Dear all,
as you already know, Flavia Famà organised our tour to the Court of Cassation. A penal judge will join us to explain the role and the activities of the Court. The good news is that we are going to do this for free!
We are supposed to stay at the main entrance on Friday 21st before 10:00, in order to start our tour at 10:00 o’clock.
Flavia needs a comlpete list in order to send it to the security. I know that she has already written an e-mail to all you and that maybe you have already answered to the proposal commenting older posts on this blog. Anyway, I think that you could also write your name HERE, commenting THIS POST. It should be a kind of definitive list.
See you later!
| Esiste un legame tra |
Se siete interessati a conoscere la risposta a questa domanda, venite alla lezione di:
“LAW AND MUSIC”
Nel quadro del corso di lezioni in lingua inglese “Law and the Humanities”
Prof. Emanuele Conte
| Prof. Giorgio Resta (Università di Bari) & M° Enrico Maria Polimanti (Pianista)
|
La lezione, che si terrà in lingua inglese, è aperta a tutti gli interessati
Università RomaTre, Facoltà di Giurisprudenza
Via Ostiense 161- 163, Rome
12 Maggio 2010, AULA 8, ore 14:00
Per maggiori informazioni: http://landh2010roma3.blogspot.com
LAW AND MUSIC
Law & music might appear as one of the most recent and less investigated frontiers of the law & literature movement. To some extent this is true. However, the interface between law and music has also been the subject of important studies in ancient times (Plato in particular), in the middle age (one of the first examples is the anonymous treatise of the fourteenth century Ars cantus mensurabilis mensurata per modus iuris) and during the twentieth century. Prominent legal scholars have written about musical estethics and musicology (Pugliatti) and at the same time several important composers and musicians have been trained in the law (among the others C. P. E. Bach, Schumann, Stravinsky, Nono).
The most important intersection between the two disciplines is represented by the theory of interpretation. Interpreting and performing a score raises a set of questions involves a range of problems not entirely different from interpreting a constitution, a statute, a regulation, or even a legal precedent. Lawyers have frequently confronted themselves with the theory of musical interpretation, in order to enhance their self-comprehension of the legal techniques of interpretation (J. Frank, E. Betti). Not by chance, we can find the same debates between originalists, intentionalists and contextualists in law and in music as well.
During the lecture Prof. Resta will focus: a) on the relationship between law, music and power in a historical perspective; b) on the idea of authenticity in law & music; c) on the ideology of interpretation and interpretivism. Maestro Enrico Maria Polimanti will play music by Giustini, Chopin and Janáček, illustrating the most important intellectual trends and the practical problems of interpretation day by day faced by a musical performer.
Dear all,Short Introduction: Industrial Labour, cinema and legal history
May 6, 2010
Discussion about the movie.
From Europe to America and Back to Europe:
Suggested readings
Steven J. Ross, Struggles for the screen: Workers, Radicals, and the political Uses of Silent Film, in "The American Historical Review", vol. 96, n. 2 (1991), pp. 333-367
Carlo Nitsch, Prospettive dalla riflessione weberiana sulle condizioni di lavoro negli Stati Uniti, in "Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica moderna", 2007 /2, pp. 337 ss.
Prof. Vano's CV
Cristina Vano (Napoli 1961)
Associate Professor, since 2002, of Medieval and Modern Legal History at the Law Faculty of the University of Naples "Federico II". Member of the academic committee of the Research Doctorate in “Roman Law and Roman Law Tradition: the foundations of European law”. Her research focuses on Savigny and the Historical School with special regard to the construction processes of European nineteenth century legal science and to the communication strategies of scientific knowledge. Her book Il nostro autentico Gaio. Strategie della scuola storica alle origini della romanistica moderna (Napoli 2000) has been recently translated into german (Frankfurt 2008). Moreover she is interested in the history of Italian and European juridical culture of the XIX and XX century, with particular attention for such themes as the use of comparative methods , the professionalization of the jurist, the history of Labour Law.
