The Faculty Lounge

Awards Season is Approaching ....

And speaking of our friend Kelly Anders and her Oscar Trivia prowess (and congrats on the book, Kelly!) it would be wrong of me to let the new year creep in without alerting everyone to the need to spend whatever is left of the break catching up on those Oscar-buzz-worthy films.  The field is wide open this year according to Variety with no early indications of a front-runner in any of the major categories.

I can attest to the strong acting performances and quirky script in Young Adult, but I can't say I've seen too many of the other films being talked about.

Given that there's so little time and so many potential contenders, which films do Lounge readers think we should see in the remaining couple of months before the awards hit us?

Lawyering Skills: From "A" To "Z"

Creighton law prof Kelly Anders (pictured) has been a Lounge visitor on multiple occasions, including stints as one of our "Oscar trivia experts" in recent years.  Next month, Carolina Academic Press will publish Kelly's new book, Advocacy to Zealousness: Learning Lawyering Skills from Classic Films.  Details are available here.  A review of the table of contents reveals that Kelly builds her textual discussion of 26 different lawyering skills (one for each letter of the alphabet [including the always challenging "q" and "x"!]) around 26 different films, including such law-related favorites as To Kill a Mockingbird and 12 Angry Men, and others that are completely new to me, such as Pinky and Salesman.

Sounds like a book that should certainly interest those who teach a course in lawyering skills, Law and Film, or Law and Culture.  And if you don't?  A love of film should be hook enough!

Kudos, Kelly!

Rembrandt in America

For those of you who'll be in the triangle between now and mid January, I recommend the North Carolina Museum of Art's exhibit, "Rembrandt in America."  The exhibit focuses on Rembrandts collected in the United States and the theme that runs through this is what should be considered a Rembrandt?  It builds around the attributions made by the NC Museum of Art's first director, who was (it seems) extremely generous in attributions of paintings to Rembrandt.  And at several points they invite viewers to make their own judgments about attribution.  It's a very accessible exhibit and well worth the $18 admission -- or you might just want to go ahead and purchase a membership for $40, which gets you one admission ticket.

I'd hoped that they might have The Mill there, but perhaps National Gallery wouldn't loan it -- though there are several portraits from the National Gallery, as well as museums in Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis and some from private collections.  Among my favorites were two portraits of people with books -- Old Woman with a Book and Portrait of a Man Reading, from the Clark Institute -- and A Scholar by Candlelight, from a private collection in Milwaukee.  The historian of the book part of my personality causes me to take issue with the gallery's discussion of "Portrait of a Man Reading."  It says something along the lines of this shows the contemplative life. While books are, obviously, often associated with contemplation, they're also quite often -- especially law books -- also associated with activity.  As legal historians increasingly talk of law as a form of technology (Chris Tomlins, for instance, refers to law as one of the tools of colonization in Bound for Freedom -- and to go down a number of steps in sophistication, Stephen Davis and I talk of trusts as a form of technology in antebellum Alabama), we may also think of books as part of that technolgy.  It is quite possible that the Portrait of a Man Reading depicts a man using a book to plan some activity.  (I have that sense particularly because he has a finger holding a page in another part of the book; it seems very much that this reader is active.)

For those of you who won't have the chance to see the exhibit, here's a link to a very nice half hour program on the exhibit that was produced by UNC-TV.  The gallery guide is here.

Wise Words

Recently, I’ve blogged about good (and bad) writing, here and here.  In a bit of serendipity, I came across yesterday two happily short essays, both written by law professors who are masterful writers with formal training in literature. 

One essay is by Bill Miller at Michigan, the other by Stanley Fish at FIU, and both dwell on the meaning of old age.  As he does in his addictive books, Miller writes with brio and a wit that is generous and droll.  Fish, surely one of the eminent public intellectuals of his time, reflects on his life with candor, humility and, something that I didn’t naturally expect from a law professor, a moving and genuine affect. 

Miller and Fish hint that they are near the end; as someone who, by turns, adores and covets their talent for the craft of writing, I hope not.   

Big Words

Jacqui’s post got me thinking about prose, and especially, the meaning of good prose; I had written about that before. 

In Jacqui’s post, Stephen King was quoted as saying that a simple word, with its purported directness and lucidity, is usually better than a longer one, with its clumsy pretentiousness. 

There’s a happily intuitive appeal about King’s view.  I mean, do I really want the 2L students in my First Amendment seminar, the night before their papers are due, to raid Roget’s Thesaurus, looking desperately for pseudo-scholarly substitutes for “significant” and “odious,” in some vain endeavor to gravy over an otherwise substantively mediocre paper? 

