More Singing Lawyers
Over at the blog Lowering the Bar, Kevin Underhill notes that law student Josh Keesan is rocking, just like law prof Mark Pettit.
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November 2007
Erik Jensen on Law Prof Attire
Erik Jensen, Case Western Reserve Law School, has published "Law School Attire: A Call for a Uniform Uniform Code." It is forthcoming in the Oklahoma City University Law Review and is available as Case Legal Studies Research Paper 07-30. Here is the abstract.
Law professors dress scruffily, and we need to do something about that.
[Yes. That's it.]
Download the entire Article from SSRN here.
I wish to note that Professor Jensen was my law school tax law professor. He is the creator of the school of buffalo law jurisprudence. See Wheir's the Beef? Buffalo Law and Taxation and A Call for a New Buffalo Law Scholarship, 38 University of Kansas Law Review 433 (1990).
Droit Moral, IP, and Harry Potter's World
Gary Pulsinelli, University of Tennessee College of Law, has published "Harry Potter and the (Re)Order of the Artists: Are We Muggles Or Goblins?" Here is the abstract.
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, author J.K. Rowling attributes to goblins a very interesting view of ownership rights in artistic works. According to Rowling, goblins believe that the maker of an artistic object maintain an ongoing ownership interest in that object even after it is sold, and is entitled to get it back when the purchaser dies. While this view may strike some as rather odd when it is applied to tangible property in the “muggle” world, it actually has some very interesting parallels to the legal treatment of intangible property, particularly in the areas of intellectual property and moral rights. Because of the way these parallels have been developing and growing, we seem to be becoming more goblinish in our willingness to recognize ongoing rights in artistic objects, including allowing the artist to collect a commission on subsequent resale of the work. Practical and social considerations suggest that we are unlikely to go as far as recognizing a permanent personal right in the creator that lets him or her reclaim such an object after a sale or other transfer is made. However, we are moving closer to recognizing some forms of the collective right that the goblins actually seem to demand, a cultural moral right in important cultural objects that enables the descendants of that culture as a group to demand the return of the object. Thus, we muggles may not be as far from the goblins as we may have at first believed.
Download the entire paper from SSRN here.
More Parodies Collected by NPR
Here are some more clever parodies, courtesy of the NPR website.
Some Columbia Business School students, irked by President Bush's appointment of Ben Bernanke to the post of head of the Federal Reserve, created this musical parody in support of their guy, Dean Glenn Hubbard.
Jon Shayne "as Merle Hazard" wrote and sang this parody to express concern over Wall Street woes.
The Federal Reserve has a resident poet: Robert McTeer, of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank. Sample his work here.
Finally, if you are a haiku fun, or a Donald Rumsfeld fan, you might enjoy these works:
Singing Law School Professor
Today's NPR Morning Edition has a story about Mark Pettit, the singing Contracts Professor of Boston University Law School. According to reporter Tovia Smith, Professor Pettit really spices up the classroom with student-provided parodies of standards like Michael Jackson's "Beat It" and Britney Spears' "[You're] Not That Innocent." Read the story here.
So, does Professor Pettit's IP law colleague discuss the use of these parodies in his/her class? Or would that spoil the fun? [Yes, probably].
[Cross-posted to the Law and Humanities Blog].
Joke Stealing and the Law
Larry Getlen discusses the history, culture, and ethics of joke stealing in Radar Magazine in an article called Take the Funny and Run. He makes some interesting points about the comedy community differs in how to deal with this problem. Generally, the law doesn't know how to deal with it: if you write down a joke, or videotape yourself telling it, it will be protected by copyright law. But short of that, you're pretty much out of luck. And is it worth it to sue? Talk of the Nation interviews Mr. Getlen and another comic, Ralphie May, on November 8's show.
