The Faculty Lounge

Stephanie Lindquist Leaving Texas, Heading Georgia School of Public Affairs

University of Texas School of Law professor and associate dean (and former interim dean) Stephanie Lindquist is leaving Austin for Athens.  She has been named the new dean of the University of Georgia Schoolof Public and International Affairs.  Lindquist, who holds a JD from Temple and a Ph.D from the University of South Carolina, taught in both the law school and political science department at Vanderbilt before moving to UT in 2008.  She began her teaching career at UGA.  

The Best High Tea In New York City? Afternoon Tea At The Hotel Lowell Pembroke Room

One of the great pleasures of a trip to NYC is a stop for afternoon tea.  No, it's not London.  But the city does have a number of wonderful places to stop for some afternoon relaxation.  Among the city's finer options is, of course, The Russian Tea Room.  But I don't think I've ever had a nicer trip back to 1948 than tea at the Hotel Lowell on the Upper East Side.  The dining room and the service both feel as if they'd been preserved from that moment, 65 years ago.  Sure, the tea was delicious.  The place was filled with grown ups when we were there, but our flock of three girls - ages 8-11 - were welcomed and felt entirely comfortable.  And when it turned out that  the restaurant had run out of Nutella (for about 10 minutes), the girls were treated to a mind boggling martini glass filled with candies.  Anything to keep their spirits up!

It's not just the restaurant.  The Hotel Lowell is a gem, through and through.  I've heard it said that it's best New York hotel you've never heard of.  

But I don't have to rely on hearsay when it comes to high tea.  The girls left the experienced awed.  We couldn't have asked for better.

Boilerplate Symposium Continues Next Week

As I mentioned in a post last week, ContractsProf Blog has been hosting an on-line symposium on Peggy Radin’s new book, Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights and the Rule of Law, which continues into next week.  If you haven’t yet read Boilerplate, I highly recommend it. The book is no less than you would expect from Peggy Radin, which is to say: bold, thoughtful, and almost certain to be influential. 

I’ll post something here, of course, once next week’s reviews (including my own) appear over at ContractsProf.  But for those wanting a preview, the images included in this post should give a taste (click the liability waiver to enlarge, and you may have to zoom to read all of the text.)  Those of you who know me, and are also familiar with Peggy’s work, will not be surprised to learn that we have very different views regarding the virtues of private ordering as compared to public solutions, particularly when it comes to substantive limitations on freedom of contract.  But, as is the case with her work on contested commodities, Peggy forces us to think hard about the potential shortcomings of private ordering in certain contexts. 

I remain largely unconvinced that substantive restrictions on freedom of contract are the best way to overcome those limitations, but Peggy has very thoughtfully shown the increasingly poor fit between many traditional contract law principles and modern day contracting practices.  The issues raised by Boilerplate likely will continue to generate discussion over the coming years.  In any event, read the book if you haven’t done so already, as well as this review by Omri Ben-Shahar, and stay tuned for further posts in the on-line symposium.  

 

(The author, in Patagonia, after signing the above liability waiver)

Looking For Uncle Leo: The Film

My great-uncle Leo was deported to his death in Poland from Würzburg, Germany, on April 25, 1942.  

It turns out that the Nazis commissioned a film of the deportation.  The movie vanished after the war.  I am desperate to find it (if it still exists).  Crowd-sourcing and social media present a new and exciting way to try to locate historical materials like this.

I've created this little video asking for help.  It's in German, but if you hit the "cc" button you'll see captions in English.  If you know anyone in Germany -- or know anyone who knows anyone in Germany -- would you send this along and ask them to pass it along via Facebook or Twitter or whatever crazy medium the German kids are using these days? 

Thank you for helping.

History Office History

 

 

            Fellow UCLA History PhD and current JD student at Yale Law School, Twitter enthusiast Josh Stein, has recently posted a note over at the Legal History Blog, and the piece definitely merits attention here. Josh welcomed me to the department at UCLA when I got started as a student of Ruth Bloch and later Michael Meranze, so he will always have my personal gratitude and professional admiration, and that is despite the fact that we would spend the next few years arguing from very different intellectual backgrounds and concerns.