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Dear all,
Dear all,"Lorenzo Cherubini, a.k.a “Jovanotti”, has been invited to Harvard University to give a talk at a conference on "Music and Human Rights". The meeting has been proposed and organized by Italian Society at Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Consulate General of Italy in Boston. This has been the first time that an Italian musician has been asked to address students about this topic at Harvard.
Post-war popular music and its best musicians have always been linked to the promotion of Human Rights and Jovanotti is not an exception. He has been asked to talk to students about his decades long experience in Human Rights issues. He elucidated the relationship that exists between popular music and the diffusion and defense of Human Rights around the world.
From the very beginning of his career Lorenzo has used the power of his public image to promote Human Rights and fight oppression. Because he isn't ideologically driven, he is considered an extremely credible figure by the new generation. At Harvard he has gone into detail about his experience as a Human Rights champion, and has talked about successes and failures, opportunities and challenges, idealism and disillusionment. He gave a true "lecture" from the point of view of an artist based in Italy, a "peripheral" country relative to the great flows of global information, but not an irrelevant country, because Italy has made much progress in the great history of Human Rights and international solidarity.
The artist says that “true” music is indeed “liberation”. “Because in the global and interconnected world where we live, music touches the roots of individuals. I am convinced that if American Constitution should be written today, the sentence “all men are created equal” would not be there anymore [N.d.R. The sentence quoted is indeed placed in the Declaration of Independence by Jefferson]. I think that the word “equal” would be replaced by the word “unique”.” Jovanotti points out this universal way to be unique through his music. An international method of communication, that gives a particular importance to the Italian origins of the artist, as he says. “That is true. I believe that people feel my “Italianity”. I do not know what it exactly means: because I was birth there, this way of being is natural for me, but I know that my message reaches people also because it comes from there [N.d.R. from Italy]. It is a way of being positive that people share”.
Dear all, 
LAW AND LITERATURE IN THE RENAISSANCE
This seminary invites students to investigate the origins of ‘Law & Humanities’ in Renaissance humanism. This variegated movement started among professional jurists on the Italian peninsular who were fascinated by the culture of Antiquity, the beauty of the pristine language of the Romans, and the classical ideal of the virtuous and learned citizen. Soon, jurists across Europe would try to imitate this inspiring model of the uomo universale, thereby laying the foundations of legal history, law and literature, and the study of the larger political and sociological context in which the law operates.
1. BACK TO THE ORIGINS OF LAW AND THE HUMANITIES
The first lesson will give students an overview of some important characteristics of legal humanism, starting with renowned humanists like Petrarca and gradually moving towards the reception of Italian humanism in France with jurists like Budé. These humanist lawyers’ passion for literature and history will be highlighted, as well as their ambiguous relationship with traditional legal education.
- P. Stein, Legal Humanism and Legal Science, Tijdschrift voor rechtsgeschiedenis, 54 (1986), p. 297-306
2. LOVE AND CONTRACTS IN LEGAL HUMANISM
- G. G. Pontano (1429-1503), Eridanus 1.9
- E. Forcadel (1519-1578), Cupido Jurisperitus, cap. 2-3
[see forthcoming papers by W. Decock]
3. LYING AND POLITICS IN LEGAL HUMANISM
- J. Lipsius, Politica. Six books of politics or political instruction. Edited with translation and introduction by Jan Waszink, Assen 2004, p. 84-104 and p. 507-533 (odd pages)
Wim Decock (°1983) graduated as a classicist at the Catholic University of Leuven (lic. summa cum laude 2005).
He went on to participate in an interdisciplinary research project on European Legal Cultures, financed by the European Commission (6th Framework Program).
As a Marie Curie Early Stage Training Fellow he stayed at the Max Planck Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main (2006-2007), the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane in
He is currently a fellow of the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research preparing a PhD on the emergence of modern contract doctrine with the scholastics of the renaissance period.
Dear all,
Prof. Watt prepared 3 really challenging classes: you should "do your homework" before in order to really profit of his presence at the Roma3 University. See the exercises (preparation) below.
Seminar One:
Wednesday 24th March 2010 13:45 - 15:45 “Foundations: architectural metaphors of law and society”
“A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect”.
Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering (1815)
“In that jurisdiction precedes law, in that it marks the point of entry into the juridical sphere and speech, it has to be visible in advance of utterance and hence must be a property of communal space, of the architecture of the institution, of context and vestment that can be apprehended prior to any discursive intervention in the name of legality.” Peter Goodrich, “Visive Powers: Colours, Trees and Genres of Jurisdiction” (2008) 2(2) Law and Humanities 213–231, 214.
“Civilisations cannot be built mechanistically – there must be art as well as science. Where the stones of law are stubborn we must turn to the art of equity. If law is the mason’s art of producing rectilinear stones from the bedrock of nature, equity is the sculptor’s art of revealing the human form from within the rectilinear stone. As the great American jurist, Judge Learned Hand, once said: ‘the work of a judge is an art…[i]t is what a poet does, it is what a sculptor does’” G Watt, Equity Stirring: The Story of Justice Beyond the Law (2009)
“law matters because of death and time and our care for others. Like architecture or language, it is part of the work of cultures which seeks to reach across time, and beyond life”
Desmond Manderson, ‘Desert Island Discs (Ten reveries on pedagogy in law and the humanities)’ (2008) 2(2) Law and Humanities 255–270, 270.
Preparation:
Identify an architectural metaphor employed in the legal language of Italy or elsewhere – and come prepared to discuss it. (For a general introduction to the dominance of metaphors in US legal language, read Bernard J. Hibbitts, “Making Sense of Metaphors: Visuality, Aurality, and the Reconfiguration of American Legal Discourse”, 16 Cardozo L. Rev. 229 (1994) (accessible at http://faculty.law.pitt.edu/hibbitts/meta_con.htm))
Seminar Outline:
We will consider the significance to legal language of the architectural metaphors, including the metaphors of “the rule” and “the level ground”. We will also critically examine the following two quotes which use architectural metaphors to explain “equity”:
“The formall cause of Equity is the matching and levelling of facts falling out, and the circumstances thereof, with the rules of the Law, as buildings are framed to carpenters lines and squares...Not unfitly is Equity termed the rule of manners: for as by a rule the faults of a building are so discovered, so doth equity judge aright, both of the written law, and also of all mens actions and behaviours: and therefore such as are ministers of Justice, apply and frame their judgments, after the square and rule of good and legal, that is to say, of God’s Law, and the Lawes of Nature”
William West, Symboleography (1593)
“When the law speaks universally, then, and a case arises on it which is not covered by the universal statement, then it is right, where the legislator fails us and has erred by oversimplicity, to correct the omission-to say what the legislator himself would have said had he been present, and would have put into his law if he had known. Hence the equitable is just, and better than one kind of justice-not better than absolute justice but better than the error that arises from the absoluteness of the statement. And this is the nature of the equitable, a correction of law where it is defective owing to its universality. In fact this is the reason why all things are not determined by law, that about some things it is impossible to lay down a law, so that a decree is needed. For when the thing is indefinite the rule also is indefinite, like the leaden rule used in making the Lesbian moulding; the rule adapts itself to the shape of the stone and is not rigid, and so too the decree is adapted to the facts.”
Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, Book V chapter 10
Seminar Two
Thursday 25th March 2010 10:00 - 11:45 “Honoré Daumier and the Moving Image of Law”
“a painter so mighty, that no terms can exaggerate the greatness of his importance”.
- Julius Meier-Graefe (Florence Simmonds, trans.)
“Dictus et Amphion, Thebanae conditor arcis,
Saxa movere sono testudinis, et prece blanda
Ducere quo vellet. Fuit haec sapientia quondam,
Publica privatis secernere, sacra profanis…leges incidere lingo”.
Horace, De Arte Poetica
[Amphion too, the builder of the Theban wall, was said to give the stones motion
with the sound of his lyre, and to lead them -whithersoever
he would, by engaging persuasion. This was deemed
wisdom of yore, to distinguish the public from private weal,
things sacred from things profane…to engrave laws on tables of wood.]
