The Consequences of Imagery

Gregory Scott Parks, District of Columbia Court of Appeals, and Danielle C. Heard, Stanford University School of Humanities & Sciences, have published 'Assassinate the Nigger Apes' [1]: Obama, Implicit Imagery, and the Dire Consequences of Racist Jokes . Here is the abstract.

In 1994, Congress passed legislation stating that Presidents elected to office after January 1, 1997, would no longer receive lifetime Secret Service protection. Such legislation was unremarkable until the first Black President - Barack Obama - was elected. From the outset of his campaign until today, and likely beyond, President Obama has received unprecedented death threats. These threats, we argue, are at least in part tied to critics and commentators’ use of symbols, pictures, and words to characterize the Obama as a primate, in various forms - including cartoonist Sean Delonas’ controversial New York Post cartoon. Against this backdrop and looking to history, cultural critique, federal case law, as well as cognitive and social psychology, we explore how the use of seemingly harmless imagery may still be racially-laden and evoke violence against its object.

[1] Morgan v. McDonough, 540 F.2d 527, 531 (1st Cir.1976) (holding in a school desegregation case, that White students harassed Black students by chanting "assassinate the nigger apes"); see also infra notes 99 to 103 and accompanying text.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Art and Legal Form

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, The Westminster International Law and Theory Centre, University of Westminster,has published Repetition: Deleuze and Kierkegaard on Law, Justice and Art, in Law and Art (Oren Ben-Dor, ed; London: Routledge, 2010). Here is the abstract.

In the final stage of his career, Giorgio de Chirico produced an interminable series of almost identical paintings that copied and only partly developed his successful early metaphysical period style. This was less of a performance and more of an income-generating exercise based on the high demand for his metaphysical paintings, especially the ones of the Piazza d’Italia. Still, the practice amounted to the production of what de Chirico called ‘extremely exact variations’. This poses questions on whether repetition is capable of generating difference. From this perspective, I compare de Chirico’s obsessive repetition with the normative repetition in law. The text considers the edifice of the law as the repeating practice of normative production and questions whether this can be repetition in the sense of producing difference. In such an edifice, awnings of justice can be observed, artfully posited against the horizon, as awnings capturing spaces of transcendence. This connection between the edifice and the horizon is described here as the awnings of justice. The argument is substantiated through a discussion on Kierkegaard and Deleuze’s theories of repetition.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

The Supreme Court and Baseball

Ross E. Davies and Craig D. Rust, George Mason University School of Law, have published "Supreme Court Sluggers: Behind the Numbers," at Green Bag 2d 213 (Winter 2010). Here is the abstract.

Issued last fall, the Chief Justice John G. Roberts “Supreme Court Sluggers” trading card pictured on page 213 above is the first in what should be a very long series of “Sluggers” cards. The first Associate Justice card – of John Paul Stevens – will be out this spring. Others, of the sitting Justices and of their predecessors, will follow in the coming months and years. The Green Bag’s ambitions for this project are simple, if not small: (a) to develop and share comparable measurements of the work of every member of the Supreme Court since 1789; (b) to gradually expand and refine those measurements with an eye to making them as useful and interesting as possible; (c) to create informative, entertaining, and unorthodox yet respectful portraits of the Justices by first-rate artists; and (d) to present all of this material in a way that will be enjoyable for the producers, consumers, and subjects of the “Sluggers” cards. As an introduction to the “Sluggers” project, we offer here short descriptions of what went into the development of the front and back of the Chief Justice Roberts card. The front is a work of art that makes light-hearted connections between its subject and the game of baseball. The back is packed with statistics and sprinkled with quotations drawn from the subject’s judicial work.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Law and Art Symposium at the Tate

At the Tate, a one day symposium on Law and Art: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Justice on March 23, 2010.

Law and Art

A couple of articles on law and the art by the New York Times' Adam Liptak: here on Daniel Moore and here on Donald Johnson, serving three life terms for murder.

Word Imagery

Cristina Costantini creates "word clouds" out of her writings using a program called Wordle. See examples here and here. Very neat!

How Right (Or Wrong) Does Television Get It?

From MSNBC.com, two stories about how television reflects the real world; a piece on the progress women have made in breaking through the glass ceiling since the 1970s,and a story on those interesting older woman/younger man relationships. Along the way: do anti-discrimination laws help or hurt, or have no effect? Do women flooding into the workplace eventually have the effect of flooding into the boardroom, or not?

