Controversy at MLK Memorial

The process of building a new memorial in Washington, DC always creates controversy. The forthcoming Martin Luther King Jr., National Memorial is no exception. The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which has veto power over the design, recently announced its objections to a model of the mammoth statue planned as a centerpiece of the site. The statue, at 28 feet intended to be significantly taller than Lincoln's at his memorial, depicts Dr. King standing with his arms folded and a very serious expression on his face (see the model here). In a breathtakingly terrible choice of words, the Commission worried that the statute so envisioned is too "confrontational in character."

This objection comes on top of earlier protests at the choice of a Chinese sculptor, Lei Yixin -- some saying that a black person or at least an American should design the statue; others criticizing the use of Chinese granite instead of the good ol' American kind, and others objecting that some of Lei's earlier work celebrates Mao Zedong.

The new criticism claims to be aesthetic rather than political, but the two are so fundamentally intertwined in this setting that art cannot distinguish itself from politics. Take, for instance, the following from a Washington Post blogger:

Leaf through hundreds of photos of [King] and you see him standing before oceans of Americans, one arm raised to the sky, his mouth open in a call to unity. He reaches forward, rallying, cajoling, explaining. Or he is leaning in, head to head with Lyndon Johnson, and you can almost hear King, the gentle voice, the rock-hard logic. ... Nowhere but in this proposed arms-crossed sculpture is King seen in the arrogant stance of a dictator, clad in a boxy suit, with an impassive, unapproachable mien, looking more like an East Bloc Politburo member than an inspirational, transformational preacher who won a war armed with nothing but truth and words.

Such controversy is par for the course. Several large memorials have been built on the National Mall in the last 15 years, including very large and prominent commemorations of the Korean War(1995), World War II (2004), and the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt (1997). WIkipedia quotes a writer in the Philadelphia Inquirer attacking the "pompous style" of the World War II Memorial as the sort "also favored by Hitler and Mussolini." Disability activists agitated for a statue of FDR in which his wheelchair was visible (such a statue was later added on to the memorial). Most famous of all, remember the howls that greeted Maya Lin's visionary design for the Vietnam Wall. And of course many have -- quite correctly, in my view -- criticized all these memorials for their giant scale and cacophony of cliche elements (Flags! Fountains! Inscribed quotes! Stone pillars representing something! Niches for reflection!). In this nifty illustrated essay for Slate, Witold Rybczynski tours the DC memorials and highlights, among other things, how didactic modern memorials have become, a feature surely shared by the plan for the King Memorial, as illustrated here.

Yet eventually all these were built; all are visited. More fundamentally, I wonder if this process of arguing over the nature of the memorial is itself part of its legacy. The debate captures, in miniature, the process of a culture communally shaping the narrative of its past. And in that vein, the thoughtful and diverse comments to the blog post quoted above are fascinating. For the most part, these are the kinds of comments I wish you saw more often on blogs. The very first commenter agrees with the aesthetic objection to the statue but doesn't care if it's "Made in China," then someone a few down says "outsourcing of the memorial to China is appalling" but likes the design, and so on for screen after screen. This thing is a Rorschach blot!

And in the end, isn't that a pretty good model for a memorial?

Posted by William McGeveran at 05:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The New Seven Wonders of the World

Based on 100 million votes cast from around the world, a new list of "seven wonders" has been created. They are:

Chichén Itzá, Mexico
Christ Redeemer, Brazil
The Great Wall, China
Machu Picchu, Peru
Petra, Jordan
The Roman Colosseum, Italy
The Taj Mahal, India

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 08:06 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Preaching in the Court House: An Experiment in Blog Advertising

At last January's AALS meetings, Larry Solum gave advice to new scholars on the use of SSRN, suggesting that it was a good idea to post short, initial versions of an article as a way of generating interest and invitations to workshop one's piece at other schools. Perhaps blogs can be used in the same way. Hence this post.

