Oxford University Press's Blog, page 674

Why bother reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula?

The date-line is 2014. An outbreak of a deadly disease is happening in a remote region, beyond the borders of a complacent Europe. Local deaths multiply. The risk does not end with death, either, because corpses hold the highest risk of contamination and you must work to contain their threat. All this is barely even reported at first, until the health of a Western visitor, a professional man, breaks down. Too late: the disease has found a vector out of the margins and into fortress Europe. A carrier has travelled along the transport networks. Soon enough, the disease spreads from the entry port to the very heart of London. Only a few dedicated experts stand in the way of catastrophe.

If the way the Ebola crisis in West Africa has been reported feels familiar, it is because it has followed a narrative template, what Priscilla Wald has called ‘the outbreak narrative’. This repeats the same story of epidemic anxiety traced back to a single foreign carrier — a ‘typhoid Mary’ — who infiltrates modern states with an infection that exploits the very modernity of networks and so brings catastrophe. This happened before with ‘Patient Zero’ who was thought to have carried AIDS to America. It is also, of course, the basic plot of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula.

In Stoker’s novel, the infection is not an indifferent virus merely seeking replication. The Count is a malignant and unholy force from the fuzzy edges of Western Europe where Christian virtues and the rational Enlightenment reach their limits and run out of steam. The vampire emerges from what is described as a ‘whirlpool’ of races, a metaphor that Stoker clearly borrowed from late Victorian debates that was used to describe the East End of London, home to large numbers of Eastern European Jewish migrants escaping persecution. Their burgeoning numbers, swelling in the slums, were feared to be bringing all manner of physical and moral infections to Britain. No wonder that Count Dracula is associated with swarms of rats and other creatures that carry filth and disease. The vampire brings an awful wasting illness that will thin the blood and corrupt the race.

The enduring power of Stoker’s novel is that it is both ancient and modern, mythical and historical. It is deeply embedded in very old structures of story, from the quest of white knights to kill the dragon, or the chivalric defence of female virtue under severe test, all the way up to using every convention of the Victorian melodrama, in which dastardly and louche aristocrats menace women but are eventually bested by a gang of middle-class professionals. It also borrows many devices from the Gothic romance — for over a hundred years the poor old English Protestant protagonist had been threatened body and soul by weird and menacing foreigners, particularly in Ann Radcliffe’s sensationally successful Gothic romances from the 1780s and 90s, nearly all set in southern, Catholic Europe.

Transylvania, Romania cemetery. CC0 via Pixabay.

Whilst using these generic conventions Stoker is at the same time able to address his contemporaries with melodrama cunningly concocted from current headlines. 1897 was the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign, supposedly a great occasion for the trumpeting of Great Britain as the pre-eminent imperial power. Yet Count Dracula chooses a house in Piccadilly that is about as near as you can get to Buckingham Palace: he is the dark other to Empress Victoria. Dracula addresses profound uncertainties about the authority of Britain, the deep fear that once empires rise, they also fall. This was not just reflected in fears about the racial ‘whirlpool’ of the great imperial metropolis of London, addressed by continued restrictions on immigration at home and the colonial annexation of territory abroad. Sexual decadence and immorality were in the news. Stoker’s childhood friend, Oscar Wilde, was in jail for acts of gross indecency with other men in the years that Stoker composed his novel. The New Woman and the women’s suffrage movement were also challenging traditional conceptions of gender balance in public and cultural life. Stoker composed the novel in an innovative way — a network of typed notes, newspaper reports, transcribed diaries, typewritten or phonographically dictated notes — to reflect the speed and modernity of communications. The book rattles along at the speed of the Orient Express, which could plunge the London traveller into the exotic East within a couple of days.

But what is also really striking is that Stoker’s narrative and the metaphor of the vampire is flexible beyond the limits of its own time. You do not need to be an expert in the cultural life of London in the 1890s to get the raw power, the dread and anxiety, that suffuses this text. The vampire has been invented and reinvented and become a container for exploring the many different aspects of the ecstasy or fear of losing our boundaries, of invasion, of infection. The Victorians placed much of their sense of self in the symbolics of blood. That seemed to disappear for a while in the twentieth century understanding of the self, but the exchange of blood became a problem again in the 1980s, and the vampire as a cultural icon inevitably returned with new force in response to the global AIDS pandemic. It is hard to bury the undead: they begin by coming back. Right now, it seems that the zombie and the vampire are imagined in hordes and swarms, and as global vectors of infection. As the ebola crisis unfolds, it has never been more important to understand from where our cultural narratives derive.

