My article on Jefferson is going to print this month. Titled “‘Jefferson’s Laws of Nature’: Newtonian Influence and the Dual Valence of Jurisprudence and Science,” the article will appear in The Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2010). View the SSRN page here.
My paper on the Dred Scott decision is available on SSRN. Click here to view the abstract and then click “One-click Download” to read the paper.
My profile of John William Corrington, a Southern man of letters, appears in The Front Porch Republic. View the piece here.
Listen to Michael Blumenthal, novelist, poet, translator, and now law professor, as he muses about life, America, and growing older: West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
In his weekly column for The New York Times, Stanley Fish takes to task David A. Strauss, whose method of constitutional interpretation, or explanation of constitutional interpretation, seems incoherent, pivoting on grand assumptions about the ways in which readers of a text construe the meaning(s) of that text.
“Why study literature in professional school?” people have asked when I said that I work in a discipline called law-and-literature. I usually reply, “For the same reason we study math from elementary school until college: to learn about ‘truth.’”
The concept of “truth” has become the subject of ridicule. The postmodern era of scholarship, with its roots in poststructuralism, deconstruction, and narratology, ushered in new conceptions of metaphysics and ontology: all texts, indeed all things emanating from texts, whether cultural norms or social values, are at variance with themselves. Nothing has essential meaning; everything is indeterminate and arbitrary. The self-evident “meaning” perceived by individuals is socially constructed, having been centered or passed down through networks of people and events. These, at any rate, are the simplistic accusations put forth by those fed up with postmodernist presuppositions.
I’m no enemy of postmodernism, but I tend to agree with French theorist Bruno Latour, who claims that we have never been modern, so we cannot have been postmodern, and besides, there is something to this concept of “truth.” Why else would we have mathematics? Mathematics, like literature, has the capacity to bring about answers. True answers. Postmodernism has never quite debunked this truth-seeking field. Read the rest of this entry »
Reviews of Scott Turow’s new novel appear in The Wall Street Journal, The Seattle Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The New York Post.
On May 3, The Connecticut Law Tribune profiled Richard L. Hershatter, a retired, 86-year-old novelist. The piece is available here.
Scott Martelle profiles Scott Turow in anticipation of Turow’s forthcoming novel, Innocent. The article, which appeared in the L.A. Times, is available here.
Turow has penned eight works of fiction and two works of nonfiction. He continues to practice law at Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, LLP, in Chicago.
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