Giorgio Agamben is a critical legal-literary theorist whose work Homo Sacer I both admire and recommend. This new edition addresses Agamben’s scholarship.
Here is an interesting article for anyone considering law school.
Author Archive
News of Note
In Arts & Letters, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Literary Theory & Criticism, News and Current Events on January 14, 2011 at 9:40 pmOn My Teaching
In Arts & Letters, Communication, Information Design, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Writing on January 10, 2011 at 8:05 am
Everything is an argument. I say that not because I’m a lawyer, but because all writing has a rhetorical purpose. Poets have reasons for writing what they write, just as technical writers have reasons for writing what they write. Poets have audiences; technical writers have audiences. What distinguishes poetry from technical writing, or from any kind of writing for that matter, is audience expectation, or, in a word, genre. Students in my classroom quickly learn that all writing has a purpose that usually, though not always, has to do with audience. They learn to anticipate audience by contextualizing writing. A brief for a judge, for example, serves a different purpose than an expository essay, and thus a “good” brief will look different from a “good” creative narrative. A short story by Toni Morrison may be good writing, but it does not fit the needs of a peer-reviewed academic journal because the audience and genre do not match. A crucial process of writing therefore involves understanding cultural and social interaction and their relation to discourse communities. Communication, after all, is participatory and not unilateral. It is the transmission of information from one source to another through particular media such as language. The receiver or reader is as important to writing as the sender or writer. Read the rest of this entry »
Jurisprudence: East vs. West or East and West?
In Arts & Letters, Communication, E.M. Forster, Eastern Civilizaton, Islamic Law, Jurisprudence, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Literary Theory & Criticism, Pedagogy, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Western Civilization, Writing on December 29, 2010 at 6:53 pm
Today in the Malaysia Star, Shad Saleem Faruqi published “In law, West is not really best,” an article arguing that the fundamental paradigms of legal pedagogy in Malaysia remain Western. Faruqi laments this fact and declares that despite years of experimentation, legal education “today is as much a colonial construct as it was during the days of the raj.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Oft-Ignored Mr. Turton: The Role of District Collector in A Passage to India
In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, E.M. Forster, Jurisprudence, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Politics, Religion, Writing on December 23, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Click here to read my latest law-and-literature article. Below is the abstract for the article, which appears in Libertarian Papers:
E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India presents Brahman Hindu jurisprudence as an alternative to British rule of law, a utilitarian jurisprudence that hinges on mercantilism, central planning, and imperialism. Building on John Hasnas’s critiques of rule of law and Murray Rothbard’s critiques of Benthamite utilitarianism, this essay argues that Forster’s depictions of Brahman Hindu in the novel endorse polycentric legal systems. Mr. Turton is the local district collector whose job is to pander to both British and Indian interests; positioned as such, Turton is a site for critique and comparison. Forster uses Turton to show that Brahman Hindu jurisprudence is fair and more effective than British bureaucratic administration. Forster’s depictions of Brahman Hindu are not verisimilar, and Brahman Hindu does not recommend a particular jurisprudence. But Forster appropriates Brahman Hindu for aesthetic and political purposes and in so doing advocates a jurisprudence that does not reduce all experience to mathematical calculation. Forster writes against the Benthamite utilitarianism adopted by most colonial administrators in India. A tough figure to pin down politically, Forster celebrates the individual and personal relations: things that British rule of law seeks to suppress.
The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature, by Cheryl L. Nixon
In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Jurisprudence, Law-and-Literature on December 22, 2010 at 6:05 pm
This new book looks quite promising. Note the following from the publisher:
Cheryl Nixon’s book is the first to connect the eighteenth-century fictional orphan and factual orphan, emphasizing the legal concepts of estate, blood, and body. Examining novels by authors such as Eliza Haywood, Tobias Smollett, and Elizabeth Inchbald, and referencing never-before analyzed case records, Nixon reconstructs the narratives of real orphans in the British parliamentary, equity, and common law courts and compares them to the narratives of fictional orphans. The orphan’s uncertain economic, familial, and bodily status creates opportunities to “plot” his or her future according to new ideologies of the social individual. Nixon demonstrates that the orphan encourages both fact and fiction to re-imagine structures of estate (property and inheritance), blood (familial origins and marriage), and body (gender and class mobility).
Whereas studies of the orphan typically emphasize the poor urban foundling, Nixon focuses on the orphaned heir or heiress and his or her need to be situated in a domestic space. Arguing that the eighteenth century constructs the “valued” orphan, Nixon shows how the wealthy orphan became associated with new understandings of the individual. New archival research encompassing print and manuscript records from Parliament, Chancery, Exchequer, and King’s Bench demonstrate the law’s interest in the propertied orphan. The novel uses this figure to question the formulaic structures of narrative sub-genres such as the picaresque and romance and ultimately encourage the hybridization of such plots. As Nixon traces the orphan’s contribution to the developing novel and developing ideology of the individual, she shows how the orphan creates factual and fictional understandings of class, family, and gender.