Heading image:Screenshot from Dracula (1931). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Why understanding the legally disruptive nature of climate change matters

It is now commonly recognized by governments that climate change is an issue that must be addressed. The 21st Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to be held in Paris in December 2015 is the most high profile example of this, but there are also many examples of governments beginning to craft national and supranational regulatory responses. Climate change has also begun to give rise to many different types of litigation and there is a rich literature charting this.

The ‘super wicked’ characterization of climate change as a scientific problem has resulted in a determined focus on finding solutions. Regulatory talk is in terms of catchphrases: ‘mitigation’, ‘adaption’, ‘prevention.’ Court cases are understood as victories or defeats for litigants attempting to promote action in relation to climate change. And the international treaty process is seen as the ultimate panacea.

Regulation and international treaties are important, but equally important is to understand exactly what type of problem climate change is. Only with that understanding can long-lasting legal responses to climate change be developed. There are many different social dimensions to climate change as a problem but the most obvious to us as lawyers is its impact upon the everyday operation of law and governance.

Within legal orders, we have well-established doctrines, means of regulation, and dispute resolution procedures that provide the starting point for dealing with social problems and disputes, including those affected by climate change. Even if we create new climate change regimes, the background legal culture does not disappear. For example, principles such as the rule of law and separation of powers are constitutional bedrocks of many legal systems and any action in relation to climate change must be judged against them. Yet the identification of, and response to, climate change as a legal problem does not always sit easily with these existing principles, doctrines, and frameworks. This can particularly be seen by focusing on the growing body of case law concerning climate change. These cases are interesting because courts and other adjudicative bodies are places in which social conflicts caused by climate change surface and manifest as legal problems, and which provide legitimate and peaceable means for their resolution. Understanding the adjudication of climate change issues is thus both socially and legally important and involves delving into at least three challenging legal issues.

First, there is the overarching question of whether law can and should recognize climate change as a problem and develop a response to it. Climate change does not fall easily into a pre-existing category of harm recognized by the law. It relates to future harm, which is dispersed across the globe. To establish the cause of such harm requires the use of complex computer models and tackling uncertainties. Climate change is the product of multiple agents working in an interdependent global market economy. Agents can argue that their contribution to climate change is just a ‘drop in the ocean’ that should not attract legal consequences. Dealing with climate change forces us to think about how law makes sense of the facts of a case, rules of evidence, concepts of causation, and about a reasonable basis for regulatory action. The precautionary principle has become a high profile legal principle because it is directly concerned with the factual basis of public decision-making. Its controversial status highlights the intractability of these ‘factual’ issues.

Second, even if climate change is recognized as a problem, it still presents a series of difficult legal issues as courts and legal decision-makers are drawn into responding to it. Political will in relation to climate change has not been strong and much litigation concerning climate change has been about catalyzing action. But demands for action come up against pre-existing doctrines concerning standing, substantive legal doctrines relating to legal responsibility, judicial conventions of comity and constitutional restraint, and the fact that the traditional vehicle for public action is the nation state. Furthermore, there is a fundamental question of which courts, in which countries, are appropriate forums for dealing with climate change-related issues, and how different courts should interrelate on these issues (if at all).

Third, if new regulatory regimes are developed to respond to climate change, they often create novel regulatory schemes of which lawyers struggle to make sense. Emission trading schemes are a good example. Our understanding of these complex legal devices is malleable and contested, as has been seen in the case of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), which has given rise to a complex body of case law about its nature and scope. The social and legal challenges created by climate change are not resolved by clever regulatory schemes.

All of this might sound faintly depressing. Can’t we talk of solutions rather than probing the problems in more detail? But, what a study of climate change litigation makes clear is that courts across the world are finding that arguments are being made before them that they cannot ignore. They must take them seriously and they must find a path through the questions identified above so that they can act as adjudicators. Climate change thus forces us to take a very hard look at what adjudication is, and in particular what legitimate adjudication is. What climate change related issues should different courts decide? What type of reasoning should they use to decide them? What legal limitations need to be overcome for courts to act as proper adjudicators of climate change disputes?

Featured image credit: Mountains. Photo by Samuel Zeller. CC0 via Unsplash.

