HARVARD LEGAL THEORY FORUM

The Georgetown Law Journal has recently published an interesting article by Pierre Schlag, “Spam Jurisprudence, Air Law, and the Rank Anxiety of Nothing Happening (A Report on the State of the Art)” (along with some short responses by Daniel Ortiz, Richard Posner, Richard Weisberg, and Robin West). We’ll discuss Schlag’s essay this Wednesday, April 1, at 7:15 PM in Pound 203. The Schlag essay (and the response pieces) are available at: http://www.georgetownlawjournal.com/issues/display/?volume=97&issue=3

Thanks to everyone who came to the reading group meeting last week; we had a great discussion on Kennedys article. Our next meeting will be on Wednesday, March 4, at 7 PM in Pound 203. We’ll discuss Catherine MacKinnons article, Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory, 7 Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 515 (1982). The article is available in the Fisher and Kennedy volume or in JSTOR (Harvard ID required). It is much shorter than the Duncan Kennedy article.

We’ll plan on scheduling Legal Theory Reading Group meetings every other week for the remainder of the semester, probably on Wednesdays (on March 4, March 18, April 1, April 15, and April 29) unless anyone objects.

Jonathan Gingerich will be workshopping a paper on “Deliberative Democracy, Social Psychology, and the Authority of Laws” next Wednesday, March 11 at 7 PM in Pound 203. The paper is available at: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hltf/files/2009/03/gingerich03032009.doc

If anyone has a paper that they would like to workshop (or will have something written later this semester), please let me know, and I’m happy to arrange dates for discussions of such papers. Anyone who has a piece on legal theory that they’d like to present is welcome.

Event: The Free Market Mindset: History, Psychology, and Consequences
Hosted by the Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School
Start Time: Saturday, March 7 at 9:00am
End Time: Saturday, March 7 at 6:00pm
Where: Harvard Law School, Austin Main

At this year’s conference, leading social scientists and legal scholars will present and discuss their research regarding the historical origins, psychological antecedents, and policy consequences of the free market ideology that has dominated legal discourse and lawmaking the last few decades.

To see more details and RSVP, go here.