Law and Magic Blog

Clark on Abracadabras in the Law

To add to the law and magic bibliography:

John Holley Clark, Abracadabras in the Law: How the Scales of Justice are Weighted with Strange Phrases That Work Wonders But Mean Nothing, 229 The North American Review 584-591 (May 1930).

Full text available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/25113547.

Sommers and Weisburd on "Legally Magic" Words: An Empirical Study of the Accessibility of Fifth Amendment Rights @rosesomm.bsky.social @rosesomm @uclaw_sf @UMichLaw

Roseanna Sommers, University of Michigan Law School, and Kate Weisburd, UC San Francisco Law, have published "Legally Magic" Words: An Empircal Study of the Accessbility of Fifth Amendment Rights, at 119 Northwestern University Law Review 638 (2024). Here is a link to the article at the Review's website. 

ICYMI: Seidler on The Law of Haunted Houses: A Comment on Stigmatized Properties Following Wang v. Shao @SmartBiggar @UBCLawReview

ICYMI: Reagan Seidler, Law Society of Upper Canada, Smart & Biggar, has published The Law of Haunted Houses: A Comment on Stigmatized Properties following Wang v Shao at 54 (4) UBC Law Rev 455 (2021). Here is the abstract.

Deaths, hauntings, and other scandalous business can impact the value of a home. What must sellers of such “stigmatized” properties disclose to buyers? With the Supreme Court of Canada recently declining to answer the question, this piece aims to help sellers and professionals decide what to say when haggling over Hill House. A comparative look at real estate law and practice in English Canada, Québec, England, and the United States reveals wide differences in approach, revealing deeper differences in how the jurisdictions treat latent defects. The most doctrinally consistent answer is that subjective flaws like ghosts and murders are not defects, but if they are, online coverage of the issue renders them latent. Sellers may therefore pass quiet title while themselves remaining quiet about any skeletons in the closet.

Download the article from SSRN.

Maddox on The Lawyer, the Witch, and the Witness: Witchcraft and the Law of Evidence @nyulaw

Trace Maddox, NYU Law, is publishing The Lawyer, the Witch, and the Witness: Witchcraft and the Law of Evidence in volume 5 of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities (2024). Here is the abstract.

In the sixteenth century, a new crime arrived on the scene of the secular courts: witchcraft. Over the following two hundred years, tens of thousands of individuals across Europe and its colonies would be tried and convicted of this offense. In England alone, hundreds of men and women were executed for covenanting with the Devil or using harmful magic against their neighbors. Almost universally, this “age of credulity and injustice” has provoked a kind of retrospective horror that “rational, highly educated men ‘could have been so bigoted as to put people to death for . . . patently impossible acts’”. In popular thought, convictions for witchcraft must have been miscarriages of justice: because witchcraft does not exist, witchcraft prosecutions are, almost by definition, sham trials. Thus, at best, the early modern witch trials are seen as being marred by a sort of hysteria that overwhelmed the normal safeguards of the judicial process. At worst, they are viewed as deliberate persecutions, driven by sexism, class conflict, or personal animosity. This article challenges those views. Relying on firsthand accounts of early modern trials, as well as contemporary and near-contemporary treatises and commentaries, this article demonstrates that, at least in their evidentiary aspects, the English witch trials were largely unremarkable. Far from evincing “the abandonment of normal legal procedures”, witch trials in England generally followed the established rules of criminal procedure. While many men and women were convicted on evidence that they had nursed demons or failed to pray properly, these and other apparently flimsy proofs were not arbitrary, nor was their admission at trial a legal anomaly. English witches were not presumed guilty, or tortured into confession, or summarily convicted on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations. Instead, they were executed after trial and conviction with full legal process. In other words, the central claim of this article is that, whatever criticisms we might level with the benefit of hindsight, the English witch trials simply were not a miscarriage of justice. Rather, they were, by and large, a realization of justice as it existed at the time.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Tait on The Haunting of Wealth Law @athenais1674 @URLawSchool

Kind of law and magical! Allison Anna Tait, University of Richmond School of Law, has published The Haunting of Wealth Law at ACTEC Law Journal 49 (2023). Here is the abstract.

Wealth law is full of ghosts, ghosts everywhere all at once. As a form of both preservation and disruption, a form of continuance as well as a form of interruption, ghosts are reminders of the past in its multiple forms. But they are also figures that prompt consideration of the present as well as speculation about the future. Jacques Derrida, who suggested the idea of “hauntology,” posited haunting and the ghostly as being “time out of joint,” a reference to Hamlet’s confused cry upon seeing his father’s ghost. Like ghosts, inheritance and wealth transfer laws represent ruptures in time, enabling the destabilizing presence of the past alongside the various possibilities for the present and future. It should come then as no surprise then that ghosts of many shades and stories populate the lawscape of inheritance. There are images of ghosts who return to monitor the afterlives of their wealth, full of fear and skepticism about how relatives will manage their legacies. These are the ghosts of decedents with property to control, ghosts concerned about legacies and the perpetuation of personal and family legacies. These ghosts are kindred to the ghosts, cadavers, and hoarders invoked by Karl Marx, tied to specters of asset creation and asset protection, buoyed by the enchantment of money and the magic of purchasing power. Accompanying and abetting these individual ghosts, there are more diffuse and ethereal ghosts, the ghosts of history and empire, the ghosts of dynastic rule and past property systems. This short Article represents a brief and not at all comprehensive attempt to analyze the various kinds of ghosts that haunt property and wealth transfer law and what messages they hold, both specifically for the legal regulation of inheritance law and, more broadly for the political economy of inheritance.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Sean Doolan, Lawyer/Magician

Sean Doolan is a trial lawyer turned magician. Read more about him and his transition from attorney to conjurer here. 

Norfolk, Virginia, Repeals Its Crafty Sciences Ban

Norfolk, Virginia, has repealed its ban on fortune telling. 

Section 29-65 of Norfolk's municipal ordinances (dated 1979) read:

(a)

It shall be unlawful for a person to engage in the practice of palmistry, palm reading, phrenology or clairvoyance, for monetary or other compensation, in this city.

(b)

Any person violating this section shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.

(Code 1958, § 31-49)

 

Ordinance 49-631, dated June 11, 2024, repealed this section. (https://library.municode.com/va/norfolk/ordinances/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=1294455)

 

Front Royal, Virginia repealed its ban in 2014. 

Another Law and Magic Cite From 1914

Another useful article to add to the law and magic bibliography:

L. Arthur Wilder, Legal Status of Seers and Necromancers, 21 Case & Comment 445 (1914). 

Simon on Yada, Yada, Yada: The Magic of 3 in Legal Writing @uarizonalaw

Diana Simon, University of Arizona College of Law, has published Yada, Yada, Yada: The Magic of 3 in Legal Writing at LAW360 (October 3, 2023) LAW360 (October 03, 2023) https://www.law360.com/pulse/articles/1720327. Here is the abstract.

This article focuses on the magic of three in legal writing. First, it addresses the magic of three in history and culture. Second, it addresses the magic of three in persuasive messages in general based on a scientific study. Third, it demonstrates how the U.S. Supreme Court itself uses first, second, and third as linking transitions when articulating its reasoning.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.