Directed by George Cukor, the film Adam’s Rib tells the story of Adam (Spencer Tracy) and Amanda Bonner (Katharine Hepburn), New York attorneys whose marriage smacks of “tough love.” The couple square off when Adam is assigned to prosecute a woman (Judy Holliday) who has attempted to murder her philandering husband—a bumbling dweeb—in the apartment of his mistress. Amanda, who approves of the woman’s act, which she views as resistance to patriarchal society, takes up the case as defense counsel.
Genesis tells us that God fashioned Adam from dust, Eve from Adam’s rib. Adam’s Rib tells a different story.
If anything, Amanda, or “Eve,” is the starting-point—a source of controversy, inspiration, and curiosity. Adam’s Rib isn’t the first production to render gender contests in comedic tones—it’s part of a tradition dating back at least to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew or Fletcher’s Tamer Tamed, and probably much further—but it is one of the more remarkable of all twentieth-century productions, especially in light of Amanda’s advocacy for a doctrine that, in American family law, came to be known as “formal equality.”
What, exactly, does Adam’s Rib offer law students? What does it teach law students, and why should law professors bother with it?
A film that’s in no way after verisimilitude is unlikely to teach law students how to file motions, write briefs, analyze statutes, or bill clients—tasks that we assume are requisite to becoming “good” lawyers. So what’s the point?
In his cunning way, James Elkins, during his Lawyers & Film course that I took in law school, responded to questions of this variety by drawing two boxes on the blackboard: one representing law, the other film.
“We’ve gotta get from this box to this box,” he explained, retracing the diagram with the tip of his chalk. “One place to start,” he suggested, “is with the movie scenes depicting lawyers or the courtroom.” Read the rest of this entry »
We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us, to live in a fictional reality that illuminates our daily reality. We do not wish to escape life but to find life, to use our minds in fresh, experimental ways, to flex our emotions, to enjoy, to learn, to add depth to our days.
—Robert McKee, from Story
Law school is, in a way, about performing. From the minute you walk into the building as a 1L, you search for and construct a new identity—one that conforms to your assumptions of what a lawyer is and does.
The first time a professor called on me—Mr. Mendenhall, can you tell us how the judge in this case distinguishes restitutionary from reliance damages?—I panicked. I knew the answer. More or less. But I had no chance to rehearse. Here I was, before a large audience, a packed house, all alone, all eyes on me.
“Um, yes,” I stammered, apparently suffering from stage fright.
I don’t remember how I answered—not precisely—but I remember taking a deep breath, feigning confidence, and pretending to know what the professor expected me to know. I must’ve sounded silly talking about things I hardly understood; but I must’ve performed satisfactorily because the professor let me alone and interrogated another student.
Ericson, David F. The Debate Over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
“The slavery issue in the antebellum United States was defined centrally by the failure of a people to bear witness to its own liberal principles” (90).
Chapter One
Rhetoric matters, and this book is about the anti- and pro- slavery rhetoric during the antebellum period. Ericson argues that rhetoric separated a nation that was not so “divided against itself” as people assume. Both anti- and pro-slavery rhetoric appealed to “liberalism,” according to Ericson, and thus the overall discourse at that time, in this country, under those circumstances, smacked of “liberty” and “equality”: concepts rooted in the mores of Christianity, Republicanism, and discursive pluralism. Today we might lump these concepts into classical liberalism or neo-liberalism, but Ericson suggests that we should not lump concepts the way “consensus scholars” do; rather, he suggests that we accept that liberalism, in all its manifestations, is a complex and multifarious tradition inherited and adapted in many ways and for many purposes. He endorses the approach of “multiple-traditions” scholars that reveals how advocates on both sides of the slavery debate attempted to conform their arguments to the tradition of liberalism.
Chapter Two
Ericson spells out liberalism and distinguishes it from “non-liberal” thought: “I define liberal ideas as a general set of ideas that appeal to personal freedom, equal worth, government by consent, and private ownership of property as core human values. Conversely, nonliberal ideas appeal to some notion of natural inequality based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or birthright that denies those liberal values to significant numbers of human beings” (14). The proslavery liberal logic went as follows: “The institution was a just institution because slavery was the status in which African Americans could enjoy the most practical liberty in light of their present circumstances, which rendered them incapable of prospering as free men alongside European Americans” (14-15). The antislavery liberal logic went as follows: “The Southern institution of racial slavery was an unjust institution because it effectively denied that African Americans were men with a birthright to freedom equal to that of European Americans” (14). The antislavery non-liberal logic went as follows: “The Southern institution of racial slavery was an unjust institution because it effectively denied African Americans the opportunity to work, worship, and learn at the feet of a superior white/Anglo-Saxon/Protestant race” (15). The proslavery non-liberal logic went as follows: “The institution was a just institution because African Americans constituted an inferior race consigned by nature or God to be the slaves of a superior white/Anglo-Saxon/Protestant race” (15). Read the rest of this entry »
The old adage “big things come in small packages” has perhaps never been more fitting for an artist than in the case of Jennings, the one-name moniker of New York based siren Mary Jennings.