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Ritual in our lives [quiz]

Whether we know it or not, ritual pervades our lives, silently guiding our daily behavior. Like language, tool use, and music, ritual is a constituent element of what it means to be human, joining together culture, archaeology, and biology. The study of ritual, therefore, is a reflection on human nature and the society we inhabit.

In his book, Ritual: A Very Short Introduction, author Barry Stephenson explores ritual from theoretical and historical perspectives, discussing the places where ritual interacts with everyday life. Stephenson displays the ways in which ritual forms identity, transmits values and beliefs, and affects historical change.

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Image Credit: “A Roman Triumph” by Unknown Engraver. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Celebrating Saint John Muir’s birthday

John Muir practically glowed with divine light in the early 1870s. “We almost thought he was Jesus Christ,” the landscape painter William Keith exclaimed to an interviewer. “We fairly worshipped him!” Muir’s sister told him, “For so long a time we considered you the grand exception to the curse, standing as you do on a higher plane, cooling your brow in the pure mountain air and feasting your soul on the absorbing study of sweet soothing nature, untrammeled by either the love, or the fear of society and its folly.”

At the peak of his career, the nation knew Muir as a nature writer, advocate of national parks, and founding president of the Sierra Club. But as a young man, Muir was a charismatic prophet of God’s presence in nature who drew artists, scientists, celebrities, and even Ralph Waldo Emerson to his Yosemite cabin door.

Recently Muir’s holy reputation has revived. In 2010 the Episcopal Church named Muir a minor saint in Holy Men, Holy Women: Celebrating the Saints. Iconographer Mark Dukes painted a haloed Muir dancing among 91 saints on the walls of Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco.

No angels sang or wise men with gifts stood at the door when Muir was born on 21 April 1838, in Dunbar, Scotland. The world of his childhood and youth schooled him to be a charismatic preacher of God of the mountains. The Calvinist Church of Scotland was in the midst of a decade of controversy that would split it in two in 1843. Foreign visitors marveled to hear farmers debate fine theological points. Fiery preaching roared from every pulpit.

John Muir around 1875, photographed by Carleton Watkins. Credit: Carleton Watkins [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Muir’s father, Daniel, was thoroughly caught up in the turmoil. A severe economic depression drove the Muirs to move to frontier Wisconsin in 1848, but their dinner table still rang with lively religious conversation and argument. Daniel became a fervent lay preacher.

Emulating the famous naturalist-explorers of his day, in 1867, with a New Testament and John Milton’s Paradise Lost in his pack, Muir walked a thousand miles through Appalachian mountains and Florida swamps, botanizing as he went. His journals record a religious journey as well, from orthodoxy to a passionate appreciation of the world as the work of a loving Creator.

Muir entered Yosemite Valley in 1868 enraptured by divine glory all around him. He stayed for years, preaching his “sermons” full of Biblical, Calvinist, and Miltonic allusions.

“Glaciers made the mountains and ground corn for all the flowers, and the forests of silver fir,” he urged in 1871, “made smooth paths for human feet until the sacred Sierras have become the most approachable of mountains. Glaciers came down from heaven, and they were angels with folded wings, white wings of snowy bloom. … Unvital granite [was] soon carved to beauty. They bared the lordly domes and fashioned the clustering spires; smoothed godlike mountain brows, and shaped lake cups for crystal waters; wove myriads of mazy canyons, and spread them out like lace. They remembered the loudsonged rivers and every tinkling rill. The busy snowflakes saw all the coming flowers, and the grand predestined forests. … Thus labored the willing flake-souls linked in close congregations of ice, breaking rock food for the pines, as a bird crumbles bread for her young, spiced with dust of garnets and zircons and many a nameless gem; and when food was gathered for the forests and all their elected life, when every rock form was finished, every monument raised, the willing messengers, unwearied, unwasted, heard God’s ‘well done’ from heaven calling them back to their homes in the sky.”

In the 1880s, work and family silenced Muir’s prophetic voice. He emerged in the 1890s as victorious political crusader for forest reserves and national parks. By his last years he was friend to presidents and author of many books of his adventures in the wild.

William Keith’s Yosemite Valley, painted in 1875 at the height of Muir’s holy influence on him. Credit: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Public domain.