 

            In his article, Historians Before the Bench: Friends of the Court, Foes of Originalism, Josh critiques a tendency of historians writing amicus briefs in recent US Supreme Court Cases to accept the originalist and conservative premise of the normative weight of the past. As an alternative to the understandable desire to offer historical critique in the face of what many historians take to be dangerously reactionary judicial philosophy and politics, Josh outlines three interrelated approaches legal historians might take: destabilization, fidelity (something very close to constitutional redemption as outlined by Jack Balkin), and what historian Peter Hoffer calls a “special master approach,” or narrowly focused expert testimony on specific historical questions as opposed to broad, ideological advocacy.

 

            Josh takes the historical profession to speak with one voice and to share a consensus that its special expertise, or “mastery,” is in the art of historicizing, or destabilizing the only-apparently authoritative narratives in which scholars of other disciplines and the public continue to constitute themselves as jurists, philosophers, theorists, or citizens. If this is true, I think it is unfortunate. It seems to me that if Josh is right that we are in an “opportune” moment to rethink how historians interact with the court, it is equally an opportune moment to think what it means to be doing history in the first place. This project, it seems to me, would fruitfully start by extending the historical awareness of context, complexity, and plurality to the conditions of our own intellectual practice. Historians take it for granted that destabilization is an unmitigated good and that the authority of the discipline rests on precisely their special mastery and license to render the past complex and therefore only understandable and relatable with the help of professional historians.

 

            This mode of practice has come under tough (and indeed, historical) criticism recently from Christopher Tomlins and Kunal Parker. Despite these criticisms, I continue to identify with (among other things) a contextualist approach to legal and political thought, and I take the work of Pocock on Gibbon and history, of Tully and Brett on empire, and of Geuss on politics and philosophy to be evidence of the continued efficacy of that kind of work. But the promises of contextualism, broadly defined, rest on the willingness of historians to extend such awareness to themselves, and to accept the fact that there are multiple roads to the past and a plurality of ways of responding to the presence of the past in the present. The failure to attend to the conditions of intellectual practice on the part of historians is ironic, perhaps, but it is also deeply problematic. Historical practice that is defined by its practitioners as the sole domain of constituted professional expertise is one that is by definition and with increasing intensity not even remotely civic.

 

            Against the bureaucratic faith in the special knowledge-production of the expert and their office, I want to rescue a Jeffersonian and radical common-law awareness of use and transformation. A substantively democratic constitutionalism would require a faith not in the ultimate redemption of the text of the US Constitution itself so much as an appreciation for the potentially redemptive work of people and peoples working on the material of their civic inheritance. To participate in history is to make transformative use of the stuff of historical representation, and from this perspective, the task of the historian might be less to destabilize authoritative narratives than to render their constituent components open to thought and action, to consideration and to use. I take this to be roughly in the spirit of S. Levinson’s work and to be looking for a protestant reformation in jurisprudence and history both- one particularly oriented around recovering the priesthood of all believers, or the responsibility for legal and political judgment of all citizens. This is also basically, even if softly, Marxist- it is to insist that we attend to the at once subjective and objective quality of the sensuous, material, and revolutionary domain of practice.

 

“Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,- Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin… Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating, History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers- nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other, - her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,- that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each Day, losing our forebears in forever,- not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,- rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into a the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common.”

 

- Thomas Pynchon, Mason and Dixon, p. 349

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kudos to This American Life

A few weeks ago I blogged here about a recent episode of This American Life, "Dr. Gilmer and Mr. Hyde," about the quest of one Dr. Gilmer (Benjamin) to understand why another, beloved Dr. Gilmer (Vince), had brutally murdered his own father after hearing voices that compelled him to do so. The episode ends (spoiler alert) with the revelation that Vince suffers from Huntington's, a rare, neurodegenerative disease that causes progressive physicial, cognitive, and psychological deterioration.

