If Your Law Were an Animal … or a Tool … or Music?

When I was in Europe last November, I asked a group of legal professionals some unusual questions. The results are in my new video.

 

A Lively, Learned Symposium

The symposium about The Rule of the Clan on Concurring Opinions continues—and continues to be highly engaging, with many intelligent, learned posts from the respondents and interesting comments from readers, spanning subjects as diverse as the war in Afghanistan, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and “The Godfather.”

You can find the full symposium thus far, with posts in reverse chronological order, here. The provided link will continue to update until the symposium comes to a close this Friday.

“Towards a Literary History of International Law”: A Post on Opinio Juris

Christopher Warren of the Carnegie Mellon University English Department has a nice methodological post today about literature and international law in the “Emerging Voices” series on Opinio Juris. On his faculty web page, Warren shares that his current book project “investigates Renaissance literature’s complex and often-neglected contributions to the history of international law by reading Renaissance poets including Shakespeare, Donne, Grotius, and Milton in the dual contexts of literary history and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century formation of international law.”

Warren rightly laments “the present disconnect between international law and humanistic disciplines like literature and history.” “Our fragmented disciplines,” he asserts, “have given us a fragmented view of history, implausibly cutting wider cultural history from the history of international law.” It’s worth remembering, he writes, that literature and wider cultural texts “are typically places outsiders [first] encounter” international law’s “specialized domain” (here he kindly cites, among other writings, my recent thread on Stuart Little and world federalism).

Warren concludes with this compelling suggestion: “it may be most illuminating then to consider the distinctive ways different genres like epic, comedy, tragicomedy, and tragedy have tended to organize experience and the ways those tendencies map or don’t map onto recognizably modern legal categories like the laws of war, trade law, environmental law, and human rights.”

The post is called “A View from Early Modern Cultural Studies on Fragmentation and the Law of Nations.”

The Sound of One Book Clapping

A narrative milestone: I’ve made a video under two minutes long! Mike Widener of the Yale Law School rare books library shows me an English law book printed in about 1481.

Symposium on Concurring Opinions

From July 22-26, the blog Concurring Opinions will host an on-line symposium about The Rule of the Clan, moderated by Deven Desai. All readers are warmly invited to take part in what I’m sure will be a stimulating, wide-ranging discussion. I’m grateful already to my valued friends and readers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan for their interest contributing—if you’re able, I’ll be delighted to have you be a part of our conversation.

The dedicated commentators of the symposium come from a wide variety of intellectual backgrounds—and they’re terrific. They are:

Prof. Mark Fenster, Levin College of Law, University of Florida, author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture.

Dean Lucas Grosman, University of San Andrés School of Law, Argentina, author of Escasez e Igualdad: Los Derechos Sociales en la Constitución.

Dr. Arnold Kling, Adjunct Scholar, Cato Institute, blogger at askblog, author of Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy. Dr. Kling is also the author of “State, Clan, and Liberty,” a review of The Rule of the Clan for The Liberty Fund’s Library of Economics and Liberty.

Dr. Jan-Christoph Marschelke, Managing Director, Global Systems and Intercultural Competence Program (GSiK), University of Würzburg, Germany, author of Jeremy Bentham — Philosophie und Recht.

Prof. Tim Murphy, Universiti Utara Malaysia (University of North Malaysia), formerly professor at the University of Akureyri, Iceland, author of Law and Justice in Community (with Garrett Barden).

Prof. Abdullah Saeed, Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia, author of Islamic Thought: An Introduction.

Dr. Doyle R. Quiggle, Jr., author of “Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqdan in New England: A Spanish-Islamic Tale in Cotton Mather’s Christian Philosopher?” Dr. Quiggle has taught oratory, rhetoric and classics to U.S. soldiers in both Djibouti and Afghanistan.

Prof. Jeanne Schroeder, Cardozo School of Law, author of The Triumph of Venus: The Erotics of the Market. Prof. Schroeder is also the author of “Family Feud,” a review of The Rule of the Clan soon to be under consideration for publication.

Prof. Kevin Stack, Associate Dean for Research, Vanderbilt School of Law, author of The Regulatory State (with Lisa Schultz Bressman and Edward L. Rubin).