Food Wars

Ernesto Hernandez Lopez, Chapman University School of Law, has published LA’s Taco Truck War: How Law Cooks Food Culture Contests as Chapman University Law Research Paper No. 10-29. Here is the abstract.

This paper examines the Los Angeles “Taco Truck War” (2008-9), when the city of Los Angeles and LA county used parking regulations to restrict “loncheros,” i.e. “taco trucks.” It describes the legal doctrine used by courts to invalidate these local restrictions. The California Vehicle code makes local food truck regulations illegal. Decades of court decisions affirm this. The paper sheds light, legal and cultural, on food truck debates, which will surely expand nationwide. It examines: the cultural and business arguments for food truck regulations; food’s role in migrant, community, and national identities; Mexican food’s influence in California culture; and recent trends in food trucks such as Koggi BBQ.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

The Nuremberg Trials in Historical and Cultural Context

Christiane Wilke, Carleton University, Department of Law, has published Reconsecrating the Temple of Justice: Invocations of Civilization and Humanity in the Nuremberg Justice Case, at 24 Canadian Journal of Law and Society 181 (2009). Here is the abstract.

The Nuremberg Trials provide the foundation for contemporary international criminal law. Yet these trials are rarely explored in their broader ideational and social context. This article examines the context and role of the concept of “civilization” as used in U.S. v Altstoetter, the 1947 trial of Nazi judges and judicial administrators at Nuremberg. I place the reference to civilization in Altstoetter within a tradition of international law that understood law and civilization as co-constitutive. The Altstoetter Court conceptualized Germany as an essentially civilized country that lapsed into barbaric and therefore lawless violence. This account helped the Court to establish the blameworthiness of the defendants’ conduct, blame the Nazi violence on lawlessness, and establish its own authority.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Symposium On Copyright In Culture

The University of Maryland is hosting UMUC’s Center for Intellectual Property to Host 2010 Symposium on Sustaining Culture in Copyright

WHAT: University of Maryland University College’s (UMUC) Center for Intellectual Property (CIP) will host a three-day workshop, June 22–24, 2010, entitled, “Sustaining Culture in Copyright.” With an influx of new videos, music and textual works, the 2010 symposium will explore better ways to balance the needs of cultural innovation with the rights of owners of creative works.

Peter Jaszi, professor of law, Washington College of Law, American University; and William Patry, senior copyright counsel, Google, Inc., will serve as keynote speakers. Other panel discussions will cover a variety of topics related to copyright, including social media, P2P filesharing, broadband and net neutrality.

For a full list of sessions, topics and speakers, visit www.umuc.edu/cip2010

UMUC’s CIP provides education, research and resources for the higher education community on copyright, academic integrity, and the emerging digital environment.

WHEN: Tuesday, June 22–Thursday, June 24, 2010

WHERE: Walter E. Washington Convention Center
801 Mount Vernon Place, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20001

REGISTRATION: To register, visit www.umuc.edu/cip2010 or call 240-684-2803

COST:
Symposium Registration: (Early Rate) $240 (Member) / $300 (Non-member)
Daily Rate: $200 (Member) / $250 (Non-member)
Pre-Symposium Seminars:
(Choice of one, June 22) $100 (Member) / $135 (Non-member)
About University of Maryland University College
University of Maryland University College, headquartered in Adelphi, Maryland, is the largest public university in the United States, serving 90,000 students and offering 130 undergraduate and graduate programs online and on-site. In addition, UMUC is one of the largest public providers of online higher education in the nation. UMUC boasts a 60-year history of service to the military and currently enrolls an estimated 50,000 military service members, veterans, and their family members each year. The university offers face-to-face instruction at 21 locations throughout Maryland and educational services in 27 countries and more than 150 locations worldwide, including the Middle East. UMUC is accredited by the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools and is a constituent institution of the University System of Maryland, an agency of the State of Maryland.

Summer School--Cultural Study of the Law

*Synergies: Law, Language and Culture*
The Second International Osnabrueck Graduate Summer School on the Cultural Study of the Law August 4th-August 18th http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/lawandculture

*Invitation*

The Second International Summer School on the Cultural Study of the Law will be held from this August 4th to August 18th in Osnabrueck, Germany.
Hosted by the Institute of English and American Studies, in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen, the Birkbeck School of Law at the University of London, York University, Toronto, and the European Legal Studies Institute at the University of Osnabrueck, the summer school seeks to bring together graduate students from around the world to promote and examine the interdisciplinary study and research of law and culture.

