Jan 6, 2010 Michael FroomkinWork Law
Section Editors
The Section Editors choose the Contributing Editors and exercise editorial control over their section. In addition, each Section Editor will write at least one contribution (“jot”) per year. Questions about contributing to a section ought usually to be addressed to the section editors.
Professor Samuel Estreicher
Dwight D. Opperman Professor of Law; Co-Director, Dwight D. Opperman Institute of Judicial Administration; Director, Center for Labor and Employment Law, New York University School of Law Continue reading "Meet the Editors"
Jan 6, 2010 Michael FroomkinWork Law
Jotwell: The Journal of Things We Like (Lots) seeks short reviews of (very) recent scholarship related to the law that the reviewer likes and thinks deserves a wide audience. The ideal Jotwell review will not merely celebrate scholarly achievement, but situate it in the context of other scholarship in a manner that explains to both specialists and non-specialists why the work is important.
Although critique is welcome, reviewers should choose the subjects they write about with an eye toward identifying and celebrating work that makes an original contribution, and that will be of interest to others. Please see the Jotwell Mission Statement for more details. Continue reading "Call for Papers"
Jan 6, 2010 Michael FroomkinWork Law
The Journal of Things We Like (Lots)–JOTWELL–invites you to join us in filling a telling gap in legal scholarship by creating a space where legal academics will go to identify, celebrate, and discuss the best new legal scholarship. Currently there are about 350 law reviews in North America, not to mention relevant journals in related disciplines, foreign publications, and new online pre-print services such as SSRN and BePress. Never in legal publishing have so many written so much, and never has it been harder to figure out what to read, both inside and especially outside one’s own specialization. Perhaps if legal academics were more given to writing (and valuing) review essays, this problem would be less serious. But that is not, in the main, our style.
We in the legal academy value originality. We celebrate the new. And, whether we admit it or not, we also value incisiveness. An essay deconstructing, distinguishing, or even dismembering another’s theory is much more likely to be published, not to mention valued, than one which focuses mainly on praising the work of others. Books may be reviewed, but articles are responded to; and any writer of a response understands that his job is to do more than simply agree. Continue reading "Jotwell Mission Statement"
Jan 5, 2010 Michael FroomkinTrusts & Estates
Section Editors
The Section Editors choose the Contributing Editors and exercise editorial control over their section. In addition, each Section Editor will write at least one contribution (“jot”) per year. Questions about contributing to a section ought usually to be addressed to the section editors.
Professor Bridget J. Crawford
Pace Law School Continue reading "Meet the Editors"
Jan 5, 2010 Michael FroomkinTrusts & Estates
Jotwell: The Journal of Things We Like (Lots) seeks short reviews of (very) recent scholarship related to the law that the reviewer likes and thinks deserves a wide audience. The ideal Jotwell review will not merely celebrate scholarly achievement, but situate it in the context of other scholarship in a manner that explains to both specialists and non-specialists why the work is important.
Although critique is welcome, reviewers should choose the subjects they write about with an eye toward identifying and celebrating work that makes an original contribution, and that will be of interest to others. Please see the Jotwell Mission Statement for more details. Continue reading "Call for Papers"
Jan 5, 2010 Michael FroomkinJurisprudence
Section Editors
The Section Editors choose the Contributing Editors and exercise editorial control over their section. In addition, each Section Editor will write at least one contribution (“jot”) per year. Questions about contributing to a section ought usually to be addressed to the section editors.
Professor Brian Bix
Frederick W. Thomas Professor of Law and Philosophy,
University of Minnesota Continue reading "Meet the Editors"
Dec 23, 2009 JotwellJotwell
Jotwell is taking a short winter break. Posting will resume early in January.
I am tremendously grateful to our authors and readers who together have made Jotwell’s launch such a great success. Thank you for reading, and for your support.
Dec 21, 2009 Frank PasqualeTechnology Law
Anthony Varona,
Toward a Broadband Public Interest Standard, 61
Admin. L. Rev. 1 (2009), available at
SSRN.
I was recently reading Bob Garfield’s book The Chaos Scenario, which describes the accelerating deterioration of old business models for mainstream media. Garfield’s weekly podcast/radio show, On the Media, has meticulously documented the problems journalists, musicians, and news programs are encountering as content converges onto broadband-based intermediaries. In the face of all these dramatic changes, what are legal scholars adding to the debate?
In cyber- and media law scholarship, Anthony Varona deserves special notice for integrating the two fields in his recent article “Toward a Broadband Public Interest Standard.” Varona tries to revive an old and oft-neglected standard for broadcasting—the public interest—for the digital age. In areas where scholarship too often degenerates into arid formalism, libertarian rejectionism, and toothless jeremiads, Varona is a breath of fresh air. He has articulated both a comprehensive justification for better broadband regulation and a method of achieving it. The article is both a rigorous intervention into extant debates on network neutrality and importantly demonstrates (and helps remedy) the partiality and ideological character of many of those debates. Continue reading "Democratizing Online Life via Cultural Infrastructure"
Dec 17, 2009 Susan BandesCriminal Law
Susan Bandes
Criminal procedure and criminology have developed along oddly parallel tracks. Criminal procedure is rights-based and court-centric. It cares about policing and crime control not as subjects in their own right, but as objects of constitutional limitation. The field implicates the regulation of police behavior, but has traditionally paid little attention to police attitudes or police organizational culture. It implicates crime control, but has paid little attention to the social, political and cultural context in which the criminal process unfolds. This focus seems increasingly myopic. Most of the promising innovations in police reform and crime control have little to do with judicial enforcement of constitutional rights. Continue reading "Parallel Play: The Disconnect Between Criminal Procedure and Criminology Revisited"
Dec 15, 2009 Pat GudridgeConstitutional Law
Elliott Visconsi, Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England (Cornell University Press: 2008).
This is a book about the fictionalization of the origins of law in later Stuart England. My focus is on crucial literary texts such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost and John Dryden’s Indian Emperour, works devoted to demanding of the audience a set of structured interpretive deliberations about the first principles of government, the charismatic utterance of law, and the transition from savagery to civility. At the heart of such an intellectual program is the norm and practice of equity…. Equity is a moral principle (equal justice, fairness), an interpretive method (summoning the original intention or spirit of a law in order to judge fully particular acts or events), and a gesture of sovereign mercy (relaxing the rigorous letter of the law in order to ensure justice). For the writers I study, equity is habit of thought that may be cultivated through fictional methods. … I take as given the claim … that in the later Stuart period, serious literary texts are a crucial language for the public constitution of the legal norms and conceptions of sovereignty, subjecthood, and political authority. Moreover, I share the view that literary texts are often the most effective and lasting language for explaining and legitimating legal regimes. (1-2)
This is a book I like a lot in part because of who – professionally – Elliott Visconsi is. He wrote the book while an assistant professor of English. Lines of Equity is careful tenure track work. Visconsi announces right at the beginning (“I take as given”) that he is working within a field already mapped (naming and footnoting his predecessors in the passage I delete.) And he was also an assistant professor of English at Yale – making his way, therefore, within one of the most established, celebrated, central English departments in American academia. There is nothing radical, it appears – or not much – in Visconsi’s project. Constitutional thinking is, apparently, a pretty much accepted starting point for exploring the organization and power of literary works. Professor Visconsi cheerfully announces on his Yale webpage that he will “spend a year studying US and comparative constitutional law at Yale Law School courtesy of a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship. The major focus of my current research touches on the cultural and legal history of the separation of church and state….” Continue reading "Taking the Literary Turn"
