The Faculty Lounge

The Legal Kiss

Just in time for Valentine's Day comes The Legal Kiss, a new book authored by Texas Tech law professor Vickie Sutton.  From the back cover:

     Did you ever think that a kiss was just a kiss?

     Anything that has stirred the emotions as much as the kiss, would almost certainly be something that civil society would demand to be controlled!  Indeed, throughout history from the fateful kiss of betrayal by Judas in the Garden of Gethsemane leading to the most famous trial of human history, to 1019 when a kiss was required by law for the transfer of property, to the ban in 1439 by King Henry VI to avoid passing along the Black Death, to the 1500s when the “kiss of peace” was required for all peace agreements in Spain --- law has tried to harness this force of nature, through prohibiting the kiss or requiring one!  The Legal Kiss is a light-hearted look at the law that has developed throughout time to harness the power of the kiss.

You can find a review here.

Carrots, Strings, and Power: The New York Times on Ruth Grant’s Strings Attached

My fabulous colleague, Ruth Grant’s, new book, Strings Attached, is reviewed in yesterday’s New York Times.  As a bit of background, Ruth is a Professor of Political Science at Duke University, specializing in political theory with a particular interest in early modern philosophy and political ethics. She is the author of John Locke's Liberalism and of Hypocrisy and Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau and the Ethics of Politics. She is also the editor of two collections of essays; Naming Evil, Judging Evil and In Search of Goodness.

But it is her newest book, Strings Attached, that currently has the NY Times’ attention, and mine as well.  In it, Grant frames the ethics of incentives within a broader framework that I find infinitely richer than most that I have come across recently.  Specifically, Grant frames the ethics of incentives within an analysis of power.  In doing so, Grant insists that incentives are more than just a voluntary bargained-for-exchange.  Instead, they are one of the mechanisms employed to get people to do things that they otherwise would not.  As such, they are – like all kinds of power – subject to abuse. 

One of the things that I particularly appreciate about Grant’s analysis is the triad of coercion, persuasion, and incentives that Ruth sets up – all three are exercises of power and all three entail ethical considerations.   All three are also judged under the same standards of legitimacy of purpose, voluntariness, and effect on the character of the parties involved. 

Ruth is quite a bit more skeptical of incentives, and quite a bit more accepting of persuasion, than I am, but her critique of some of the assumptions regarding incentives is important and, for me at least, eye opening.  For example, her historical treatment of the rise of incentives and the insight that incentives are often employed in the context of an authority relationship – adult/child, employer/employee, and government/citizen, for example – is a helpful means of getting a handle on what it is about some incentives that instinctively rub many people the wrong way. 

I am not yet persuaded by Grant’s preference for persuasion versus incentives as a means of facilitating democratic deliberation and decision-making.  Says Grant:

When incentives are employed, there is no need to convince people that collective goals are good or to motivate them to pursue those goals by appeals to rational argument, personal conviction, or intrinsic motivation.  Experts and powerful elites can thus direct institutions and shape people’s choices without the sort of public discussion and consent that ideally characterize democratic processes and decision-making. 

But when we move away from ideal democratic processes to real ones, I am not so sure that the types of persuasion employed by powerful elites or the decision-making processes of those subject to their influence are so benign, or that they fare so well as compared to incentives. 

One last comment on crowding out, which I think is more complex than one would gather from the book and the Times review.  There is a large literature on crowding out, some of which finds support for the crowding out theory and some of which does not.  Moreover, the findings appear to be very sensitive to experimental conditions, such that it is not always clear what factors are driving the experimental outcomes.  Finally, any crowding out effects can sometimes be overcome through other interventions, such as an option to donate any monetary rewards to charity.  In other words, crowding out appears to be a very complicated phenomenon and, in most settings, at least, it would, to my mind, be premature to conclude that we might predict with confidence the outcome of a well-designed incentive structure.

