[Sasha Volokh, December 8, 2006 at 1:26pm] Trackbacks
New developments in scholarship:

For those who are interested in law and music, and the (really!) fascinating question of what musical interpretation has to teach us about statutory interpretation, check out Ian Gallacher's Conducting the Constitution: Justice Scalia, Textualism, and the Eroica Symphony. It's fun -- and even contains snippets of score! -- but not, I think, altogether fair to the textualist perspective. (For example: Who says a legal textualist should think textualism even desirable in music?) A better contribution to the genre, as I recall (it's been maybe ten years since I read this), is Sanford Levison's and J.M. Balkin's Law, Music, and Other Performing Arts, 139 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1597 (1991).

And, for those of you whose interests tend either to tax law or to silly jokes about buffalo, check out Erik M. Jensen's Wheir's the Beef?: Buffalo Law and Taxation, 36 N.M. L. Rev. 517 (2006). This is really one where you have to read the footnotes.

Marc :
ha ha -- finally an article on this site that i as a sort of music professor can understand. the levison/balkin review of the debate about musical authenticity is really quite good and miraculously he almost avoids post-modern jargon entirely (until near the end where he uses the word 'problematics'. huh?)

thanks very much for the reference-- i will assign it for my history class next semester.
12.8.2006 6:33pm
Scott Scheule (mail):
One of my favorite cycles of the Beethoven symphonies is Gardiner's, complete with originalism galore. I generally can't abide people twisting tempi out of all context, adding accents that aren't there, etc. So I suppose I speak as a musical originalist. An original-intent originalist at that. That is probably not akin to textualism, though there may be overlap. I suppose I carry a textualist presumption.

I doubt I'm a constitutional originalist or textualist, though I'd probably prefer either method to most others.

The tension between these two positions does not keep me up at night. There seems to me something quite different about the interpretation of a document that claims to bind people to certain legal outcomes, and the interpretation of a document that's meant to produce artistic sound. Moreover, the former claims to be the crystallized "will of the people", and textualist or original-meaning interpretations seem decent methodologies of uncovering what that will is (which is important if you care about democracy, which I don't). The latter is authored by one person alone (by and large): the composer. We can safely look to his intentions without fear of contradiction--his are the only intentions that count--save in the case of the schizophrenic composer. But Schumann sucks anyway.

I conclude music and law are different. We can learn this by trying to run the Internal Revenue Code through a player piano (John Cage may have tried this--that proves my point). Though our search for interdisciplinary bridges should by all means go on. I can't be the only one to have noticed the striking similarities between Environmental Law and Anime.
12.8.2006 8:34pm
Sasha Volokh (mail) (www):
You mean, how you can see the underwear?
12.8.2006 10:13pm