Graduate students pursuing a PhD in the humanities and advanced students of the law who are interested in the interdependence and interaction between law and culture are invited to apply. During the two week program, students will partake in a unique experience of scholarly collaboration and exchange through workshops, public lectures, panel discussions, excursions and a final symposium. Participating faculty in this year's summer school include:

*Rosemary J. Coombe (York University, Toronto) *Helle Porsdam (University of Copenhagen) *Fiona Macmillan (Birkbeck School of Law, University of London)

with more faculty to be announced in the upcoming weeks.

The School will offer a total of four workshops for 20-25 international graduate students over a two-week period. The first workshop will be concerned with basic theories, concepts and perspectives within the emerging field of cultural legal studies, focusing specifically on the range and potential of interdisciplinary studies and approaches. The remaining three workshops will focus on key areas of critical inquiry that have been central to the dynamic development of the field and are of particular importance within an European context:

-->The relation between human rights and cultural rights

-->Historical development and current debates about culture as heritage,
property and as a resource and its legal definition and regulation (including concepts like copyright, intellectual property and authorship)

-->The cultural presence and representation of the law and the possible
emergence of a transnational legal culture


*Participant Eligibility*

Doctoral candidates in literature, the law, the arts, the humanities, and the related social sciences are invited to apply, as are advanced students pursuing a J.D. or its equivalent (such as the L.L.B). Young scholars or junior faculty members who have received a Ph.D. or corresponding degree in the last five years are also eligible. There are openings for approximately 25 students to participate in the summer school.

*Application Process*

Applicants should complete:

-->An application form, indicating preferred workshop that can be found
at: http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/lawandculture/admission/
-->A statement of purpose no more than two pages long, describing
-->current
scholarly interests, previous research, and plans for how the Summer School would specifically further these interests and plans.

-->An up-to-date curriculum vitae.

Students interested in taking part in the Summer School should submit their applications no later than April 30, 2010. Detailed information about the school, the workshops, international faculty, admission and fees can be found at:

http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/lawandculture

*Questions*

Questions about the Osnabrueck Summer School on the Cultural Study of the Law may be directed to any of the Summer School Coordinators:

*Devin Zuber, Coordinator for the Humanities, Faculty Contact and Institutional Cooperation

*Matt Lemieux, Coordinator for Legal Studies

*Nadja Hekal, Assistant Coordinator

Symposium On Food, Culture, and the Law

From Penelope Pether, Villanova University School of Law, an announcement of a symposium on "Food, Culture and the Law," on February 26, sponsored by the University of Iowa and to be held at the Old Capitol Senate Chamber.

Singing About Species

Charles Darwin has his own minstrel. The Scientist's Victoria Stern writes about Philadelphia entertainer Brett Keyser, who sings about Mr. Darwin's accomplishments, both on the street and in a one-man show called "Darwinii: The Comeuppance of Man." Read more here (subscription; free).

Meanwhile, former child star and current creation science activist Kirk Cameron is engaged in a new project: handing out copies of The Origin of Species on college campuses, but he and his colleagues don't exactly want university students to come to Darwin. These copies of Mr. Darwin's seminal work have a new introduction that seeks to show why it's flawed. According to recent media reports,

The 50 page introduction that Cameron helped pen includes passages that link Darwins work with Nazi eugenics and overall mysogyny.

"You can see where [Hitler] clearly takes Darwin's ideas to some of their logical conclusions and compares certain races of people to lower evolutionary life forms," Cameron told People. "If you take Darwin's theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify all number of very horrendous things.

But Mr. Cameron may not be getting through. Said one student, "I don't think they are accomplishing what they set out to do. All these people are getting a free 'Origin of Species.' If they read the book they'll see through (the introduction)...". Read more here in a Christian Science Monitor article.

Interracial Relationships

Jason Gillmer, Texas Wesleyan University School of Law, has published "Telling Stories of Love, Sex, and Race." Here is the abstract.

The history of interracial sex is often told from the perspective of either legislatures or lynch mobs. The approach has a certain appeal; it allows us to track the ideological currents of the dominant society, as they ebb and flow from passive acceptance of the practice to outright hostility. But the approach also minimizes the role of the participants, routinely casting them as unimportant players in the overall history of sex and race in this country. In this book chapter, I look at the subject of interracial intimacy from the perspective of the people involved: one story involves a white man and black woman from slavery times, and the other involves a black man and white woman from the turn of the century. The purpose is to add some depth and detail to our understanding of some of these relationships, in the process upending some of our basic assumptions about what they might have been like. Indeed, by shining a light on individual cases, we begin to appreciate both the contradictions and complexities of interracial unions, breathing life into a portion of history too often left untold.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Intellectual Property and the Meaning of Culture

Katya Assaf III has published "The Dilution of Culture and the Law of Trademarks" in volume 49 of IDEA: The Journal of Law and Technology (2008). Here is the abstract.