But should King’s dictum apply for everyone?  Take the satirist David Lodge or, for that matter, Christopher Hitchens, with their luscious grammar and deft—no, masterly—grasp of English.  (Lodge and Hitchens, both British,. . . that wasn’t intentional, by the way,. . . please, no accusations of America-bashing.)

I find their vocabulary, multisyallbic and challenging, to be gorgeous and illuminating, the sort of stuff that I wish I had written, not just for their substance, but their fabulous style.    

 

 

 

Whichbook

I usually have a stack of "fun" reading on my night stand.  Currently, the stack includes The Piano Shop on the Left Bank (a re-read actually of a quirky book about living in Paris),  and Daniel Silva's new book Portrait of a Spy (the latest in the Gabriel Allon series).  

I often collect recommendations from colleagues, and a friend recently told me about a book recommendation website:  Whichbook.    You can select up to four different qualities in the book (happy v. sad, funny v. serious, easy v. demanding, etc.)   The site then gives you recommendations, which include the title, an excerpt from the book and "similar" books.   The Whichbook site has helped me move outside my reading comfort zone with some unexpected recommendations.   Give it a try!

Twitter Libel

TMZ reports that New Edition member Johnny Gill is facing a lawsuit (presumably for libel) based on what he said in a tweet. Being sued for what you say on Twitter is nothing new.  As we've covered at TortsProfs, Twitter libel suits are fairly common these days.  Kim Kardashian, for example, was sued based on a tweet. But Johnny Gill appears to think that 140 characters or less provides a license to say anything.  He reportedly told TMZ that people shouldn't be allowed to sue based on a tweet because "the courtrooms would be filled with a bunch of Twitter people complaining about things people say every day."

His remark caused me to think about electronic communication generally.   What is it about electronic communciation (tweets, emails, texts) that causes us to say things we otherwise would not say orally or in a non-electronic writing?  It could be the mere speed of the communication.  Maybe we just speak too soon without any reflection time.  But is it something more than just speed?

Warner Collection at the University of Pennsylvania

From today through November 6, the Arthur Ross gallery at the University of Pennsylvania's Furness Building, will be displaying "An American Odyssey: The Warner Collection of American Art."  I've been talking of late about the dismantling of the extraordinary collection that Jack Warner assembled over a lifetime of collecting -- including the sale of Asher Durand's important antebellum landscape Progress.  This was particularly shocking news to me, because Progress occupies an important place in my work on pre-Civil War legal thought.  

The "American Odyssey" exhibit has work from Mr. Warner's personal collection, which was not liable to sale, including Thomas Cole's Catskill Mountain House.  I have not written much, if anything about it here, but it's a wonderful landscape of a hotel in the middle of the Catskills.  Quite an odd juxta-position of a Greek Revival Structure in the mountains.  The hotel itself is worth some commentary -- decades later (in the mid-twentieth century) it was in dis-repair and it was intentionally burned in 1983, so says wikipedia.

I hope to take the exhibit in sometime this fall when I'm in Philadelphia.  It will be wonderful to see some old friends from Tuscaloosa in a setting that once meant so much to me, on Penn's campus. 

The image is of the Furness Building.

 

Where Academic Writing Could (Sadly) End Up

With gratitude to my colleague (and occasional Faculty Lounge guest blogger), Cassandra Robertson, for drawing this to my attention.  Here's a review of an academic book on photography that Cassandra and I both felt may tell us something about the perils of how some of us write (or feel that we should write) law review articles.  See what you think!

Going Ape Over Monkey Movies

In honor of today's opening of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (what's not to love - intelligent apes, dangerous biotech research etc?), I invite readers to comment on their favorite monkey movies over the years.

Was it in Madagascar the the monkeys were discussing when they should "fling poo" in cultured British accents?

And if anyone can explain all the time and space paradoxes in previous Planet of the Apes movies, I'd be most grateful.  Don't they start in the future and end in the past?

 

Last Minute Summer Reading

If anyone is trying to fit in some summer reading in a last desperate bid to convince themselves that the fall semester is not imminently upon us, I would recommend two books I read recently. 

The first is Before I Go to Sleep which is a British novel - I think a debut novel from a new writer.  It's a mystery/thriller about a woman who has amnesia and can only remember the day she is living and then forgets and starts anew the next day.  She has to attempt to solve the mysteries of her past life and how she got to where she is without being able to remember.  It's kind of derivative, but a definitely new and gripping take on an existing theme.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second recommendation is Split which is also a debut novel by a new young writer.  This deals with the question of what happens to a teenage boy who escapes an abusive home.  It sounds like a downer but it's told with humor, sincerity, and warmth from the perspective of the teenager who runs away to seek his older brother who escaped from the home some years earlier.  I found it beautifully written and very touching.