Madeleine Albright has some interesting things to say about the power of a woman's word, even if it's expressed symbolically. In her new book, Read My Pins: Stories From a Diplomat's Jewel Box (HarperCollins, 2009) the first female U.S. Secretary of State discusses how Saddam Hussein inspired her use of jeweled pins to make subtle pronouncements on behalf of the government. "It would never have happened if not for Saddam Hussein. When U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright criticized the dictator, his poet in residence responded by calling her "an unparalleled serpent." Shortly thereafter, while preparing to meet with Iraqi officials, Albright pondered: What to wear? She decided to make a diplomatic statement by choosing a snake pin. Although her method of communication was new, her message was as old as the American Revolution—Don't Tread on Me." (From the B&N website). The pins are part of a special exhibit at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York, and then will travel to several cities in the country including Little Rock and Indianapolis.

Marriage In Fine Art

Benjamin A. Templin, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has published "The Marriage Contract in Fine Art," in volume 30 of the Northern Illinois University Law Review (2009). Here is the abstract.

This paper studies the depiction of the marriage contract in Dutch, French and English genre paintings from the 14th to 18th centuries. Increasingly, scholars have recognized that visual imagery influences the development of legal norms and institutions. During the period studied several genre artists produced paintings that dealt with themes that were central to the issues surrounding the marriage laws, such as the rights of women or whether marriage is a sacrament or a contract. Interestingly, many of the themes depicted in the collective body of marriage contract art echoes and amplifies the issues surrounding the rights of women and the scope of the marriage contract in the writings of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Although it is impossible to measure the impact this collective body of work had on changing the law, the artistic and legal themes expressed in these paintings illustrates the “pre-formative” role of art in terms of signaling where change may occur in our legal norms and institutions. This analysis of the depiction of the formation of the marriage contract may also be of some interest to family law scholars given the renewed interest in the historical foundation of marriage law as a result of the debate over same-sex marriage. The analysis of visual representation of the marriage contract yields another data point for marriage scholars researching the history and origin of society’s conception of marriage as either a contract or a sacrament.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Enabling "Tagging" and Other Art Forms

Randall P. Bezanson, University of Iowa College of Law, and Andrew Finkelman have published "Trespassory Art," in volume 43 of the University of Michigan Journal of Reform (2010). Here is the abstract.

The history of art is replete with examples of artists who have broken from existing conventions and genres, redefining the meaning of art and its function in society. Our interest is in emerging forms of art that trespass - occupy space, place, and time as part of their aesthetic identity. These new forms of art, which we call trespassory art, are creatures of a movement that seeks to appropriate cultural norms and cultural signals, reinterpreting them to create new meaning. Marcel DuChamp produced such a result when, in the early twentieth century, he took a urinal, signed his name to it, titled it Fountain, and called it art.

Whether they employ 21st century technologies, such as lasers, or painting, sculpture and mosaic, music, theatre, or merely the human body, these new artists share one thing in common. Integral to their art is the physical invasion of space, the trespass, often challenging our conventional ideas of location, time, ownership, and artistic expression. Their art requires not only borrowing the intellectual assets of others, but their physical assets. This is trespassory art - art that redefines and reinterprets space - art that gives new meaning to a park bench, to a billboard, to a wall, to space itself.

Our purpose is to propose a modified regime in the law of trespass to make room for the many new forms of art with which we are concerned - art that is locationally dependent or site specific. We begin by briefly describing and characterizing these often-new artistic forms. This provides a jumping off point for addressing the basic question this article seeks to address - should the law accommodate these new types of art, and if so, to what degree? We first turn to the law of trespass, with particular focus on real property, both public and private, but also with an eye to personal and intellectual property. We conclude that adjusting trespass remedies for artistic trespass through a set of common law privileges would better balance the competing interests of owners and artists than do current trespass rules. We then turn to a set of constitutional issues and conclude that our common law proposal is consistent with, and in some ways perhaps required by, the First Amendment. Finally, we summarize our proposal and then revisit the value of trespassory art as art in our creative culture.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Textbook Cover Images and Law

Sarah Beresford, University of Lancaster, has published Judging a Book by its Cover The Deployment (and) Unsettling of Familial Images on Family Law Textbook Covers , forthcoming in the Griffith Law Review. Here is the abstract.

An individual's legal identity can be constituted by a multitude of often-complex notions, and is not necessarily of their own construction. Legal discourse has a significant role to play in the construction of an individual's legal identity and can apply to gender identity as much as any other. This construction can occur not just through what is written or said, but also by and through the image(s) of law. The image presented to the viewer is prescriptive in both its nature and operation. This paper deliberately chooses a medium which is often omitted from analysis - the front cover of an undergraduate textbook - and offers a 'reading' of some of the images that are selected to adorn certain text family law textbooks. It argues that the cover can be read as visual rhetoric as powerful and as constitutive of legal identity as the written words within the book. If left unchallenged, law's cultural prejudices are often shielded from critical examination, leaving the operation of 'power' and 'truth' within discourse to continue uncritiqued and unquestioned.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Art Vandalism

M. J. Williams has published Framing Art Vandalism: A Proposal to Address Violence Against Art in volume 74 of the Brooklyn Law Review (2009). Here is the abstract.