Then a proposal to dam beautiful Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park for San Francisco’s water supply again called forth Muir’s righteous preaching. “These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar,” he famous cried. “Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple as ever been consecrated by the heart of man.” He preached in vain. The devotees of commercialism built the dam, destroying the temple. A year later, in 1914, Muir died.

Now, over a century after his death, Saint John Muir’s evangelism still echoes for us — in his books, in the “stilly twilight” of a grove of redwoods that bears his name (Muir Woods National Monument), and now in the sanctuary of a church in San Francisco. Today is his birthday, and tomorrow, the 22nd, the Episcopal church celebrates his saint’s day.

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The life and legacy of Lucy Stone

A gifted orator, Lucy Stone dedicated her life to the fight for equal rights. Among the earliest female graduates of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Ohio, she was the first Massachusetts-born woman to earn a college degree. She rose to national prominence as a well-respected public speaker – an occupation rarely pursued by women of the era. Despite vocal protestations about marriage, motherhood, and the ties that bound women to domesticity, Stone eventually married and raised a daughter, Alice, nevertheless remaining an active leader of the nineteenth-century equal rights movement. Though her name is not as recognizable as other participants – such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – her contribution to their common cause is undeniable.

Below, we introduce Stone’s life and legacy in a series of definitive events, excerpted from Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life by historian Sally G. McMillen.

Featured image: A National American Woman Suffrage Association check, hand-written by Harriet Taylor Upton as the Association’s treasurer and counter-signed by Susan B. Anthony as president and Alice Stone Blackwell as recording secretary. Image courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian Institution. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Air pollution and cognitive function in older adults

As a resident of Los Angeles, one of the most polluted cities in the United States, I think a lot about the air we breathe. It’s well established that outdoor air pollution is a health threat — exposure to high pollution concentrations has been linked to increased risk of respiratory and cardiovascular damage, emergency room visits and hospitalization, and premature mortality. What I find particularly alarming is the mounting evidence demonstrating links between urban air pollution and damage to the structures and functioning of the brain.

Most of the research on pollution and the brain has been conducted in animals, and human research is largely focused on brain development in children. In a study published in The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Social Sciences, a colleague and I sought to determine if exposure to air pollution has consequences for the aging brain as well.

Although several air pollutants are harmful to human health, I’m especially concerned about particulate matter air pollution, a byproduct of industrial activities and automobile emissions. Fine particulate matter, or PM 2.5, includes particles that are 2.5µm (microns) in diameter and smaller. To put this in perspective, a grain of fine beach sand is around 90µm in diameter. Due to their small size, fine particles can be inhaled deep into the lungs and may even deposit in the brain by traversing the thin lining of epithelial cells separating the nasal cavity from the brain.

To determine if PM 2.5 is important to the aging brain, we examined differences in cognitive function between older adults living in low and high pollution environments. Information on annual PM 2.5 concentrations at the census tract level was linked to data on participants ages 55 and older in the Americans’ Changing Lives (ACL) study. Cognitive function was assessed with an abbreviated form of the Short Portable Mental Status Questionnaire (SPMSQ), which consists of a subtraction test of working memory and recall of the date and names of the president and vice president to assess orientation.

Study participants lived in areas with an average PM2.5 concentration of 13.8μg/m3 (micrograms per cubic meter). The National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for fine particles, which is determined by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to be the level at which there is increased risk to human health, is 12.0μg/m3. Nearly two-thirds of the study participants lived in areas where annual PM2.5 concentrations exceed the NAAQS.

We found that a 10 unit increase in PM 2.5 was associated with a 1.5 times greater error rate on the cognitive assessment, suggesting older adults living in high pollution areas have worse cognitive function compared to those living in low pollution environments. Importantly, this difference was not explained by individual demographic, social, and economic factors, length of time at residence, or neighborhood socioeconomic composition.

Los Angeles air pollution. Photo by David Iliff. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The negative health impacts of air pollution present a challenge, considering how much of our activities involve going outdoors and being around traffic emissions, if not industrial emissions. As individuals, we can become more aware of our local air quality. Just as we check the weather forecast when planning our day, we should also check the daily air quality index. AirNow.gov compiles data from the EPA’s air monitoring networks to provide information on local air quality in real time. Each day the Air Quality Index (AQI) provides a value indicating how clean or polluted the local outdoor air is. Values are coded to reflect underlying health concerns and range from ‘good’ to ‘hazardous’ to one’s health. Days when AQI levels are considered to be unhealthy may not be the best days to undertake major physical exertion outdoors, especially for sensitive populations, such as older adults with a history of respiratory or cardiovascular problems.

