Law\u27s Visual Afterlife: Violence, Popular Culture, and Translation Theory

In Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin argues that translations enable a work’s afterlife. Afterlife is not what happens after death but what allows a work (or event or idea) to go on living and to evolve over time and place and iteration. In its afterlife, the original is transformed and renewed. In this piece I explore film’s visual translation of law and the role film plays in law’s afterlife. Film translates law not by translating from one language to another, but by translating between media and discourses. The cultural-critical lens of translation highlights the discursive similarities and dissonances between law and film; it allows us to see the legal in the aesthetic and the aesthetic in the legal; and it gives us new purchase on thinking about the ways that word, image, power and justice operate in and through different media. I take up the western HBO series Deadwood and the science fiction film Serenity to explore the representations of law, state and violence at the borderlands of time, place and authority in order to illustrate the layers of legal translation that film can occasion. My argument focuses on how a few specific scenes translate the dilemmas of state authority, violence and law into the visual, and explores how the visual translations allow a different retelling of legal concerns. I also re-read the film genres in which these specific legal preoccupations most often circulate as legal genres. Both the western and science fiction, as genres, offer two parallel narratives about a foundational problem in law—the relationship of the state to violence. The narratives of the western tend to be progressive yet nostalgic; they are stories about the coming of civilization and the largely successful efforts of the state to reign in excessive private violence by exercising a monopoly on violence. But they are nostalgic for the kind of men—moral individualists—who were the precursors to the state but whose existence is incompatible with state power. The narratives of science fiction are more often dystopic and its stories about law and violence come in two versions. In one version, science fiction portrays the state as perfecting its monopoly on violence to the point of abuse. The state itself becomes the perpetrator of excessive violence. Another version of the science fiction genre narrates the future breakdown of the state, the dissolution of its monopoly on force and the return to private violence. This second version is a marriage of the two genres—the futuristic western. These two film genres in particular often translate the legal anxiety over the state’s unstable relationship to violence in such a way as to give visual life to its instability, an instability that is both suppressed in and central to legal discourse

Law As Culture

This Essay is an attempt to theorize the relationship of law to culture and culture to law beyond the intuitive, commonplace sense that law partakes of culture - by reflecting it as well as by reacting against it - and that culture refracts law. It proposes a theory of law as culture that, in detailing the mutually constitutive nature of the relationship, distinguishes itself from the way law and culture have been conceived by realist and critical legal scholars, as well as by social norms writers. The Essay concludes by speculating about one possible method by which this theorizing might be analytically employed in a cultural interpretation of law

Out of the Ordinary: Law, Power, Culture, and the Commonplace

Review of The Common Place of Law: Stories From Everyday Life by Patricia Ewick & Susan S. Silbey (1998). Sometimes a work\u27s intellectual influences reveal both its strengths and its shortcomings. This is certainly the case with Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey\u27s The Common Place of Law: Stories From Everyday Life, and its indebtedness to the thinking of Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau. Taken together, Foucault and de Certeau\u27s work suggests that investigations of law\u27s power are most fruitful not at the level of legal institutions and the state but at the level of lived experience, where we can see how power is exercised, understood, and sometimes, resisted. This is, in essence, the narrative at the heart of The Common Place of Law, where two sociologists of law examine how law or legality (power that is at once institutional and embedded in day-to-day social practices) is recognized, resisted, and reconstituted by a wide variety of ordinary people going about their lives. It is out of the most ordinary acts that law is constituted as law