Listeners, it seemed to me, could naturally conclude from the episode that it was Vince's Huntington's that had caused him to murder his father. That might or might not be true in this particular case. Huntington's can cause behavioral and mood changes, including irritability, aggression and belligerence. It can also cause (less often) psychosis. But even if Huntington's caused Vince to murder his father, or somehow contributed to the murder, the extreme violence that Vince displayed — strangling his father, then sawing off his father's fingertips to preclude identification — is in no way typical of the Huntington's population as a whole. And so what most troubled me about the episode was its failure to note just how rare this kind of extreme violence is among those with Huntington's, just as it is very rare among human beings generally. And so I wrote to TAL, requesting a clarification.

I'm happy to report that the TAL producer for the episode, Sarah Koenig — who had not intended to suggest any causal link between Vince's murder of his father and his Huntington's, much less between murder and Huntington's more generally — has issued a clarification on the show's blog, and promises to make a similar clarification in the episode itself, should they ever re-air it. Kudos to TAL, and many thanks to Sarah for being incredibly gracious in our exchanges.

One clarification deserves another. In my earlier blog post, I also worried that some listeners might  conclude that Vince's father was similarly driven to commit horrific acts of sexual abuse on Vince and his sister because he, too, was (presumably) suffering from Huntington's (an autosomal dominant genetic disease). Although I think that a listener who didn't know better could reasonably conclude that Huntington's causes people to become sexual predators almost as easily as they could conclude from the episode that Huntington's causes people to become murderers, nothing in the episode suggests that Sarah, Benjamin Gilmer, or anyone else at TAL believe that Huntington's causes sexual abuse, or that they intended for listeners to reach that conclusion. I regret anything in my earlier post that suggested otherwise.

Again, I'm very grateful to Sarah and everyone else at TAL for hearing me (and other listeners) out and for agreeing to make the clarification — and just in time for HD Awareness Month!

Cost of a Legal Education — Accreditation Overhead

    There has been a lot of discussion recently, both in the Lounge and other less important places ☺, about the costs of legal education. Obviously, both market forces and the pursuit of a higher U.S. News ranking contribute significantly to raising the cost of providing a legal education. Likewise, qualifying for either ABA or AALS accreditation have significant costs whether in the form of needing significantly investments in faculty size and type, in the operation of multiple clinics, in expecting more from each faculty member than just teaching, or in the other expenses directly associated with delivering a legal education of the type mandated by the ABA and AALS. To date, however, a smaller, but still significant cost imposed on law schools has not been considered — the cost of complying with the ABA’s demands for data about each law school’s program. In other words, the cost of establishing to the satisfaction of the ABA that the school satisfies the ABA’s Standards is expensive.

    This is a picture of the statistical data we have provided to the ABA for our initial application and our limited site visit:




In case you cannot see the ruler clearly, this is 9½ inches of data. To a certain extent, if you measure the quantity of data in the inches of paper necessary to report it, you know that it is massive.

    Effectively, to generate this data, one full-time, mid-level administrative employee-equivalent has been needed in each of the last two years (and will be needed for the foreseeable future). In fact, this probably underestimates the amount of time needed to generate the data as the rest of us, from the Dean on down, have had to spend weeks worth of time on the project. You have to look up from the Dean’s Office, too, to capture the efforts of the various university-level administrators who were involved. If you put all of this time together, this has been the functional equivalent of dropping our enrollment by three or four students each year. Please understand that this is not a cost to run an accredited institution, it is merely the cost of trying to establish that you are running one.

    To focus on just one statistic, consider the way the ABA measures the bar passage rate of each law school. The goal is to determine exactly how many students both took and past the bar. Consequently, each school has to spend a lot of time and effort to track down how each student did. Of course, this is not a local matter as students take bar examinations throughout the country. Some jurisdictions make obtaining this data an easy process, but many do not. The school must follow up with the other jurisdictions or, worse, with the individual students. Of course a failure to track sufficient students has draconian effects as it becomes impossible to establish compliance with the standards.

    It does not have to be this way. For those of us who do empirical research about the law, we commonly build statistical models for what we are studying. My current research effort, for example, involves patent quality. For the vast majority of patents, there is no direct measurement of quality. Consequently, I will be looking at a variety of other factors that I hope to establish can successfully predicts quality. Bar passage can be handled the same way.

