The Internet: Academic Foe or Friend

Many people who regularly look to the internet for answers to their questions are disappointed by the potentially confusing array of information they find there, not to mention its uncertain reliability. Many others, as I point out here, often ignore the internet altogether. For me, as an academic law librarian, this is potentially good news

Advocacy as History? That Takes the Prize!

"Gulag: A History", the recipient of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, may be particularly well received by lawyers and law students because they can appreciate author Anne Applebaum's writing skills. Gulag reads like a lawyer's product: a conclusion replete with facts and arguments. Those who enjoy perfecting their legal skills while reading for pleasure should read this review. Gulag is, in essence, a successful legal brief

A brief critique of the emaciated state and its reliance on non-governmental organizations to provide social services

When, in January 2006, seven-year-old Nixzmary Brown was tortured and beaten to death, allegedly by her stepfather as her mother ignored her cries for help, every New Yorker looked at the city's Administration for Children's Services for answers. Conversely, I do not recall any discussion about the failure of charities to adequately provide for the city's abused children. Charities, like non-governmental organizations (NGOs), are not expected to be responsible for systemic problems. They are a moral and social bonus, which fill the gap in discrete areas where taxpayers' money is not sufficient. So I may be accused of having a one-track mind, but I cannot seem to escape the following questions: Why do we even talk about providing social services in the twenty-first century? Couldn't we have had this issue resolved by now? Why don't we have a “sophisticated national system of government departments” charged with this task? Most other Western countries have one. Even corporate America would like the government to be in charge of providing social services for its employees. Instead we find ourselves on the cutting-edge of a newly fashionable neo-liberal government that looks as emaciated as a Hollywood diva and as masculine as a New York City cop. This decade-long transformation comes hand-in-hand with a trend of privatization and an increased reliance on the nonprofit sector, both domestically and internationall

Applying Bentham\u27s Theory of Fallacies to Chief Justice Roberts\u27 Reasoning in West Virginia v. EPA

This essay summarizes the Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA. It also analyzes Chief Justice Robert’s reasoning and addresses the case’s flaws from two perspectives. It references the Court’s decision connecting it to the so-called New Deal Cases, because in both Panama Refining Co. v. Ryan, and West Virginia v. EPA, the Court accepted to review a lower court’s decision about a non-existent regulation. In 1935, the governmental kerfuffle was due to a lack of regulatory transparency; the Federal Register had yet to be established. This essay’s analysis incorporates Jeremy Bentham’s 1809 work on two classes of fallacies, authority and confusion. Bentham’s work on fallacious thinking continues to be relevant today as it exposes arguments used to cloud reasoning and block governmental reform

Tempest in a teacup or the mystique of sexual legal discourse

This article is about sex; but not about sex meaning gender, an adjective, or “that thing we are.” It is about sexual behavior. It is, in Professor Franke's words, about sex as verb--“that thing we do”--or, to quote Judge Posner, it is about that “quintessential private activity [of] our culture.” However, it does not focus on sex as “the ultimate animal necessity.” That would be the realm of today's talk shows headed by Jerry Springer and his ilk. Instead, it focuses on the pervasiveness of sexual discourse in the legal realm and tries to explain the reason behind it. This article suggests that sex has become a human behavior that is often legally sanctioned because it offers itself to endless and various permissive and restrictive regulations. Furthermore, policing sex requires little infrastructure, unlike, say, a war in Iraq or improving the public school system. Allowing permissive sex legislation is also less expensive. Moreover, like thirst and hunger and irrespective of any regulation, sex will continue its old ways, whether heterosexual or homosexual, reproductive or amative

Technology, Alienation, and the Future of Litigation-Based Social Change

This article addresses the apparent inconsistency of the impact technology has on the "rights vocabulary." It theorizes how, in certain circumstances, it erodes this progressive vocabulary by making it and the subsequent judicial litigation superfluous

The red booklet on feminist equality: Instead of a manifesto

If feminist legal theory were to face its legacy today, it would see that its tremendous value rests in its means more than in its ends. True, it has produced palpable results for its promoters domestically. It satisfied many feminists' discrete incremental requests, from Women's History Month to a limited right to bear or beget. While feminism partially satisfied well-identified gendered demands, it has ignored their “base” or frame. I argue that it has ignored basic calls for social justice. As shown here, how gendered demands are satisfied depends on whether basic demands for food and shelter have even been formulated. Once those basic demands for social justice are part of the public discourse, gendered wants can easily become visible, and be formulated in addition to the basic ones, rather than instead of them. Legal feminism needs to see how those basic demands enable the very existence of gendered demands in the same way “grammatical rules are the indispensable base for our free thought[s]” or our conception about the rule of law is the base for our rights-based system. Absent such basic demands, the gendered ones are castrated of the potential influence they can exercise on all their intended beneficiaries and the society at large

Popular Culture and Legal Pluralism: Narrative as law. By Wendy A. Adams

Wendy Adams’ book is published in Routledge's “Law, Justice, and Power” series, edited by Austin Sarat. Like Sarat, Adams, who teaches law at McGill University, belongs to the school of "cultural studies of law". Thus, her writing is refreshingly cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary. Her project is to build a “legal narrative,” which is a framework for popular culture as law, where illegal acts could easily become re-imagined in an alternative legality. She argues that “legal texts originating with the state may well be of less significance in creating legal meaning in our lives than the representations of law in popular culture.

An Eco-esc Pendulum of Copyright

The thesis of this paper is neither new, nor subtle. It has, in fact, been a recurrent theme in many writings concerned with the interests in copyright and their effects in the present world. My LLM student concern was with the perversion of domestic copyright provisions from an incentive for learning and progress - within whatever limits that goal was fairly found in the statute and case decisions - into an insurmountable international obstacle to learning and education. Unfortunately, this 1993/4 LLM thesis remains as actual today as it was then