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Floyd Abrams plays a judge in the new Alan Alda film Nothing But the Truth, about a lawyer who defends a journalist. The film is supposed to parallel the Valerie Plame case. Read more here. Reminds me of Otto Preminger's decision to cast Joseph Welch as the jurist in Anatomy of a Murder...
Here's a review of the new series Viva Laughlin! from the New York Times' indefatiguable Alessandra Stanley suggesting that, well, "viva" isn't the word for it.
There's a new biography of Agatha Christie out by Laura Thompson, called, rather unimaginatively: Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. Here's the review by Lindsay Duguid. But the author had access to a great quantity of unpublished material, so it seems worthy of further investigation.
Pushing Daisies is a new series on ABC with a lot of buzz. The premise is that Ned, a young piemaker (why is buried in his childhood), has the ability to touch the dead and bring them back to life for one minute. But a second touch returns them to their original state, which is to say, death. If he doesn't touch them, someone else must take their place. This result actually sounds like one of the rules governing Dead Like Me, a series that ran for two seasons on Showtime and then was repeated on the SciFi Network. That shouldn't be surprising, since Bryan Fuller, who created and produced Dead Like Me, is also responsible for Pushing Daisies.
Why Ned has this power isn't explained; you simply have to accept that he has it. Ned is in a sense some kind of mutant. He doesn't see much use for his talent, especially after, as a child he brings his mother back to life and then, in accordance with the rule I describe above, accidentally sacrifices the father of his childhood girlfriend. He then accidentally touches his mother--and she dies for good. Children don't understand death very well, and they certainly don't understand that they aren't (usually) responsible for the deaths of those they love. Consider, then, that Ned feels responsible for the deaths of his mother and the death of his girlfriend's father, because of this weird "gift".
How could this be a premise for a series? Fuller weaves it into the first episode this way. A private detective sees Ned touch a fleeing suspect who has died by falling out a window and bring him back to life. The PI decides to propose that Ned and he set up shop together. The PI will investigate crimes for which Ned can provide information from dead victims. He will have one minute to ask them how they died and who killed them. Of course, they may not always know--that would make the crime solving too easy. Then they will either solve the crimes together, or turn over the information to the police. Either way, they will put themselves in line for big rewards. Everybody wins. Ned is skeptical. In addition, he simply doesn't want to get involved in other people's problems, or in other people's death. This kind of thing has never brought him any happiness. From his point of view, bringing people back to life sets up an instant barrier--he cannot touch them, or they will die, but he must touch them, or someone else will, in order to take their place.
In addition, the balancing rule that I describe requires that Ned make some extremely difficult choices. He cannot decide who will die in exchange for someone he would like to bring back from the dead. He cannot exercise some kind of extra-judicial notions of supreme power. Those decisions are beyond him. Someone, or something, else is making those choices. Thus, in most, if not all, cases, he must touch the persons he brings back to life within one minute and send them back to their deceased state, even if he likes them. In the first episode he breaks that rule, since the person he brings back to life is his childhood friend Chuck. In order to keep her alive, he sacrifices the funeral director; he justifies the choice by telling the PI that the funeral director was a crook. But is that Ned's choice to make? Does having a magical ability give one the right to make such extra-legal decisions? Isn't that exactly why, assuming they exist, we mistrust magic and magicians to begin with? In addition, Ned and Chuck must now agree never to touch each other. Their relationship can never be intimate. It can never have any physical dimension at all, or Chuck will die again. How the series resolves this situation will be intriguing to discover.
Pushing Daisies promises to be an extremely interesting series that raises some fundamental questions about the choices that we make and how we make them, even if it invests its protagonist with an impossible ability. That's what makes it fun.
Cross posted to the Law and Magic Blog.
Julie Elgar's That What She Said is a blog devoted to the fallout from the series The Office--actually, to the legal fallout from each episode should the idiocy go to trial. Elgar is a labor and employment attorney at Ford & Harrison in Atlanta, Georgia. She analyzes each episode for legal stupidity and tallies up the costs. Each post is invaluable. Check them out.
When 51-year-old Brian Marquis got a C in his political philosophy class at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, instead of that A- he was expecting, he didn't just grouse. He sued. After federal district judge Michael Ponsor discussed the case with Mr. Marquis and the university's counsel, he decided Mr. Marquis's suit had no merit. But the unhappy undergraduate is not convinced, and says he may appeal. Read more here in a Boston Globe article. Read Mr. Marquis's complaint here. Read the University's motion to dismiss here.
HogwartsProfessor.com is devoted to Harry Potter. Check it out here.
Robin Lister, University of Bradford, presents a case for teaching Law and Literature in the undergraduate curriculum, in ""Law and Literature and the LLB: An Apology for Poetry in the Undergraduate Law Curriculum." It was presented at the Learning in Law Annual Conference, UK Centre for Legal Education (www.ukcle.ac.uk ), University of Warwick, January 2007. Here is the abstract.
A survey of UK law schools suggests that only 'three or four' offer Law and Literature as an optional subject on their Qualifying Law Degrees (Harris & Beinart, 2005). This number seems surprisingly low, given the proliferation of Law and Literature literature since the emergence of this distinctive approach to thinking about law in the US in the 1970s, the widespread availability of Law and Literature courses in US law schools, and the advocacy of Law and Literature studies on law degrees by a number of UK academics throughout the 1990s (for example, Lee, 1990; Aristodemou, 1993; Ward, 1993; Bradney, 2000).
Download the entire paper from SSRN here.
Cross-posted at Law and Humanities Blog.
