Creating Art Out of Crime

Katherine Biber, University of Technology, Sydney, Faculty of Law, is publishing In Crime's Archive: The Cultural Afterlife of Criminal Evidence in the British Journal of Criminology. Here is the abstract.

This article explores the cultural afterlife of criminal evidence. During the criminal trial, strict rules govern the collection, admission and interpretation of evidence at trial. However, after the conclusion of the trial, this material returns to a notional ‘archive’ and is sometimes used by artists, scholars, curators and others, but subject to no rules nor standards. This article examines a range of instances in which criminal evidence has been used post-trial, and proposes a jurisprudence of sensitivity for responding to the harm that is sometimes done when criminal evidence leads a cultural afterlife.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Colonialism, Cultural Assumptions, Property Rights, and Land Law Reform

Robert Home, Anglia Ruskin University, has published ‘Culturally Unsuited to Property Rights?’: Colonial Land Laws and African Societies at 40 Journal of Law and Society 403 (2013). Here is the abstract.

Hernando de Soto, advocate of central registers of land rights, raised the possibility of Africans being culturally unsuited to property rights. This article argues that sub‐Saharan Africa's high proportion of tribal/communal land (as distinguished from private and public/state land) results from a combination of geography, history, and population distribution. External colonial rule created a dual system of land tenure that restrained private property rights in the tribal/communal land areas. The research draws upon archival evidence from the colonial land tenure panel chaired by Lord Hailey (1945–50). The finding is not that Africans are inherently culturally unsuited to property ownership, but that colonialism reinforced pluralistic forms of property rights, which create particular challenges to land law reform. 

The full text is not available for download from SSRN.