    While it might be nice to have a precise measurement of every student’s performance on the bar examination, we may be able to do as well by just measuring the domestic bar exam. You would think that if a school’s students do well on its home-state’s bar, they would do well elsewhere, too. If, for example, law schools that have an acceptable overall bar passage rate (however the ABA wishes to define this) consistently show a passage rate of X or more on the domestic bar, why not dramatically lower the cost of accreditation compliance by only requiring X to be reported?

    To be fair, I do not know that there is such a relationship, but this is, at a minimum, an easily testable hypothesis. If confirmed, it could dramatically lower the cost of establishing compliance as could other similar statistical measurements.

Boilerplate Symposium at ContractsProf Blog

ContractsProf Blog is hosting an online symposium on Peggy Radin’s new book, Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights and the Rule of Law over the next two weeks.  You can read Jeremy Telman’s introduction of the first five reviewers here. 

I had a chance to read and comment on a draft chapter when Peggy came out here for a workshop some time back.  I am also participating in the symposium and will post a link here when my post(s) appear.  In the meantime, though, you should head over to the ContractsProf Blog to see the posts so far.

Female Institute Trivia

I wish I had the resources to do more with womens colleges in University, Court, and Slave.  I talk some about proslavery thought at womens colleges (and academies) -- through a moral philosophy treatise written by the president of the Tuscaloosa Female Seminary, a proslavery tract written by the head of a female seminary in Greensboro, Alabama, and the short stories written by a teacher in several female seminaries.  University, Court, and Slave relies heavily upon literary and graduation addresses and I use a few given at female institutes, though they're often more on topics like the utility of beauty than on more immediately political topics.  It won't be in this book, but I hope to deal more down the road with ideas and also demography of southern female institutes.  

This is a long way around to saying that I have a trivia question related to a female institute from the pre-War era.  Where is it?  This is a wind-up to a real doozie of a trivia question (or maybe it'll be a series of questions).

Caleb Smith's The Oracle and The Curse

I recently had the pleasure of reading Yale English Professor Caleb Smith's The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War.  It's about the conflict between oracles (judges) and cursers (people on the outside of "the system" -- like antislavery advocates, especially people like Nat Turner and John Brown).  Thus this is an interpretation of American literature as it relates to the clash of visions of law and justice in the years leading into Civil War.  Cribbing now from Harvard University Press' website:

Condemned to hang after his raid on Harper’s Ferry, John Brown prophesied that the crimes of a slave-holding land would be purged away only with blood. A study of omens, maledictions, and inspired invocations, The Oracle and the Curse examines how utterances such as Brown’s shaped American literature between the Revolution and the Civil War.

In nineteenth-century criminal trials, judges played the role of law’s living oracles, but offenders were also given an opportunity to address the public. When the accused began to turn the tables on their judges, they did so not through rational arguments but by calling down a divine retribution. Widely circulated in newspapers and pamphlets, these curses appeared to channel an otherworldly power, condemning an unjust legal system and summoning readers to the side of righteousness.

Exploring the modes of address that communicated the authority of law and the dictates of conscience in antebellum America’s court of public opinion, Caleb Smith offers a new poetics of justice which assesses the nonrational influence that these printed confessions, trial reports, and martyr narratives exerted on their first audiences. Smith shows how writers portrayed struggles for justice as clashes between human law and higher authority, giving voice to a moral protest that transformed American literature.

I have some more thoughts on The Oracle and the Curse in the spring 2013 issue of the Civil War Book Review.  I note that Caleb Smith’s The Oracle and The Law speaks to huge issues, such how pre-Civil War American law gained and maintained legitimacy? How authority shifted from legal and religious elites to popular sovereignty from Revolution through Civil War? And how our country reconciled the higher law arguments of abolitionists with the principles of law and constitutionalism that so widely supported property rights in enslaved humans? It speaks to timeless questions of obedience to law, even as the law is unjust. And our nation continues to struggle with them, as our citizens turn sometimes to the streets and occasionally even to violence, as they challenge everything from environmental development to our wars abroad.  The rest of my review is available here.