To illustrate, the Times discusses a study, referenced in Strings Attached, in which women offered cash to donate blood were almost 50% less likely to give blood than women who were offered no money.  Male subjects exhibited no such crowding out.  (The NY Times references a “study of British women,” though I believe they mean this study, which is also the one Ruth cites to in the book).  But there is no mention that the study actually measured the willingness of subjects to undergo a health examination, which was a precondition to donate blood, rather than actual blood donations (a test condition that could operate differently on men and women), that the monetary offer was only about US $7, and that the crowding out effect disappeared when subjects were given the option to donate the proceeds to charity.

A more recent NBER working paper by Nicola Lacetera, et. al., Rewarding Altruism? (released after the book was in press, I believe), a natural field experiment involving nearly 100,000 individuals, contradicts these findings.   Lacetera finds a large, positive effect of economic incentives on blood donations, with limited or no crowding out in both the short and long term. They find no gender effects.  All of this is just to say that crowding out appears a complicated phenomenon, and one that we’re still learning about.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that because Grant is a respected political theorist and the book deals with weighty ethical issues it will be dry or abstract.  Grant’s theories and examples are extraordinarily timely and relevant.  The section on IMF loan conditionality caused me to reframe the entire Greek debt crisis debate in terms of coercion, persuasion, and incentives.  And the sections on recruiting medical research subjects (which, perhaps surprisingly, Grant finds relatively benign) and pleas bargaining will be of interest to those working on medical ethics and the criminal justice system, respectively.  A highly recommended read!

Opening Lines

I've been thinking a lot of late about opening lines.  This is largely because I'm getting to the end game with University, Court, and Slave.  Err, at the the beginning of the end game anyway -- there's still a lot of revising to go and the concluding chapter (on public constitutional arguments about secession) needs a lot of work.  I'll be testing the final chapter at the University of Florida in March and will be talking about this a bunch over the next few weeks.

Long before I get to the end, I have to finish the beginning.  And so I've been thinking on three of my favorite openings to books.  The first is Marshall Sahlins' line in his much-discussed book, How Natives Think: About Captain Cook, For Instance: "Heinrich Zimmerman heard it directly from the Hawaiians: Cook was Lono."   That captures Sahlins' key theme -- that Captain Cook was believed by the native Hawaiians to be a god.  Little bit of backstory here from an essay I published a few years back on Hawaiian property law: 

Sahlins was engaged in a debate with Princeton anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere over whether native Hawaiians actually thought that Captain Cook was Lono, a god of the new year—or whether that was merely how westerners thought natives thought.  The question whether natives believed Cook was a god has implications for our understanding of how natives thought.  Obeyesekere opened the debate with a challenge to Sahlins:  that Sahlins’ argument that natives believed Cook was a god indicated Sahlins’ adoption of a western viewpoint.  The western viewpoint,in Obeyesekere’s opinion, was that natives would think some westerner was god.  In fact, westerners since the time of Columbus had told themselves that natives believed them to be gods.  Sahlins responded that Obeyesekere imposed his own set of values on the natives about what is rational.  And so Sahlins turns what was an attack on him for imposing western values (what one might phrase as “of course, the unsophisticated natives must have thought that Cook was Lono”) into a claim that he respected natives’ ideas more than Obeyesekere (maybe some in the west think it’s irrational for natives to think that Cook was Lono, but it made sense within their world).  The exchange is complex and an engaging read, in part for Sahlins’ sparkling prose.  The first line of the book captures the essence of the argument.

Similarly, Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice's Report, begins with a very elegant line: "Let us begin with a clock."  The clock, which now sits in a meeting room at Brown University was once on a ship that carried enslaved human beings to the new world.

There are longer openings, too.  One of my favorites is Anthony F.C. Wallace's Rockdale.  The book, published in 1972, is a great example of blending social history, based often on quantitative sources, with ideology.