The good news is that air quality has improved in the United States in recent decades. Since the EPA introduced the first air quality standards for PM 2.5 in the late 1990s, national annual concentrations of PM 2.5 have decreased 34%. With the new standards released in 2012, we can expect to see further reductions in air pollution.

The population of older adults living in large metropolitan is growing rapidly as a result of population aging. This study highlights a possible modifiable risk factor for cognitive decline in older adults. If we can reduce our exposure to air pollution, through individual or national efforts, we’ll all breathe a little easier.

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Death and all of his tunes

Whether they be songs about angels or demons, Heaven or Hell, the theme of the afterlife has inspired countless musicians of varying genres and has embedded itself into the lyrics of many popular hits. Though their styles may be different, artists show that our collective questions and musings about the afterlife provide us with a common thread across humanity. Here are some of the songs that best represent this wide range of emotions that many people have about what lies beyond.

“Love & the First Law of Thermodynamics” by Cloud Cult


Stories of the afterlife are important to us whether we are religious or scientific. This gorgeous instrumental is one of several songs written by Craig Minowa about the loss of his infant son Kaidin to crib death. Based on the First Law of Thermodynamics—that energy cannot be destroyed—he believes that he will absolutely see this child he loves again.

“Death and All of his Friends” by Coldplay


This classic stadium anthem from one of the world’s biggest bands takes us on a musical journey as it wrestles with the fact that death is inevitable—and that many of our human practices like revenge lead us inexorably to that conclusion.

“And When I Die” by Blood, Sweat & Tears


Is there a Heaven? A Hell? The afterlife is mysterious. Only dying, as David Clayton Thomas sings here, will tell us what will happen to us. But one of the most comforting stories about death is that whatever happens to us, life goes on (unless it’s the end of the world—which is another story). A person dies, a baby is born.

“A Girl, A Boy, and a Graveyard” by Jeremy Messersmith


From The Reluctant Graveyard, a concept album by the Minneapolis indie rocker, a song that explores what death is, what might follow it, and how we use metaphors of death and rebirth to think about our everyday lives.

“Welcome to the Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance


What is it like to die? From another concept album, The Black Parade, this song captures the experience of death from the standpoint of the album’s central character, The Patient, who is carried off by the Black Parade.

“Angel” by Sarah McLachlan


Beautiful and haunting as any song about death could be, this song is a staple on television and in films. We want to believe that those we love are comforted in the arms of the angels, and McLachlan’s words could be our own. In fact, this song has been a staple in times of national tragedy, helping us make meaning of events that otherwise would seem overwhelming.

“I Can’t Outrun You” by Thompson Square


A popular story of the afterlife is that some human souls hang about because of unfinished business. The idea of haunting—and that the past can’t be easily escaped—is captured in songs like this one by the musical couple Thompson Square—“it’s like your ghost is chasing me.”

“All You Zombies” by The Hooters


Another omnipresent afterlife story in our culture is that of zombies—the walking dead. In this song by the mid-80s rockers The Hooters, the chorus asks who the zombies are, and suggests, as some of our pop culture narratives do, that there’s little difference between the walking dead—and the living.

“Cheek to Cheek” by Fred Astaire


We use Heaven as a way of expressing how transcendent earthly experiences feel. Here, Fred sings about how dancing cheek to cheek feels like Heaven, but we make this comparison over and over again in poetry and popular song, including several great examples in this playlist.

“Will the Circle Be Unbroken” by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band


One of our primary stories about Heaven is that it is a place where we will be reunited with those we have loved and lost. Here we have such a reunion—Johnny Cash sings lead, and the backing choir includes others of the dear departed: June Carter Cash, John Denver, Roy Acuff, and Earl Scruggs.

“Heaven Is a Place on Earth” by Belinda Carlisle


Maybe nothing in life is more perfect than an infectious pop song—especially a pop song about finding Heaven on earth. If we’re incapable of accurately describing the world to come, we certainly feel like we can recognize a taste of Heaven when we find it—and that’s what Carlisle does for us here.

“Too Marvelous for Words” by Ella Fitzgerald


One of the literary conventions in writing about the afterlife is that Heaven can’t be described in earthly words—it is, quite literally, too marvelous for words. Here, Ella Fitzgerald sings about the difficulty we have in conveying the ineffable when all we have are words (and one of the world’s most marvelous voices).