I now have a completed draft of a paper that I am interested in workshopping at any school that might be interested in having an outside presenter during the summer. Here is an abstract:

Preaching in the Court House and Judging in the Temple

A number of American religious denominations – Quakers, Baptists, Mormons, and others – tried with varying degrees of success to opt out of the secular legal system, resolving civil litigation between church members in church courts. Scholars of alternative dispute resolution have studied these ecclesiastical judiciaries as a chapter in the perpetual quest for low-cost alternatives to the expense and technicality of the common-law courts. Using the rise and decline of civil litigation in Mormon ecclesiastical courts during the nineteenth century as a case study, this paper argues that the move to bring civil litigation within the fold of the church must be understood against a much richer background of theological development and civic symbolism. Ultimately the Mormon courts emerged as a result of theological ideas with roots in the early sixteenth century and as a religious critique of the legal profession and the symbolic status of litigation in civic life. Likewise, their decline resulted from a combination of rising economic and legal complexity and the symbolic renegotiation of law’s meaning within the Mormon community.

If this sounds interesting to you, contact me at nboman-at-wm.edu.

Posted by Nate Oman at 10:47 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Favorite American Architecture

The Wall Street Journal has the results of an interesting survey on people's favorite architecture in America. The top 10:

1. Empire State Building, New York, NY 1931
2. The White House, Washington, DC 1792
3. Washington National Cathedral, Washington DC 1990
4. Thomas Jefferson Memorial, Washington, DC 1943
5. Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, CA 1937
6. US Capitol, Washington, DC 1865
7. Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC 1922
8. Biltmore Estates/Vanderbilt Residence, Ashville, NC 1895
9. Chrysler Building, New York, NY 1930
10. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washingon, DC 1982

According to the survey results: "Other than the Bellagio Hotel and Casino, no building of the past decade made it in the top 30 in the poll of 2,000 people by Harris Interactive for the American Institute of Architects."

I am also pleased that 6 out of the 10 come from Washington, DC, the city I live in.

The WSJ Law Blog notes: "Only three of the most beloved structures were law-related: The U.S. Supreme Court, which clocked in at #15, the University of Michigan Law Library at #94, and the federal courthouse in Islip, N.Y., at #97."

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 01:55 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

The Architecture of Legal Education

My father is an art historian, and as a child he literally read me books about architecture as bed-time stories. Wild individualist that I am, I gave up on my childhood ambition to become an architect and went to law school. Still, childhood teachings never leave us, and I can't help but being an architecture snob, indeed something of an architecture reactionary. (My father is a huge fan of Ruskin.) Not surprisingly, I love William & Mary. Indeed, I think that our College has one of the half-dozen or so most beautiful campuses in America. The so-called "Ancient Campus" around the Wren Building boasts some of the oldest academic architecture in North America. (As always, William & Mary and Harvard debate whose buildings are older, a question complicated by fires and moves.) Even the newer part of campus is not that bad. Like most schools, William & Mary expanded when the Baby Boomers went to college, and among the other pernicious effects of that generation was a massive academic building boom right at the aesthetic nadir of Western architecture. In Williamsburg, however, conservatism (if not anachronism) and snobbery in the main carried the day, and the buildings of the 1960s and 1970s are not nearly as hideous as they could be. All and all, it is a good place for an architectural reactionary to work.

Unless, of course, you are a law professor. The Marshall-Wythe School of Law, alas, partakes of essentially none of the main campus's architectural charm. We are located four or five blocks away from the main campus in a nondescript building begun in the 1970s, which can only garner the faint praise that it is not as ugly as it could have been. It occurs to me that many of the realities of American legal education get played out in the architecture of law schools. William & Mary is certainly not alone in locating its law school away from the main campus. The geographic distance reflects both the intellectual distance -- we're a professional school, law is its own arcane branch of knowledge -- and the intellectual anxieities -- we aren't quite taken seriously as real academics, our discipline isn't sufficiently integrated with others, etc. It also reflects the history and economics of legal education. The law school used to be located on the main quad at William & Mary in cramped quarters in one of the old academic halls. The new building far from the campus represented the economic coming of age of the school and the independence from domination by the central administration. It is the architectural manifestation of the same forces that give me a more comfortable salary than my friends in the government or history departments.

I am curious about law schools without the architectural distance between law and the rest of the campus. Wisconsin comes to mind. Does a physical location at the heart of the University make any intellectual or symbolic difference? Wisconsin, of course, has a tradition of social scientific approaches to the law. Maybe we got Stewart Macauly because of the architecture.