There is a village in American called Rockdale where the people used to manufacture cotton cloth.  It lies along the banks of Chester Creek in Delaware County, in southeastern Pennsylvania, between Philadelphia and Wilmington.  None of the people who worked in the first cotton mills is alive anymore, but some of their children's children still live there, and the ruins of stone factories, as well as stone tenements and fine stone mansions, are yet standing.  Nearby are remains of the other hamlets that made up the Rockdale manufacturing district--Lenni, Parkmount, West Branch, Crozerville, Glen Riddle, and Knowlton--where cotton yarn was spun on mules and throstles and cloth was woven on looms powered by water wheels. ...

As I leave my house on the outskirts of the village, drive the car along the roads, stroll along the paths in the cemetery at Calvary Church, I sometimes fell that I can almost reach out and touch the people I have come to know from their letters and diaries and ledgers, that they are near, behind a thin veil of time.  It was just yesterday, just down the road.  And it was so far away, so long ago ... In a certain mood of elegiacal sentimentality I can see old Rockdale glimmering through a golden haze, where the spinster Sunday School teacher Clementina Smith and her sister Harriet ar still sweetly instructing the mill hands int he elements of Christian faith, and the nervous manufacturer John P. Crozer still sweats over preparing a repor to the Board of Directors of the Delaware County National Bank, and John S. Phillips, that clever mechanicians, still drives his horse Mazeppa in a Byronic fury donw the hills and over the bridges to court the Du Pont girls on the Brandywine, fifteen miles away.

Every time I read those words again, I recall that it's one of my great regrets in life that I didn't take a class with him when I was in college.  Too soon old; too late wise.  But I do plan on making a trip by Rockdale next time I'm visiting Filler in Wallingford, because it's just down the road.  I began to investigate this last summer and I think there's some high-end housing there now -- no surprise in that.

Sharfstein, The Invisible Line

You may recall that a few months back I mentioned Brent Staples'  review of Daniel Sharfstein's The Invisible Line in the New York Review of Books.  I want to circle back around to Sharfstein's epic book, which opens in seventeenth century Virginia and moves down through the middle of the twentieth century and in some ways right up to the present.  Sharfstein focuses on three families who lived their lives near the color line; some crossed it and in one case their descendants became leading citizens of the South -- one was even a Confederate General.  In other cases, families did not cross the line or delayed the crossing for many generations.  

There is a lot that should be said about this book, in terms of its contribution to historical method (it is narrative history of the kind rarely seen these days) and also in terms of the questions it asks: what can we learn about the color line from those who lived close to the border on either side.  What, for instance, do we make of the family that was sued for starting a rumor that their neighbors were black and then were sued by those neighbors for defamation?

I now have a brief essay about The Invisible Line out in the on-line companion to the Vanderbilt Law Review, which touches on a few of these themes.  I titled it, rather provocatively, "Go White Young Man," as a way of tapping into the question of why people would choose to cross the color line.  As Brent Staples highlighted, that was a decision that helped some families but left others worse off, as upper-class African American families sometimes lost status in the move across the color line (at least this is what Sharfstein found for the early twentieth century). While my review focuses on the question of how many people could make that journey, in some ways the numbers who made the trip are less important than what was necessary to cross -- and why some chose to cross and others did not.  This is a very important book, which invites serious thought on a lot of levels.

We're going to be working through Sharfstein's insights for many years.  And in the near term, I am certain that Sharfstein's beautiful prose, breadth of time, and scope of analysis will put him on the short list for many important prizes this spring.   I'll be on the lookout as the major prizes are announced over the next few months.

White on Law in American History, Volume 1

This afternoon's mail brought the first volume of G. Edward White's planned three volume history of American law -- Law in American History: From the Colonial Years Through The Civil War. This is a fabulous book.  As long-time readers of the faculty lounge might suspect, this is the volume that's of most interest to me, because my primary area of interest is the pre-Civil War South (though I sometimes glance backwards to seventeenth century Quaker thought and also forward to African American thought in the early twentieth century).  When I first started working on the pre-Civil War era one of my early and important guides was White's Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 1815-1835 -- and it's a book I still use as a model for how to integrate constitutional doctrine into its intellectual context.  I highly, highly recommend Marshall Court to people looking for a one volume introduction to the methods -- and elegance -- of legal and constitutional history.  