“Coming Home” by Diddy—Dirty Money & Skylar Gray


Another of the central appeals of the myth of Heaven is that someday we will find the place we belong, and this track captures the emotional pull of being reunited with those we have lost and, as well as, in the words of TS Eliot, arriving at the place where we began and knowing it for the first time.

“Angel” by Jack Johnson


It’s a time-honored trope of popular music that we compare those we love to angels—only those heavenly creatures could bring us this kind of happiness, be so beautiful. Johnson’s sweet lilting song is a fine example of how such songs work.

“Angels We Have Heard on High” by Aretha Franklin


In the Bible, angels are messengers of earthshaking news, none more earthshaking than the birth of Jesus the Messiah. Here the Queen of Soul offers a contemporary gospel version of the hymn about the angels singing in the heavens at the Christ Child’s birth.

“My Little Demon” by Fleetwood Mac


One of the questions we’re attempting to answer when we tell stories about devils and demons is where human evil comes from. Is it intrinsic to our condition, or are we simply in the middle of a cosmic battle between good and evil? Are demons outside of us—or are they our own worst natures?

“Highway to Hell” by AC-DC


For some bad boys (and girls), the idea of hanging out with the worst the cosmos has to offer shows their street cred. (See also Van Halen’s “Running with the Devil.”) “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven,” John Milton has Satan say, and so sings AC-DC’s Bon Scott.

“Wise Up” by Aimee Mann


The Purgatory myth has at its center human self-improvement. How do we become better persons? We learn to do better. To be better. Aimee Mann’s song—best known as the centerpiece of P.T. Anderson’s movie Magnolia, about a dozen tortured souls who need to do better—is a perfect statement of one of our most important human stories.

“Wash Away” by Joe Purdy


At the heart many of our stories of the afterlife is the hope that someday, somewhere, we will reach a better place, a place where the hurt and heartache have washed away, and we have been redeemed—whatever that may mean. Featured in an early episode of that great purgatorial television drama Lost, Joe Purdy’s song is a gentle and beautiful reminder of that hope.

Check out Greg Garrett’s full playlist below.

Headline Image: Cloud photo by Julia Revitt. CC0 via Unsplash.

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An overview of the UNIDROIT PICC, with Stefan Vogenauer

The UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts, or PICC, were created in 1994 after decades of preparation, against what Oxford author Stefan Vogenauer calls a “romantic background” of a global commercial law, or lex mercatoria. In the following videos, Stefan explains how the PICC can be used as a form of “Esperanto” law for cross-border contracts.

While the UNIDROIT PICC offer a harmonizing global contract law, some objectors may say that as “principles”, they are too vague. Stefan tackles this objection in the video below, and also highlights how some practitioners may be surprised by the contents of the Principles.

But how does the UNIDROIT PICC work in practice? In this next video, Stefan discusses a case study that involves Principles and the Belgian Supreme Court.

While the Principles were first created in 1994, their conception began in the 1960s. But what does the future hold for the UNIDROIT PICC? Stefan discusses this in the video below.

Featured image credit: ‘Oxford – Feel the magic’, by Angel Ganev. CC-by-2.0 via Flickr.

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Six features of hip hop poetry

Hip hop has increasingly influenced a new generation of American poets. For instance, the current issue of Poetry excerpts poems and essays from the recently published anthology, The BreakBeat Poets, edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall. In the anthology’s introduction, Marshall asserts:

This is the story of how generations of young people reared on hip-hop culture and aesthetics took to the page and poem and microphone to create a movement in american letters in the tradition of the Black Arts, Nuyorican, and Beat generations and add to it and innovate on top.

Even observers who do not particularly like hip hop recognize that it offers contemporary poets an important resource. “I think the Shakespeare of this century would certainly—would certainly—learn from rap, yes,” Geoffrey Hill, the octogenarian Oxford Professor of Poetry, insisted to a television interviewer.