Two Narratives of Courage

One of the corollaries of any study of manliness is courage, the supremely male virtue.  But if courage forms the center of male virtue, do we know what courage is?  In a work in progress, I’m interested in juxtaposing two narratives of courage, those proffered by judges to underwrite their opinions and those ushered by combat soldiers to make sense of what they experienced.  I know the below examples, not at all the product of random sampling, hardly begin to scratch the surface; perhaps, though, they’re food for thought. 

 Three Judges on Courage

 “Those who won our independence believed. . . .courage to be the secret of liberty. . . .”--Justice Brandeis, Whitney v. California (1927). 

“. . . the exercise of First Amendment rights often requires an act of courage,. . . .” --Judge Ramirez, Keene v. Meese (1985).  

“To justify a homicide the fears of the slayer must be those of a reasonable man, one reasonably courageous, reasonably self-possessed, and not those of a coward.” --Judge Louis L. Brown, Wheeler v. State (1934). 

Three Soldiers on Courage

“It is hard to know what bravery is.”--Tim O’Brien, Vietnam War combat veteran.

“It was some months and only a few more bullets and shells later that I knew my courage for what it was—a reaction to the shame I felt at being afraid,. . . .”--Robert Crisp, World War II veteran, recipient of Britain’s Distinguished Service Order and Military Cross.

“I understand desertion.  A man distraught determines that the last act of his life shall at least be one of his own volition; and who can say that what is commonly regarded as the limit of cowardice is not then heroic?”--Max Plowman, World War I combat veteran.

Man up!........Man up?

Thanks to Dan for letting me guest blog.  Alas, I immediately repay his kindness by exploiting this opportunity to post on something bleakly provincial to my own scholarly preoccupations:  manliness.  Specifically, manliness in the context of law and literature.  I know, I know.  Here we are, in the debt crisis, facing the impending end of Western civilization, and I want to blog about law & literature. . .regarding. . . “manliness.” (isn’t this the shameless epitome of the self-indulgent academic?) 

But so much of the debt crisis is suffused with the idiom of manliness, isn’t it?  Liberals cry that Obama needs to “man up” and confront the Tea Party while Boehner, even for a dude who doesn’t mind having a good ole’ public cry now and then, once committed, can’t stand down from his manly posture without embarrassment. 

But this post isn’t me expounding my views on manliness (ummmm, you can find that here, incidentally).  It’s rather me asking for your help.  I’m trying to put together an annotated bibliography, provisionally titled, “Manliness:  A Law and Literature Perspective.”  So, for example, I would include—would have to include—Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.  Talk about manliness, it has every aspect of it:  the patriarch, the reckless man-child, the avuncular bully, the callow son trying to prove his manhood, the faltering wimp, you name it.  And all of it takes place in the context of law.  Guys trying to violate it, bribe it, evade it, enforce it.  Much of the law, then, presents obstacles and opportunities for and extensions and emanations of manliness. 

So, I need your help:  what do you think would be good pieces of literature to include in such a bibliography of manliness in law and literature?    

Campus Architecture

Well, I'm back from an extended research trip, working mostly on the jurisprudence of slavery and freedom at Washington College -- which took me to Richmond for time at the fabulous Library of Virginia.  That's the place where I first read Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp and Cobb's An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery lo' those many years ago, so it occupies a very, very important place in my heart.  And to the library at West Chester University, to get a copy of a cemetery dedication address from 1854, and to the Washington and Lee University special collections for some astonishingly rich archives.  As I said to one of the librarians, I guess that's the kind of detail that's available when your campus isn't burned during the war!  

As the paper comes together I'm going to be talking about a bunch of different things in it -- the switch from Enlightenment to romanticism to empiricism; the switch from anti-slavery to proslavery; the nature of utilitarian reasoning in proslavery thought; the differences between Washington College and VMI.   And maybe even something about the nature of the college's relationship to enslaved people it owned, though my primary interest is the ideas of the slave-holding class.  I know, I know -- I'm interested in the dead, white, slaveholders.

I also want to talk about the Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson cemetery in Lexington at some point soon. It's got a lot of really cool things going on there; it changes style from a typical early 19th century cemetery to a rural cemetery part way through -- which is cool enough to warrant discussion.  But the people who're there are simply extraordinary.  More on that shortly.  

