early nineteenth century, a British Lord removed much of the sculpture from the Parthenon and shipped it to England. Housed in the British Museum and named after their exporter, the Elgin Marbles have become a source of international controversy. The Greeks wish to see the Marbles returned to the Acropolis and their position is supported by a growing movement seeking the repatriation of cultural property. The Elgin Marbles are representative of the many works of art in the world's museums and private collections that could be subject to repatriation. Rejecting the emotional appeal of the Greek position, Professor …

Patrons Despite Themselves: Taxpayers And Arts Policy, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Patrons Despite Themselves: Taxpayers and Arts Policy by Alan L. Feld, Michael O'Hare, and J. Mark Davidson Schuster

The Judicial Opinion And The Poem: Ways Of Reading, Ways Of Life, James Boyd White

Michigan Law Review

This paper is an essay in what I want to call the poetics of the law. I begin with a largely autobiographical account of what seems to me a striking similarity in the ways in which poetry and law once were taught - and to some degree still are taught, though perhaps less comfortably so. My first object is to suggest some connections: between these two kinds of thought and expression; between the ways in which we are habituated to read texts of each sort; and between the dilemmas that confront readers and critics in each field. In doing these …

Tax Treatment Of Prepublication Expenses Of Authors And Publishers, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

This Note analyzes the tax treatment of prepublication costs. Part I presents the analytic framework of the business expense/ capital expenditure distinction and searches for practical, income- reflecting criteria that achieve theoretically correct results. Part II covers the historic treatment of prepublication expenditures, concluding that neither the courts nor the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have been consistent in their approach and that both have largely ignored the income-reflecting goals outlined in Part I. Part III applies the income-reflecting approach in order to develop a principled method of examining the tax consequences of various prepublication expenses.

Recognition Of The National Football League As A Single Entity Under Section 1 Of The Sherman Act: Implications Of The Consumer Welfare Model, Myron C. Grauer

Michigan Law Review

This article argues that Justice Rehnquist has analyzed the operational structure of the NFL in a manner that is consistent with proper antitrust enforcement policy, and expands upon the view that he espoused. It contends that the NFL is analogous to a law firm partnership, with the teams analogous to departments or partners that can make operating rules for the firm without fear of violating section 1 of the Sherman Act. In arriving at the opposite conclusion, both the Oakland Raiders and NASL courts relied on several cases involving player restraints that presupposed that teams in professional sports leagues, such …

The Homer Of The Pacific: Melville's Art And The Ambiguities Of Judging Evil, Lee C. Bollinger

Michigan Law Review

Writing in 1952 of Herman Melville's work and its significance, Albert Camus praised Melville as the "Homer of the Pacific." Such Olympian fame was deserved, Camus wrote, because "[i]f it is true that talent recreates life, while genius has the additional gift of crowning it with myths, Melville is first and foremost a creator of myths." This essay concerns one aspect of those myths, Melville's exploration of man's struggle with the injustice and evil that originates from both within and without himself, and asserts its relevance to an understanding of the judicial process.

Consent In Criminal Law: Violence In Sports, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

Because there have been few criminal prosecutions for violence in sports, there are several difficult issues that have received only cursory analysis. This Note will focus on one such issue-the existence and effect of the consent of the injured party. In section I, it will analyze the various general theories relating to the nature of actual consent and will suggest that the current theoretical framework's emphasis on ascertaining the victim's subjective state of mind is, in some contexts, ill-conceived and unhelpful. It will argue that societal interests involved in human interactions should become a major focus of any analysis, particularly …