REMINDER: Submission Midterm Exam

Dear all,

I would like to remind you that you should submit your Midterm Exam today, via email, to the following email addresses: 
e.conte@uniroma3.it; 
gialdronis@gmail.com; 
angelacondello@gmail.com.
Many of you have already done it but I would like to be sure that you don't miss the date.
See you soon 

Emanuele Coccia on Law and Religion

Dear All,

next week's classes will be devoted to a complex and  incredibly fascinating topic: Law and Religion.

Here are two brief introductions to the seminars:

1. The Poetics of the Law in Ancient Judaism

The Tanakh (the jewish “Bible”) is not just a religious book : it is a collection of law books which includes narratives and literary texts. Alexandrine Judaism developed a very detailed theory on the reason why the Law has not to limit itself to using imperative forms and has to adopt a larger variety of rhetoric and literary forms. What is a form of Law, which speaks the language of Literature? 

 2. Law and Biography : from the Gospels to Facebook

The inclusion of the four Gospels in the New Testament (the juridical Appendix to the Tanakh –the Old Testament) represents a sort of revolution in the history of Western normative forms : for the first time four biography were at the center of a Law Book. Which kind of normativity is embodied in a biography ?

 For what concerns the readings, you just got an email with a list of them.

 Enjoy!

 Prof. Coccia's CV:

Emanuele Coccia is Associate Professor in Social Sciences at the Ecole de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research focuses on the history of christian normativity and on aesthetics. Among his publications are : La trasparenza delle imagine. Averroè e l'averroismo, Milano 2005 (Spanish transl. 2008), Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam, Milano 2009 (with G. Agamben), La vie sensible, Paris 2011 (portuguese transl. 2010, Spanish transl. 2011, Italian transl 2011,  Romanian transl. 2011 ; English transl. forthcoming), and Le bien dans les choses, Paris 2013 (Italian transl. 2014, Portuguese, German and Spanish transl. forthcoming).

Sara Menzinger on Law and Dante

Dear Students,

this week's classes will take place on Wednesday and Thursday only - due to Easter break.

They will be devoted to the topic of "Law, Canonists and Bible in the Political Thought of Dante".

The classes will be based on sources which you will receive via email today. 

If you would like to have a more thorough insight on the topic, here are some further non compulsory readings: 

- J. Steinberg, Dante and the Limits of the Law, Chicago 2013; 

- D. Quaglioni, “Arte di bene e d’equitade”. Ancora sul senso del diritto
in Dante (Monarchia, II v 1), in “Studi Danteschi”, 76 (2011), pp.
27-46; Monarchia, ed. by D. Quaglioni, in Dante Alighieri, Opere, ed.
M. Santagata, vol. II, Milano, Mondadori («I Meridiani»), 2014;

- B.Tierney, Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional Thought.
1150-1650, Cambridge 1982.

Next week the classes will take place regularly (April 23rd and 24th)! 

Prof. Menzinger's CV:

Sara Menzinger is Substitute Professor of Legal History at the Law Department in Roma Tre. She specializes in Medieval Legal History and she has published widely on the topic of Italian city states [e.g. Giuristi e politica nei comuni di Popolo. Siena, Perugia e Bologna, tre governi a confronto (ius nostrum. Studi e testi pubblicati dall’Istituto di Storia del Diritto italiano, Università degli Studi di Roma, “La Sapienza”, vol. 34), Roma 2006 and La Summa Trium Librorum di Rolando da Lucca (1195-1234). Fisco, politica, scientia iuris. Roma 2012 (together with Emanuele Conte)].

She has conducted research in many Italian and international universities and research centers, among which the Istituto Italiano di Studi Storici (Naples), the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (Frankfurt) and the Deutsches Historisches Institute (Rome).

About the Midterm and Final Exam

Dear all,

I would like to remind you about the content and schedule of the Midterm Exam and tell you something more about the Final Exam.

Wednesday, April 30th 2014: Submission Midterm Exam ("Competition")

As you already know, this year the Midterm Exam will consist of a sort of "Competition". The idea is to be creative, to "perform Law and the Humanities". You can submit a photo, a drawing, a video (short! No more than 5 minutes!), a poem, a novel, etc. related to the topics we have discussed in class or others. In case you are going to submit an image or a video, please remember to add a brief comment in order to explain the connection to "Law and the Humanities". It could be even just a title, if it's a good one. In any case, you shouldn't write more than one page.

