Law And Letters In American Culture

Author : Robert A. Ferguson
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674514652
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Law and Letters in American Culture written by Robert A. Ferguson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of religion in early American literature has been endlessly studied; the role of the law has been virtually ignored. Robert A. Ferguson's book seeks to correct this imbalance. With the Revolution, Ferguson demonstrates, the lawyer replaced the clergyman as the dominant intellectual force in the new nation. Lawyers wrote the first important plays, novels, and poems; as gentlemen of letters they controlled many of the journals and literary societies; and their education in the law led to a controlling aesthetic that shaped both the civic and the imaginative literature of the early republic. An awareness of this aesthetic enables us to see works as diverse as Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and Irving's burlesque History of New York as unified texts, products of the legal mind of the time. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the great political orations were written by lawyers, and so too were the literary works of Trumbull, Tyler, Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown, William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and a dozen other important writers. To recover the original meaning and context of these writings is to gain new understanding of a whole era of American culture. The nexus of law and letters persisted for more than a half-century. Ferguson explores a range of factors that contributed to its gradual dissolution: the yielding of neoclassicism to romanticism; the changing role of the writer; the shift in the lawyer's stance from generalist to specialist and from ideological spokesman to tactician of compromise; the onslaught of Jacksonian democracy and the problems of a country torn by sectional strife. At the same time, he demonstrates continuities with the American Renaissance. And in Abraham Lincoln he sees a memorable late flowering of the earlier tradition.

Author : Michael Asimow
Publisher : Peter Lang
ISBN 13 : 9780820458151
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Law and Popular Culture written by Michael Asimow and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2004 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the interface between law and popular culture, two subjects of enormous current importance and influence. Exploring how they affect each other, each chapter discusses a legally themed film or television show, such as Philadelphia or Dead Man Walking, and treats it as both a cultural and a legal text, illustrating how popular culture both constructs our perceptions of law, and changes the way that players in the legal system behave. Written without theoretical jargon, Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book is intended for use in undergraduate or graduate courses and can be taught by anyone who enjoys pop culture and is interested in law.

Author : Teresa Kissane Brostoff
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0199895457
Total Pages : 472 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book United States Legal Language and Culture written by Teresa Kissane Brostoff and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-05-30 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Legal English, experienced educators and professors Teresa Kissane Brostoff and Ann Sinsheimer answer the needs of law students unfamiliar with the use of English in legal settings. They introduce the student into a new world of study of the law by carefully guiding them through the vital skills and techniques they will need to feel comfortable and proficient in English-speaking and American legal culture.

Author : Peter Schneck
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 3110253771
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Rhetoric and Evidence written by Peter Schneck and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book traces the changing relation and intense debates between law and literature in U.S. American culture, using examples from the 18th to the 20th century (including novels by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Harper Lee, and William Gaddis). Since the early American republic, the critical representation of legal matters in literary fictions and cultural narratives about the law served an important function for the cultural imagination and legitimation of law and justice in the United States. One of the most essential questions that literary representations of the law are concerned with, the study argues, is the unstable relation between language and truth, or, more specifically, between rhetoric and evidence. In examining the truth claims of legal language and rhetoric and the evidentiary procedures and protocols which are meant to stabilize these claims, literary fictions about the law aim to provide an alternative public discourse that translates the law's abstractions into exemplary stories of individual experience. Yet while literature may thus strive to institute itself as an ethical counter narrative to the law, in order to become, in Shelley’s famous phrase “the legislator of the world”, it has to face the instability of its own relation to truth. The critical investigation of legal rhetoric in literary fiction thus also and inevitably entails a negotiation of the intrinsic value of literary evidence.

Author : Laura Nader
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520208339
Total Pages : 468 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Law in Culture and Society written by Laura Nader and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997-04-25 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A classic collection in the anthropology of law. While some exceptionally good descriptive work is presented, the volume is particularly valuable in providing a range of thoughtful, engaged, and empirically grounded theoretical explorations of issues in the comparative study of law and conflict."—Donald Brenneis, author of Dangerous Words

Author : R. Schur
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230101720
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book African American Culture and Legal Discourse written by R. Schur and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-12-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines the experiences of African Americans under the law and how African American culture has fostered a rich tradition of legal criticism. Moving between novels, music, and visual culture, the essays present race as a significant factor within legal discourse. Essays examine rights and sovereignty, violence and the law, and cultural ownership through the lens of African American culture. The volume argues that law must understand the effects of particular decisions and doctrines on African American life and culture and explores the ways in which African American cultural production has been largely centered on a critique of law.