The first law journal treatment of art vandalism, this Note considers intentional attacks on art works, primarily in museums and public galleries, and how existing laws fail to address much less control the crime. In light of the near absence of legal analysis of the issue, the Note aims to spark more thought and study about an art crime that, while rare, can lead to devastating and, too often, permanent loss. To serve as a resource, the note also includes an appendix of reported instances of art vandalism in public institutions from 1977 to 2007.

En Garde! Van Gogh, Gauguin, and That Missing Ear

Did Van Gogh really slice off his ear? More than 120 years later, a new book claims to set the record straight, and inform us that the famous earlessness was really the result of battery inflicted by fellow artist Paul Gauguin, a noted swordsman. Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans set forth their theory in a new tome called In Van Gogh's Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence,
Read more here and here.

Publication information: Kaufmann, Hans, and Rita Wildegans, Van Goghs Ohr: Paul Gauguin und der Pakt des Schweigens (Osburg Verlag, 2008).

Law and Art

Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Law, has published "Property and Progress: Antebellum Landscape Art and Property Law." Here is the abstract.

Landscape art in the antebellum era (the period before the American Civil War, 1861-1865), often depicts the role of humans on the landscape. Humans appear as hunters, settlers, and travelers and human structures appear as well, from rude paths, cabins, mills, bridges, and canals to railroads and telegraph wires. Those images parallel cases, treatises, orations, essays, and fictional literature that discuss property's role in fostering economic and moral development. The images also parallel developments in property doctrine, particularly related to adverse possession, mistaken improvers, nuisance, and eminent domain.

Some of the conflicts in property rights that gripped antebellum thought also appear in paintings, including ambivalence about progress, concern over development of land, and fear of the excesses of commerce. The concerns about wealth, as well as the concerns about the lack of control through law, appear at various points. Other paintings celebrate intellectual, moral, technological, and economic progress. The paintings thus remind us of how antebellum Americans understood property, as they struggled with the changes in the role of property from protection of individual autonomy of the eighteenth century to the promotion of economic growth in the nineteenth century.

Download the paper from SSRN here.
Here's a related post by Professor Brophy.

Law and Popular Culture

From the New York Times's Brent Staples, a survey of "The Ape in American Bigotry, From Thomas Jefferson to 2009." Provocative reading in the wake of the controversy over the publication of that cartoon in the New York Post.

The Visual, French History, and Virtual Memory

Daniel Maxwell Sussner has published "Projections: The visual structure of French history," a dissertation in partial completion of the requirements for the PhD at Harvard University. Here is the abstract.

How do visual media structure historical thinking? In the context of collective memory, this essay argues that engraving, the daguerreotype and film organize how historians make sense of the past. Specifically, analogizing from the digital technique of "virtual memory," the simulation of contiguous accessible digital memory available to efficiently manage computer programs, this essay shifts direction away from studies employing visual material to illustrate arguments or demonstrate historical meaning. Instead, virtual memory explains how visual media (re)organize memory, staging a collective dreaming of the past. "History," Tocqueville reminds us, "indeed, is like a picture gallery in which there are few originals and many copies."

Three hypotheses underscore this applied mechanics of thinking visually: (1) visual media displace aspects of human memory; (2) copyright law politically empowers visual media; and (3) visual media virtualize collective memory. Each chapter advances a case study elaborating a visual medium's organization of collective memory in techniques specific to its mode of reproduction Chapter One, in detailing the decline of the ancíen regime, explains the emergence of a public visual space for engraving as the collective mediation of political representation. Chapters Two, Three and Four consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution together, not simply in terms of direct or retrospective impact, but as the fruition of commemorative practices indelibly linked to Rousseau's obsession with the communication of visual memory. Rousseau's "memory project" engaging the engraving medium to organize key moments of his complete works, provided readers with the mnemonic tools to virtualize Rousseau's collective memory. Chapter Five frames the emergence of the daguerreotype, emphasizing the transition from engraving to new historical modes of virtual memory. The focus here will be a now-forgotten trial involving French plagiarisms of Edgar Allen Poe. Finally. Chapter Six explores the medium of film. From the internal struggle between content and medium to the ineluctable complicity between moviegoers and historians in ascribing objectivity to fictional films about the past, cinema has much to teach us. In particular. Alain Resnais changes the rules of the game: if earlier visual media structure collective memory, the point of film is to smash it.

His advisor is Patrice Higonnet.

Update: For those interested in obtaining dissertations, they are generally available from University Microfilms International.