All materials should be sent to the 3 of us (gialdronis@gmail.com; angelacondello@gmail.com; e.conte@uniroma3.it) by April 30th. There will be no lesson on April 30th but it is the final date for the submssion of the Midterm. If you want to submit a drawing or similar, please scan it and send it via email.

Friday, May 30th 2014, 10:00 am: Final Exam 

The Final Exam will consist of a list of questions about all the topics discussed in class. You will then choose  the two questions you prefer and answer, writing two short essays. You won't be allowed to use any vocabulary. Time at your disposal: 1h 30m. Remember that the readings are very important in order to improve your evaluation!!!

Gary Watt on Law, Dress and Fashion

Dear All, 

here are some introductory remarks on this week's classes. 

Please read carefully!

Professor Gary Watt’s three seminars under the title ‘Law, Dress and Fashion’ are based on chapters from his book Dress, Law and Naked Truth: A Cultural Study of Fashion and Form (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) (http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/dress-law-and-naked-truth-9781472500427/). The seminars will use cultural and artistic sources (including The Epic of Gilgamesh, Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Shakespeare’s Othello and Twelfth Night, Dickens’s novels and Daumier’s lithographs) to show that ‘dress is law and law is dress’. The history of political civilization is the history of social regulation that has been simultaneously, and similarly, established in the cultural forms we call ‘dress’ and ‘law’. The first seminar, ‘Foundations of the State of Dress’, demonstrates foundational, architectural qualities shared by dress and law, with special reference to The Epic of Gilgamesh. Students should familiarize themselves with the text of the Epic in advance of class. We will be using the Andrew George penguin translation (which can be accessed free online: enter ‘roberthaug.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/epic-of-gilgamesh.pdf’ into Google and you will see a pdf available for free download). The second seminar, ‘Shakespeare on Proof and Fabricated Truth’ looks at the way in which the language and culture of legal proof closely parallels the language of armorial proof, with the result that the artificial process of producing satisfactory armour can be said to mirror the artificial process by which legal evidence produces satisfactory proof in a court of law. (In order to prepare for the second seminar, students should read Shakespeare’s plays Othello and (or) Twelfth Night (available online here: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/).) This seminar will suggest that proof is a manufactured thing, thereby challenging the assumption that juridical courts are constituted for the purpose of discovering underlying or ‘naked’ truth. This leads to the subject of the third seminar, ‘The Face the Law Makes’. In this seminar we will see how the legal profession performs the public face of law through theatrical use of costume and how this performance reinforces the architectural foundations of the law and presents a carefully-fashioned fascia of authority. (In order to prepare for the third seminar, students should browse the images of Daumier’s legal lithographs here: http://bir.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/5/browse?value=Lawyers&type=subject)
In addition to the readings set out above, please carry out the following brief tasks ahead of each seminar. Seminar One: come prepared to share a source or a quotation from creative literature (a novel, a play, a fairy tale etc) which supports or challenges the statement “dress is law”. Seminar Two: come prepared to share a source or a quotation from creative literature of the period 1550-1650 which demonstrates deception by dress, or doubt based on perceived discrepancy between inner substance and outward form. Seminar Three: please bring a nineteenth century (1800-1899) image of a lawyer to class and be prepared to discuss it. The image should not be by Daumier.

Prof. Watt's brief CV: 

 
Gary Watt is a Professor in the School of Law at The University of Warwick. He is a National Teaching Fellow and was named UK ‘Law Teacher of the Year’ in 2009. His books include Trusts and Equity 6th edn (OUP, Oxford, 2014), Equity Stirring: The Story of Justice Beyond Law (Oxford, Hart, 2009) and Dress, Law and Naked Truth: A Cultural Study of Fashion and Form (London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). He is a founding co-editor of the journal Law and Humanities, and writes extensively at the intersection of law, culture and the arts. He has written for BBC Radio 3, the Times Literary Supplement and regularly delivers workshops in rhetoric for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The Supreme Court - the pictures (of us)

Thanks to Francesca Semeraro for the picture...and to Giorgio Polacco for the selfie!