Author : Susanna L. Blumenthal
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674048935
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Law and the Modern Mind written by Susanna L. Blumenthal and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In postrevolutionary America, the autonomous individual was both the linchpin of a young nation and a threat to the founders’ vision of ordered liberty. Conceiving of self-government as a psychological as well as a political project, jurists built a republic of laws upon the Enlightenment science of the mind with the aim of producing a responsible citizenry. Susanna Blumenthal probes the assumptions and consequences of this undertaking, revealing how ideas about consciousness, agency, and accountability have shaped American jurisprudence. Focusing on everyday adjudication, Blumenthal shows that mental soundness was routinely disputed in civil as well as criminal cases. Litigants presented conflicting religious, philosophical, and medical understandings of the self, intensifying fears of a populace maddened by too much liberty. Judges struggled to reconcile common sense notions of rationality with novel scientific concepts that suggested deviant behavior might result from disease rather than conscious choice. Determining the threshold of competence was especially vexing in litigation among family members that raised profound questions about the interconnections between love and consent. This body of law coalesced into a jurisprudence of insanity, which also illuminates the position of those to whom the insane were compared, particularly children, married women, and slaves. Over time, the liberties of the eccentric expanded as jurists came to recognize the diversity of beliefs held by otherwise reasonable persons. In calling attention to the problematic relationship between consciousness and liability, Law and the Modern Mind casts new light on the meanings of freedom in the formative era of American law.

Author : Lisa C. Bower
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 9780816633814
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Between Law and Culture written by Lisa C. Bower and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens to legal thought when key terms-society, culture, power, justice, identity-become unsettled? With the boundaries defining sociolegal scholarship undergoing a profound shift, this book explores the intersections of law, culture, and identity. Sexuality, race, sports, and the politics of policing are among the topics the authors take up as they examine how law both reproduces and challenges fundamental notions of order, discipline, and identity. Contributors: Rosemary J. Coombe, U of Toronto; David M. Engel, SUNY, Buffalo; Marjorie Garber, Harvard U; Herman Gray, UC, Santa Cruz; Rona Tamiko Halualani, San Jos State U; David Harvey, CUNY; Deb Henderson; Yuen J. Huo, UCLA; S. Lily Mendoza, U of Denver; Trish Oberweis, American Justice Institute; Paul A. Passavant, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Lisa E. Sanchez, U of Illinois; Carl F. Stychin, U of Reading; Tom R. Tyler, New York U; Christine A. Yalda.

Author : Jill Norgren
Publisher : Praeger
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book American Cultural Pluralism and Law written by Jill Norgren and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2006-07-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Previous editions published : 1996 (2nd) and 1988 (1st).

Author : Susan Scafidi
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813536064
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Who Owns Culture? written by Susan Scafidi and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is not uncommon for white suburban youths to perform rap music, for New York fashion designers to ransack the world's closets for inspiration, or for Euro-American authors to adopt the voice of a geisha or shaman. But who really owns these art forms? Is it the community in which they were originally generated, or the culture that has absorbed them? While claims of authenticity or quality may prompt some consumers to seek cultural products at their source, the communities of origin are generally unable to exclude copyists through legal action. Like other works of unincorporated group authorship, cultural products lack protection under our system of intellectual property law. But is this legal vacuum an injustice, the lifeblood of American culture, a historical oversight, a result of administrative incapacity, or all of the above? Who Owns Culture? offers the first comprehensive analysis of cultural authorship and appropriation within American law. From indigenous art to Linux, Susan Scafidi takes the reader on a tour of the no-man's-land between law and culture, pausing to ask: What prompts us to offer legal protection to works of literature, but not folklore? What does it mean for a creation to belong to a community, especially a diffuse or fractured one? And is our national culture the product of Yankee ingenuity or cultural kleptomania? Providing new insights to communal authorship, cultural appropriation, intellectual property law, and the formation of American culture, this innovative and accessible guide greatly enriches future legal understanding of cultural production.