Shanks-Dumont on Godzilla and the Imaginal Legal History of Ecocide

Daimeon Shanks-Dumont, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the 
University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, has published Godzilla Cinema and the Imaginal Legal History of Ecocide in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities:

This Article develops a theory of imaginal legal history in the service of recovering aspects of social phenomena that are habitually suppressed in contemporary modes of legal history. It offers a retrospective account of the emerging international crime of ecocide through the use of unlikely source material: Godzilla cinema. Through the use of moving images, this history surfaces latent meaning within the concept of ecocide that has been concealed in traditional narratives, namely an anthropocentric grounding that is at odds with its self-professed environmentalism.

The Article is divided into two main Parts. The first lays out a speculative theory of imaginal history. It begins by critiquing the dominate modality of professional historiography, contextualism, and the reduction of narrative that is a result of the hegemony of the written word. It then considers how images operate in and through legal practices and materials as a general matter of symbolic ordering, before moving on to discuss what the concept of the imaginal offers legal-historical study. It then outlines a novel methodological paradigm—imaginal legal history—that promises a way out of the obsession with radical contingency that has arrested legal history since its encounter with Critical Legal Studies in the 1980s.

The second Part is an attempt to operationalize imaginal legal history with film—to create what Walter Benjamin called a “critical constellation”—to better appreciate current efforts to leverage international law to address the climate crisis. It begins by explaining why Godzilla cinema is an apt repository of moving images with which to engage the histories of international law, arguing that the genre’s global scope, international scale, and deep inventories of symbolic imagery and fantasy recommend it as a tool of imaginal legal history. It then analyzes a foundational moment of international environmental law’s history in the 1960s and 1970s—the invention of the concept of ecocide, the beginning of the modern environmental movement, and the articulation of environmental consciousness in American jurisprudence. Finally, the Article “reads” the 1971 film, Godzilla vs. Hedorah, and what its imagery, symbolism, and structure reveals of contemporaneous and current environmental and legal consciousness.

The dénouement comes in the Conclusion, which takes the montage of images brought forward in the Article, dissolved of their contexts, and through a critical interpretation integrates them in ecocide’s horizons of meaning. A short Coda to the text follows, meditating on a materialist reading of Godzilla vs. Hedorah, and the traces of the Real that survive in the interstices of the film.

--Dan Ernst 

Holmes: The Movie

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE] 

On September 11, 2025, at 5 p.m., join the Law Library of Congress and the Supreme Court Historical Society for a special film screening to celebrate Constitution Day in the Coolidge Auditorium. This event will feature a screening of “Holmes.” This film depicts Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, on his 90th birthday, reflecting on his life on the Supreme Court of the United States and his service to the Union Army in the United States Civil War.

This event will also feature remarks by Law Librarian of Congress Aslihan Bulut, Supreme Court Historical Society Director of Publications Clare Cushman, and Senior Counsel of Legal Programs and Initiatives for the Library of Congress Jeanne Dennis. We hope you can join us.

Please register here. 

OAH Barnouw Award to "The Chinese Exclusion Act"

One more bit of legal history news from the recent Organization of American Historians meeting. The film The Chinese Exclusion Act received the Erik Barnouw award for "outstanding programming on television, or in documentary film, concerned with American history, the study of American history, and/or the promotion of American history." The film is a co-production of Steeplechase Films and the Center for Asian American Media. It was directed by Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu and produced and written by Ric Burns, Robin Espinola, and Li-Shin Yu. Executive Producers: Stephen Gong and Donald Young, Center for Asian American Media; Mark Samels, American Experience.

Weekend Roundup

• Airing this evening at 8:50pm EST on C-SPAN3 is Justice Robert H. Jackson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, which John Q. Barrett, St. John's Law, delivered in the Supreme Court Historical Society's Leon Silverman Lecture Series at the Court last month.

• In Atlas Obscura, Jessica Leigh Hester was a very nice report on an exhibit on naturalization at the New-York Historical Society. 

• A Vanderbilt press release and student newspaper note the conclusion of (ASLH President-Elect) Laura Benton's tenure as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.   

