Papers of the 2012 Tupac Amaru Shakur Collection Conference: Hip Hop, Education & Expanding the Archival Imagination

The Papers of the 2012 Tupac Amaru Shakur Collection Conference: Hip Hop, Education & Expanding the Archival Imagination has now been published.  The file is available here.  Last Fall the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Atlanta University Center (Clark Atlanta University, Spellman College, Morehouse College, and Interdenominational Theological Center) hosted a conference that brought together scholars from across disciplines and across the world.  This blogs very own, andré douglas pond cummings and Nick J. Sciullo both presented.  Sciullo's paper can be found at pp. 32-37 of the conference proceedings.  

This interdisciplinary exploration of Tupac, hip-hop, and the archival imagination should be of tremendous interest to hip hop, law, criminology, and librarianship scholars.


-- Nick J. Sciullo

Hip Hop and the Law Isn't Just for the Academy: A Practitioner's Take on Kanye West and Family Law

From the email files...

Attorney Joshua E. Stern recently emailed HipHopLaw.com to tell us about some work he had done on Kanye West and Illinois family law.  Have a question about child support?  Kanye's got your answers according to Stern in this post.

Joshua Stern works in Evanston, Illinois, not far from Northwestern University.  He received his J.D. from Emory and B.S. from DePaul.  While at Emory he worked on the Emory International Law Review.  And, aside from this impressive pedigree, he's a bit of a hip hop aficionado.

Councilor Stern's post highlights a key point we at HipHopLaw have been trying to make, namely that hip hop has influenced and will continue to influence lawyers, law students, legal activists, and legal scholars.  The point is not that hip hop solves all of the world's problems, or that only hip hop can help us understand the law, but is instead that hip hop is an important way many people come to understand the law and that to understand law we must be cognizant of the influences popular culture has on popular conceptions of law.  In short, hip hop can help us.  If  clients or students come into our office, sometimes it's easier to explain things using Kanye or Jay-Z than talking about Blackacre or a "bundle of rights."

How are other practitioners thinking about hip hop?  We'd like to know...


Photo credits: Law Offices of Joshua E. Stern and UPROXX.com.


-- Nick J. Sciullo

Hip-Hop and the Law Review: The Year in Review

The previous year has seen a number of articles published on hip-hop in the country's law reviews.  The following is a nearly complete list of those articles that consider hip-hop in any number of forms: case study, methodology, theoretical intervention, etc.  One trend is the continued study of hip-hop's relationship to copyright law.  2012 has seen more focus on hip-hop and copyright law than on hip-hop and other sub-disciplines.  Why?  Perhaps the continued evolution of web-based technologies and the increasing ease of sharing information (Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) has made issues of copyright law and intellectual property more salient to the average person.  Perhaps the re-appropriation of corporate logos by Occupiers has inspired more inquiry into the ways in which material is used and abused.  No matter the reason, 2013 should see continued work on hip-hop as scholars continue to study the effects of hip-hop on the Arab Spring, further investigate the effects of mass incarceration, become increasingly exposed to students who grew up with hip-hop, and theorize new relationships to the law given our increasingly diverse country. 

In no particular order, here are 2012's hip-hop-related articles:

Andrea M. Ewart with Kimberly R. Villiers, "Dangerous" Dancehall Reggae and Caribbean Treaty Obligations, 27 Connecticut Journal of International Law 321-343 (Spring 2012)

andre douglas pong cummings, Derrick Bell: Godfather Provocateur, 28 Harvard Journal on Racial and Ethnic Justice 51-66 (Spring 2012)

andre douglas pond cummings, Symposium: War on...The Fallout of Declaring War on Social Issues: "All Eyez on Me": America's War on Drugs and the Prison-Industrial Complex, 15 Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 417-448 (Spring 2012)

Vera Golosker, Student Note: the transformative tribute: How Mash-Up Music Constitutes Fair Use of Copyrights, 34 Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal 381-401 (Spring 2012)

Lisa T. Alexander, Hip-Hop and Housing: Revisiting Culture, Urban Space, Power, and Law, 63 Hastings Law Journal 803-866 (March 2012)

Unsigned Student Note, Student Note: Not in Court "Cause I Stole a Beat": The Digital Music Sampling Debate's Discourse on Race and Culture, and the Need for Test Case Litigation, 2012 University of Illinois Journal of Law, Technology & Policy 141-166 (Spring 2012)

Donald F. Tibbs, Symposium: War on...The Fallout of Declaring War on Social Issues: From Black Power to Hip Hop: Discussing Race, Policing, and the Fourth Amendment Through the "War on" Paradigm, 15 Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 47-79 (Winter 2012)

Anna Shapell, Student Note: "Give Me a Beat:" Mixing and Mashing Copyright Law to Encompass Sample-Based Music, 12 Journal of High Technology Law 519-565 (2012)

Kim D. Chanbonpin, Legal Writing: the Remix: Plagiarism and Hip Hop Ethics, 63 Mercer Law Review 597-638 (Winter 2012)

John S. Pelletier, Student Note: Sampling the Circuits: The Case for a New Comprehensive Scheme for Determining Copyright Infringement as a Result of Music Sampling, 89 Washington University Law Review 1161-1202 (2012)

Tracy Reilly, Good Fences Make Good Neighboring Rights: The German Federal Supreme Court Rules on the Digital Sampling of Sound Recordings in Metall auf Metall, 13 Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology 153-209 (Winter 2012)

Caleb Mason, Jay-Z's 99 Problems, Verse 2: A Close Reading with Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps, 56 Saint Louis University Law Journal 567-585 (Winter 2012)

Here's to a hip-hop and the law filled new year and more excelleent scholarship. 


-- Nick J. Sciullo

New Article: Jay-Z's 99 Problems, Verse 2: A Close Reading with Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps

Caleb Mason (Southwestern Law School) recently published Jay-Z's 99 Problems, Verse 2: A Close Reading with Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps in the Saint Louis University Law Journal (Vol. 56, No. 2, 2012).  The article has received mentions in the Huffington Post, SOHH.com, The Grio, BET, Gawker.com, Music Law Seminar, TheRoot.com, AboveTheLaw.com, and the Wall Street Journal blog.  The YouTube video of Jay-Z's song:




The article has also inspired a Canadian response authored by Emir Crowne.  From the abstract from Mason's original article:

This is a line-by-line analysis of the second verse of 99 Problems by Jay-Z, from the perspective of a criminal procedure professor.  It’s intended as a resource for law students and teachers, and for anyone who’s interested in what pop culture gets right about criminal justice, and what it gets wrong.

Hip Hop Comes to Yale Law School

Hip hop has made it to the hallowed halls of the Ivy League. Recently at Yale Law School artists and legal scholars collaborated on a panel to discuss hip hop and corporate influence. Akilah Folami (Hofstra), Bret Asbury (Drexel), Jasiri X, and Paradise Gray spoke of far ranging topics from misogyny to corporatization, marketing to social justice.

This panel's placement at Yale Law School should serve as a harbinger for the hip hop and the law movement. It clearly represents a strong interest by both scholars and artists to engage the law in new ways. Five or ten years ago, would we have seen such a panel? Not likely. Read the story from the Yale Daily news here.

Photo: Jennifer Cheung, Yale Daily News


-- Nick J. Sciullo

Hip Hop and the American Constitution

Dr. Donald Tibbs in collaboration with Professor andré douglas pond cummings are offering a first-of-its-kind law school course entitled "Hip Hop and the American Constitution," this spring semester 2012. Through an innovative link-up between Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law and the West Virginia University College of Law, Tibbs and cummings are presenting to law students at both schools an intellectual and academic experience connecting the intersections of hip hop with the law. The course is being presented primarily as a lecture series, where academics and activists from across the nation are traveling to Philadelphia and presenting their published work which examines various aspects of the the law through the lens of hip hop, its artists, culture and messaging. Students will be required to read the lecturing scholars work, be it law review articles or books, and will then intellectually engage with the visiting scholars following a lecture presented by each visiting professor. In addition, students will keep a journal of their insights through the semester, and will present a final paper tackling a current issue in the law and how hip hop music or culture critiques this law.

The lecture series will occur on Thursday evenings at Drexel Law throughout the spring 2012 semester and is being broadcast live to students at WVU Law. The lecture series line-up will proceed throughout the semester as follows:

January 19, 2012: Professor Bret Asbury, Drexel Law, "Anti-Snitching and the Hip Hop Community"

January 26, 2012: Professor andré douglas pond cummings, WVU Law, "All Eyez on Me: Hip Hop, Mass Incarceration and the Prison Industrial Complex

February 3, 2012: Professor Paul Butler, George Washington Law, "Let's Get Free: A Hip Hop Theory of Justice

February 9, 2012: Dr. Imani Perry, Princeton University, "Prophets of the 'Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop"

February 16, 2012: Professor Akilah Folami, Hofstra Law, "Law, Hip Hop and the Black Public Sphere"

February 23, 2012: Dr. Tryon Woods, UMass - Dartmouth, "Law, Black Sexual Politics, and Punishment"

March 1, 2012: Professor Kim Chanbonpin, John Marshall Law, "Legal Writing, The Remix: Plagiarism and Hip Hop Ethics

March 8, 2012: Professor Anthony Farley, Albany Law, "Sarah Palin: The Last Black President or Straight Up Gangsta"

March 22, 2012: Professor Pamela Bridgewater, American Law, "Is Feminism Dead? Is Hip Hop Dead? And Other 21st Century Questions of Marginal Utility"

March 29, 2012: Professor Andre Smith, Widener Law, "OPP - Other People's Property: Hip Hop's Inherent Clashes With Property Laws and its Ascendance as Global Counter Culture"

April 5, 2012: Dr. Donald Tibbs, Drexel Law, "From Black Power to Hip Hop"

April 12, 2012: Guest Finale/Keynote Speaker (TBA)

Contributing scholars who will teach portions of the WVU Law section include Professor Atiba Ellis, WVU Law and Nick Sciullo, Ph.d candidate, Georgia State University.

Each of the above lecture series participants will publish their articles or book excerpts in an anthology that Tibbs and cummings will edit, slated for publication in 2013.