The book is beautifully produced and it will occupy a place of pride on my shelf next to several of White's other books -- Marshall Court, the American Judicial Tradition, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Inner Self, and Tort Law in America: An Intellectual History (which I blogged about some over at legal history blog some years ago).  Though, for those of you who're wanting to read some of it immediately without waiting for your copy to arrive, many of the chapters are on White's ssrn page.  My favorite chapter (on slavery, the Constitution, and the coming of Civil War), is here, for instance.   This is a really interesting model for making scholarship available -- and one that White has engaged in before.  You may also recall that his introduction The Common Law is HUP's website, too.   This model deserves a lot more comment at some point.  I'm guessing that White and OUP made the judgment that putting chapters up for free help get people interested in the full book -- probably a decent calculation.  It's certainly the right decision from the perspective of disseminating knowledge.

What particularly interests me about the Civil War chapter is how much it's tied to the military and political history of the War.  That chapter, but the whole book, really, is legal history deeply embedded in  American history -- and it is legal history like I have never seen it before.  Where White's earlier work was grounded first, I'd say, in the methods of intellectual history, this is grounded more in economic, social, and military history.  I look forward to what are certain to be the many and wide-ranging assessments of how White changes the methods of legal history and the questions we expect it to answer.  One of the things I think this book does is place American legal history at the center of the story of American history, so that it tells the story of our nation through the eyes of law, lawyers, and judges.  I think this is a critical methodological move.

Genre Bending Books

I've blogged in the past about genre-bending movies (and I finally saw Cowboys and Aliens on DVD over the break - or at least I saw most of it, I think I fell asleep about half way through).

But lately I've been reading some cute genre-bending fiction, so here's some recommendations to pick up and read on planes to and from conferences this semester.

A friend gave me the P.D. James novel, Death Comes to Pemberley, for Christmas and I finally got around to reading it.  It's really cute.  I can't say I've read much, or indeed any, P.D. James in the past but she does a good job of taking Austen's characters and making them face murder most foul in the woodlands of the Pemberley estate.

Another one that may or may not count as a genre-bender, but I'd like to think it does, is Kate Bernheimer's 2010 collection of modern, and extremely creepy, fractured fairytales entitled My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.  Not only are there some really good modern takes on traditional fairytales in this book by a variety of writers from all over the world, but each writer gets to explain why (s)he picked a particular fairytale for inspiration and the process in developing it into a new version.  For those of us copyright law geeks interested in the creative process, it's really interesting to see so many authors talking about their inspiration and process in the short story context.

I guess I'll have to stop reading books soon and turn back to movies because awards season is upon us and I missed the Golden Globes last weekend.  Did Ricky Gervais go as far as he did last year?  But the list of winners reminded me of all the movies I have yet to see before the Oscars.  Who's in charge of the Oscar Trivia pool this year??  Tim??

 

Don't Read if Disillusioned About Legal Academia ....

With thanks to a colleague - I won't embarrass her by identifying her here - some of you may enjoy this comic novel excerpt from Cameron Stracher's new work, The Law School Trifecta.

Tibbs on From Black Power to Prison Power

It's a pleasure to mention that Donald Tibbs' new book, From From Black Power to Prison Power: The Making of Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union, was published last week.  This is the latest in Palgrave Macmillan's series on Contemporary Black History, edited by the late Manning Marable and Peniel F. Joseph.

Cribbing now a little from the book's web page:

This book uses the landmark case Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union to examine the strategies of prison inmates using race and radicalism to inspire the formation of an inmate labor union. It thus rekindles the debate over the triumphs and troubles associated with the use of Black Power as a platform for influencing legal policy and effecting change for inmates. While the ideology of the prison rights movement was complex, it rested on the underlying principle that the right to organize, and engage in political dissidence, was not only a First Amendment right guaranteed to free blacks, but one that should be explicitly guaranteed to captive blacks—a point too often overlooked in previous analyses. Ultimately, this seminal case study not only illuminates the history of Black Power but that of the broader prisoners' rights movement as well.

