law and literature

Louise Erdrich on NPR’s All Things Considered

Kate Fort1 Comment

A particularly timely interview of Louise Erdich on her new book, The Round House, given Prof. Carlson’s talk at our symposium this afternoon.

Here.

On the difficulties of finding justice on Native American reservations

“There are several kinds of land on reservations. And all of these pieces of land have different entities who are in charge of enforcing laws on this land. So in this case, Geraldine Coutts does not know where her attacker raped her. She didn’t see, she doesn’t know. So in her case, it is very, very difficult to find justice because there’s no clear entity who is in charge of seeking justice for her …

“So in writing the book, the question was: If a tribal judge — someone who has spent his life in the law — cannot find justice for the woman he loves, where is justice? And the book is also about the legacy of generations of injustice, and what comes of that. Because, of course, what comes of that is an individual needs to seek justice in their own way when they can’t find justice through the system. And that brings chaos.”

Fletcher on “Laughing Whitefish” and Tribal Customary Law

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

Matthew Fletcher posted “Laughing Whitefish: A Tale of Justice and Anishinaabe Custom” on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Laughing Whitefish, a novel by Robert Traver, the pen name of former Michigan Supreme Court Justice John Voelker, is the fictionalized story of a case that reached the Michigan Supreme Court three times, culminating in Kobogum v. Jackson Iron Co., 43 N.W. 602 (Mich. 1889). The petitioner, Charlotte Kobogum, an Ojibwe Indian from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, brought suit to recover under a note issued to her father, Marji Gesick, by the mining company in the 1840s. The company had promised a share in the company because he had led them to one of the largest iron ore deposits in the country, the famed Jackson Mine. Despite the company’s defense that Mr. Gesick was a polygamist and therefore Ms. Kobogum could not be his legitimate heir, the Michigan Supreme Court held that state courts had no right to interfere with internal, domestic relations of reservation Indians, and upheld the claim. Justice Voelker’s tale is a powerful defense of the decision, and offers insights into why state courts should recognize the judgments of tribal courts even today.

book cover of Laughing Whitefish by Robert Traver

Program for Society for the Study of Midwest Literature 2008 Annual Meeting

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

The annual meeting for the Society for the Study of Midwest Literature will be here at MSU beginning Thursday May. The program can be downloaded here. The events are in the MSU Union.

Highlights include:

Thursday

Session C — 4-5:30 PM — Parlor B — Law and Literature

Mae Kuykendall and Renee Knake of MSU law college will be presenting on this panel

Friday

Session G — 1:30-3 PM — Parlor C — Fiction Reading

Me!!! [right before I have to run off to make the law college graduation ceremony]. I’ll be reading from a short story called “Parker Roberts” (parker-roberts).

Saturday

Session K — 10:30-Noon — Gold Room B — Law and Literature

Fred Baker, Jr. on Justice Voelker and “An Anatomy of An Anatomy of a Murder”

American Indian Law & Lit Speakers Profile — Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

We are pleased to welcome Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic to East Lansing this weekend. They will be presenting a talk entitled, “Crossover.”

They are both very prolific writers and have been pioneers in the development of Critical Race Theory. And Richard has published several articles related to Indian law and policy, see, e.g., here and here. Jean and Richard co-authored a recent book of law and literature, “How Lawyers Lose Their Way: A Profession Loses Its Creative Minds” (Duke, 2005).

MSU American Indian Law & Lit Speaker Profile: Kirsten Matoy Carlson

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

In the coming weeks, we will be profiling the work of the speakers scheduled to present at the 4th Annual Indigenous Law Conference, “American Indian Law and Literature.”

The first profiled speaker, Kirsten Matoy Carlson, will be presenting a paper called, “Unresolved Disputes:Narratives in the Transformation and Processing of Persistent Claims.”

Kirsten’s abstract (from SSRN):

In 1980, the Supreme Court decided the largest land claim ever lodged against the United States government in favor of the Lakota people. The decision should have ended Lakota claims to the Black Hills, but it did not. This law review article seeks to understand why these claims persist despite their formal adjudication. It brings two traditions of legal scholarship together for the first time by considering the role of narrative in the sociolegal processes of dispute creation and re-creation. It argues that grievances persist through narratives, which facilitate the naming, blaming, and claiming stages of dispute creation. These narratives present a separate historical and legal perspective, and argue for the righting of historical injustices. As these narratives are repeated, the dispute is created and re-created intergenerationally, often evolving along the way. The article concludes that these narratives, which diverge from traditional legal narratives about the claims, explain the persistence of the unresolved dispute.