June 1, 2009

Recent Conferences at Chicago and Stanford Law

Though most law students devoted the bulk of their free time during the months of April and May to preparing for exams, the fascinating spring conferences hosted by faculty and research centers at the University of Chicago and Stanford offered a compelling diversion for those students who could spare a few hours.

Most recently, Chicago’s Shakespeare and the Law Conference was held May 15-16 at the Law School and hosted by renowned professors Richard Posner, Martha Nussbaum and Richard Strier, drawing top legal, philosophy and literature scholars from across the U.S. to discuss legal themes in some of the Bard’s most famous plays.  The conference began with a panel presented by current Chicago students, including a lighthearted paper by Chicago Law student Patrick Barry titled “Shakespeare Re-writes One L: What the Bard Can Teach Us About the First Year of Law School,” and continued with presentations by scholars such as Columbia University English and classics professor Kathy Eden and longtime Chicago law professor Richard Helmholz.  The real highlight of the conference was Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s appearance as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, alongside Professor Nussbaum as Queen Gertrude and Judge Posner as the royal advisor Polonius, in a scene from Hamlet staged prior to the keynote panel conversation.  Justice Breyer, who is well-known in the legal community for having an interest in Shakespeare, was invited to participate in the conference at the behest of Professor Nussbaum and Judge Posner, and took plenty of time to answer questions posed by students in the audience.  Professor Nussbaum, Judge Posner and Professor Strier hosted the conference as part of the popular interdisciplinary course on Law and Shakespeare that they co-taught this year, the latest in a series of law and literature courses that in previous years focused on other writers, such as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde.  The two-day conference was free to the public.

A few weeks earlier, the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society held its “Play Machinima Law” conference, which examined the legal issues surrounding the popular video game art form.  Machinima is a type of user-generated computer animation that draws from pre-existing copyrighted material, such as video game characters, music and environments, to populate videos and other forms of online media.  Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, one of the country’s foremost cyberlaw research centers, alongside the university’s Libraries and Academic Resources group and Humanities Lab, invited machinima artists, intellectual property lawyers, video game creators and academics to brainstorm solutions reconciling the artists’ vision with the realities of copyright law.  The conference started with a panel discussion titled “Machinima 101: Making Movies in Game Worlds,” for which machinima artists screened some of their work and talked about their passion for their art.  Later, intellectual property lawyers from firms such as Latham Watkins LLP and Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, representatives from tech firms such as Electronic Arts and Microsoft, and academics from Stanford and University of Southern California Law School who specialize in cyberlaw spoke about existing copyright laws, distribution and the limitations of Fair Use.  On the second day of the conference, academics discussed the techniques used to create machinima and ways that those techniques could be used for non-commercial purposes.

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