This seminar is based around an annotated slideshow of the life and art of Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) is an exploration of the artist’s remarkable power to reveal human motivations and to move his viewers through images which for the most part were lithographic caricatures and therefore quite literally “set in stone”. Focusing on his representation of the legal profession, we discover that Daumier’s project was to present the theatrical show of law – complete with chiaroscuro lighting, costume, stage, props, gestural rhetoric and, most significant of all, a director’s insight into what motivates the actors.
Preparation:
· Access Daumier lithographs: the human comedy on Google Books (see page 4 on chiaroscuro).
· Look up the subject of “lawyers” at http://dcoll.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/5/browse?type=subject
· Bring a picture (by any artist) demonstrating chiaroscuro and be prepared to discuss its symbolic significance to the law.
· Read the extract from the editorial to (2008) 3(1) Law and Humanities (set out below).
Seminar Outline:
We will discuss the significance of the chiaroscuro images you have found, and some others that I will bring to the seminar. Are you familiar with the phrases “black letter law” and “bright line rule”? Is anything in nature black and white? Is the law? Be prepared to produce your own chiaroscuro study of the law – materials will be supplied!
Gary Watt on law, architecture and the art of chiaroscuro in the work of Honoré Daumier, from the Editorial to 3(1) Law and Humanities (2008):
“Daumier’s work exhibits a complete mastery of composition, line, tone and – when used, which was relatively seldom – colour. A distinctive feature of much of his work is the bold use of chiaroscuro (or clair-obscur), which is the use of dark shadow and bright light to produce dramatic tonal contrast. This feature is the foundation for many of his greatest oil paintings - including Le Lutteur (1852-53); Les Deux Avocats (1855-7); L’Homme à la corde (1858-60); La Laveuse (1860-1) and Crispin et Scapin (1863-5) – and, of course, it is an almost universal feature of his caricatures, which were for the most part executed exclusively in black-and-white monochrome – or as we might term it nowadays, “greyscale”. One can attribute Daumier’s fascination with lawyers to many sources – including the fact that he was employed (at the age of twelve or thirteen) to act as a runner for a notary or bailiff in Paris and the fact that, around the same time, his father is said to have been a frequent visitor to the courts on account of his troubled business affairs – but whatever captured his artistic imagination, it was surely the singular contrast between lawyers’ white collars and black robes that captivated his artistic eye. In the introduction to the English language publication of Les Gens de Justice, Julien Cain notes that “Daumier saw this ‘magic lantern of black figures’ performed before his very eyes” (Les Gens de Justice (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1959) page 13). As for the deeply sardonic critique of lawyers that emerges through his work, that may be attributable to his republican – essentially revolutionary – political outlook, and to the fact that he was imprisoned in his early twenties for his caricature Gargantua (1831). This caricature depicts the last king to rule in France - Louis-Philippe I, so-called “King of the French” – seated on a commode throne continually “issuing” favours whilst being continually fed by the bourgeoisie....
Daumier deserves his place in the pantheon of Law and Humanities, because he exemplifies the central aim of the whole project – which is to cast external scholarly or artistic illumination upon law and lawyers. But do Daumier’s caricatures cast too bright a light? Is his clair too brilliant, with the result that his obscur is too dark, too cynical? We do not think so. If there is an extremism to Daumier’s caricatures, it is attributable to a great extent to the somewhat journalist context in which those works appeared. There was also the need to ensure that the work was attractive to the editors and to the paying public. Surprising as it may seem to us, Daumier sometimes struggled to have certain pieces accepted – even, and perhaps especially, towards the end of his career. Despite this, the passionate humanity of the man is clear from his caricatures – his depiction of the lawyer leaving court with a tearful widow and her “orphan” child achieves pity and avoids sentimentality. The picture is so well drawn, the legend accompanying it in Les Gens de Justice is otiose: “Vous avez perdu votre procès c'est vrai ..... mais vous avez du éprouver bien du plaisir à m’entendre plaider”. This caricature appears as plate number 35 in Les Gens de Justice (see Stone number 1371: www.daumier.org), and to conclude we will briefly consider the plate that immediately follows it. Plate 36 (Stone number 1372: www.daumier.org) depicts the grand staircase leading up to the Palais de Justice, which still stands at the heart of Paris on the Île de la Cité. Walking down the