Final Call for Nominations for Cromwell Article Prize

The deadline (May 31) for the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation's prize for an outstanding article published by an early career scholar is rapidly approaching.  By way of background, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation has generously funded a prize of $2,500 for an excellent article in American legal history published by an early career scholar in 2012.  Articles published in 2012 in the field of American legal history, broadly conceived, will be considered.  There is a preference for articles in the colonial and early National periods.  Articles published in the Law and History Review are eligible for the Surrency Prize and will not be considered for the Cromwell Article Prize.

The Cromwell Foundation makes the final award, in consultation with a subcommittee from the American Society for Legal History.  This subcommittee invites nominations for the article prize; authors are invited to nominate themselves or others may nominate works meeting the criteria that they have read and enjoyed. Please send a brief letter of nomination, no longer than a page, along with an electronic or hard copy of the article, by May 31, 2013, to the subcommittee's chair, Alfred Brophy, University of North Carolina School of Law, Campus Box #3380, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3380 or via email at [email protected]. Other members of the Articles Subcomittee of the Cromwell Prizes Advisory Committee are Mary Sarah Bilder of Boston College, Dean Daniel W. Hamilton of the UNLV, and Kristin A. Olbertson of Alma College.

Last year's prize, awarded at the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History in St. Louis, went to David Engstom's “The Lost Origins of American Fair Employment Law: Regulatory Choice and the Making of Modern Civil Rights, 1943-1972,” which appeared in volume 63 of the Stanford Law Review in 2011.  Cribbing now from the Cromwell Foundation's citation:

During deliberations Committee members praised Engstrom’s deep look at the strategies employed by various civil rights groups to craft fair employment law, along with his intensive archival work across a wide range of sources, to tell a new story about how civil rights emerged not just from statutes and from judicial interpretation, but from the administrative state as well. Recent monographs have begun to open up the story of civil rights in the post-War period by showing that civil rights action activism emerged in many places, not just on southern streets in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, and not just in education and in public accommodations.  Engstrom, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School, extends that analysis to the employment setting.  In telling this new story, he extensively mined the federal archives. This is an important and neglected story that stretches across decades as our nation moved from the Second World War through the Civil Rights movement and then its ending. It is also an extraordinary work of research, which invites us to see how administrative law functions and is central to our legal history.

Further information on this and other awards and fellowships in legal history is available at the American Society for Legal History's webpage.

Online Symposium on the Law, Ethics & Science of Re-identification Demonstrations

Over the course of the last fifteen or so years, the belief that “de-identification” of personally identifiable information preserves the anonymity of those individuals has been repeatedly called up short by scholars and journalists. It would be difficult to overstate the importance, for privacy law and policy, of the early work of “re-identification scholars,” as I’ll call them. In the mid-1990s, the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission (GIC) released data on individual hospital visits by state employees in order to aid important research. As Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld assured employees, their data had been “anonymized,” with all obvious identifiers, such as name, address, and Social Security number, removed. But Latanya Sweeney, then an MIT graduate student, wasn’t buying it. When, in 1996, Weld collapsed at a local event and was admitted to the hospital, she set out to show that she could re-identify his GIC entry. For twenty dollars, she purchased the full roll of Cambridge voter-registration records, and by linking the two data sets, which individually were innocuous enough, she was able to re-identify his GIC entry. As privacy law scholar Paul Ohm put it, “In a theatrical flourish, Dr. Sweeney sent the Governor’s health records (which included diagnoses and prescriptions) to his office.”

Sweeney's demonstration led to important changes in privacy law, especially under HIPAA. But that demonstration was just the beginning. In 2006, the New York Times was able to re-identify one individual (and only one individual)  in a publicly available research dataset of the three-month AOL search history of over 600,000 users. The Times demonstration led to a class-action lawsuit (which settled out of court), an FTC complaint, and soul-searching in Congress. That same year, Netflix began a three-year contest, offering a $1 million prize to whomever could most improve the algorithm by which the company predicts how much a particular user will enjoy a particular movie. To enable the contest, Netflix made publicly available a dataset of the movie ratings of 500,000 of its customers, whose names it replaced with numerical identifiers. In a 2008 paper, Arvind Narayanan, then a graduate student at UT-Austin, along with his advisor, showed that by linking the “anonymized” Netflix prize dataset to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), in which viewers review movies, often under their own names, many Netflix users could be re-identified, revealing information that was suggestive of their political preferences and other potentially sensitive information. (Remarkably, notwithstanding the re-identification demonstration, after awarding the prize in 2009 to a team from AT&T, in 2010, Netflix announced plans for a second contest, which it cancelled only after tussling with a class-action lawsuit (again, settled out of court) and the FTC.) Earlier this year, Yaniv Erlich and colleagues, using a novel technique involving surnames and the Y chromosome, re-identified five men who had participated in the 1000 Genomes Project — an international consortium to place, in an open online database, the sequenced genomes of (as it turns out, 2500) “unidentified” people — who had also participated in a study of Mormon families in Utah.

