Casablanca: Judgment and Dynamic Enclaves in Law and Cinema

By interpreting the narrative and imagery of the film Casablanca, this article seeks to explore the concept of law as enclave. An enclave is a domain-physical, virtual-emotional, conceptual, social or other-defined by certain boundaries and rules of entrance and exit. We argue that Casablanca is about constructing and reconstructing such enclaves. The structure of a pending journey between enclaves organizes the events taking place in Casablanca and constitutes their dynamic nature. Enclaves, we argue, are central to the structure and operation of the law. Recognizing the enclitic nature of law allows us a better grasp of the ethical dimensions of legal practices and reasoning. Further, it makes apparent the oft-overlooked aesthetic dimensions of normative judgments in law (and in film). Our analysis of Casablanca\u27s legal aspects is one example of how law and film may be juxtaposed. Such juxtaposition enriches our understanding of the concepts that structure law and offers a nuanced reading of ethical judgment practiced within the legal and cinematic discourses

Law as Film: Representing Justice in the Age of Moving Images

Two main theses are presented here. The first is that there is a conceptual resemblance between the ways in which messages are transmitted in the courtroom and the ways in which they are transmitted in the cinema. The second is that the evolution of legal procedure is being influenced by developments taking place in visual culture generally and film specifically. Taken together, these theses lead to the conclusion that the development of a theory of ‘‘law-as-film’’ can provide insights into the contemporary practice of law that might otherwise be overlooked

Precarious Childhood: Law and its (Ir)Relevance in the Digital Lives of Children

This research provides insight to the way children perceive law and its relevance in the digital realm drawing on in- depth semi-structured interviews with sixty-six eighth- and ninth-grade students from three different Israeli middle schools. According to the findings, children experience the digital world as a precarious environment. Most children interviewed where unaware of or misunderstood relevant legal norms designed to protect web users in general and children in particular. Moreover, children experienced a lack of legal or other appropriate responses to severe incidents of cyberbullying that they experienced firsthand or witnessed as bystanders. Even though children are considered by adults to be digital savvy, as they are spending a growing share of time online and on social media apps, they have almost no awareness of their rights in this sphere. This study provides evidence suggesting that this low-level legal consciousness is responsible for the anxiety and fear articulated by the children we interviewed

Views on Prostitution

The Essay argues that both law and art represent deeply-rooted cultural ambivalences and ethical incoherence towards prostitution. The choice of Picasso\u27s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as representative of this tension stems from the sui-generis status of the painting in the history of modern art—as an avant-garde which later became a canon. Of the various views evoked by the painting, four are especially prominent: a moralizing, a normalizing, a victimizing and a patheticizing view. The examination of various Western prostitution laws shows that each of the laws simultaneously expresses different perceptions and ideologies about prostitution, much like the views evoked by the painting. It appears that law is unable to avoid the cultural incongruity linked to prostitution, which is apparent even in countries that allegedly declare unambiguous standing towards it

Mother, Monster, Mrs, I:A critical evaluation of gendered naming strategies in English sentencing remarks of women who kill

In this article, we take a novel approach to analysing English sentencing remarks in cases of women who kill. We apply computational, quantitative, and qualitative methods from corpus linguistics to analyse recurrent patterns in a collection of English Crown Court sentencing remarks from 2012 to 2015, where a female defendant was convicted of a homicide offence. We detail the ways in which women who kill are referred to by judges in the sentencing remarks, providing frequency information on pronominal, nominative, and categorising naming strategies. In discussion of the various patterns of preference both across and within these categories (e.g. pronoun vs. nomination, title + surname vs. forename + surname), we remark upon the identities constructed through the references provided. In so doing, we: (1) quantify the extent to which members of the judiciary invoke patriarchal values and gender stereotypes within their sentencing remarks to construct female defendants, and (2) identify particular identities and narratives that emerge within sentencing remarks for women who kill. We find that judges refer to women who kill in a number of ways that systematically create dichotomous narratives of degraded victims or dehumanised monsters. We also identify marked absences in naming strategies, notably: physical identification normally associated with narrativization of women’s experiences; and the first person pronoun, reflecting omissions of women’s own voices and narratives of their lived experiences in the courtroom

Social Protest and the Absence of Legalistic Discourse: In the Quest for New Language of Dissent

Abstract Legalistic discourse, lawyers and lawyering had minor representation during the 2011 summer protest events in Israel. In this paper we explore and analyze this phenomena by employing content analysis on various primary and secondary sources, among them structured personal interviews with leaders and major activists involved in the protest, ?yers, video recordings made by demonstrators and songs written by them. Our ?ndings show that participants cumulatively produced a pyramid-like structure of social power that is anchored in the enterprise of organizing the protest. Our ?ndings explicate how the non-legalistic and even anti-legalistic discourse of the protest was formed, shaped and generated within the power relations of the protest, and how a pyramid of power produced a new poetics of protest that rejected the traditional poetics of state law. The power relations that generated the discourse regarding state law were embedded in socioeconomic strati?cation along the divide of center and periphery in Israel.Keywords Social protest and law Legal poetics Pyramid of power relatio

Casablanca: Judgment and Dynamic Enclaves in Law and Cinema

By interpreting the narrative and imagery of the film Casablanca, this article seeks to explore the concept of law as enclave. An enclave is a domain-physical, virtual-emotional, conceptual, social or other-defined by certain boundaries and rules of entrance and exit. We argue that Casablanca is about constructing and reconstructing such enclaves. The structure of a pending journey between enclaves organizes the events taking place in Casablanca and constitutes their dynamic nature. Enclaves, we argue, are central to the structure and operation of the law. Recognizing the enclitic nature of law allows us a better grasp of the ethical dimensions of legal practices and reasoning. Further, it makes apparent the oft-overlooked aesthetic dimensions of normative judgments in law (and in film). Our analysis of Casablanca\u27s legal aspects is one example of how law and film may be juxtaposed. Such juxtaposition enriches our understanding of the concepts that structure law and offers a nuanced reading of ethical judgment practiced within the legal and cinematic discourses

Law as Film: Representing Justice in the Age of Moving Images

Two main theses are presented here. The first is that there is a conceptual resemblance between the ways in which messages are transmitted in the courtroom and the ways in which they are transmitted in the cinema. The second is that the evolution of legal procedure is being influenced by developments taking place in visual culture generally and film specifically. Taken together, these theses lead to the conclusion that the development of a theory of ‘‘law-as-film’’ can provide insights into the contemporary practice of law that might otherwise be overlooked