Hurricane Katrina, with 140 mile-per-hour winds, was one of the deadliest natural disasters to ever strike the United States. It impacted more than 93,000 square miles, caused approximately $100 billion in damage, and displaced more than 770,000 people. Worse still, it killed more than 1,300 people, leaving many families devastated. For some, the most lasting image or memory of Hurricane Katrina was the city of New Orleans where the media televised the daily struggles of the city’s inhabitants.
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As one of the most, if not the most, progressive and inclusive anti-discrimination acts for non-heterosexual people in the United States, the District of Columbia Human Rights Act can still be improved. The Act already protects individuals on the basis of “sexual orientation,” but it would be more inclusive if its language were changed to protect individuals on the basis of their “lawful sexual conduct.” There is an important difference in the meanings of these two phrases. “Sexual orientation,” a product of the identity theory of sexuality, refers to sexuality as an inborn trait or identity. “Lawful sexual conduct,” rather, recognizes that it is not only an individual’s identity that causes some to be discriminated against; an individual’s conduct and actions are also equally relevant to anti-discrimination analysis.
In Save the Homosassa River Alliance, Inc. v. Citrus County, Florida, the Fifth District Court of Appeal broadened the scope of citizens’ standing to challenge whether development decisions are consistent with a local government’s comprehensive plan. In defining the meaning of an aggrieved or adversely affected party under Section 163.3215(2) of the Florida Statutes, the court held that plaintiffs need only allege a particularized interest, and not a particularized harm, in order to satisfy the statutory requirement that their grievance exceeds in degree the general interest in community good shared by all persons. Thus, the court held that an environmental group and its individual members who “demonstrated concern for the protection of the interests furthered by the comprehensive plan” had standing under Section 163.3215(2).
Johnnie is a registered sex offender. When he was eleven he touched his four-year-old half-sister’s vagina (over her underwear). A few months later, she performed oral sex on him at his request. Johnnie’s mother found out. She called the police and Johnnie spent sixteen months in a residential juvenile sex offender program, where he successfully completed treatment. When he was released, Johnnie’s mother wanted nothing to do with him, so he ended up living with his grandmother. Two months after he started at a new middle school, someone found Johnnie on the state’s Internet sex offender registry. Two days later, Johnnie walked into oncoming traffic and told a police officer he wanted to die. He transferred to an alternative school for juvenile delinquents. Even there, the harassment continued. Some of the other boys confronted Johnnie on the school bus, calling him a sex offender and yelling: “You tried to rape your sister!” As a result of anger and depression, Johnnie has twice been admitted to psychiatric hospitals. Not only is Johnnie suicidal, but when he transferred to yet another school and the harassment continued, he told a counselor that he wanted to kill another student for taunting him. Johnnie knows what he did to his sister was wrong and continues to feel guilty about it. Johnnie has never committed another sex offense. Nevertheless, his name,
photo, address, and school information continue to appear on the Internet registry, where they will likely remain for the rest of his life.
There is nothing like a sex scandal to grab people’s attention. In January 2008, the Detroit Free Press published sexually graphic text messages exchanged by Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his then chief of staff Christine Beatty, both of whom had vehemently denied that they were having an extramarital affair. The published messages revealed that Kilpatrick and Beatty lied under oath in a whistleblowers’ lawsuit and that Kilpatrick agreed to settle the suit for $8.4 million to keep the affair quiet. These revelations led to criminal charges that forced Kilpatrick to resign as mayor, give up his law license, pay restitution, and ultimately serve jail and probation time.
As this symposium demonstrates, to seek the law in literature and film is to cast a very broad net. The treasure recovered ranges from the sublime (Chekhov and Sophocles) and stunning (videotape of a 2003 capital sentencing hearing and the 2007 Swedish thriller “Solstorm”), to the ridiculous (“The Mikado” and “My Favorite Martian”) and beyond (John Waters’ “Trash Trilogy”). The symposium also shows the variety of ways of writing about law, literature, and film, from the Ruthann Robson’s experimental musings on Antigone to Russell Murphy and Kate Day’s very practical applications of narrative to legal education.
Enter Antigone.
Antigone of Thebes, of the accursed family, of the two dead brothers, only one of whom can be legally buried, of the halfbrother who is also her father, and of the silenced sister.
Antigone of the contest with Creon, with the State, with the powers that be and the powers that would be; with the outcome never in doubt.
Antigone of the cave.
Antigone of the many plays by the same name, of some plays under a different name, of cameo appearances in philosophies, of vases and paintings and operas and songs and cinema.
Like any other great writer, Anton Chekhov dealt with some of the most pressing and poignant themes of human existence from which the lawyer, for all his learning and training, is not immune—love, loss, pain, joy, suffering, victory, sorrow, and death. We know that from Chekhov’s humble beginnings on the Sea of Azov, this son of a grocer from Taganrog went on to become a renowned story teller and compassionate medical doctor who died at forty-four and left behind some 240 stories, which he approved for his Collected Works, as well as some of the most influential plays ever to hit the world stage. More on his extraordinarily short but fruitful life later. But what precisely does Dr. Chekhov say to the lawyer?
Librettist Sir William Schwenck Gilbert and composer Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan collaborated on fourteen operettas between 1871 and 1896. Although the score to the first of their operettas, Thespis, has disappeared, companies around the world continue to perform the others. The 1999 biographical film portraying Gilbert and Sullivan’s lives, Topsy-Turvy, received tremendous critical acclaim, sparking great interest in the operettas. Since then, more than twenty DVDs of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas have come on the market, and the renewed interest in the operettas has revived interest in their parodic content.
This Article analyzes the 2007 Swedish film Solstorm, an adaptation of the book The Savage Altar by Asa Larsson. The rationale for engaging with this particular film is to apply Rick Altman’s semantic/syntactic framework for genre analysis to a film that is on the margins of what might be considered a law film. By utilizing this theoretical framework, the Article evaluates both the descriptive and what might be termed the more ideological dimensions of Solstorm to determine whether the film, and other films not clearly within the genre, can be drawn within the boundaries of a law film. Solstorm is a useful example because at first sight it does not appear an obvious choice for inclusion within the category, as there are no court scenes and indeed no trial. Yet, the film shares some common characteristics with more conspicuous candidates. The analysis requires consideration of where concepts of justice sit with respect to the boundaries of law film. Put simply: Is Solstorm a law film? Altman’s goal was to aid the development of genre theory, which is clearly more applicable when there are established conventions and principles with which to work. Although law film has little of this, Altman’s framework is still a useful mechanism to apply to a single film and to link the film back into the wider body of material.