Posted by Nate Oman at 01:30 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

David Lat Misses a Trick

David Lat offers this post about a Cravath partner's recent real estate sale. David makes some hay about a supposed tax break that made the sale even more profitable. It may be therefore worth noting that John Beerbower, the partner in question, was the lead attorney at Cravath on a recently resolved pro bono suit on behalf of the City of New York that resulted in a tax refund of $280,000,000 for New York's police, firefighters, and sanitation workers injured in the line of duty. The refund resulting from the suit was the second largest in NYC history. (Full disclosure: I worked for John for almost two years. He's a terrific lawyer and a wonderful person.)

More importantly, how can Lat, despite his well-placed sources (but dubious use of mensch as an adjective), have missed the key detail about that apartment, well-known to a generation of CSM summer associates: the neat round room with the amazingly detailed, historic, wallpaper?

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 03:31 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Finding Jupiter Optimus Maximus

It is not a horribly original point, but Americans expect a great deal from their courts. If we have some nasty and apparently insoluble social problem, we take it to the men in black robes and expect them to give us wonderful oracular solutions to our problems. (Amazingly, despite two centuries of failing to provide wonderful oracular solutions to social problems, we still go to court!) And of course, we surround our courts with this oracular mystique. The judges wear priestly robes. They emerge from within an inner sanctum in which they commune with the ineffable wisdom of the law. The Supreme Court Building is modeled on a Greek temple, not only in its exterior architecture, but also in its inner lay out. An entrant to the building passes through a succession of courts, each grander than the last. Admission to each court is more closely controlled, until finally one is ushered into the soaring court room where the justices emerge from behind the veil. In ancient and less judicially ambitious times, this architectural experience would have marked a symbolic assent into the presence of the gods, where the priests emerged from behind the veil that shrouded the Ark of the Covenant or the statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

Apparently, we Americans learn this reverence (idolatry?) for the law early. A few weeks ago, I took my four-year-old son with me to the law library to pick up some books. As we walked past shelf upon shelf of the federal reports, my son asked me what those big books were. I pulled down a volume to show him, thinking that I would explain to him what a case and an opinion are. No need. He took one look at the double columned agate type on foolscap paper, and said, "Oh. It's the scriptures." I looked down and realized that the reporters do look suspiciously like the family Bible. It would seem that even in our book binding, the law apes the sacred.

Posted by Nate Oman at 02:27 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Weird Statues

No, that's not a typo in the title. . . . This is a post about weird statues, not statutes (although there are plenty of weird statutes too). I don't have much to say about the law today, but I found this website with pictures of unusual statues from around the world to be irresistible.

Hat tip: BoingBoing

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 07:18 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Flipping the Divine Lorraine

On my way to Temple Law from my home in Center City Philadelphia there sits the Divine Lorraine Hotel, famous as a symbol of the City's ever-crumbling, once-proud glory. It sits on Broad street within view of City Hall, but has been shuttered and uninhabited for years. Now, for the third time this decade, a developer has bought the building. The last developer apparently made around a 100% profit in a little under three years (bought: $5.8 M; sold $10.1 M), riding Philly's marvelous real estate bubble boom reasoned uptick. The purchaser reports that the project will take about five years and is "extremely likely to happen... . It seems like a lot of nothing has happened there, but everyone has advanced the ball."

Before we get too excited about the reclamation of this landmark, recall that this is Philadelphia. It's been over a year since the last petty-ante municipal corruption investigation, so we're due. And I'm sure the electrician's union will come nosing around. Moreover, the new developer appears to be making a bet that Temple will continue to increase student enrollment over the next few years, and that a few of those students will want to live somewhere cheap, compared to center city, but lively, compared to campus. This seems like a big bet to make, given recent changes on campus.

So, I'm skeptical.

But if the renovation of the hotel pays off, it would be fantastic: restoring the Divine Lorraine would be a real feather in the cap of the City. It would be the last piece of the revitalization of downtown that has been percolating over the last decade.