I've already had the chance to read it and I have to say that it's outstanding.  It begins with the social and intellectual context of black power and then uses that foundation to explore the prison union case, which it follows all the way to the Supreme Court.  This is a model of how to situate constitutional law in its intellectual context -- akin in method to G. Edward White's Marshall Court and Cultural Change.   I noticed that one very keen observer of African American legal history (wink) said of the book: 

From Black Power to Prison Power feels stunningly new—a book about a prison union, which most of us know absolutely nothing about, even though their case traveled all the way to the United States Supreme Court in 1977. Donald F. Tibbs plumbs the deep history of black power, especially as it relates to criminal justice. He goes back decades before the North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union lawsuit to put it into the context of the emergence of black power, a movement of national and even global dimensions. Tibbs links black power to the movements for feminism, workers' rights, and Civil Rights and along the way joins radical literature, activism, and litigation in a way I have not seen before. Legal history has rarely been so exciting.

The Author as Marketer

I've been doing a little research into the book publishing industry lately - an industry which like many content industries has been going through dramatic changes over the last decade or so in response to the advent of digital technologies.

One common theme across genres/markets is that publishers seem to be relying more and more on authors in the promotion and marketing of their work.  In trade, academic, non-fiction, and fiction markets, it appears that authors are routinely asked by publishers when pitching proposals how the author will assist in the marketing endeavors.  Authors may be expected to organize readings/signings at bookstores, blog about their work, distribute flyers at conferences etc.

This is understandable on the basis that the author is expected to identify a target market in order to pitch the book in the first place so the author may be expected to assist in making some inroads into the marketing of the work through contacts etc.  Also, publishers are under increasing financial pressure as the industry is disrupted by digital technology so they understandably want as little risk and as much assistance as possible when selecting authors/topics to work with.

Fiction authors routinely do all sorts of creative things including setting up blogs, Facebook pages in the names of their characters, book events, media appearances etc.  I'm interested in what law professors do.  In my last couple of book proposals, I was asked by my publisher how I would assist in marketing.  Obviously there's blogging and conferences.  And I do have some colleagues who organize readings and signings of books at bookstores.  What do others do?  How much work/time should academic authors be expected to contribute to the marketing side of the equation, particularly when one is doing a lot of writing for very little financial reward, although one would assume that a well marketed book plays into an author's success in other ways - recognition within their own field etc.

 

Reforming Jim Crow

I've just turned in a short review of Barnard College political science professor Kimberley Johnson's very fine book Reforming Jim Crow: Southern Politics and State in the Age Before Brown (Oxford University Press, 2010).  I'll wait to talk a lot about the book until the review comes out in the American Historical Review later this year -- though I will say now that legal historians who're interested in Jim Crow will like this book a agreat deal, because it puts the state at the center of the discussion of Jim Crow.  Where we often talk about courts or about those who opposed Jim Crow, Johnson does a very nice job of reminding us of what should be obvious -- the state (the federal government, as well as southern states) had a lot to do with undermining Jim Crow.  She also shows how a number of reforms that might at first look like they were designed to ameliorate Jim Crow and thus make only incremental change were part of the larger movement against it.   Reformers put the state on the trajectory to big changes.  Phrased another way, small reforms led to big changes.

But right now I want to talk about something else related to the book.  As I was putting the dust jacket on the book last evening I wondered about the photograph on jacket.  Who were those people?  And where where they?  As I peered at the back flap for the description, I was astonished to see that they were members of the Virginia Interracial Cooperation Commission and that they were standing out front of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond.  I know the church well.  What really surprised  me was that they were there to honor Right Rev. Beverley Dandridge Tucker!  Never ceases to surprise me how small the world is.  I study an earlier Beverley Tucker (Nathaniel Bevereley Tucker) -- a professor at William and Mary before the war.

