UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th- Century Studies

	Letters Before the Law, 1640-1789 A conference at the Clark Library organized by by Jayne Lewis and Ann Jessie Van Sant, University of California, Irvine
	Friday October 3rd & Saturday October 4th 10a.m.	This conference will highlight a period characterized not just by dramatic change in both English law and English imaginative literature, but also by a uniquely intimate—indeed mutually constitutive—relationship between the two. This conference brings together a number of scholars working at the forefront of today's law and literature movement to look at how radical transformations in the jurisprudential landscape between the English Civil Wars and the French Revolution intertwine with such significant transformations in the world of letters as the institution of a popular print culture, the reformulation of authorship and reading practice, and the rise of new genres, particularly the novel. Numerous emergent or transitional concepts—from equity, contract, and copyright to property, inheritance, and criminal liability—mediate the relationship between law and letters in the period. Working within and across, participants will investigate the extent to which legal categories are in fact embedded in various literary forms even as they consider how far the English legal writing of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may itself be subjected to literary and rhetorical analysis. At the heart of this conference thus lies a question that is also at the center of Blackstone's pivotal Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-9): What does it mean that the law was encountered for the first time as a written, and specifically English, object of historical knowledge even as it retained its dynamic valence in the practical terms of legislation on the one side and case law on the other? How in turn did these dramatic reconceptions of what law is and does interact with equally dramatic reconceptions of what literature is and does?

		Registration Deadline: September 26, 2008. Please click here for a printable registration form. Registration Fees: $25 per person; UC faculty & staff, students with ID: no charge* *Students should enclose a photocopy of their current ID with the registration form. Fees are not refundable and apply to full or partial attendance. Complimentary lunch and other refreshments are provided to all registrants. Please be aware that space at the Clark is limited and that registration closes when capacity is reached. No confirmation will be sent, but we will contact you if we receive your registration after we reach capacity.

		Program Schedule:
	Friday, October 3rd 9:30 A.M. 10.00 A.M.	Morning Coffee Law and Representation Peter H. Reill, UCLA Welcoming Remarks Ann Jessie Van Sant, University of California, Irvine Moderator Wolfram Schmidgen, Washington University, St. Louis The Law of Illegitimacy Amy Louise Erickson, University of Cambridge Questions of Identity in Eighteenth-Century London
	12.00 P.M.	Lunch
	1.30 P.M.	Writing and Speaking the Law Jonathan Grossman, UCLA Moderator James Sharpe, University of York New Ways of Writing Crime: Violent Offences and Newspaper Reporting in Northern England in the Later Eighteenth Century Susan Staves, Brandeis University Cruel Punishment: Speaking from the Scaffold vs. Speaking from the Bench Martin A. Kayman, Cardiff University 'Graced as thou art with all the power of words:' Lord Mansfield and 'the glorious uncertainty of the law'
	4:30 P.M.	Reception
	Saturday, October 4th 9:30 A.M.	Morning Coffee
	10:00 A.M.	Law and the Limits of Expression Jayne Lewis, University of California, Irvine Moderator Debora Shuger, UCLA The Prison Diaries of William Laud Elliott Visconsi, Yale University The Limits of Toleration: Dryden's Civil Religion Victoria Silver, University of California, Irvine ‘Neither person nor cause shall improper me:’ Milton and Defamation
	1:00 P.M.	Lunch.
	2:30 P.M	Law, Crime, and the Novel Helen Deutsch, UCLA Moderator Sandra Macpherson, Ohio State University Murder and the Rise of the Novel Judy M. Cornett, University of Tennessee College of Law Knowing Women: Epistemology in Eighteenth-Century Law and the Novel
	Return to Center for 17th- & 18th- Century Studies front page.