Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

The first convener of Workshop 4 “Cultural Productions, Contentious Properties” is new to the OSI, as this will be Danilo Mandic‘s first visit to Osnabrück as part of the OSI faculty. He is currently a Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow at the Centre for Law, Society and Popular Culture, Westminster Law School, University of Westminster in London. He received a doctorate in 2014 for a thesis concerning the relation between copyright and technology titled ‘Copyright and Technology: Hearing the Dissonance’ from the same school. In addition to copyright law, his research interests include, critical legal theory, art and law, senses, media and sound studies.

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We are proud to introduce OSI-alumni Cristina S. Martinez as the second convenor of Workshop 4 ” Cultural Productions, Contentious Properties.” She is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa. She holds a PhD in Art History and Law from Birkbeck College, University of London, and completed a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto.

Her research focuses on eighteenth-century art and culture, in particular British art, and the historical interactions between visuality and law, political satire and libel law. She is also interested in copyright law and the use of appropriation strategies in modern and contemporary art. She has presented her work on art and law at Yale Law School’s library, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington; the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow; and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in New York. She has also presented her work at conferences in the U.K., Switzerland, Australia and Canada. This summer, she is co-organizer of the panel ‘Copyright Law and the Visual’ at the Law and Society Association to be held in Mexico City, 20-23 June 2017. Continue Reading »

As the fourth workshop of this year’s OSI, we are happy to announce “Cultural Productions, Contentious Properties,” which will be convened by Danilo Mandic and Cristina S. Martinez. This workshop will deal with some of the questions around copying, appropriation, authorship, and copyright that have become particularly prescient in the 21st century.

This workshop explores and challenges the contentious properties that both law and culture inform and perform. Considering different forms of cultural production and expression, it seeks an understanding of property rights, legal fictions, artistic practices of copying and appropriation. Taking as a point of departure Michel Serres’s notion of ‘appropriation through pollution’ and extending it to current case studies we will discuss and examine contentious claims and negotiations. To what extent are we in need to (or, bound to) discuss cultural production through legal structures? The relation between authors and users and the division between private and public maintain an ongoing tension between dichotomous viewpoints manifested in different spheres of cultural production, particularly as these are intensified by the proliferation of digital technology and the challenges it has introduced with regard to production, distribution and use of cultural expression. We will explore the legal concepts of property/ownership/appropriation, and question the extent to which the processes of relations/communication both precede and inform them with an attempt to understand and challenge the dominating and expanding proprietary principles of copyright.

We are very happy to announce that Leti Volpp will return to this year’s OSI as the second convenor of Workshop 2 “Claiming the Past, Belonging for the Future.” She is the Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law at Berkeley Law, where her research focuses on questions of immigration and citizenship. She has served as a Visiting Professor affiliated with the Amerika-Institut of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and as past Faculty for the Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of Law. Her honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation Individual Research and Writing Grant, and the Association of American Law Schools Minority Section Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Award. She is a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

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The first convener of Workshop 2, “Claiming the Past, Belonging for the Future,” that we would like to introduce is Marianne Constable. She is Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and has published broadly on a range of topics in legal rhetoric and philosophy. Her most recent book, entitled Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts, (Stanford University Press, 2014) shows how legal utterances, in speech and writing, are forms of law-in-action. She is currently working on the “new unwritten law” that ostensibly exonerated women who killed their husbands in Chicago a century ago, as a way of exploring the rhetoric of law and the rhetoric of history. Her earlier books include Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (2005) and The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changes in Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (1994), which won the Law and Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History.

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