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!

Latest on The King Never Smiles

Following up on a post from mid-October, about Joe Gordon's guilty plea for web-publishing Thai translations of The King Never Smiles: there are reports that Joe Gordon has now received a two and one-half year sentence.  That seems mighty harsh -- and, as happens so frequently in this world, counter-productive.  I'm wondering how many other books from academic presses have led to jail sentences.  None that I know of.

 I'm not sure how that sentence serves the interests of anyone.  Apparently Gordon's next move will be a request for a pardon.

Here's what I posted last October .... Years and years ago -- back in 2006 -- the Thai government tried to stop Yale University Press from publishing a biography of the Thai king, The King Never Smiles.  Now comes news that a US citizen, Joe Gordon, who translated the biography and posted the translation on-line (some years ago while living in the US) is in jail in Thailand awaiting sentencing for defaming the royal family.  Here's an excerpt from a post I put up at propertyprof back in September 2006:

The New York Times has an article (entitled "A Banned Book Challenges a Saintly Image of Thai King") on Paul Handley's book The King Never Smiles (Yale University Press, 2006), about King Bhumibol Adulyade of Thailand.  According to the article, one of Handley's central points is that the king--who has enjoyed very favorable press--has been more concerned with order than democracy.

What particularly interested me were the efforts made by the Thai government to suppress the book, including sending representatives to meet with President George Bush, with Yale University's president, and (apparently) with the director of Yale University Press.  Extraordinary, particularly for a book from a university press.  The press did push back the publication date (so that it would not coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the monarch's ascension) and also permitted, apparently, Thai officials to comment on the manuscript before it was published.  Both reasonable, though I should imagine, unusal concessions.  (Also, I should emphasize that I am in no position at all to evaluate the merits of Handley's thesis.)

Not surprisingly, the publicity surrounding the attempt to supress its publication (and its banning in Thailand) has led to a lot of sales.  This afternoon it was ranked #259 on Amazon--an astonishingly good performance for a university press book.  Exciting times at YUP, no doubt, even if the king is not smiling....

I continue to be surprised at the efforts to control the distribution of an academic book.  Not sure that I know of any other academic press book that's generated this kind of controversy.  The King may not be smiling -- and I'm mighty certain that Mr. Gordon isn't either.

Here, by the way, is a link to an excerpt on books.google.  Yale University Press has put the preface and introduction on their website.

 

Name that Library Building

Everyone's working very hard this weekend -- lots of studying for finals (or in my case writing one) -- and so perhaps it's time for a short break.  How about library trivia?  Where is this library building?  (It was a Carnegie library, though it's not still used as a library building.) 

This one is really tough -- but given how quickly Jason solved the Lynchburg Cemetery trivia a couple weeks back, perhaps not completely impossible.

Robots, Networks, and Us

I finally finished reading Sherry Turkle's most recent book, Alone Together, which continues her examination of human relationships with machines and various forms of artificial intelligence.  It is an extremely interesting read, focusing more on anecdotal discussions with various groups participating in experiments with machines (rather than on empirical data).  The application of Turkle's psychoanalytical perspective to the question of 'us and robots' is fascinating and the latter part of the book, dealing with socialization of the generation that has grown up with Facebook, IMing, text messaging etc is really eye-opening. In fact, the organization of the book itself is quite interesting with the first half dedicated to an exploration of machines that emulate humans and the second half focused more on today's 'networked' society.

Coincidentally, I happened to read the book back-to-back with a new YA sci-fi novel that engages with some of the themes Turkle tackles in the first half of her book - dealing with human/A.I. interactions.  The novel was My Beginning by Melissa Kline.  It was an interesting juxtaposition to read the more serious psychological study of human/machine interaction followed by a sci-fi story that develops many of the same themes, and themes we have seen before in movies like Blade Runner and Bicentennial Man.  The nice thing about My Beginning is that it makes these themes accessible to a younger audience, including questions about what makes humans into humans and where the lines between machine and human might begin to blur in the future.