The cultural meaning of a trademark is built up by creating associative links between the mark and various positive cultural signs such as freedom, youth and happiness. This article argues that these links are reciprocal. That is, while the trademark begins to carry some of the meaning of the cultural signs it has been linked to, these cultural signs also absorb some of the meaning of the mark. This article develops a semiotic model, which helps to analyze the flow of meaning from non-commercial cultural signs into trademarks and from trademarks into other contexts. It argues that, by protecting the cultural meaning of trademarks, the legal system encourages the commercialization of culture and reinforces the dominance of consumer culture in our society.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Gender and Stereotypes in Literature

Asha S. [sic], MEASS College, has published Reading Lolita in Tehran: Rehashing Orientalist Stereotypes, at 4 The Icfai University Journal of English Studies 47(March 2009). Here is the abstract.

Popular narratives produced from the west, particularly since 9/11, perpetuate negative stereotypes about Middle Eastern Muslim women. Native writers settled in the west also dish out heart-rending tales of women's oppression in fundamentalist Islamic societies, targeting a western audience long fed on tales of Islam's intolerance towards women. These 'New Orientalist' narratives, portraying Muslim women as hapless victims of Islamic fundamentalism, only serve to reinforce the stereotypes entrenched in popular western imagination. With Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran as a case in point, this paper seeks to examine how new orientalist narratives misrepresent the position of women in Islamic societies. The paper concludes that bestsellers, produced by native as well as western writers and touted as authentic representations of life in the Middle East, mostly draw a black and white distinction between western and Middle Eastern societies, depict violence and discrimination against women as characteristic of Islamic culture, and under-represent indigenous struggles for women's rights, thereby covertly suggesting that western mediation is inevitable in order to improve the condition of women in Middle Eastern societies.

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.

Summer Study in Osnabrück

From Professor Matt LeMieux, University of Osnabrück, comes news of this summer school program:

Convergences: Law, Language and Culture
First International Osnabrück Summer School on the Cultural Study of the Law


Invitation

The inaugural International Summer School on the Cultural Study of the Law will be held from August 2nd to August 16th in Osnabrück, Germany. Hosted by the Institute of English and American Studies, in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen, the University of Toronto, and the European Legal Studies Institute at Osnabrück University, the summer school seeks to bring together graduate students from around the world to promote and examine the interdisciplinary study and research of law and culture.

Graduate students pursuing a PhD in the humanities and advanced students of the law who are interested in the interdependence and interaction between law and culture are invited to apply. During the two week program, students will partake in a unique experience of scholarly collaboration and exchange through workshops, public lectures, panel discussions, excursions and a final symposium.

The Summer School will offer four workshops clustered into two broad areas of study. The first cluster of workshops addresses questions of cultural representation, literary aesthetics, and linguistic translation, areas in which interdisciplinary approaches to studying the law have been at the forefront of scholarly discourse over the last three decades. The second group, “Law and Culture: Convergence and Conflict,” explores related issues of human rights, property, and copyright that have gained increasing importance with the rise of globalization.

The 2009 Osnabrück Summer School is meant to be the first of a series of collaborative efforts to establish an international network of younger and established scholars for the interdisciplinary study of law and culture. Students interested in taking part in the Summer School should submit applications no later than May 15, 2009.

Participant Eligibility

Doctoral candidates in literature, the law, the arts, the humanities, and the related social sciences are invited to apply, as are advanced students pursuing a J.D. or its equivalent (such as the L.L.B). Young scholars or junior faculty members who have received a Ph.D. or corresponding degree in the last five years are also eligible. There are openings for approximately 30 students to participate in the summer school.

Application Process

Applicants should complete:

- An application form, indicating preferred workshop cluster, that can be found at: http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/lawandculture/application/
- A statement of purpose no more than two pages long, describing current scholarly interests, previous research, and plans for how the Summer School would specifically further these interests and plans.
- An up-to-date curriculum vitae.

Detailed information about the school, the workshops, international faculty, admission and fees can be found at:

www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/lawandculture

Questions

Questions about the First Osnabrück Summer School on the Cultural Study of the Law may be directed to either one of the Summer School Coordinators:

Devin Zuber, Coordinator for the Humanities, Faculty Contact and Institutional Cooperation.

Matt Lemieux, Coordinator for Legal Studies.

Law, Language and Culture Summer School
Institute for English and American Studies (IfAA)
University of Osnabrück
Neuer Graben 40
49069 Osnabrück / Germany.

lawandculture@uos.de

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.

Lincoln and Popular Culture

The American Bar Association is presenting a program on Lincoln in pop culture: The Lincoln Myth: How Pop Culture Defines America's Great Lawyer/President on February 24. Here's more. David Hundley, of Cinema Mishmash, and I are speaking. Henry White, Executive Director of the ABA is introducing the program, and Edward Adams, editor of the ABA Journal is moderating the program.