Standing just a shade over five feet tall, Jennings delivers a robust and heartfelt sound that is anything but small-scale. Her music reflects an enormous strength and drive that is uniquely hers, combining a deep range of rock and pop influences with an unabashed sense of vintage style that few, if any, could ever pull off.
“I believe that the difference between an artist and the average person is a fearless and relentless willingness to expose their quarks, oddities, secrets, and passions for all of the world to see and hear,” says Mary.
Mary’s surge in musical expression started after the sudden death of her mother in 2001. “This tragedy rocked me to the core, but there is so much beauty in what it allowed me to do,” she says. “All of my emotions came pouring out in the form of melody.”
At the time, her father, a former musician himself, gave her the option to go through therapy or record an album. He knew both would be equally helpful to her, but by recording her music, she would be able to have something to hold on to and share with others for a lifetime.
It was on that first album that Jennings established her creative foundation, crafting music that bonds her to the listener in a genuinely honest and relatable way. That openness, and the raw emotion that she has shared on subsequent records, has attracted praise from fans and press alike. “Jennings’ music is sweet, lush, powerful, full of great hooks, intelligent and meaningful to boot! I love it!” said Heather Miller-Rodriguez of 100.1FM KRUU. Platinum award winning producer John Rowe agrees, calling Jennings’s music “creative and original… A breath of fresh air!”
Recent years have seen Mary’s musical aspirations starting to take shape. She has worked with Billboard-charting songwriters, toured with national acts and has had a number of her songs placed on popular television shows. While the professional growth and the accolades are nice, she values most the simple act of connecting with a live audience. “Live performances give me such a rush,” she says. “They are one of the best parts about being a musician. To me, they are what really brings the music to life. To know that you only have a few moments to capture an audience and keep them engaged long enough to fall in love with you and your music is a difficult task, but one that I wouldn’t trade for any other profession.”
Jennings’s growth continues with the release of her latest album, Collapse Collide. It’s a project that reflects an artist, and a woman, who has confidently found her voice over the course of a long, and, at times, heart-breaking journey and the beginning of what many have already predicted: a bright and promising future for a truly one-of-a-kind talent.
The Libertarian Alliance (London, U.K.) has published my article “Transnational Law: An Essay in Definition with a Polemic Addendum.” View the article here, or download it from SSRN by clicking here. I have pasted the abstract below:
What is transnational law? Various procedures and theories have emanated from this slippery signifier, but in general academics and legal practitioners who use the term have settled on certain common meanings for it. My purpose in this article is not to disrupt but to clarify these meanings by turning to literary theory and criticism that regularly address transnationality. Cultural and postcolonial studies are the particular strains of literary theory and criticism to which I will attend. To review “transnational law,” examining its literary inertia and significations, is the objective of this article, which does not purport to settle the matter of denotation. Rather, this article is an essay in definition, a quest for etymological precision. Its take on transnationalism will rely not so much on works of literature (novels, plays, poems, drama, and so forth) but on works of literary theory and criticism. It will reference literary critics as wide-ranging as George Orwell, Kenneth Burke, and Edward Said. It will explore the “trans” prefix as a supplantation of the “post” prefix. The first section of this article, “Nationalism,” will examine the concept of nationalism that transnationalism replaced. A proper understanding of transnational law is not possible without a look at its most prominent antecedent. The first section, then, will not explore what transnationalism is; it will explore what transnationalism is not. The second section, “Transnationalism,” will piece together the assemblages of thought comprising transnationalist studies. This section will then narrow the subject of transnationalism to transnational law. Here I will attempt to squeeze several broad themes and ideals into comprehensible explanations, hopefully without oversimplifying; here also I will tighten our understanding of transitional law into something of a definition. Having tentatively defined transnational law, I will, in section three, “Against the New Imperialism,” address some critiques of capitalism by those cultural critics who celebrate the transnational turn in global law and politics. Although I share these critics’ enthusiasm for transnational law, I see capitalism – another hazy construct that will require further clarification – as a good thing, not as a repressive ideology that serves the wants and needs of the hegemonic or elite.