• The First 100 Years Project: According to Legal Cheek, the two-year countdown has begun to “the centenary of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 which allowed women to practice law.”

• The Mitchell Library hosts an event on “four of the grisliest murders of the 19th and 20th centuries” in Glasgow’s“square mile of murder.”  H/t: Glasgow Live.

• The New York State Archives announces awards in support of historical research in its holdings. "The Larry J. Hackman Research Residency Program is intended to support advanced work on New York State history, government, or public policy by defraying travel-related research expenses."

• ICYMI: An interview of St. Mary's Law School professor Michael Ariens on his book Lone Star Law, in the San Antonio Express-News.  Jacob Heilburn on the West Coast Straussians as Donald Trump's Brains, in the NYRB.  Sarah Vowell’s suggested book gifts on “the increasingly reassuring 25th Amendment” for “the constitutional worrywarts and civic-minded hypochondriacs on your gift list.," in the NYT.  Also, a letter on the first deaf juror in Ireland.

• As you start thinking about syllabi for the spring, you may want to have a look again at our earlier posts on teaching legal history through film--here and here.

• Law Engaged Graduate Students at Princeton's Law and Public Affairs Program are hosting a graduate symposium on March 16, 2018: "Unintended: The Promises and Perils of Criminal Justice Reform." Proposals due Jan.15, 2018.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Weekend Roundup

• Recently posted in the Washington Post’s “Made By History” series is Victoria Saker Woeste’s The anti-Semitic origins of the war on "fake news."  It recounts “How Henry Ford tried to discredit the media in order to spread anti-Jewish propaganda.”  

• A scholars' brief on "the History and Original Meaning of the Fourth Amendment as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioner in Carpenter v. United States" is now up on SSRN.

• The Faculty Lounge has an announcement of a new project at Southern Methodist University, Women’s Rights in America: From Early Stirrings to Third Wave Feminism.

• Congratulations to Sarah Staszak, whose No Day in Court: Access to Justice and the Politics of Retrenchment (Oxford University Press, 2015) has recently won the J. David Greenstone Book Award from the American Political Science Association for best book published in the past two years in politics and history. 

• Of possible interest to legal historians of Asia: two back-to-back conferences on comparative law in Asia at the National University of Singapore, Sept.27-28, 2018. The deadline for registration is Sept.12. Details here.

• A follow-up to our recent post on teaching non-US and global legal history through film: Bram Fischer (2017) is about lawyers and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Trailer here (H/t: Rohit De). 

• The Constitutional Sources Project (ConSource) is co-hosting an art exhibit on the Bill of Rights at Cooper Union in New York City during Constitution Week (September 18-23). The exhibit is free and open to the public.

• Congratulations to Steven Brown, Auburn University, for wining the Hughes-Gossett Senior Prize for the best article in the Journal of Supreme Court History.  More. 

• Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, delivers The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office, the 2017 William Roger Louis lecture, before the National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program on Monday, September 11, 2017, 4:00pm-5:30pm, in the Wilson Center’s 6th Floor Moynihan Boardroom.

• A reminder that the Law Library of Congress will commemorate Constitution Day with a talk by Michael J. Klarman, Harvard Law School, on The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2016), on Tuesday, September 12, 2017, from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. in Room LJ-119, located on the first floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, DC.

• Until just recently we missed quite a symposium on Native American Law in the Modern Era in the Albany Government Law Review 10:1.  Contributions include  Indian Title: Unraveling the Racial Context of Property Rights, or How to Stop Engaging in Conquest, by Joseph William Singer; Indians, Race, and Criminal Jurisdiction in Indian Country, by Alex Tallchief Skibine; Anishinaabe law and "The Round House,” by Matthew L.M. Fletcher; The Doctrine of Christian Discovery: Its Fundamental Importance in United States Indian Law and the Need for its Repudiation and Removal, by Joseph J. Heath, Esq.; and The Anglocentric Supremacy of the Marshall Court, by Neyooxet Greymorning.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.