What Is an Author?

MV5BMjEyNTcyMTUwNV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNTc4ODQ2__V1__CR0,0,311,311_SS90_I greatly enjoyed last week’s exchange among colleagues Bruce Boyden, Ed Fallone, and Gordon Hylton regarding literary sequels and the general purposes of copyright law. It is my impression that most blog posts do not purport to be “scholarly,” but the posts by Boyden, Fallone, and Hylton had the length and depth necessary for that characterization.  I hated to see the exchange end. 

The exchange rekindled for me the intellectual question of how to best understand what an “author” is.  The notion of an “author” in modern western culture is a weighty one, carrying with it some sense of origination.  It connotes more than “writer,” which is a less prestigious characterization that goes primarily to a particular activity.  We customarily assume “authors” are intense and even tortured souls heroically working alone.  We also sometimes assume that their chief incentive must and should be monetary enrichment.  These assumptions grow out of dominant ideological prescriptions related to, respectively, autonomous individualism and the bourgeois market economy.

I think it is better to conceive of an “author” as socially constituted. 

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Lawyer in Your Living Room

davidPapkeI enjoyed serving on “the jury” chosen by the American Bar Association to pick the top 25 law shows during the history of prime-time television.  Our list and sketches of the shows just appeared in the August, 2009 ABA Journal.  I was pleased but surprised that “The Defenders,” a fine series from the early 1960s ranked third.  The other top series – “L.A. Law,” “Perry Mason,” and “Law & Order” – are not only great law shows but also milestones in the history of entertainment television.  Meanwhile, I’m not sure “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” deserve their places on the list.  I enjoy both, but they seem to me police procedurals rather than law shows.

If anyone is curious, here’s the full list:

  1. “L.A. Law” (1986-94)
  2. “Perry Mason” (1957-66)
  3. “The Defenders” (1961-65)
  4. “Law & Order” (1990-present)
  5. “The Practice” (1997-2004)
  6. “Ally McBeal “ (1997-2002)
  7. “Rumpole of the Bailey” (1978-1992)
  8. “Boston Legal” (2004-08)
  9. “Damages” (2007-present)
  10. “Night Court” (1984-1992)
  11. “Judging Amy” (1999-2005
  12. “Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law” (1971-74)
  13. “JAG” (1995-2005)
  14. “Shark” (2006-08)
  15. “Civil Wars” (1991-93)
  16. “Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law” (2000-9)
  17. “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” (2001-present)
  18. “Murder One” (1995-97)
  19. “Matlock” (1986-1995)
  20. “Reasonable Doubts” (1991-93)
  21. “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (1999-present)
  22. “Judd for the Defense” (1967-69)
  23. “Paper Chase” (1978-79, 1983-86)
  24. “Petrocelli” (1974-76)
  25. “Eli Stone” (2008-09)
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Sonia Sotomayor: Activist Grammarian

William Safire reported in a recent column that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has a pronounced distaste for bad writing.  She wants the briefs she reads to be written properly, and she believes in carefully crafting opinions.  In particular, Sotomayor says, “the unnecessary use of the passive voice” causes her “to blister.”

When I was a young man, I worked briefly as a journalist, and all of my editors argued the active voice was a more direct and vigorous mode of expression.  The passive voice, they insisted, denied human agency by sticking a helping verb such as “is” or “was” between the subject of a sentence and an action verb.  Since becoming a legal academic, I have noticed the passive voice everywhere I look in legal prose, and I have struggled (with limited success) to stop the passive voice’s creeping incursion in my own writing.

Why is the passive voice so common in legal writing?  It would be too simple, I think, to say lawyers are lousy writers.  Surely we are no worse than accountants, bankers, doctors, and track coaches.  Perhaps the ubiquity of the passive voice in legal writing relates to the positivist assumptions most legalists internalize.  We like to believe laws, legal principles, and precedents stand tall and clear.  When we apply the law to controversies, neutral and certain answers emerge.  It is easy and ideologically convenient to announce, “It is so ordered.”   Might Sonia Sotomayor be prepared to say instead, “I think the correct result is . . . .” 

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