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 09:23 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

The Jurisprudence of Courthouses

I have a theory about English and American courthouse architecture, which is interesting but probably wrong. I start out by noting that the most prestigious courthouse in the United States -- the U.S. Supreme Court building -- is a quintessential example of classical architecture, self-consciously modeled on the buildings of ancient Rome. The classical model, of course, has been hugely influential in American civic architecture. In contrast, the most prestigious courthouse in the United Kingdom -- the Royal Courts of Justice in London -- is a sterling example of neo-gothic architectures, self-consciously modeled on the buildings of the Middle Ages. The neo-gothic model, of course, has been very important for English civic architecture, most notably perhaps in the Houses of Parliament. Why did Americans go for Rome and Englishmen for the medieval?

There are lots of possible answers: America is a republic, and hence Republican Rome is a natural source of inspiration, while England is a monarchy whose legitimacy rests of long-established practice. The French Revolution is another possibility. Having spent twenty or so years fighting first Revolutionary France and then Bonaparte, nineteenth-century Englishmen were disposed to think of neo-classicism as a precursor to chaos, war, and tyranny. Revolutionary iconoclasts smashed the sculpture of St. Denise, self-consciously desecrating the medieval symbolism of the French state. The English responded by valorizing their medieval roots. Hence the Royal Courts of Justice. Let me suggest, however, that there is also a jurisprudential angle.

The defining theorists of the English common law tradition were Coke, Hale, and Selden. All of them were historians of one sort or another, and all of them located the well-springs of legal legitimacy and English liberty in the immemorial customs and laws of the realm. Tellingly, one of Coke's greatest works -- Commentaries on Littleton -- is not a treatise at all, but rather an exposition of a medieval law book of feudal tenures. In a sense, the Royal Courts of Justice are the architectural instantiation of this legal world view. The neo-gothic courthouse is not simply an exercise in nineteenth-century Romanticism, or English Francophobia. It is Coke's artificial reason of the law incarnated in brick and mortar.

American jurisprudence, in contrast, is less obsessed with history and much more friendly to notions of natural law. The primal document of English law is the Magna Charta, shaky deal struck between barons and a hated king over the intricacies of knights service and fishing rights on the Thames, transformed by centuries of veneration into a fount for the historic rights of Britons. In contrast, the primal document of American law is the Declaration of Independence, which invokes abstract and self-evident rights that come not from history and custom but direct from nature and nature's God. On this view, the classicism of the Supreme Court building is less about invoking an ancient republican ideal than it is about the negation of history. What we see in marble before us is not the rebirth of the republic on the Tiber, but that abstract forms of inalienable rights. It is less Roman than Platonic.

Posted by Nate Oman at 12:36 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Monument Law

Ah, public monuments. They're how we remember important events and help define who we think we are. Dan Solove's recent posts on courthouses reminds me of how much we're concerned with presenting the right image to communities. And there's been a lot of writing about the function that courthouse architecture has served in American history. Moreover, lots of folks are writing these days about monuments and their meaning. Sanford Levinson's charming book, Written in Stone covers a lot of ground in a little bit of space. And people are talking more about removing monuments from parks or renaming them (such as the Nathan Bedford Forrest Park in Memphis). Sewanee: The University of South is going through something like this right now.

I haven’t seen any serious commentary (in the blogosphere or elsewhere) on the United Daughters of the Confederacy v. Vanderbilt University, decided last May by the Tennessee Court of Appeals. Perhaps, though, it warrants a little bit of attention. It has some things to say about long-term contracts, the right of donees to alter monuments (like changing the names of buildings), and even how we remember the Civil War. The case arose from the effort of Vanderbilt University in 2002 to rename a dormitory on its campus from “Confederate Memorial Hall” to “Memorial Hall.

According to the court of appeals' opinion, Chancellor Gordon Gee began efforts to change the name when he arrived at the University in the summer of 2002. People on campus had been talking about renaming the building for some years; some thought it was appropirate. Not surprisingly, others did not. Now, name changes are incredibly controversial, and I have mixed feelings about them. There’s something to be said for keeping names up because we want to honor folks who contributed money or whose accomplishments deserve honor. Even in the case those who engaged in what some might now think of as rather reprehensible conduct, we might still want to continue to honor, because of other contributions they made. And because a name on a building is part of a tradition. On the other hand, names convey messages to folks; and sometimes those messages are unfriendly, even if not everyone sees them as unfriendly.

