See Disclaimer Below.

Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Law Professors and Laws of Slavery

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, History, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Slavery, The Literary Table, Western Civilization on April 4, 2011 at 3:44 pm

Allen Mendenhall

This post was first published over at The Literary Table.  I have reposted here because the content of the post relates to many recent posts on this site.

Kenneth Stamp published his landmark study The Peculiar Institution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf) in 1956, thus inaugurating the institutionalized and concerted efforts of scholars to examine the history of slavery in America with greater detail.  Research and study of the history of slavery then gained momentum in the 1960s.  One of the seminal texts from this period was David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Cornell University Press, 1966), winner of the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.  An ambitious undertaking, this book seeks to demonstrate the continuity of slavery through various times and places in Western Civilization.  A legitimizing narrative or logic always accompanies the institution of slavery, Davis suggests, but such narrative or logic—or narrative logic—is fraught with paradoxes threatening to undermine the institution altogether.  How, for instance, does one reconcile the ideals of freedom and equality, so celebrated by American Revolutionaries, with the pervasive reality of human bondage?  How does one make sense of a Christianity that both condemns and justifies slavery?  How can slaves be humans—rational agents with free will—and chattel property at once?  How does ending the slave trade worsen conditions for the enslaved?  If enslaving infidels, and only infidels, is valid by law and church teaching, then how do European colonists validate the enslavement of converted Africans?  How can colonists rely heavily upon an institution that they fear?  How can one of the earliest American colonies to oppose slavery (Georgia) become a hotbed for slavery?  If, according to law and church teaching, only pagans can be enslaved, why are not Natives enslaved as frequently or as much as Africans?  For that matter, why do early objections to slavery focus on Natives, who are less likely to become slaves than blacks?  Why do colonists insist on Christianizing slaves yet fear converted slaves?  How does the antislavery movement develop out of the very ideology sustaining slavery?  How do notions of sin both justify and subvert the institution of slavery?  Why does the Age of Enlightenment, with its celebration of reason, humanism, and liberation, intensify rather than disparage slavery?  And how can the New World, a putatively progressive landscape, rely on and perpetuate an ancient institution?  These and other questions permeate Davis’s provocative text.  Davis does not try to resolve these apparent contradictions so much as he explores them through various persons, places, and patterns; in so doing, he describes how human bondage gets revised and extended from one age to the next, and how justifications for slavery in one era inaugurate justifications for slavery in later eras.  Read the rest of this entry »

, , , ,

Law & Literature: A Basic Bibliography

In American History, Arts & Letters, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Literary Theory & Criticism, Nineteenth-Century America, Novels, Pedagogy, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Semiotics, Slavery, The Literary Table, The Supreme Court, Western Civilization on April 2, 2011 at 9:16 pm

Patrick S. O’Donnell compiled this bibliography in 2010.  He teaches philosophy at Santa Barbara City College in California.  This bibliography first appeared over at The Literary Table. 

Amsterdam, Anthony G. and Jerome Bruner. Minding the Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Atkinson, Logan and Diana Majury, eds. Law, Mystery, and the Humanities: Collected Essays. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Ball, Milner S. The Word and the Law. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Bergman, Paul and Michael Asimow. Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies.  Kansas  City, MO: Andrew McMeels Publ., revised ed., 2006.

Best, Stephen M. The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Binder, Guyora and Robert Weisburg. Literary Criticisms of Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Biressi, Anita. Crime, Fear and the Law in True Crime Stories. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Black, David A. Law in Film: Resonance and Representation. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Brooks, Peter. Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago, IL: University of  Chicago Press, 2001.

Brooks, Peter and Paul Gewirtz, eds. Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998 ed. Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , ,

Outline and Summary of Sylvia R. Frey’s Water from the Rock

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, History, Politics, Slavery on February 20, 2011 at 3:03 pm

Allen Mendenhall

Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991) 