Troy Camplin holds a Ph.D. in humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. He has taught English in middle school, high school, and college, and is currently taking care of his children at home. He is the author of Diaphysics, an interdisciplinary work on systems philosophy; other projects include the application of F.A. Hayek’s spontaneous order theory to ethics, the arts, and literature. His play “Almost Ithacad” won the PIA Award from the Cyberfest at Dallas Hub Theater.
Q: Your interdisciplinary background seems to lend itself to commentary on this site. Tell us a bit about that background and a bit about your thoughts on the value of interdisciplinary scholarship.
A: I have an unusual educational background that I only made more unusual in my independent studies. My undergraduate degree is in Recombinant Gene Technology, with a minor in chemistry, from Western Kentucky University. When I am interested in something, I spend all of my time learning about it. So, as an undergrad, I not only learned about molecular biology through my classes, but also in my independent reading. I read the journals and I read even popular works on molecular biology. This led me to John Gribbin’s bookIn Search of the Double Helix, in which he talks a great deal about quantum physics. I didn’t know a thing about quantum physics, and I really didn’t understand what he was saying about it in that book, so I decided to read his other books on quantum physics, including In Search of Shroedinger’s Cat. I cannot say I understood quantum physics much after reading that book, either, but I was hooked, and read every popular book on quantum physics I could read. In addition, I ran across several other popular science books that introduced me to what would become much more central to my thinking, including Gleick’sChaos and Ilya Prigogine’s works on self-organization. These provided several of the seeds of my development as an interdisciplinary scholar.
Another element to my interdisciplinary development was a class I pretty much lucked into. Undergraduates have to take several required courses, of course, and one semester I wanted to take a New Testament class with Joseph Trafton (who was highly recommended, and whose class I eventually did take), but it was full. So I took an Intro. To Philosophy class just to get the hours in that section in. By chance I chose a class taught by Ronald Nash—a random choice that ended up changing my life completely.
Nash taught his class using three texts: a collection of Plato’s dialogues and two books Nash himself wrote. One of the books Nash wrote was Poverty and Wealth: A Christian Defense of Capitalism. It was through Nash that I was introduced to free market economics. I was hooked. I read everything I could find in the university library with the word “capitalism” in the title or as the subject. I read Walter Williams, Milton Friedman, Hayek, and a little book titled Capitalism: The Unknown Idealby Ayn Rand. The latter, of course, led me to Atlas Shrugged, and that led me to the rest of her work. Rand hooked me on the idea of being a fiction writer and made me interested in philosophy. I began reading the fiction writers she loved (and the ones she hated, to see why) and the philosophers she loved (and the ones she hated, to see why). I read and fell in love with Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky, Aristotle and Nietzsche. Particularly Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, whose tragic worldviews were deeply appealing to me. Nietzsche deepened my appreciation for philosophy, and introduced me to tragedy. Read the rest of this entry »
Miscegenation laws, also known as anti-miscegenation laws, increasingly have attracted the attention of scholars of slavery over the last half-century. Scholarship on slavery first achieved eminence with the publication of such texts as Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen (1946), Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956), Stanley Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), and Leon F. Litwack’s North of Slavery (1961). When Winthrop D. Jordan published his landmark study White Over Black in 1968, miscegenation statutes during the era of American slavery were just beginning to fall within historians’ critical purview. The Loving v. Virginia case, initiated in 1959 and resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, no doubt played an important role in activating scholarship on this issue, especially in light of the Civil Rights movement that called attention to various areas of understudied black history.
In Loving, the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s miscegenation statutes forbidding marriage between whites and non-whites and ruled that the racial classifications of the statutes restricted the freedom to marry and therefore violated the Equal Protection Clause and Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the wake of Loving, scholarship on miscegenation laws gained traction, although miscegenation laws during the era of American slavery have yet to receive extensive critical treatment. Several articles and essays have considered miscegenation laws and interracial sex during the era of American slavery, but only a few book-length analyses are devoted to these issues, and of these analyses, most deal with interracial sex and miscegenation laws in the nineteenth-century antebellum period, or from the period of Reconstruction up through the twentieth-century. This historiographical essay explores interracial sex and miscegenation laws in the corpus of historical writing about slavery. It does so by contextualizing interracial sex and miscegenation laws within broader trends in the study of slavery. Placing various historical texts in conversation with one another, this essay speculates about how and why, over time, historians treated interracial sex and miscegenation laws differently and with varying degrees of detail. By no means exhaustive, this essay merely seeks to point out one area of slavery studies that stands for notice, interrogation, and reconsideration. The colonies did not always have miscegenation laws; indeed, miscegenation laws did not spring up in America until the late seventeenth-century, and they remained in effect in various times and regions until just forty-four years ago. The longevity and severity of these laws make them worthy our continued attention, for to understand miscegenation laws is to understand more fully the logic and formal expression of racism. Read the rest of this entry »
Three decades ago David Mamet became known among the culture-consuming public for writing plays with lots of dirty words. “You’re f—ing f—ed” was a typically Mamet-like line, appearing without the prim dashes back in a day when playwrights were still struggling to get anything stronger than a damn on stage. Mamet’s profanity even became a popular joke: So there’s this panhandler who approaches a distinguished looking gentleman and asks for money. The man replies pompously: “ ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ —William Shakespeare.” The beggar looks at him. “ ‘F— you’ —David Mamet.”
