Law and Humanities Workshop: Past Events

Tues., March 21, 2017, 12:30 - 1:45, Solarium, 84 Queens Park (Falconer House): Christopher Warren, Dept of English, Carnegie Mellon University, speaking on early modern literature and the history of international law

Thurs., Sept 15, 2016, 12:30 - 1:45, Solarium, 84 Queens Park (Falconer House): Mark Rose, Dept of English, UC Santa Barbara, "Authors in Court: Stowe v. Thomas (1853)"

Legal Texts and the New Philology

The Fiftieth Conference on Editorial Problems, Friday 20 March - Saturday 21 March 2015

Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

The conference will focus and intensify the debate over the changing nature of editorial approaches to legal texts in order to guide the fields of legal history, legal theory, and legal text editing into today's digital environments. If the basis of our legal system depends on communications of authority, and if, as the work of literary critics suggests, the mode of transmission of this authority is unstable, then the work of the new philologists has great significance for legal theorists and practitioners alike. By showing that law is a product of its own materiality -- and is therefore authored by web designers and database engineers and well as by legislators, judges and clerks -- we hope to highlight an overlooked aspect of the legal "textual condition." For more information, please see the CEP site.

2013-2014

The Law & Humanities Workshop
and
University of Toronto Out in Law

 present

 Professor Joseph Bristow (English, UCLA)
The Blackmailer and the Sodomite: Oscar Wilde on Trial

Wednesday, March 26, 2014
12:30 – 2:00
Room FA3, Falconer House

At a telling moment during the prosecution of Oscar Wilde for committing acts of "gross indecency" with other men, the members of the jury wished to know whether they could accept evidence from sex workers and extortionists who had been convicted of homosexual blackmail. In response, the Solicitor-General, Sir Frank Lockwood, informed them: "The genesis of the blackmailer is the man who had committed these acts of indecency with him. And the genesis of the man who commits these foul acts is the man who is willing to pay for their commission. Were it not that there are men willing to purchase vice in this most hideous and detestable form there would be no market for such crime, and no opening for these blackmailers to ply their calling." This paper explores the relations between "acts of indecency" and the career of "the blackmailer" during the three trials that resulted in the sentencing of Wilde to two years in solitary confinement with hard labor.

 A light lunch will be served.

 Contact:  simon.stern@utoronto.ca

2012-2013

Rita Felski
Dept of English, University of Viriginia

"An Inspector Calls"

Thurs., March 14, 2013, 4pm - 6pm
Room 119, Emmanuel College (75 Queen's Park)

Rita Felski is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her current research centres on questions of method and interpretation. Her recent manifesto "The Uses of Literature" is a neo-phenomenological investigation of aesthetic experiences such as recognition, enchantment, and shock. Her work in progress is a book on critique and the hermeneutics of suspicion. She also has longstanding interests in feminist theory, modernity and postmodernity, genre (especially tragedy), and cultural studies.

For related publications, see:
"Suspicious  Minds," Poetics Today 32 (2011): 215-34;
"Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion," M/C Journal 15 (2012)

Co-sponsored by the Law & Humanities Workshop, the Centre for Comparative Literature, and the Centre for the Study of the United States.

2011-2012

Symposium on Law and Film

(Co-sponsor)

March 2, 2012
Munk School of Global Affairs, 1 Devonshire Place

2:00 – 3:30 pm

Stefan Andriopoulos
Depts. Of German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

“The Terror of Reproduction: Early Cinema's Ghostly Doubles and the Right to One's Own Image”

Respondent: James Cahill, French and Cinema Studies, University of Toronto

Stefan Andriopoulos is chair of the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. He is the author of "Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema" (University of Chicago Press, 2008; German version: Fink, 2000), which won the SLSA Michelle Kendrick award for best academic book on literature, science, and the arts. His new publication provisionally titled "Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media," is under contract with Zone Books. His previous work, published in German, includes a monograph "Accident and Crime: Configurations between Literary and Legal Discourse around 1900" (Centaurus, 1996).

James Leo Cahill teaches in the French Department and the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on early French cinema, documentary and experimental media, and critical theory, with a special interest in the relationships between scientific uses of cinema, cinematic uses of science, and film pedagogy. Cahill is also a co-editor of "Discourse: Journal of Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture."

3:30 – 5:00 pm

Peter Decherney
Dept. of English and Cinema Studies, University of Pennsylvania

“Auteurism on Trial: Moral Rights and Films on Television”

Respondent: Simon Stern, Faculty of Law and Dept. of English

Peter Decherney is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies, English, and Communication and the Director of the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of "Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: from Edison to the Interne" (Columbia, 2012), and "Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American" (Columbia, 2005). He regularly testifies before the Copyright Office of the United States, and in 2011, he filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court Case of Golan v. Holder. Prof. Decherney has been an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Scholar and a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.

Simon Stern is Assistant Professor of Law and English at the University of Toronto. His research interests include the history of copyright law; legal, literary, and intellectual history in the 18th and 19th centuries; and methodology in interdisciplinary work involving law and the humanities. His work has been published, or is forthcoming, in the "Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities," "Law & Literature," "Law & Social Inquiry," the "Yale Law Journal," and "ELH."

2010-2011

2009-2010

2008-2009

2007-2008