Scott Turow's INNOCENT

Fans of Scott Turow may wish to tune into tonight's television adaptation of his 2010 bestseller INNOCENT (earlier post here).  Bill Pullman portrays Rusty Sabich, a role made famous by Harrison Ford more than twenty years ago in Presumed Innocent, based on Turow's 1987 blockbuster novel.

Tonight's movie airs on TNT.  Check local listings for the time in your area.

Three Hundred Ramayanas?

It's been a tough couple of months for university presses.  First there was the revival of the controversy over Yale University Press' The King Never Smiles.  The translator (who was living in the United States at the time he published the translation) pled guilty to charges of defaming the Royal Family of Thailand.

Now comes news of the controversy over whether Oxford University Press' India division will stop selling A.K. Ramanujan's collected essays, which includes his controversial article, "Three Hundred Ramayanas."  This apparently grew out of a decision at the University of Dehli to remove the essay as assigned reading from an undergraduate history class.  I think I'm on safe ground saying that but for the controversy I would never have heard of this article or Professor Ramanujan, who spent much of his career at the University of Chicago.  In fact, I'm still rather unclear on why the controversy over his essay.  However, through the magic of books.google, here is a copy of most of the essay, which appeared in Paula Richman's 1991 book Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, published by the University of California Press.  (And here is a link for those coming from urls with access to Cal Press' ebooks.)

OUP's response is that:

OUP is aware of the recent debate regarding the removal of an essay by A.K. Ramanujan ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation' from an undergraduate reading list at the University of Delhi. ... We would welcome a dialogue with Professor Pollock or his colleagues on any matters concerning scholarly freedom, which is of central importance to Oxford University Press.

This will, of course, bring more attention to Ramanujan's scholarship.  Here is a link to barnes and noble's page for The Collected Essays of A.K. Rananujan (2004 paperback edition), though it is listed as unavailable.  Amazon's only copy is a used one for $230.

Next up on the list of presses to be attacked by the censors?  I'm guessing the University of California Press for Oberlin Religion Professor Paula Richman's,  Many Rāmāyaṇas.  Copies of Many Ramayans are still widely available and for reasonable prices.  Barnes and Noble, for instance, has new copies in stock for $25 and links to used copies for about $16.  Amazon has copies in stock as well.

Update:  I'm actually now a little unclear on what, if anything, OUP India has done regarding Rananujan's Collected Essays, because it's listed as available for immediate purchasing on their website.

Thinking Like Your Editor

I'm thinking this evening about the book I've been working on for the last few years -- or, depending on how one looks at this, for like half my adult life.  I prefer to frame it as the former rather than the later, because it makes me feel better about how long I've been working on this.  The book is about jurisprudence and proslavery thought in the old South.  I study academics' writings, as well as those of judges, and an occassional anti-slavery writer.  Mostly I'm interested in pretty dense material like treatises and appellate cases, but I also use trials, orations, articles in periodicals, speeches in Congress and on the stump ... even the occassional novel.  (The issue about length of time is: do I count the years I spent working on my dissertation, which is on a simlar topic?  My dissertation was heavily focused on pre-Civil War property doctrine; those were back in the days when legal historians didn't seem all that interested in doctrine.  Over time I migrated to being more interested in issues of jurisprudence, even non-judicial statements about law.  Now I realize that interest in doctrine in legal history is making a come-back.  So I'm in the situation that I'm out of touch again with the field.  Well, at least I can dust off those chapters on the subtleties of vested rights doctrine....)

Right now I'm thinking about dealing with editors -- and so I have pulled off the shelf one of the great, GREAT books for academics -- Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato's Thinking Like Your Editor.  I rarely can tell if anyone actually listens to anything I write here.  But I must say this -- affecting the voice I use with students when I'm saying something they really need to hear, like what's on the exam, what's on the bar exam, or something that's a malpractice trap they might encounter -- if you're working on amonograph, you would really benefit from Thinking Like Your Editor.  It's easily worth the $10 or so that you'll spend to get a used copy.  Well worth it.  Also, you'll want to read -- and this is free -- Dedi Felman's article from the Chroncile on "What Book Editors Are Looking For."