Chancellor Gee's plans included changing the name of "Confederate Memorial Hall" on campus maps and on the front of the building to "Memorial Hall." The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) sued to prevent the change. The factual background is, well, a little complex. The UDC contributed $50,000 towards the building cost in the 1930s. But the history goes back to the 1910s, when the UDC was instrumental in building monuments and putting up plaques to the Confederate dead. The UDC's history is well worth a read.

In the 1910s, the UDC began talking with Peabody College about providing funding for a dormitory. There were contracts (in 1913 and 1927), which together called for the UDC to provide $50,000 to build a dormitory. In return, Peabody would call the building "Confederate Memorial Hall" and allow the UDC to nominate young women who were descended from Confederate veterans to live rent-free in the building.

The UDC had trouble raising money. Then in 1933 there was a new contract drafted (which ratified the previous two), calling for $50,000 from the UDC and the rest of the money from the National Recovery Administration, a New Deal Agency. It provided that the agreement was void if the NRA didn't provide funding. Turns out, that contract was never signed (that we can tell) and Peabody ended up getting funding from a bond they floated when the NRA said they wouldn't provide money to a private school. Peabody went ahead and built the dormitory, named it "Confederate Memorial Hall" and housed young women nominated by the UDC free of charge.

Then, in 1979 Peabody, skirting the rim of bankruptcy, was acquired by Vanderbilt. As part of the acquisition agreement, Vanderbilt agreed to accept all liabilities of Peabody. But after 1979, they no longer accepted any new nominations from the UDC to house young women rent-free in Confederate Memorial Hall.

The Tennessee Chancellor found (p. 10 of majority) that it was "impracticable and unduly burdensome for Vanderbilt to continue to perform that part of the contract pertaining to the maintenance of the name 'Confederate' on the building and at the same time pursue its academic purpose of obtaining a racially diverse faculty and student body." The UDC appealed.

Now watch these moves by the Judge William C. Koch for the majority of the Tennesee Court of Appeals, because I think they're pretty interesting.

First, the court (following the Chancellor) reads a contract into the parties' course of dealings. That is, even though the 1933 contract was never signed (and even if it had been, the NRA never provided funding), the court found that there was a contract through Peabody's acceptance of the $50,000, through the naming of "Confederate Memorial Hall," and through their acceptance of women to live in the the hall.

Second (see especially note 13), it found the contract was divisible between the UDC's right to nominate women to live rent-free and the name of the Hall. If those rights weren't divisible, then the statute of limitations would have run on the UDC's right to enforce the contract in the early 1980s. Not surprising here. But that leads to a strange result when , third, the court awards damages on the entire $50,000. That is, while the contract was divisible into parts for purposes of statute of limitations, it was not divisible for purposes of damages.

There is a lot more than one might say about the majority opinion. One of them is: it converted the Chancellor's interpretation of the contract as creating a charitable trust, which is subject to cy pres or other equitable modification, into a straight-out gift, which was not subject to such equitable modifications. My friend John Eason has a very good article on this, which was cited by the majority. The opinion's also interesting to me from a property perspective. The majority requires that the name continue as long as the building stands--which sounds a lot like an equitable servitude to me. (Vanderbilt must maintain the name "Confederate Memorial Hall" on the building.) Sounds like a nearly perpetual servitude to me. As I say, there's a lot in this rich opinion. I bet the case will be a staple of contracts (and maybe trusts) classes in the future.

But what is perhaps even more interesting to me (as a legal historian) is Judge William B. Cain's concurrence. For those of us interested in judges' thinking, the concurrence opens a window on the thought of Judge William Cain. It which consists in large part of a quotation from the memoirs of Union General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Chamberlain is an important figure; he fought and was wounded at Gettysburg. Chamberlain accepted the surrender at Appamatox.