Law, Literature, and Political Thought

P. G. Monateri, University of Torino School of Law, has published "Sovereign Ambiguity - From Hamlet to Benjamin via Eliot and Schmitt." Here is the abstract.

The Author examines how Romantic Ambiguity lies at the heart of the legal notion of Sovereignty, applying a law and literature approach to notions developed by Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Moving from a sophisticated analysis of literary texts, the inquiry intends to unveil the subtle strategies that lay behind the construction of Modernity and of its representational canon. The research perspective intentionally discloses the inherent dialectic between aesthetics and law. On this ground this paper rethinks the theory of the 'state of exception' as a pivotal concept for a deep understanding of Law and Politics (and their proper untraced boundaries), offering an alternative interpretation with respect to Giorgio Agamben's thought. The Author's lecture comes to rewrite even the centrality of representation as a fundamental notion both in literary and in political terms.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Hip Hop, Criminal Law, and Legal Critique

Nick J. Sciullo has published "Conversations with the Law: Irony, Hyperbole and Identity Politics or Sake Pase? Wyclef Jean, Shottas, and Haitian Jack - A Hip-Hop Creole Fusion of Rhetorical Resistance to the Law," in volume 34 of Oklahoma City University Law Review (2009). Here is the abstract.

This article sets out to prove why the law must be investigated in an interdisciplinary fashion which invites an intersection between law, popular culture, and identity politics. First, this article describes how Wyclef Jean, a hip-hop artist, is an active voice of legal criticism and why his criticism is important to a larger discussion of the law. Second, this paper develops a conception of Creole/Haitian legal studies and its importance as an analytical lens through which to perceive the law and legal institutions. Third, this piece formulates a rhetorical criticism of the law through the rhetorical terrain of Wyclef's hip-hop music and cultural aesthetic to critique criminal law and legal institutions. The fusion of hip-hop, Haitian/Creole cultural identity, and rhetorical criticism, opens a new area for legal analysis and understanding. This article concludes by suggesting that rhetorical criticism, hip-hop, and other rhetorical acts (among them irony and hyperbole) provide new terrain from which to understand the law, and further, that the Haitian/Creole cultural identity is an important and underrepresented facet of legal culture, which further compliments current critical race theory.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Some Gift Suggestions For the Non-Denominational Holidays

Don't know what to give for the holidays? Pierre Bayard's Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles, newly translated into English by Charlotte Mandell, is now available. In this "revisionist view" of the classic Conan Doyle novel, French critic argues that the iconic detective didn't know what he was doing half the time. Monsieur Bayard is the author of How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read, and Who Killed Roger Ackroyd: The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery.

Now available on DVD: Perry Mason: Season 3, volume 2; The Sopranos: The Complete Series; volume 1 of cult hit Pushing Daises, and both seasons of a little known series Dead Like Me, which came and went quickly, but starred Mandy Patinkin, who heads up a group of "reapers" in charge of leading the recently dead across the line that separates the living from those who have departed this life. I highly recommend Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies, which has a similar theme (crossing the line between life and death), for their wit and thoughtful consideration of the issues that touch us all. Pushing Daisies is, however, more explicitly law-related, since it's about solving crime.

The Unemployed Philosopher's Guild offers a number of interesting and amusing items, including a disappearing civil liberties mug (pour in hot liquid and watch parts of the Bill of Rights vanish) and a Democratic Dream mug (same instructions; all of the U.S. turns a Democratic blue). The site also offers religious items, but be warned--you'll need to bring your sense of humor with you.

James Boyd White On the Links Among Law, Thought, and Language

James Boyd White, University of Michigan Law School, has published "Establishing Relations Between Law and Other Forms of Thought and Language," 1 Erasmus Law Review (2008). Here is the abstract.

The law does not, and could not, exist in an intellectual or linguistic vacuum. No one believes that the law is or should be impervious to other languages, other bodies of knowledge. In this sense the argument about the 'autonomy' of law is an empty one: law cannot be, should not be, perfectly autonomous, unconnected with any other system of thought and expression; yet it plainly has it own identity as a discourse, it own intellectual and linguistic habits, which it is our task as lawyers to understand and develop. It follows that an essential topic of legal thought is the proper relation between law and other forms of thought and expression - a topic that is important, difficult and full of interest. In this paper, Professor White compares three ways in which the law is related to other fields: translation (as in the use of expert testimony), disciplinary imperialism (as in law and economics), and comparison of modes of thought and expression (as in law and literature).

Download the article from SSRN here.

A Tragic Murder, Ten Years Later

The New York Times has this feature article about The Laramie Project, a docuplay about the Matthew Shepard murder, which took place ten years ago.