Drafting and Revision
In Communication, Information Design, Legal Research & Writing, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Writing on December 21, 2010 at 10:45 am
In their article “Drafting and Revision Using Word Processing by Undergraduate Student Writers,” Anish M. Dave and David R. Russell attempt to refigure theories of drafting and revision in light of technological advances altering writing processes since drafting and revision became touchstones of composition pedagogy in the 1980s.
Process pedagogy prizes drafting and revision. Since its inception, however, process pedagogy has undergone many changes. Composition scholars and teachers have institutionalized the once novel and controversial process pedagogies; and subsequent trends—referred to as post-process pedagogies—have called into question several premises of the process movement.
The authors of this piece rethink concepts of drafting and revision by researching empirical data about pre-computer and computer eras of writing. Presupposing that drafting and revision demand social as well as cognitive theoretical frameworks, the authors show that research in the late 1980s and early 1990s tended to dismiss word processing as ineffective or irrelevant to the revision process. Studies from these years also suggest that multiple drafts benefited students, that students preferred hard-copies to computer screens, and that students viewed concepts of “drafts” differently than they do today. Read the rest of this entry »
Joan Richardson on Emerson, the Pragmatist
In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Communication, Creative Writing, Information Design, Literary Theory & Criticism, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Semiotics on December 9, 2010 at 9:22 pm
If pragmatism is, as Joan Richardson claims, “thinking about thinking” (79), and if Emerson is, as Richardson claims, a pragmatist, then we might ask ourselves what intellectual tradition Emerson appears to appropriate and modify. What are Emerson’s “moving pictures” (the title of Richardson’s chapter on Emerson), and how do they receive and transmit thought and theory? Richardson seems to suggest that, for Emerson as for Jonathan Edwards, nature and imagination are mutually reinforcing and inextricably tied concepts. Emerson works out of Edwards’s paradigms while altering them to fit his own historical moment. Emerson mimics not only Edwards’s intellectual framework—his theories—but also Edwards’s diction and syntax (63). Put differently, Emerson imitates a concept while imitating the vocabularies through which that concept passed down to him.
What makes Edwards and Emerson unique is their turn to nature to make sense of the “transcendent.” Just as Edwards looks to spiders and light to aestheticize his theology and exhilarate his congregation, so Emerson looks to nature to spiritualize the human mind. Both men observe and then internalize the natural world to refine their thinking about thinking. For Emerson, however, the human mind is itself an organism—one hungry for knowledge. The mind is not so much “the room of the idea” as it is a living being with an appetite for thought (67). Emerson employs and seeks out metaphor to organize this thought—one might say to satiate his ravenous intellectual appetite—and he does so because he realizes “the seminal role played by image” (68). The world, for Emerson, is full of semiotic possibility, and one can arrive at truths about reality through the study of metaphor. Science, after all, uses signs and symbols—i.e., metaphors—to test and decode the natural world (see, e.g., Richardson on the “metaphor intrinsic to biology’s emergence as a distinct field”) (69). Read the rest of this entry »
Being John Hagerty
In Arts & Letters, Communication, Creative Writing, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Legal Research & Writing, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication on November 18, 2010 at 8:08 pm
It’s early on a Tuesday morning when I walk into John’s classroom, a cup of coffee in my hand, my too-heavy bag draped over my shoulder. I gain the nearest desk and sit down.
Outside the leaves are beginning to change, and a cool air whistles through a crack in the window. “Smells like football season,” I think, even though the room is choked with chalk and dust. Inside the classroom the students stare at me, the new guy, the stranger, and they look away when I acknowledge their glances with my own.
I probably look funny in this desk on which I’ve arranged various papers: John’s syllabus, his assignments, his pop-quiz for the day. I’ve been up since 5:00 a.m., reading and rereading my students’ essays, so I’m not a little fatigued when class begins and John introduces me as “a new teacher” and “a lawyer.” I smile and mutter “hi.” I even manage half a wave.
John passes out the pop-quizzes, and the students, slightly panicked, seem to forget that I’m in the room. How nice it is to be sitting here watching students take a quiz rather than taking one myself. Read the rest of this entry »
MisesWiki
In Austrian Economics, Libertarianism on November 14, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Check out MisesWiki, a new project dedicated to advancing Austrian economics.
Libertarian Alliance Conference 2010
In Libertarianism on November 10, 2010 at 7:25 pm
The Libertarian Alliance held its 2010 conference at the National Liberal Club in London. Video of the event is available here. Thank you to Sean Gabb for passing along this link.
The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities 