UHLC Nota Bene

Like legal fiction?  Looking for some summer reading ideas?  The ABA Journal and the University of Alabama School of Law have announced the nominees for the 2014 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction . According to the prize’s website, the award “is given annually to a book-length work of fiction, published in the preceding year, that best illuminates the role of lawyers in society and their power to effect change.”  This year’s nominees are: The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout (Random House) Once We Were Brothers by Ronald H. Balson (St. Martin’s Griffin) Sycamore Row by John Grisham (Doubleday)   The public can help pick a winner by voting in the poll available on the ABA Journal website . The poll will be open until June 30 th .  If you are looking for other good book ideas, information about past winners is also available on the Harper Lee Prize website .

If any of you are looking for a good book, you might check out the list of the 25 greatest law novels recently compiled by the ABA.   Chosen by a panel of experts , the list contains the best “novels whose storylines revolved around lawyers or legal cases or the moral milieu of the law.”   The top 5 include:  To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866) Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1852) The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925) Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (1862) To see the full list, visit the ABA website .   To find out if a book is available at the law library or any of the other UH libraries, check the library catalog .

Superman, the Man of Steel, was born in 1938, and has been involved in copyright litigation almost as long.   Mr. Mxyzptlk himself could not have created as convoluted a history of a copyright dispute as the one that involved the rights to the Superman property.  The Superman character was the brain-child of Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster. Their idea, an alien comes to Earth and has super-powers was a new one at the time.   These two Brainiacs sold the exclusive world-wide rights to Superman to Detective Comics (“DC”) for $130.00 and took employment with DC. Superman debuted in the comic-book format in Action Comics #1. He was an instant hit. Siegel and Shuster filed their first lawsuit against DC in 1947 alleging that DC was not paying them their fair share of the profits that DC was reaping from the superhero. After trial the “official referee” found that DC had paid valuable consideration for the rights to Superman and the agreement was valid. Soon after th...

Here's a treat for those who love Sherlock Holmes (and who doesn't?): Back on Valentine's Day, an expert on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous character filed suit in Illinois federal court seeking a declaratory judgment that all copyrights in the character, his sidekick Mr. Watson, and any other characters or character traits that appeared in any of the works published in the United States before January 1, 1923 have expired and enjoining the Doyle estate from intefering with the upcoming publication of a book of new and original stories based on those characters. According to an article from the Hollywood Reporter about the lawsuit , Doyle's heirs, under the aegis of a company called Conan Doyle Estate Ltd, are objecting to the new book and insisting that a license agreement be procured under threat of an infringement claim. Apparently, although the copyright to all of Doyle's works expired in the UK in 1980 (see ¶ 18 of the complaint ), the estate contends th...

In Edward Everett Hale’s story “The Man Without a Country”, the fictional protagonist Philip Nolan is tried for treason along with Aaron Burr. Nolan is convicted and proclaims “Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” The judge grants his wish by sentencing him to live for the rest of his life on US Navy ships whose crews are instructed never to talk about the United State in Nolan’s presence.   As Nolan lives out his life moving from ship to ship, never setting foot on US soil again, he learns the painful lesson of what it means to be a “man without a country.” As he lay dying he shows a sailor the shrine he has assembled to the United States and dies happy knowing how his country has prospered. Patriotism is the obvious theme of Hale’s story. It is worth noting that the story was written in 1863, during the middle of the Civil War; its purpose to add backbone to the Union war effort. The story was written in such a realistic manner tha...