But right now I want to talk about something a little different -- campus architecture.  The different styles of campus buildings is on my mind right now because I've been on so many different campuses in the past couple of weeks and, thus, have a sense of how distinctive the architure is (and how often it's unified).  Two weeks ago I was at Swarthmore and then last  week at VMI; I suppose it's hard to imagine two campuses with more different student bodies.  

One thing I wanted to talk about regarding Swarthmore, which I have visited only a couple of times since I was in college, is their bell tower.  As I was walking up their great lawn, I saw that tower and thought, how un-Quaker like.  That certainly can't be their meeting house!  I suppose that was a concession to the dominant style of middle Atlantic college architecture in the early twentieth century.

Still, even their new buildings are built to fit in with the rest of the nineteenth-century campus.  Take Alice Paul Hall, for instance (the illustration in the upper right of this post).  I started off taking that picture so I can use it when I teach In re Strittmater in trusts and estates this fall.  Then I realized that I wanted it to illustrate how even over decades campus architecture can still remain fairly integrated.

And then there's VMI.  Again a very consistent campus architecture.   (Here's a pretty amusing vignette, by the way.  As I was wandering around the VMI campus last week I had the distinct impression that one of their -- I'm guessing by her age and appearance -- professors looked at me taking a picture of the "Virginia Mourning Her Dead" monument with that look of "here's another neo-Confederate nut coming to worship at the monument to the Confederacy."  Not that different from the look I got when I was in Linn Park in Birmingham back in February.)  

Washington and Lee, of course, also has incredibly unified architecture -- except, I guess, for the law school.  There's probably a pretty interesting story in all that.  

So that leads me to two questions, on which faculty lounge readers will have a great deal of expertise.  First, what schools have the most unified architecture?  And which schools have the least?  I'm guessing that southern schools will, by and large, have the most unified architecture -- Duke, William and Mary, and to a lesser extent the University of Alabama (though conspicuously not UNC and UGA) have quite unified architectural styles on their campuses.

The Best and Worst Fictional Leaders

While catching up on the many TV series I've missed over the years, I stumbled on Commander in Chief, starring Geena Davis as the first female American president.  Having recently succumbed to The West Wing and having always kind of had a soft spot for The American President, I started thinking about which are the best and worst portrayals of political leaders.  I mean, you kind of have to love Bill Pullman in Independence Day talking about not quietly going into the night in the face of alien attack.  And didn't Morgan Freeman try to lead the country out of meteoric disaster in Deep Impact?

And I haven't even started on portraryals of British royalty - Helen Mirren's Oscar Winning turn as Queen Elizabeth is a case in point.  (Although to be fair, this is a fictional account of a real figure unlike the fictional accounts of fictional presidents listed above.)

Who were the best TV or movie presidents, prime ministers, and monarchs in your view?

Comics, Copyright and Estate Taxation

The heirs of Jacky Kirby -- an artist behind figures such as Captain America, the Fantastic Four and X-Men -- are entangled in a legal dispute with Marvel Comics, as the New York Times reports here.  Mr. Kirby's heirs have sought to terminate copyright licenses allegedly granted by Mr. Kirby during his lifetime to Marvel Comics.  Marvel Comics counters that Mr. Kirby produced "works for hire," and that the heirs thus have no rights in the intellectual property behind these massively successful comic characters.  

One blogger has a good summary of the case here.  The full court docket is here.

It does not appear that Marvel paid Mr. Kirby any royalties during his lifetime.  (See here.) But if the court finds that the heirs indeed have the ability to terminate prior copyright licenses, Marvel will need to pony up some serious cash in order to continue using Mr. Kirby's intellectual property.   The heirs might need to turn around and pay a portion of that money to the federal government.  If the Kirby heirs do, in fact, possess termination rights with respect to Mr. Kirby's intellectual property, then the value of those termination rights should have been included in Mr. Kirby's gross estate for estate tax purposes. Even though Mr. Kirby died in 1994, there is no reason to think that the IRS would be prohibited (by a statute of limitations or otherwise) from attempting to collect.  The tax bill could be in the tens of millions.  

For the tax heads among us, Mitchell Gans and I break down the tax analysis here.  

image source: Jack Kirby Museum

Pre-Loaded Audio and Video Players

OK - so I realize I absolutely must spend less time on Amazon and less time trying to find more time to read more books.  But I did find something new on Amazon earlier today and did a little digging.  Apparently, there's a new way of enjoying books and movies via "pre-loaded" digital book and video players.  In other words, you don't buy content and download it to an MP3 device, but rather you buy hardware (a player) pre-loaded with the content you want.  There's a company that sells a whole catalog of audio and video products this way.  But I don't understand the marketing/pricing.  A popular novel costs around $50 to $60 in this format and it's not clear to me whether the device can ever be re-used to play other content or whether you have to buy a new hard copy device for each book (or movie).  If so, this is a pretty expensive pricing model.  Even a hardcover new release book only costs $20 to $30.  So I'm not 100% sure who the market is for these products and whether the manufacturers are pricing themselves out of the market anyway.  With so many models available for listening to and viewing content relatively cheaply and flexibly, it's hard to understand where this one will fit in.

