On Monday the J. Paul Getty Trust and Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced the joint acquisition of the works of Robert Mapplethorpe. The 200 unique artworks, 2000 photographs, 3,500 Polaroids and 120,000 negatives are worth in the neighborhood of $30 million.
In addition to the artworks, Mapplethorpe’s correspondence is included in the acquisition. What will probably be of most interest to history are the documents related to the 1990 “obscenity” trial in Cincinnati, a flashpoint in the era’s culture wars, that stemmed from a posthumous show of Mapplethorpe’s photography that included homoerotic and sadomasochistic images. But pop culture fans may be more interested in Mapplethorpe’s personal correspondence with rocker Patti Smith, whose memoir of her relationship with Mapplethorpe, “Just Kids,” won the 2010 National Book Award for nonfiction.
For mire on the controversial Mapplethorpe show in Cincinnati, and subsequent equivalent causes célèbres, have a look at my post on Cearta considering whether galleries should show offensive art and my follow-ups here and here on this site.
Anyone who blogs regularly will have discovered several truths. The first is that you are only as good as your last post. …
The second truth is reflected in something that Shelly Blake-Plock (@teachpaperless) has expanded upon in his excellent post ‘Why teachers should blog‘. I quote: To blog is to teach yourself what you think. …
A third truth … is this: Writing on blogs is dialogical, much more so that it ever could have been in paper format. …
The political views of academics should not be used as the bases to hire, fire, promote or demote them. That idea — not terribly disputed — is at the center of draft policies being released today by the American Association of University Professors on how to handle personnel issues involving politically controversial academics.
But even if the AAUP and many of its critics agree on that statement, they are likely to disagree on at least some of the principles put forth by the association. …
To prevent inappropriate political intrusion, the report offers a series of principles. For example, when responding to charges that indoctrination is going on in the classroom, the AAUP states that “[o]nly the proven demonstration of the use of ‘dishonest tactics’ to ‘deceive students’ — not the political views, advocacy, or affiliations of the faculty member — may provide grounds for adverse action” and that “[n]either the expression nor the attempted avoidance of value judgments can or should in itself provide a reasonable ground for assessing the professional conduct and fitness of a faculty member.” … The report says as well that colleges must focus on academic substance, not style. “The academic imperative is to protect free expression, not collegiality,” it says.
Derek E. Bambauer, Brooklyn Law School, is publishing Consider the Censor in a forthcoming issue of the Wake Forest Journal of Law & Public Policy. Here is the abstract.WikiLeaks is frequently celebrated as the whistleblowing heir of the Pentagon Papers case. This Essay argues that portrayal is false, for reasons that focus attention on two neglected aspects of the case. First, the New York Times relied on a well-defined set of ethical precepts shared by mainstream journalists to contextualize the Papers and to redact harmful information. Second, American courts acted as neutral arbiters of the paper’s judgment, and commanded power to enforce their decisions. WikiLeaks lacks both protective functions to regulate its disclosures. The Essay suggests that WikiLeaks is a bellwether: an exemplar of the shift in power over data generated by plummeting information costs. While that trend cannot realistically be reversed, the Essay offers two responses to the problems that WikiLeaks and its progeny create. First, established media outlets must continue to act as gatekeepers governed by strong journalistic ethics, even in an environment of ubiquitous access to raw data. Second, governments should consider, and debate, the possibility of using technological countermeasures – cyberattacks – against intermediaries threatening to disclose especially harmful data.
In Experience Hendrix, LLC v. Hendrixlicensing.com, (W.D.Wa. Feb. 8, 2011 (Zilly, J.), a federal judge in the Western District of Washington struck down as unconstitutional a Washington State law that attempted to grant dead celebrities, including Jimi Hendrix, a posthumous right of publicity.
David Rolph, University of Sydney Faculty of Law, is publishing Looking Again at Photographs and Privacy: Theoretical Perspectives on Law’s Treatment of Photographs as Invasions of Privacy in Law, Culture, and Visual Studies (A. Wagner and R. Sherwin eds.; Ashgate Publishing, 2011). Here is the abstract.Courts in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand are increasingly entertaining claims for invasions of privacy. Many of these cases involve the publication of photographs by a media outlet. In the United Kingdom in particular, the means of protecting personal privacy has been the adaptation of the existing, information-based cause of action for breach of confidence. This has entailed treating photographs as a form of information. This essay analyses the imposition of liability for the publication of intrusive photographs, as it is developing in the United Kingdom, using Campbell v MGN Ltd [2004] 2 AC 459 and Douglas v Hello! Ltd [2008] 1 AC 1 as case-studies. It applies critical insights from leading theorists on photography, such as Barthes, Berger and Sontag, to suggest that the judicial treatment of photography is underdeveloped.Download the paper from SSRN at the link.
Money Talks but It Isn’t Speech
by Deborah Hellman
The Article challenges the central premise of our campaign finance law, namely that restrictions on giving and spending money constitute restrictions on speech, and thus can only be justified by compelling governmental interests. This claim has become so embedded in constitutional doctrine that in the most recent Supreme Court case in this area, Citizens United v. FEC, the majority asserts it without discussion or argument. This claim is often defended on the ground that money is important or necessary for speech. While money surely facilitates speech, money also facilitates the exercise of many other constitutional rights. By looking at these other rights, the Article calls attention to the fact that sometimes constitutional rights generate a penumbral right to spend money and sometimes they do not. Thus, the fact that money facilitates the exercise of a right is insufficient to show that the right includes a penumbral right to give or spend money. The Article argues that we ought to broaden the lens through which we view campaign finance cases. Rather than asking whether a restriction on campaign giving or spending violates the First Amendment, we should ask instead, when do constitutional rights generate a penumbral right to spend money?
The death of the wife
17. There is no need to spend much time on the law. The principles are set out in the passage in the speech of Lord Brandon of Oakbrook in the eponymous case, Barder v Calouori [1988] AC 20, page 43, which is so well-known that it hardly requires quotation.
18. It is well recognised that the unexpected death of one of the spouses can be a Barder event. Barder itself was such a case (wife killed children and committed suicide five weeks after the ancillary relief order). There have been others in which the claim has succeeded: Smith v Smith (Smith and Others Intervening) [1992] Fam 69 (wife committed suicide within six months); Barber v Barber [1993] 1 FLR 476 (wife died of liver disease within three months); Reid v Reid [2003] EWHC 2878 (Fam), [2004] 1 FLR 736 (diabetic wife with high blood pressure died within two months). But it is not enough to show that one of the parties died unexpectedly very shortly after the hearing. What has to be shown, to quote Lord Brandon, is that the death “invalidate[s] the basis, or fundamental assumption, upon which the order was made”.
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