staircase are two lawyers, a few steps apart, each nursing a bundle of documents under his left arm. Each lawyer is looking straight ahead in full-frontal profile; faces devoid of passion, almost without expression – most un-Daumier-like. Their black robes drop straight, their white official scarves – an elongated version of what English barristers call “tabs” - hang from their collars rigidly perpendicular, as if starched. The plate carries the legend “Grand escalier du Palais de justice. Vue de faces”. The humour is as understated as was the pathos of the previous plate. The reference is architectural: here, in the language of architects, is a “front profile of the grand staircase”, and here – in the shape of lawyers – are two cold and rigid men of stone. The fact that the plate is itself a lithograph– and was therefore set in stone – adds a further dimension to the metaphor...Plate 36 was apparently based on an earlier wood engraving (1836), which is a pleasing metaphor for the way in which the law begins in nature before it is set in stone, but the evolution of the work does not end there. Daumier revisited the image around 1865 in the form of a mixed media work (charcoal, soft pencil, ink, watercolour and gouache on paper). The later version is entitled Le Grand escalier du Palais de justice. The pronoun “le” has been added, and the concluding clause “Vue de faces” has been removed. Accordingly, there is, on this occasion, no attempt to repeat the architectural joke. The composition of the picture broadly corresponds to the earlier lithograph, but there are significant differences. There is only one lawyer walking down the stairs, but that is not especially significant. What is significant is the fact that the lawyer is clearly moving – his hat is soft and sitting somewhat askew, his robes are flowing, his white scarf is ruffled and shifting and his feet can be seen stepping down the stairs, whereas before we did not see them. And there, on his chest, near his heart, is the smallest square of red – the ribbon of la Légion d’honneur. Apart from this small patch of red, the picture is grey or thinly washed in pale pink and yellow. There is hope in this image. The stone cold lawyer has moved. The colourless lawyer has a spark of passion in his heart. His face is still aloof but he is moving, and he is walking down from his lofty place, and he might just be walking towards humanity”.
Seminar Three
Friday 26th March 2010 10:00 - 11:45
"Law, Performance and the Sign of Blood"
Preparation:
· Please bring a quotation from any theatrical drama (in any language and of any era) in which the physical stain of blood is linked to a legal theme.
· Read Act 3 scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – especially Antony’s funeral oration in the Roman forum. (http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.3.2.html)
Seminar Outline:
We will consider how blood is used in theatre to signify legal crisis, especially where the conflict is between the law of state and the laws of nature and the divine. We will demonstrate this through attention to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Sophocles’ Antigone. In Shakespeare’s play, Brutus appears, at first, to believe in a law of blood that is deeper than the law of the State, but his appeal to Roman blood is actually devoted to the political idea of
“Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through:
See what a rent the envious Casca made:
Through this, the well-belovèd Brutus stabbed,
And as he plucked his cursèd steel away,
Mark how the blood of Caesar followed it,
As rushing out of doors, to be resolved
If Brutus so unkindly knocked or no,
For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar’s angel, -
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him. -
This was the most unkindest cut of all.” (3.2.171-180)
Antony appeals to higher laws than the law of the State. He appeals to the law of blood and the law of the gods. The appeal to the gods is obvious. The appeal to the law of blood is more subtle. Antony accuses Brutus of putting ephemeral matters of State before a kindred duty to Caesar, who was like a father to him. The repeated reference to Brutus’ “unkindness” is designed to emphasise his disobedience to the law of kindred blood. The description “most unkindest” is effective as an impassioned tortologous double-superlative, but it makes most sense if we understand “unkindest” to mean “not the sort of thing that should occur between kin”. Sophocles’ Antigone likewise considers the perpetual and unalterable laws of life, death and blood to be more fundamental than temporary laws of State and to be more fundamental, even, than laws governing the legal status of marriage:
“Had I had children or their father dead,
I’d let them moulder. I should not have chosen
In such a case to cross the State’s decree.
What is the law that lies behind these words?
One husband gone, I might have found another,
or a child from a new man in first child's place,
but with my parents hid away in death,
no brother, ever, could spring up for me.
Such was the law by which I honoured you.” (900-920)
