Mosaic Imaginings: French Art and Its Revolutions

Jonathan P. Ribner, Broken Tablets: The Cult of the Law in French Art from David to Delacroix. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Pp. xxiii, 222. $50.00. According to a contemporary account describing the festival of Simonneau, which took place in Paris in June of 1790, the most curious item in the procession as a whole was a kind of shark raised aloft on the end of a pikestaff; the sea animal had its mouth open and was showing its teeth; on its body was written, \u27Respect for the law\u27. Later in the procession, a sword of the law was held aloft, and concluding the procession was a colossal statute of the law with an inscription reading: Truly free men are the slaves of the law. If these symbols seem rather artificial - we learn that the sea monster frightened no one but made everybody laugh - they clearly articulated the festival\u27s overall message of the supremacy of law. The festival marshalled these curious elements to nurture what Jonathan Ribner, in his book Broken Tablets, characterizes as the cult of law. Ribner locates the French Revolution\u27s cult of the law in its concentrated form as pronounced by the founder of the Tennis Court Society, Gilbert Romme: Law is the religion of the state, which must also have its ministers, its apostles, its altars, and its schools. Starting with this image of law as a new religion, Ribner chronicles the cult of law in its various incarnations from the storming of the Bastille to the Revolution of 1848. As he tells us, from 1789 to 1848 - a period that saw the introduction of constitutional, parliamentary government and the adoption of the Code Napoléon - law and lawgiving were imbued with evocative power, expressed in art and poetry as well as in political discourse

Deliberating Speed: Totalitarian Anxieties and Postwar Legal Thought

Erwin Panofsky, the émigré art historian often credited with revolutionizing American art history, gave a Princeton commencement address in 1953 with a title that seemed perfectly suited to the obligatory incantations of graduation ceremonies: In Defense of the Ivory Tower.In it Panofsky distinguished the scholar occupying the ivory tower from those engaged in social activity on the ground below. Nevertheless, the occupant of the ivory tower was not entirely distanced from the social life of the community. Ultimately, the scholar functioned for Panofsky as a sort of watchman : Whenever the occupant perceives a danger to life or liberty, he has the opportunity, even the duty, not only to \u27signal along the line from summit to summit\u27 but also to yell, on the slim chance of being heard, to those on the ground. Panofsky went on to enumerate scholars who had sounded the alarm: Socrates, Erasmus, Sebastian Castellio, Voltaire, Theodor Mommsen, the seven professors at Göttingen, and Albert Einstein. All had raised their voices when they felt that there was a danger to liberty. Although Panofsky\u27s address was delivered at the height of the McCarthy era, one had to read between the lines to detect a critique of his contemporary America-he was not shouting very loudly himself. But it is nevertheless clear that Panofsky\u27s image of the scholar in the ivory tower was one of general disconnectedness from political activity, except at extreme moments in the life of the community

J.L. Brierly and The Modernization of International Law

In this Article, the author provides an analysis of a classic of international law, The Law of Nations, by J.L. Brierly. The author describes Brierly as an international legal scholar whose modernization of international law involves an emphasis on fact and complexity, an emphasis that is ultimately little more than a gesture. The author then examines the narrative structure of The Law of Nations and indicates the normative messages disclosed in Brierly\u27s telling of the story of international law. Finally, the author describes Brierly\u27s effort to describe international law as occupying a political realm while Brierly\u27s evolutionary optimism made him anything but a political realist. In short, the author sees in Brierly\u27s promises of complexity and realism a thinly veiled simplicity that would be subsumed into the orthodoxies of international legal thought

The Ever-Ending Geography of International Law: The Changing Nature of the International System and the Challenge to International Law: A Reply to Daniel Bethlehem

Abstrac

Time-Dependent Partition-Free Approach in Resonant Tunneling Systems

An extended Keldysh formalism, well suited to properly take into account the initial correlations, is used in order to deal with the time-dependent current response of a resonant tunneling system. We use a \textit{partition-free} approach by Cini in which the whole system is in equilibrium before an external bias is switched on. No fictitious partitions are used. Besides the steady-state responses one can also calculate physical dynamical responses. In the noninteracting case we clarify under what circumstances a steady-state current develops and compare our result with the one obtained in the partitioned scheme. We prove a Theorem of asymptotic Equivalence between the two schemes for arbitrary time-dependent disturbances. We also show that the steady-state current is independent of the history of the external perturbation (Memory Loss Theorem). In the so called wide-band limit an analytic result for the time-dependent current is obtained. In the interacting case we propose an exact non-equilibrium Green function approach based on Time Dependent Density Functional Theory. The equations are no more difficult than an ordinary Mean Field treatment. We show how the scattering-state scheme by Lang follows from our formulation. An exact formula for the steady-state current of an arbitrary interacting resonant tunneling system is obtained. As an example the time-dependent current response is calculated in the Random Phase Approximation.Comment: final version, 18 pages, 9 figure

Regionalism, Geography, and the International Legal Imagination

Despite international law\u27s identity as focused on spatial relations, it has long been dominated by a temporal, narrative imagination. This article argues for an increased spatial conception of international law, but one that is also culturally and temporally enriched. It begins with a section called Regionalism without the Region, which describes how efforts at emphasizing the region in international law are often empty of regional content-that is, of true locality. Then, in a section on GlobaliZation without the Globe, the article describes how globaliZation studies have focused on globaliZation as a process-that is, on the ization rather than the globe and, consequently, the real geographical impact. Finally, in a section entitled, \u27Westphalia without the West, the article takes on the Westphalian myth and suggests that the Westphalian state system was never fully in place and if so only for the briefest of moments-even in its supposed epicenter. In sum, international law has adopted so strong a narrative mode that it is ultimately more interested in mapping than maps, losing sight of geographical specificity