CFP: Literature and Law: A Celebration

April 11, 2008 (Friday)
John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) (59th Street and 10th Avenue—near Lincoln Center in Manhattan)

Conference Organizer and Contact Person: Andrew Majeske, ajmajeske@gmail.com

This conference aims to bring scholars of literature and law into an interdisciplinary setting to share the fruits of their research and scholarship. The conference celebrates the restoration of John Jay’s English major with its unique literature and law emphasis.

The conference’s keynote speaker is Brook Thomas, a noted literature and law scholar and Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California Irvine. His most recent book, just published by UNC Press, is Civic Myths: A Law-and-Literature Approach to Citizenship.

We are in negotiations with the journal Law and Literature to publish full versions of the best of the papers presented at the conference in a special symposium issue.

A limited number of “Daily Show” or “The Colbert Report” tickets may be available (we are still working on this) for the evening before the conference (Thursday April 10th) on a first-come, first-served basis. These shows are taped in studios only a few blocks walk from John Jay.
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We invite papers dealing with any aspect of literature and law, including papers which might address some of the following:

-Convict narratives
-Treason
-Mercy and equity
-The reasonable man/person standard
-Natural, divine, and positive law
-Legal standards and presumptions
-Fictional evidence
-Proportionality and punishment
-Fairness versus equality
-Reasonable Doubt
-Lady Justice
-Blasphemy and censorship
-The legal fiction of an era

Please submit abstracts (250 words or less) to Andrew Majeske, ajmajeske@gmail.com, by Friday, January 18, 2008.