Summer Reading: How to Choose...

Recently, I blogged about the differences between browsing for book selections in bricks and mortar stores versus online.  There's another difference I've noticed about selecting books digitally versus in stores and that is the way physical world recommendations work as compared with digital recommendations.  On Amazon, for example, books are recommended in three ways: (a) the "my recommendations" section of my account; (b) when I look up a title, Amazon also tells me about other books viewed/purchased by people who liked this title; and, (c) the customer reviews section, including the average number of "stars" each book has received from readers.

It's the stars I'm interested in at the moment.  I've noticed that often a book that is recommended to me by a friend, or that gets good reviews in the press actually doesn't get a lot of stars online or vice versa.  This may be a case of TMI, but my own wetware algorithms struggle with how to internally weigh real world reviews against Amazon's star system.  I do take into account how many online reviews there were: for example, a title with five stars may only have 6 reviewers if it's a new work or a work self-published by someone on Kindle.  So my wetware algorithm may discount a high number of stars if there's a low number of reviewers.  Also, I'll read through some of the actual customer reviews online, but this gets unwieldy where there are a lot of reviews, unless everyone seems to be saying pretty much the same thing about the book.

In a world of so many books to read and not enough time (can you see I'm still suffering from writer's block myself???), I need a better internal algorithm!

And in the vein of discussing my own summer reading projects, I would recommend The Memory Keeper's Daughter, although it's perhaps more drawn out than it needs to be, and I'm not sure about The Elegance of the Hedgehog.  I haven't been able to get through it.  Can anyone advise as to whether it's worth persevering?

 

You Can Tell I Have Writer's Block When ...

... I keep blogging about pop culture books and movies.  Obviously, I'm busily and importantly attempting to finish a draft conference paper that is due next month so I'm distracted by just about anything and everything that isn't copyright law.  One of my weekend distractions was the incessant replaying of Star Wars movies on TV over the weekend that my hubby was watching.  I couldn't stop him because it was Father's Day and he deserved a treat.  But even he agreed that one of the worst romantic couples ever put together in movie history was Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen in Star Wars, episodes 2 and 3.  The lack of chemistry between them is truly awe-inspiring, particularly given that they are both very good actors in their own right. 

This got me to thinking about some of the best and worst movie pairings of all time.  I think the best for me will always be Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole in How to Steal a Million.  And while I STILL haven't seen Water for Elephants, I suspect that the pairing of Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson (she's almost old enough to be his mother and actually played his mother in an earlier film) will be amongst the worst.

What are your thoughts on the best and worst movie pairings of all time?

The Movie Wasn't As Good As the Book .... Summer 2011 Edition

Returning to one of my favorite topics, I was thinking about recent movies where "the movie wasn't as good as the book".  There seem to be quite a few of them.  For example, the film version of Water for Elephants received reviews so bad I didn't bother to see it at the theaters, even though I really enjoyed the book.  Then there was I Am Number Four, a young adult sci-fi-oriented adventure story.  The film wasn't terrible, but was pretty ordinary.  And people will probably disagree with me on this one, but I finally saw the film version of Precious, and I have to say that I thought the book was actually better despite the fact that the movie was extremely well made and acted and deservedly nominated for several academy awards last year.  The film just didn't capture the writing style of the book to my mind.  And turning to mindless romantic comedy, Something Borrowed was a cute enough book but again I was talked out of seeing the film by others who told me how bad it was.

There's some forthcoming film adaptations of books that will be interesting to check out in terms of comparisons with the source work.  For example, the final installment of the Harry Potter franchise.  I must admit that Deathy Hallows Part I rivaled the book for me, although it obviously cut out significant parts of the lengthy plot of the book.  And there's the much talked-about and not yet fully cast Hunger Games movies to look forward to.  Then there's the American versions of the Dragon Tattoo books coming up.  Will they be as good as the Swedish versions, which were pretty faithful to the books and probably as good a job at translating those books to the screen as I can imagine.

What books are you looking forward to seeing translated onto the silver screen over the next year or so?  What books do you hope they don't turn into movies?  And if they do turn them into movies, would you prefer that they not be in 3D??