Love as Legal Methodology: Comments on \u3ci\u3eLove in a Time of Envy\u3c/i\u3e

In academic papers about emotion, it is not uncommon to find a kind of disconnect between the detachment of theoretical and scholarly language and the subject of the paper--the emotions. One of the lovely, and challenging, aspects of Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller\u27s article is that it not only conveys the emotions that are its subject, but it brims with its own emotion; it reads like a text written out of shattered love. Goldberg-Hiller takes up Jean-Luc Nancy\u27s contention that love is shattered by its very essence. It fragments the self at the same time as it refracts into many forms. Goldberg-Hiller understands Nancy as suggesting caution about trying to bridge the gap between love and law, and caution about any unifying theory of love. The author suspects that Goldberg-Hiller also finds in Nancy\u27s theory of fragmented love, a methodology and an emotional style. Goldberg-Hiller writes of love, envy, and law in ways that burst, cut, and multiply as Nancy suggests love does. The article throws out shards of theory, literature, politics, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, visual imagery, texts, and emotions. In Goldberg-Hiller\u27s analysis of both of the emotional moments around which his article is built, the law remains submerged. Here the author goes back to the evocative analysis of love and especially envy to see if the law can be resurrected just a little by thinking about the conflict these emotional moments reflect and the ways in which law, like language, mediates emotional conflict and social change

The Paradoxes of Cultural Property

Many current cultural disputes sound in the legal language and logic of discrimination or hate speech. The focus of this essay is on the claims made explicitly or implicitly on the basis of cultural property. The problem with using ideas of cultural property to resolve cultural disputes is that cultural property encourages an anemic theory of culture so that it can make sense as a form of property. Cultural property is a paradox because it places special value and legal protection on cultural products and artifacts but does so based on a sanitized and domesticated view of cultural production and identity. Within the logic of cultural property, each group possesses and controls--or ought to control--its own culture. This view of cultural property suggests a preservationist stance toward culture. This essay argues against both of these assumptions and for a view of culture that takes account of its dynamisms, appropriations, hybridizations, and contaminations. As a corrective to the paradoxes of cultural property, this essay offers a counternarrative of cultural fusion and hybridity. These themes are illustrated with an extended example of the regulation of Native American mascots generally and the invention of one such mascot--Chief Illiniwek--specifically

#MeToo as Catalyst: A Glimpse into 21st Century Activism

The Twitter hashtag #MeToo has provided an accessible medium for users to share their personal experiences and make public the prevalence of sexual harassment, assault, and violence against women. This online phenomenon, which has largely involved posting on Twitter and “retweeting” to share other’s posts has revealed crucial information about the scope and nature of sexual harassment and misconduct. More specifically, social media has served as a central forum for this unprecedented global conversation, where previously silenced voices have been amplified, supporters around the world have been united, and resistance has gained steam. This Essay discusses the #MeToo movement within the broader context of social media activism, explaining how this unique form of collective action is rapidly evolving. We offer empirical insights into the types of conversations taking place under the hashtag and the extent to which the movement is leading to broader social change. While it is unclear which changes are sustainable over time, it is clear that the hashtag #MeToo has converted an online phenomenon into tangible change, sparking legal, political, and social changes in the short run. This Essay provides data to illustrate some of these changes, which demonstrate how posting online can serve as an impetus, momentum, and legitimacy for broader movement activity and changes offline more characteristic of traditional movement strategies

Selected Physical Characteristics of Medical Students

The purpose of this study was to measure selected anthropometrical characteris-tics, motor abilities and cardiorespiratory functions of medical students. Eighty-seven students were involved in this investigation. The students were categorized into five groups: (1) recreational, doing sport activities irregularly, (2) basketball and (3) handball players, having training at least two times per week, as well as men (4) and women (5) students entering medical school. In all groups the mean body mass index and waist-to-hip ratio were at the upper level of the normal range, while body fat percentage was similar to standards for sedentary subjects. Better motor per-formances were obtained from the basketball and handball players than from the other groups. Static strength for the sample was somewhat above the normal sedentary level. The resting blood pressure and heart rate for most subjects were in the normal. Cardiovascular risk factors were found in six students. Their systolic blood pressure was above 140 mm Hg. There were no sub-jects identified with low blood pressure. The heart rate was elevated for three students from the recreational group, and in the women. Bradycardia did not occur. The vital capacity and the ability to hold one’s breath was at the upper level of the normal range. The present results emphasis the need to improve the students` prevention oriented life style through participation in exercising