Hip hop’s influence has reached a point where it would be helpful to clarify what poets have learned from this genre of music. To borrow Wittgenstein’s term, what “family resemblance” distinguishes the genre of hip hop poetry?  To start the conversation, I propose the following “network of similarities”:

The poet as emcee. Published in his 2002 collection, Hip Logic, Terrance Hayes’s widely noticed poem, “emcee,” stylishly established this trope. The poem details a series of opportunities and freedoms that a hip hop aesthetic encourages. “Under your spell I can do anything,” it boasts. The poet, however, recognizes the limits of the resemblance. He is an imagined emcee, not an actual one. Instead, Hayes suggests an affinity between the two artists and their art forms. Both sample and seek to innovate.
A hip hop style of allusion. Contemporary poetry increasingly offers a particular kind of allusion, marked by dense punning and hit-or-miss references to various kinds of texts, figures, and products. In this respect, it follows hip hop practice. This kind of allusion strives to appear omnivorous, capable of devouring nearly everything. The website Rap Genius—later renamed Genius—partly arose to help listeners understand musical examples. As in modernist poetry, such allusions favor experts who can identify and appreciate them. The age of Google and other internet tools, however, has changed the experience of allusion, deemphasizing interpretive difficulty and encouraging an even greater velocity.
The most conspicuous marker of hip hop’s influence on contemporary poetry has been the use of a particular idiom. A new kind of slang has gained increasing currency as poets employ the nonce words and the particular language hip hop favors.


“Dj Turntable Scratching Music Hang Up Disco” by phio, CC 1.0 via Pixabay.


Subject matter. In addition to adapting (often critically) the major themes of hip hop music, hip hop poetry takes hip hop music, culture, and personalities as subjects. Writing about her recent collection, West, Sarah Blake observes:

In 2010, I knew I wanted to write about hip hop. I love how hip hop is rooted in the present. I love its mixed diction, its humor, how it’s political, how much collaboration is involved. When I tried to write about it directly, I couldn’t. So I decided to write about an artist.

Mr. West examines moments from Kanye West’s life using a perspective distinct from his. The collection foregrounds this difference, presenting the poet as a white, middle-class, pregnant woman. Other poems in this genre include Michael Cirelli’s Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard, which retells anecdotes from the lives of a number of hip hop artists. Adrian Matejka’s “Tyndall Armory” remembers an early Public Enemy concert. Franny Choi’s “Pussy Monster” startlingly varies this approach. The poem takes its content from the words of a Lil’ Wayne song, arranged in order of frequency. The hip hop artist’s word choice is the poem’s story.

Hip hop has influenced print-based poetry’s use of form in at least two main ways. First, some poems imitate the form of hip hop lyrics transcribed onto the page. Second, hip hop has encouraged a new interest in virtuoso rhyming. As Major Jackson notes, “I put a premium on rhymes—how could I / Not living in the times of the Supa / Emcees?” While Americans poets previously generally avoided patterned rhyme, a new generation of poets has experimented with its most conspicuous forms, including multi-syllabic, mosaic, and forced rhymes. When a poet rhymes “Sudafed” with “red” or “Sierra Leone” with “home” (as Michael Robbins and Jackson respectively do), one can hear hip hop’s formal influence.


Sincerity and swagger. Both celebrated or attacked, “sincerity” has served as a key term in American poetry since the mid-century. Hip hop poetry, on the other hand, proposes a different ideal: swagger. “I think this is where swagger comes from,” Dorothea Lasky observes, explaining Biggie Smalls’ influence on her work. “It is the craft, the skill, the flow, that connects all of us as poets. The ability to take the muck of the everyday and make it beautiful.” Swagger has replaced the tones of muffled regret familiar to much “boomer” poetry. However, it remains to be seen how flexible and persuasive this attitude will be.

Image Credit: “Concert Scene Dj Music Rap Hip Hop Scenequipmente” by jorgejimenez. CC 1.0 via Pixabay.

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Mapping out the General Election

In anticipation of the imminent General Election on 7 May 2015, we pulled together information from Who’s Who to take a closer look at the major players bidding for our votes. We’ve mapped nine party leaders and deputy leaders to their constituencies, including David Cameron (Tory), Ed Miliband (Labour), Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats), Natalie Bennett (Green Party), Nigel Farage (UKIP), Nicola Sturgoen (Scottish National Party), Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru), Naomi Long (Alliance Party of Northern Ireland), and Nigel Dodds (Democratic Unionist Party). Learn the ins and outs of each figure’s life, from how they started out, to their listed achievements and successes, to what makes them tick outside of parliament.

Featured image: Westminster. CC0 via Pixabay.

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