Forget all that stuff I wrote this spring about Chris Tomlins' Freedom Bound being the work you most need to read in legal history ... if you're writing something, this is the book you need to read!

(I wrote some on this five years ago -- actually, I now see *exactly* five years ago, when I was posting at ratiojuris.)

Grown-Up Fairy Tales

It's hard to believe that it's already November and, as such, people may be looking for Thanksgiving reading - a little non-law reading material to curl up with by the fire after the Turkey fest perhaps?

For some strange reason, lately I've been coming across some interesting 'adult' takes on familiar fairy tales so if anyone is interested, I can recommend Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue which is a feminist take on a number of these tales.  A little more gruesome, but beautifully and cleverly written and using plenty of longer poetic words for those who have been concerned that I might only like monosyllables after my recent posts, consider The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter.

Other recommendations for holiday season reading welcome ...

Five Chiefs

Earlier this month Little, Brown and Company published Five Chiefs, a memoir penned by former Associate Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

From the publisher's website:

In Five Chiefs, Justice Stevens captures the inner workings of the Supreme Court via his personal experiences with the five Chief Justices -- Fred Vinson, Earl Warren, Warren Burger, William Rehnquist, and John Roberts -- that he interacted with.  He reminisces of being a law clerk during Vinson's tenure; a practicing lawyer for Warren; a circuit judge and junior justice for Burger; a contemporary colleague of Rehnquist; and a colleague of current Chief Justice John Roberts.  Along the way, he will discuss his views of some the most significant cases that have been decided by the Court from Vinson, who became Chief Justice in 1946 when Truman was President, to Roberts, who became Chief Justice in 2005.

You'll find reviews here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  And you can listen to NPR's interview with the author here.

The King Never Smiles

Years and years ago -- back in 2006 -- the Thai government tried to stop Yale University Press from publishing a biography of the Thai king, The King Never Smiles.  Now comes news that a US citizen, Joe Gordon, who translated the biography and posted the translation on-line (some years ago while living in the US) is in jail in Thailand awaiting sentencing for defaming the royal family.  Here's an excerpt from a post I put up at propertyprof back in September 2006:

The New York Times has an article (entitled "A Banned Book Challenges a Saintly Image of Thai King") on Paul Handley's book The King Never Smiles (Yale University Press, 2006), about King Bhumibol Adulyade of Thailand.  According to the article, one of Handley's central points is that the king--who has enjoyed very favorable press--has been more concerned with order than democracy.

What particularly interested me were the efforts made by the Thai government to suppress the book, including sending representatives to meet with President George Bush, with Yale University's president, and (apparently) with the director of Yale University Press.  Extraordinary, particularly for a book from a university press.  The press did push back the publication date (so that it would not coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the monarch's ascension) and also permitted, apparently, Thai officials to comment on the manuscript before it was published.  Both reasonable, though I should imagine, unusal concessions.  (Also, I should emphasize that I am in no position at all to evaluate the merits of Handley's thesis.)

Not surprisingly, the publicity surrounding the attempt to supress its publication (and its banning in Thailand) has led to a lot of sales.  This afternoon it was ranked #259 on Amazon--an astonishingly good performance for a university press book.  Exciting times at YUP, no doubt, even if the king is not smiling....

I continue to be surprised at the efforts to control the distribution of an academic book.  Not sure that I know of any other academic press book that's generated this kind of controversy.  The King may not be smiling -- and I'm mighty certain that Mr. Gordon isn't either.

Here, by the way, is a link to an excerpt on books.google.  Yale University Press has put the preface and introduction on their website.

Update:  Now there are reports that Mr. Gordon has received a two and one-half year sentence.  I'm not sure how that serves the interests of anyone.