Call for Papers: The Law of the Land: Virginia and America

Call for Papers: The Law of the Land: Virginia and America

The Supreme Court of Virginia Historical Commission and the Library of Virginia invite proposals for a needs-and-opportunities symposium on the legal history and culture of Virginia and the United States to be held at the Library of Virginia on Friday and Saturday, 12 and 13 March 2010. The symposium will be the first event in The Law of the Land: Virginia and America, which will feature a major exhibition and other public programs beginning in 2012.

The Program Committee welcomes submissions for individual papers or for session proposals emphasizing needs-and-opportunities and new scholarship that treat large and important topics such as (but not limited to) the origins of American legal culture, the influence of Virginia on American legal culture, the common law, state constitutional law, federalism and state’s rights, courts and jurisprudence, criminal law, commercial law, labor law, environmental law, legal education, law and gender, and the law and slavery, segregation, and race. Attendance is limited to 250.

Please send proposals and a brief CV by e-mail to the Program Committee before 1 May 2009, addressed to brent.tarter@lva.virginia.gov.

Zizek and the law

I was reading over some Slavoj Zizek materials yesterday after hearing more than a few debate rounds at the ADA National Tournament at Appalachian State University in beautiful Boone, NC.

Zizek is one of the more controversial intellectuals of our time. He’s had a profound impact on cultural theory, sociology, philosophy, criticism, and debate. He never avoids controversy and has a knack for being able to write across disciplines.

Zizek is often misunderstood as a contradictory crazy, for lack of a better phrase. Too often instead of appreciating the totality of his work, critics try to position each writing in conflict in order to find inconsistencies.

This masks the larger importance of Zizek’s writing, namely that his self-admitted goal is to criticize, to question. He is not a provider of answers, he is an enabler of thought. Understanding philosophy and criticism as a way to reinvigorate the subjective is a much more fulfilling path than viewing criticism as an esoteric absurdity.

Zizek opens up space and encourages questioning. These are important ideas that would compliment any discipline.  Maligning Zizek as a radical or dismissing him to the obscurity bin is the wrong approach.  He’s a much easier read than his greatest influence Lacan, or Deleuze, or Baudrillard, or Derrida.  If you haven’t thumbed through some Zizek, perhaps you should. 

I hope that as I continue to write this article that I learn more about my own relationship with the law, as a critic.  Zizek has written important about law and society, terrorism, and political action, but there has not been a thorough examination of these writings from a legal scholar’s standpoint.  I hope that I can produce something that does justice to Zizek and helps broaden our conceptions of legal theory.

I’ve published a new paper

the crit: a critical legal studies journal has published my article on Atlantis, narrative, and critical legal studies.  This is a great journal with a really excited and dedicated staff.  We need more avenues like this in the legal academy.  I hope the success of the crit and any success I can bring to them encourages other schools and students to pursue critical legal studies. 

The citation is:  Nick J. Sciullo, Atlantean Prose and the Search for Democracy, 2 the crit: j. critical legal stud. 130 (2009). 

The paper is available at the crit or on SSRN. 

The asbstract from SSRN is below:

Atlantis, the Lost City, has been a focal point of folklore, archeological inquiry, literary criticism, and mystic interpretation. It has boggled the brilliant, confused scientists, and sparked the interest of children. “Skeptics, archaeologists, geologists, and anthropologists may rant and rave, but the myth of Atlantis endures. In every generation, someone emerges to champion the cause and to embroider the story.” But the significance of Atlantean prose as an avenue through which to best understand critical legal thought has not been explored in depth. To be sure, there have been numerous books, articles, and opinions analyzing Atlantis, but little attention has been given to the legal significance of this type of storytelling. What does it mean to engage myth? How can legal scholars and practitioners learn from and use lessons of antiquity? Where does modern narrative theory fit into traditional legal discourse? I ask the reader to dive into the depths with me and consider what Atlantis can teach us about democracy, critical legal studies, and the rule of law.

Northeast Conference on British Studies Call for Papers

The Northeast Conference on British Studies will be holding its annualmeeting at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, on October 2-3, 2009. We solicit the participation of scholars in all areas of British Studies, broadly defined. In particular, we welcome proposals for interdisciplinary panels that draw on the work of historians, literary critics, and scholars in other disciplines whose focus is on Britain and its empire, from the Middle Ages to the present.

The deadline for panel and paper submissions is Friday May 8, 2009. For further information and submission guidelines, please see:
http://users.wpi.edu/~phansen/necbs.