Law and Magic Blog

Fagundes and Perzanowski on Clown Eggs, Creative Norms, and the Social Value of Property Registers @Dave_Fagundes @APerzanowski

Dave Fagundes, University of Houston Law Center, and Aaron Perzanowski, Case Western Reserve School of Law, have published Clown Eggs, Creative Norms and the Social Value of Property Registers. Here is the abstract.

Since 1946, many clowns have recorded their makeup by having it painted on eggs that are kept in a central registry in Wookey Hole, England. This tradition, which continues today, has been referred to alternately as a form of informal copyright registration and a means of protecting clowns’ property in their personae. This Article explores the clown egg register and its surrounding practices from the perspective of law and social norms. In so doing, it makes several contributions. First, it contributes another chapter to the growing literature on the norms-based governance of intellectual property, showing how clowns—like comedians, roller derby skaters, tattoo artists, and other subcultures—have developed an elaborate informal scheme in lieu of state-created copyright or trademark law to regulate their creative production. Second, this Article explores a rarer phenomenon in the norm-based IP context: formalized registration related to norm-based ownership rules. It shows that the Register exists not only to support those rules, but also serves a host of non-property functions, including expressing members’ professionalism, conferring a sense of prestige, and creating a historical record. Finally, this Article shows how its analysis of the Register offers lessons for the study of norms and law more generally. It points the way toward pluralist theories of norms-based regulation, and it highlights the underappreciated non-property functions of other ownership registers in the context of tangible and intellectual property alike.

Download the article at the link.

 

At footnotes 89 and 122, the article cites to this blog's post, Clowning Around, guest blogger Professor Lee Ann Lockridge. Footnote 18 cites to Jacob Loshin's essay in Law and Magic: A Collection of Essays (C.A. Corcos, CAP, 2018).

Haunted Houses and the Spirit of Property Law

Via @JusticeWillett, some Hallowe'en real estate law.

In Haywood v. Carraway, (180 So. 2d 758, La. Ct. App., 1965) plaintiffs sought damages and compensation for mental pain and anguish from the appellees because sometime around September 1959, the defendants' children had vandalized the plaintiffs' beautiful plantation home, known as Belle Helene. 

The appellants, who had lost at trial, were unhappy with the amount of damages awarded and attempted to argue on appeal, among other things, that the house was in such a state of disrepair that "the children were justified in thinking it an abandoned ghost house incapable of being damaged."

Responded the court, "That the juveniles may have considered the building a "ghost house" or "haunted house" is of no consequence inasmuch as the intention of a party committing vandalism does not affect the right of recovery of the injured party. Our Civil Code LSA-C.C. Article 2318 makes the parent or tutor liable for the torts of his minor child or ward. That the child may have no intent to do harm does not exonerate the parent or guardian from liability for his torts. We are aware of the tendency on the part of present day society, adults and juveniles alike, to regard immovable property which is unoccupied or not in use by its owner, as common property or property belonging to no one in particular or public property belonging to all. However, we hasten to add, for the benefit of the uninformed who may believe otherwise, that such concept finds no support in our law. Furthermore, we are not aware and have been cited no authority in our law which recognizes or establishes the concept of abandoned immovable property."

Thus, even if you think it's an abandoned haunted house, don't go in and smash it up. Someone might be watching you.

 

 

 

Keenan on The Production of Race Through Time and Title Registration

Sarah Keenan, Birkbeck College, has published Smoke, Curtains and Mirrors: The Production of Race Through Time and Title Registration, in the 2017 volume for Law and Critique. Here is the abstract.

This article analyses the temporal effects of title registration and their rela- tionship to race. It traces the move away from the retrospection of pre-registry common law conveyancing and toward the dynamic, future-oriented Torrens title registration sys- tem. The Torrens system, developed in early colonial Australia, enabled the production of ‘clean’, fresh titles that were independent of their predecessors. Through a process praised by legal commentators for ‘curing’ titles of their pasts, this system produces inde- feasible titles behind its distinctive ‘curtain’ and ‘mirror’, which function similarly to magi- cians’ smoke and mirrors by blocking particular realities from view. In the case of title reg- istries, those realities are particular histories of and relationships with land, which will not be protected by property law and are thus made precarious. Building on interdisciplinary work which theorises time as a social tool, I argue that Torrens title registration produces a temporal order which enables land market coordination by rendering some relationships with land temporary and making others indefeasible. This ordering of relationships with

 

land in turn has consequences for the human subjects who have those relationships, cut- ting futures short for some and guaranteeing permanence to others. Engaging with Renisa Mawani and other critical race theorists, I argue that the categories produced by Torrens title registration systems materialise as race.

 

The article is available through Academia.edu.