Before the War, he was a moral philosophy professor at Bowdoin College in Maine. (Moral philosophy professors were important in the years before the war. Stonewall Jackson taught moral philosophy at VMI, for instance. Moral philosophy was a class in applied ethics. I think we can understand much about antebellum judging by looking to moral philosophy texts, not because the lessons students learned in college controlled their behavior later, but because the texts give us an understanding of how people at the time thought. There's some fine work on moral philosophy recently, including Mark Bailey's Guardians of the Moral Order and Peter Carmichael's The Last Generation. Francis Wayland, who was president of Brown University before the Civil War, wrote an important moral philosophy treatise, which is quite helpful in understanding antebellum thinking about the rule of law and things like the right (or non-right) to disobey the fugitive slave act of 1850. But now we're getting rather far afield from the issue at hand.). My friend Jeremiah Goulka has recently published a book on Chamberlain.

Anyway, about the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Gettsyburg, as folks North and South were struggling with the memory of the war and with reunion, he published his memoirs. Judge Cain quotes Chamberlain's text, which honored the soldiers on both North and South:

Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond;--was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured? Instructions had been given; and when the head of each division column comes opposite our group, our bugle sounds the signal and instantly our whole line from right to left, regiment by regiment in succession, gives the soldier's salutation, from the "order arms" to the old "carry"--the marching salute. Gordon at the head of the column, riding with heavy spirit and downcast face, catches the sound of shifting arms, looks up, and, taking the meaning, wheels superbly, making with himself and his horse one uplifted figure, with profound salutation as he drops the point of his sword to the boot toe; then facing to his own command, gives word for his successive brigades to pass us with the same position of the manual,--honor answering honor. On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain-glorying, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead! . . .

What is this but the remnant of Mahones Division, last seen by us at the North Anna? its thinned ranks of worn, bright-eyed men recalling scenes of costly valor and ever-remembered history.
Now the sad great pageant--Longstreet and his men! What shall we give them for greeting that has not already been spoken in volleys of thunder and written in lines of fire on all the riverbanks of Virginia? Shall we go back to Gaines Mill and Malvern Hill? Or to the Antietam of Maryland, or Gettysburg of Pennsylvania?--deepest graven of all. For here is what remains of Kershaws Division, which left 40 per cent. of its men at Antietam, and at Gettysburg with Barksdales and Semmes Brigades tore through the Peach Orchard, rolling up the right of our gallant Third Corps, sweeping over the proud batteries of Massachusetts--Bigelow and Philips,--where under the smoke we saw the earth brown and blue with prostrate bodies of horses and men, and the tongues of overturned cannon and caissons pointing grim and stark in the air. . . .

Then in the Wilderness, at Spottsylvania and thereafter, Kershaws Divison again, in deeds of awful glory, held their name and fame, until fate met them at Sailors Creek, where Kershaw himself, and Ewell, and so many more, gave up their arms and hopes,--all, indeed, but manhoods honor. . . .

Ah, is this Picketts Divison?--this little group left of those who on the lurid last day of Gettysburg breasted level cross-fire and thunderbolts of storm, to be strewn back drifting wrecks, where after that awful, futile, pitiful charge we buried them in graves a furlong wide, with names unknown! Met again in the terrible cyclone-sweep over the breast-works at Five Forks; met now, so thin, so pale, purged of the mortal,--as if knowing pain or joy no more. How could we help falling on our knees, all of us together, and praying God to pity and forgive us all!

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, The Passing of the Armies 260-62 (Stan Clark Military Books 1994) (1915).

What's significant to me is the way that Chamberlain's thoughts appear again, nearly one hundred years later, in a judicial opinion. They are a reminder of how north and south reconciled after the war and the meaning of the monuments to the Confederacy to many. As the concurrance later observed,

It is to the memory of these men that Confederate Memorial Hall was built and, to that end and at great personal sacrifice in the midst of the Great Depression, that the United Daughters of the Confederacy raised and contributed to Peabody College more than one-third of the total cost of the construction of the dormitory.

Posted by Al Brophy at 11:10 AM | Comments (2)

Is the Supreme Court Moving to the National Mall?

I was reading a Washington Post article about plans to expand the Mall in Washington DC because of all the clutter from new monuments, museums, and memorials. On this page, the Post has a few visions for the new expanded Mall, which would utilize East Potomac Park. I was quite surprised when I read the caption at the top of the drawings:

Architects have responded to a call for ideas on expanding the Mall, particularly into East Potomac Park, with visions of plazas, museums, a new Supreme Court building, stores — and beaches.