Most recently, Sweeney and colleagues re-identified participants in Harvard’s Personal Genome Project (PGP), who are warned of this risk, using the same technique she used to re-identify Weld in 1997. As a scholar of research ethics and regulation — and also a PGP participant — this latest demonstration piqued my interest. Although much has been said about the appropriate legal and policy responses to these demonstrations (my own thoughts are here), there has been very little discussion about the legal and ethical aspects of the demonstrations themselves. As a modest step in filling that gap, I’m pleased to announce an online symposium, to take place the week of May 20^th, that will address both the scientific and policy value of these demonstrations and the legal and ethical issues they raise. I’ll cross-post my own contribution here, but the full symposium will be hosted over at Bill of Health. Participants fill diverse stakeholder roles (data holder, data provider — i.e., research participant, re-identification researcher, privacy scholar, research ethicist) and will, I expect, have a range of perspectives on these questions:

Misha Angrist

Madeleine Ball

Daniel Barth-Jones

Yaniv Erlich

Beau Gunderson

Stephen Wilson

Michelle Meyer

Arvind Narayanan

Paul Ohm

Latanya Sweeney

Jennifer Wagner

I hope readers will join us on May 20.

Richard Coulson (1942-2013)

I want to pass along the sad news that one of my mentors, Richard Coulson, passed away last week.  Richard, whose scholarship was centered around international law and legal history, was an emeritus faculty member at Oklahoma City University, where he had taught for decades.  Richard was a beloved figure among the students and faculty and taught me a great deal about law and teaching when I was on the OCU faculty in the 1990s.  

We also had a lot of fun together.  I remember in particular a trip we took back in 1996 to the American Society for Legal History, when it was meeting in Richmond.   We flew into the Baltimore airport (mostly we could get really cheap flights because of Southwest).  But we thought I'd make a virtue out of this, so we stopped in Fredericksburg and I think did a little driving around the Richmond battlefields.  Fun times for two people who were deeply interested in history and its relation to law and how history is presented to the public.

I have a lot more I want to say about Richard's role building the OCU law school and as an educator and colleague, but I wanted to pass this news along now.  And on a personal note, I know Richard was very, very proud of his son Doug's work on law, history, and rhetoric, which includes a terrific article in the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities in 2010, "Distorted Records in "Benito Cereno" and the Slave Rebellion Tradition."  Doug is starting this fall as an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon Univeristy, which I know Richard was delighted about.   Here is Richard's obituary from the Edmund Sun.

Update as of June 5:  There is a link to the video of Richard's memorial service  on June 1 at OCU's chapel here.  These are really lovely tributes that recall well many of Richard's great qualities.

ATL Law School Rankings, Criticism & Methodology

As most people know by now, Above the Law created its own Top 50 rankings here.  It engaged in self-reflection here and here.  And now its methodologist-in-chief has been interviewed at Prawfs.  Next thing you know, Bob Morse will be all over the Sunday morning shows.

John Trasviña Named Dean Of USF Law

The University of San Francisco School of Law named John Trasviña its new dean last week.   Trasviña, who holds a JD from Stanford, is currently the Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Opportunity in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.  He was previously President and General Counsel of MALDEF.  

Antebellum Courthouse Trivia

Very soon I'm going to have some trivia related to the Nat Turner rebellion (broadly construed).  But I thought that I'd start the summer off with a trivia question about an antebellum courthouse.