Some critics said his plays were pointlessly brutal. As a consequence he became famous and wealthy. It didn’t hurt when it dawned on people that many of his plays, for all the profanity and brutality, were works of great power and beauty, and often very funny to boot. When people began to say, as they increasingly did by the middle 1980s, that the author of Speed-the-Plow and American Buffalo and Lakeboat had earned a place in the top rank of the century’s dramatists, no one thought that was a joke. He took to writing for the movies (The Verdict, The Untouchables, Wag the Dog), won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his masterpieces (Glengarry Glen Ross), and moved to Holly-wood, where he became a respected and active player in the showbiz hustle.
Ferguson goes on to describe a speech at Stanford in which Mamet expressed his disenchantment with higher education:
Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.
“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting . . . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”
This led to a full-throated defense of capitalism, a blast at high taxes and the redistribution of wealth, a denunciation of affirmative action, prolonged hymns to the greatness and wonder of the United States, and accusations of hypocrisy toward students and faculty who reviled business and capital even as they fed off the capital that the hard work and ingenuity of businessmen had made possible. The implicit conclusion was that the students in the audience should stop being lab rats and drop out at once, and the faculty should be ashamed of themselves for participating in a swindle—a “shuck,” as Mamet called it. Read the rest of this entry »
Austrian Economics and Literature Poetry Writing Contest
Austrian Economics and Literature is having a poetry writing contest. The subject of the poems must be, of course, on economics. The poems will be judged on both the author’s demonstration of economic knowledge and on poetic form and skill.Here are the rules:
1. The subject of the poems must be on economics. Naturally, metaphorical treatments are acceptable.
2. Poems are to be submitted to Troy Camplin at zatavu1@aol.com
3. Co-bloggers cannot enter.
4. All judgments are final and cannot be contested.
5. Deadline for entries: June 30, 2011
6. The winning entry will be posted on Austrian Economics and Literature and the author of the winning entry will receive a signed copy of Troy Camplin’s book, Diaphysics.
I remember trying to write a paper for my high school English class and sitting in the library for what seemed like hours, looking at my blank sheet—we didn’t use laptops in those days—and thinking, “How am I going to write six pages about this book.”
The book was Wuthering Heights, and I was, I think, sixteen. I had written papers before, but never one this long. I was stuck. I had writers’ block. All I could think about was thinking about finishing the paper as soon as possible.
Eventually, I jotted down something that led to something else that led, in turn, to something else, which became the bulk of my paper. I don’t remember what my paper was about, or the grade I received for my efforts. All I remember was the panicked moment in the library when that blank-white paper stared back at me and seemed to demand that I fill it with words.
I was angry because I felt helpless. My high school “not-gonna-do-it” attitude was much like the attitudes I sense in my college students. Frustrated, I convinced myself that I didn’t need to write about Wuthering Heights because the book was old or for girls or whatever. The problem was, I liked the book and wanted to write about it. I just couldn’t.
“If we are going to teach our students to need to write,” remarks James A. Reither, “we will have to know much more than we do about the kinds of contexts that conduce—sometimes even force, certainly enable—the impulse to write.”
Reither is spot on.
Today, I can hardly restrain my impulses to write. I write all the time. I feel that I’m always learning how to write—and to write better.
What happened between my junior year of high school and today? I can’t reduce the explanation to a single cause.
The best answer is probably that many things happened between then and now, each of them influencing me in some way.
As Reither claims, “writing processes and written products are elements of the same social process,” by which he means the social process of immersing ourselves in discourse communities and becoming fluent in the language and cultures of our audience. Writing is not easy. It involves repetition, experiment, experience, and mimesis.
Reither submits that “[m]ost of us learned to do what we do on our own—perhaps in spite of the courses we took—and some students continue to do the same.”
In college, I read unassigned essays just to get a feel for how authors conveyed their thoughts and feelings, for how they punctuated their sentences and toyed with syntax. I underlined vocabulary that I wanted to use in my own papers. I suppose this method of learning could be called emulation. Read the rest of this entry »
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