Many people's first reactions might be: Beaches? In Washington, DC? But I'm a law nerd, so my reaction was: A new Supreme Court building? On the Mall?

Sure enough, one of the proposals has a new Supreme Court building sitting not too far from the Jefferson Memorial. I'm not too keen on this idea.

First, I think that the current Supreme Court building is glorious, and I wonder whether we really need a new Supreme Court building. As Jason Mazzone notes, the Court certainly hasn't been expanding its workload of late, so why would it need more space?

Second, I wonder whether the new location is a commentary on the Supreme Court. Instead of its current location behind the Capitol, it will sit rather isolated in a place near memorials. Is this insinuating that the Court has become isolated and aloof, sitting on an island practically all by itself? Is it insinuating that the Court has become an historical relic, something that mattered once in the past but that is now relegated to serving largely as a memorial?

Related Posts:
1. Solove, Old Courthouse Architecture
2. Solove, New Courthouse Architecture
3. Solove, More New Courthouse Architecture

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 04:11 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Memory on the Sewanee Campus

It doesn't take a lot of skill to predict that this New York Times article about the controversy over what we used to call "The University of South" and what's now called "Sewanee: The University of the South" is going to generate, well, a lot of controversy.

First, some background. A few years ago, apparently motivated by a marketing study, the University of the South began emphasizing the "Sewanee" part of its name. Alumni have been concerned (to put it mildly) that it's not just about the name, however. They think there is a lot more at stake on the campus--like how the University deals with its distinguished and complex history. At the center of that history is the University's founder, Leonidas Polk. Bishop Polk was, also, a general in the Confederate States Army.

And so in discussions about Polk, we can see the cultural war over the memory of the Civil War in miniature. Polk was responsible for building the University, with much help and sacrifice by the Episcopal church; generations of its alumni have enriched the nation. Polk is, however, seen by some people as a man who fought to maintain the institution of slavery. How can the University reconcile those competing interpretations?

This involves incredibly complex issues of how we remember our ancestors and how we make sense of our past. Even a cursory exploration of the issues involves questions of respect for tradition, honoring the contributions of ancestors, recognizing their faults, and trying to reconcile the competing claims of people to a space on the Sewanee: The University of the South's campus. The University has already done some other things, like remove Southern state flags from the Chapel; some alumni fear that the stained glass windows in the Chapel, which include the seal of the Confederacy, may be next.

I have not yet had the opportunity to visit Sewanee: The University of the South, though I hope to someday soon, in part because my friend Margaret Howard tells me that it is one of the most beautiful campuses in the country. And, since Margaret teaches at Washington and Lee, she knows something about beautiful spaces.

I wish the students, alumni, faculty, and administration all the best of luck as they try to reach a reconciliation. This is going to be hard.

And for those of you interested in these kinds of issues, the spring's going to be busy--it will bring the report by Brown University's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, more debate on naming Sewanee and related issues of the memory of the Civil War on that campus, and further discussion of UNC's acknowledgement of its connections to slavery.

[The picture is of the flags of Southern states in the University of the South's chapel, which were removed a few years ago. The image appears here. The chapel without the flags appears here.]

Posted by Al Brophy at 12:12 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

More New Courthouse Architecture

I previously blogged about new courthouse architecture and old courthouse architecture. I have a few more leftover pictures of new courthouse architecture, so here they are:

Related Posts:
1. Solove, New Courthouse Architecture
2. Solove, Old Courthouse Architecture

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 02:33 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Old Courthouse Architecture

The other day, I blogged about new courthouse architecture. A few of the commentators said they had a soft spot for older courthouse architecture, which I share. Therefore, I thought I'd surf the web for some examples of older courthouses. I love architecture, and I found many an interesting picture to share with you. Here is what I found, with the year each was constructed:

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 12:34 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

New Courthouse Architecture

They're being built at a staggering rate. New ones are rapidly replacing old ones. Top architects are being called in to design them. . . .