ONE

The Prerevolutionary South: Foundations of Culture and Community

This chapter describes the landscape and characteristics of the South before the Revolution.  The Chesapeake was much different from the lower South, which depended on the production of rice for economic competition.  Rice cultivation was common in states like South Carolina and Georgia, but less common in states like North Carolina.  Virginia and North Carolina grew tobacco.  In some places in Virginia, the slave population equaled the white population; in some places in South Carolina, slaves outnumbered whites.  Whites and blacks worked together and lived in close proximity, but they developed different cultural norms.  Big homes, churches, and courthouses served to unify the white community.  Symbols of power like plantation homes served to unite whites.  The bigger the plantations, the greater the separation between masters and slaves.  Criminal codes for slaves expanded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the slave population increased.  The Stono Rebellion of 1735 led Southern states to pass laws to deter slave insurrection.  County courts retained ultimate punishment power over slaves.  The most common religion in the South at this time was Anglicanism, although religion generally was spread out and not institutionalized.  The gentry tended to be Anglican.  The first effort to Christianize slaves in the South came from a missionary sect of Anglicans called the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.  This sect evangelized to blacks from roughly 1705-1760, at which point other denominations such as the Baptists and Methodists took up that role.  As whites gradually sought to ensure their dominance through institutions, laws, and architecture, they also allowed slaves to cultivate a unique culture.  The emerging black culture fused West African traditions with various, competing African American practices and with a new religious culture centering on the church.  By the late eighteenth century, most slaves in America had been born in America.  Slaves in the lowcountry, especially in the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia, were able to nourish and sustain an African-influenced culture.  Family became the site of cultural cohesiveness for slaves and even helped to determine which African customs to retain and which to discard.  By the eve of the Revolution, the monogamous slave family was not an established model partially because slaves lacked the legal and religious protocols for marriage.  Polygyny was common among slaves and in keeping with West African traditions.  Many slaves sought to preserve West African religious traditions.  Gradually slaves adopted a Christian religion alongside but not within white Christianity.  The growth of organized religion among slaves was a product of the Revolutionary era and was spearheaded by slaves themselves.  The synthesis of republican ideals and religious sentiment emanating from the Great Awakening made for the budding antislavery movement.   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

Allen Mendenhall

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

Allen Mendenhall

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.

, , , , ,

Saying Yes to No

In Communication, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication on October 9, 2010 at 12:24 pm

Not long ago I was in the passenger seat of my friend’s car.  This friend, backing out of a parking space, collided with another car that he didn’t see coming.  I had seen the other car but remained silent, assuming, wrongly it turned out, that my friend would notice the car, which, after all, was an oversized SUV.  Would that I had cried “no!” or “watch out!”  Instead I allowed the wreck to happen.

This year Republicans are crying “no!”  (Would that they had done so earlier.)  Massive bailouts, nationalized healthcare, increased spending—these things simply will not do.  Taking a page from Ron Paul’s playbook, Republicans have realized the power of “no” as a strategic signifier.  They have—implicitly at least—portrayed Obama as someone backing out of a parking space without looking over his shoulder or even checking his rearview mirror. Read the rest of this entry »

, , , ,

Jefferson’s Laws of Nature

In Arts & Letters, Jurisprudence, Law-and-Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Politics, Thomas Jefferson on June 29, 2010 at 10:24 pm

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.

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jefferson and Information Policy

In Arts & Letters, Information Design, Jurisprudence, Literary Theory & Criticism, Politics, Rhetoric & Communication on May 18, 2010 at 7:11 pm

 

Since the emergence of the Internet and the innovations of information technology, intellectual property law (IP) has become an increasingly important and contentious field.  Applying old ideas to new inventions can lead to heated debates.

IP has always stood on shaky footing in light of claims that rights to intangible products such as ideas, or tangible products that amount to artistic or commercial creations of the mind, are legal fictions.

IP involves monopolistic privileges for inventors to incentivize inventing.  Opponents of IP argue that monopolies are inefficient, uncompetitive, exploitative, and unjust, even when granted to artists or performers.

David Opderbeck, a scholar of IP, has examined information policy, which studies the interface of information technology and government.  He argues against social constructivism as an approach to information policy and for a combination of critical realism and environmental virtue ethics.  The latter approach breaks from what he calls “modern positivism” and “postmodern skepticism,” insisting that social constructivism is itself grounded in deeper realities.

Opderbeck brings to mind Bruno Latour’s description of the vacuum pump experiment: although the conditions of the experiment are artificial or socially constructed in that they never would appear naturally, the results of the experiment are real (i.e., natural).  Social constructions are means to natural ends, but to reduce the entire experiment to social constructivism misses the point.

The same is true for information technology.  Social constructions influence the ways in which information, broadly conceived, interacts with government, just as they influence the ways in which humans interact with nature.   Read the rest of this entry »

,

Stanley Fish

In Arts & Letters, Jurisprudence, Literary Theory & Criticism, Politics, The Supreme Court on April 29, 2010 at 7:16 pm

Stanley Fish writes about The First Amendment and Kittens.

, ,

Moundsville Penitentiary

In Jurisprudence, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Politics, Prison on April 29, 2010 at 6:50 pm

These articles express my frustrations about, and ambivalence toward, the tourist spectacles at Moundsville Penitentiary:

“Moundsville Penitentiary, Model and Symptom of Hyperreality,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2009).

“Moundsville Penitentiary Reconsidered: Second Thoughts on a Small Town Prison Tour,” Libertarian Papers, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2010).