Good luck, this isn't the easiest in the world -- but it's a heck of lot easier than the next one I have lined up.

Money and Capitalism: A Misunderstood Relation

Further to the recent literature on the history of capitalism -- to which legal history has a lot to add.

Rawls! The Musical!

The O'Reilly Theater at Keble College, Oxford recently played host to a new show: John Rawls's A Theory of Justice: The Musical!  It was billed as "an all-singing, all-dancing romp through 2,500 years of political philosophy."

Here's a trailer from the show:

A Theory of Justice: The Musical - trailer from Tom Edkins Films on Vimeo.

 

Here's the official description from Vimeo:

In order to draw inspiration for his magnum opus, John Rawls travels back through time to converse (in song) with a colourful cast of political philosophers, including Plato, Locke, Rousseau and Mill. But the journey is not as smooth as he hoped: for as he pursues his love interest, the beautiful student Fairness, through history, he must escape the evil designs of his libertarian arch-nemesis, Robert Nozick, and the objectivist seductress, Ayn Rand. Will Rawls achieve his goal of defining Justice as Fairness?

The world’s first feature-length musical about political philosophy showcases a script steeped in drama, humour and romance - with a musical score that covers everything from rap battles to power ballads.

Based on the ground-breaking philosophical book "A Theory of Justice" (1971), this exciting new musical was met with critical acclaim when it opened in Oxford in 2013. Philosopher Nigel Warburton called it "brilliant: hilarious witty and profound... I cried with laughter for most of two hours!"

A crisp student review of the show is here in Philosophy Now.  There are apparently plans to bring the show to the U.S., but those who don't want to wait can download the full production for $9.99 here.

Anyone working on Habermas: The Musical? Sunstein: The Musical?

Good Guys, Bad Guys, and Guns

After Newtown there was a lot of talk about how important it is for the "good guys" to have guns because the "bad guys" have guns.

Charles Ramsey, this intriguing and appealing fellow who rescued the three captive women in Cleveland, seems like the perfect illustration of the foolishness of that line of argument.

He strikes us as a "good guy" if there ever was one -- and just think how much more prepared he would have been to rescue the women from the "bad guy" captors if he'd had a gun! -- but now it turns out that in another facet of his life he's not unambiguously a "good guy," and in fact has been a violent "not-good-guy" in situations where guns often prove tragically lethal. 

Enough of the good guy/bad guy trope in the gun rights debate. It's just dumb. Good guys are bad guys and bad guys are good guys. All of us.

Great Gatsby and the 1920s version of Product Placement?

I mentioned yesterday the inept reference that Tom Buchanan made in The Great Gatsby to Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color -- which is really a scary book.  

Right now I want to focus on something else -- the publisher of Stoddard's book.  I've been wondering why Charles Scribner's published eugenics literature (in addition to Stoddard, they published Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race).  Perhaps they were publishing whatever they thought would sell?  Maybe there's something deeper here.  

But then I realized that Gatsby was also published by Scribner's!  So now I'm wondering if the reference to Stoddard's book (which Tom incorrectly referred to as written by Goddard, who was another of the writers on eugenics -- though his work was published by MacMillan) was really a product placement in the novel?  That is, was Fitzgerald writing an advertisement for his press' book into the novel?  I was talking with one of my students, Thomas Thurman, about this -- and he said, quite astutely, if Fiztgerald was serious about a product placement he would have given the author's correct name and the full title of the book.  Thomas might have added that he wouldn't have made Tom look like such a fool, too.  Though maybe this was Fitzgerald's effort to subtly influence readers?

Update:  I see that the Financial Times has the rundown on how the movie's pushing clothes and jewelry.  No word yet on whether The Rising Tide of Color appears in the movie.

Update 2: Holy Cow!  Later on in the novel, it turns out that Gatsby has the Stoddard Lectures, a series of books on travel by Lothrop Stoddard's father, John Stoddard.  (Never read, of course, because the pages were never cut.)  And guess what?  John Stoddard taught at Boston Latin School and you know what Lothrop's profession was?  Legal historian.  This deserves some more commentary down the road.

Update 3: You can see the handwritten page from Gatsby that deals with "Goddard" in the Princeton Library collections here.