No, I'm not talking about stadiums. I'm talking about courthouses. A recent Legal Affairs article chronicles a dramatic transformation in courthouse architecture and describes the building boom in new courthouses. Courthouses used to be built as "solemn, neo-Classical style structures," but recently things have changed. Today, top architects bid on the construction of courthouses:

The new architect selection standards coincide with the largest federal courthouse building initiative in the nation's history, a program necessitated by the rise in the number of federal cases—up some 20 percent in the last decade—and a shift in caseloads from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt. As droves of people continue to move from Buffalo to Houston or from St. Louis to Phoenix, caseloads are moving with them. In all, nearly 200 courthouses will be built or renovated over the next 25 years, at a cost in the tens of billions of dollars.

If you're interested in the history of courthouse architecture, the article is well worth checking out. One of the courthouses discussed in the article is the stunning new federal courthouse in Boston, pictured below:

For all the law architecture nerds out there, I did a little web surfing and found some pictures of new or planned courthouses. Beginning with state courthouses, here are ones from Lexington, SC, Lexington, KY, and Syracuse, NY:

Here are courthouses from Albequerque, NM and Hall County, GA:

Here are new federal courthouses from Washington, DC and Fresno, CA:

Here are new federal courthouses in Las Vegas, NV and Minneapolis, MN:

Here are new federal courthouses in Seattle, WA and Buffalo, NY:

And, although not brand new, it is certainly worth mentioning the 9th Circuit courthouse in Pasadena, CA where I clerked, which is one of the most beautiful courthouses I've seen:

Hat tip: beSpacific

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 12:02 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

The Unappreciated East Pediment

Since Miers's nomination has focused the attention of the blogosphere on the Supreme Court, I figured that now would be a good time to discuss the unappreciated east pediment of the Supreme Court building. The lion's share of the pedimentary attention at the Court goes to the west pediment. This makes sense, of course, since the building faces west (like the Capitol it has its back to Europe), but I think that it has led to an undue focus on the west pediment's inscription: "Equal Justice Under Law." Don't get me wrong. I am all for equal justice under the law, but I think it is unfortunate this is the particular legal maxim-engraved-in-marble that has become so exclusively adopted as an icon of our law. I think that we would do well to pay more attention to the inscription on the east pediment, which reads "Justice the Guardian of Liberty."

"Equal Justice Under Law," it seems to me, is essentially a public-law message. Justice is something that comes down from above on to us, and our marble-inscribed aspiration is that when the ton of bricks falls it will fall without regard to race, religion, or creed. This is a noble ideal to be sure, but it focuses our attention on the law as a regulator. The basic public-law orientation of the west pediment's inscription follows the 20th-century legal academy's valorization of public law. Virtually all law professors seem to secretly want to teach constitutional law, and as anyone who has gone on the AALS meat market having listed "administrative law and civil rights law" as their primary interests can attest, the legal intellectuals churned out by our law schools tend to stampede in tightly concentrated masses in that direction.

"Justice the Guardian of Liberty," on the other hand, is an essentially private law message. Justice is something that facilitates private ordering, and our marble-inscribed aspiration is that the law constitutes a space in which we freely and justly work out our own lives. There was a time, of course, when the academic valorization was reversed, and private law ruled the intellectual roost. The opening debates around which modern American legal education coalesced were essentially private law disputes: Langdell and Holmes on contract law, Brandies on the right to privacy (initially a private cause of action not a public right against the government), etc. By the time the Court's building was finally completed in the 1930s, however, public law was firmly in the intellectual saddle and private law was relegated to the indignity of the European-facing pediment.

Listening to the arguments about Miers's nomination and before that the debates over Roberts, I have been struck by how intellectually exhausted our public discussion of constitutional law has become. This is not to suggest that that the discussion is unimportant, or to argue that those who spend their lives in constitutional law lack intellectual ability, imagination, and even -- occasionally -- insight. But the debates strike me as increasingly stylized and stale. Furthermore, in a world of global markets and legal transactions, the debates of American public law are becoming increasingly parochial. While the constitutional law mandarins debate the propriety of cf. citations to foreign law, private law straddles the globe, and webs of contracts and private ordering weave from nation to nation. Perhaps the east pediment will get the last laugh in the end.

Posted by Nate Oman at 09:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack