Legal Niches

Call for Papers

By Jim Chen at al.

I am currently soliciting paper presentations for panels on?Food, Law, and Culture? for the annual Law, Culture, and Humanities Conference to be held at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University, March 28-29, 2008.

Last year we organized two panels with papers on such topics as the legal regulation of margarine, taxation and the family farm, cultural identity and the 21st Amendment, and federal school lunch programs. Recent work in the humanities and social sciences has begun to explore food?s role in culture, and our goal will be to apply this interdisciplinaryscholarship to critically examine the place(s) of food in the law.

Important questions include: How can we explain the law?s varying treatment of food? What role does law play in shaping cultural ideas about food and food production? And, inversely, how does food culture affect the law? My work, for example, analyzes the treatment of culinary creativity by modern intellectual property law.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

Intellectual property rights in genetically modified foods;
Hunger strikes and force-feeding prisoners;
Last meals;
Food torts, e.g,. exploding sodas, fingers in chili, coffee inthe lap;
Government regulation of food and alcohol;
Obesity regulation;
Dietary laws and regulations in different cultures;
Trademark rights in appellations of origin;
Farm subsidies and international trade;
Linguistic classification of food, e.g. kosher, 1st Growths,Organic'
Sumptuary laws;
Famine;
Labeling, packaging, and branding;
RationingFood stamps;
Ethanol production and the food supply

The deadline for submissions to the conference is October 15, 2007, so please let me know as soon as possible if you think you might be interested in joining the panel. Abstracts can wait until closer to the deadline. Also, please circulate this to any colleagues that might be interested.

Feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions or comments.

Sincerely,
Christopher Buccafusco

chrstphr@uchicago.edu

Full post as published by Agricultural Law on September 07, 2007 (boomark / email).