For Memorial Day: Cross Purposes in San Diego
28 May 2007 1 Comment
This 29-foot, brilliant-white cross is part of a WWI/WWII/Korean War memorial on Mt. Soledad outside San Diego. The federal government took it over from the city as a historic landmark (a type of cultural property) in May of 2006, after repeated federal court orders to remove it from city land as an improper government preference for one religion over another, beginning in 1991.
The cross can be seen from freeways, public beaches, and other vantage points all over the city. Viewed out of context (as it is by any uninformed observer farther away then the parking lot), it may be a reminder of the role of Spanish missions in California history, or it may seem to announce “This is Christian territory” – reassuring to Christians, maybe not-so-much to others. Even in the context of the memorial function, it may compare any soldier’s death in the service of his or her country to Jesus Christ’s ultimate sacrifice of his life so that others could live, or it may look like “This is a memorial to Christian veterans; other veterans should go get their own.” Some atheists (some of whom were veterans, despite Fr. William Thomas Cummings’ 1942 contention that “there are no atheists in foxholes”) took exception to having their tax dollars support what they saw as a religious advertisement, and filed suit in 1989 to compel the city to either remove it or render the land on which it stood “non-public.” And many years of litigation ensued (sic).
The American Legion and Christian legal groups are launching an initiative to protect crosses on public war memorials from “secular attacks.” (You know a religious-freedom law is working when it can make even the most dominant, powerful religion in the land feel persecuted. : )) On the other hand, many of our country’s historic properties have religious connections – those of the people who made the history in the first place. What happens to the San Diego cross may affect what happens to other publicly-owned historic sites and artifacts.
Must government-supported historic preservation be confined to strictly secular subject matter? Let’s think about this. And for a change, let’s try to describe the existing law accurately.
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Send In the “GIs”: The U.S. Defends its Vinous Territory
23 May 2007 Leave a Comment
in Distressed Genes, Tales of "Terroir"
What goes around, comes around. Wine tasting is one metaphor; you draw the first sip up one side of your tongue, aerating it noisily in a way that would have gotten you banished from your childhood dinner table, and let it slide down the other, savoring all its flavors and, if you’re in that kind of a setting, searching for coherent words to describe them all.
That sip of wine goes around, then it comes around, then you have to either swallow it or spit it out. Similarly, the U.S. has finally come around, at least a little, to the European perspective on identifying wines with place names – because recently our vintners have, figuratively, walked a mile in the Europeans’ vats.
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For National Maritime Day: Whose Turf is Under the Surf?
22 May 2007 Leave a Comment
in Vivat Wrecks
OK, so you want to look for sunken treasure – be it monetary, historical, or both. (Or you find out someone else is doing it, you don’t think they should, and you want to see if you can stop them).
You’re in luck, sort of.
The bad news for underwater artifact-hunters is that unless the body of water is completely surrounded by private land, you’ll probably have to get permits from, comply with the regulations of, and possibly split the loot with, some government or other. Even if it is on private land, some environmental laws may still restrict what you can do. The good news (for both hunters and their opponents) is that now it’s well settled which governments have jurisdiction where. This issue was hotly contested between the coastal states and the federal government in the two-decade U.S. v. Florida series of cases.
I’ve prepared a diagram* that shows the types and extents of underwater government jurisdiction in the United States. Click the thumbnail image below to enlarge it:
*All clip-art used by permission of Jupiter Images (subscription when the images were downloaded, + non-commercial use).
Curse of the Atocha Part 3: Collateral Damage
22 May 2007 1 Comment
in Vivat Wrecks
In Parts 1 and 2, we heard about the legal travails of Treasure Salvors, Inc., who found and salvaged the wreck of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha. But the curse of curios-in-curiae didn’t end there: even buying, owning, selling, or donating Atocha artifacts had legal ramifications.
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Curse of the Atocha Part 2: Mosquitoes Among the Alligators
08 May 2007 Leave a Comment
in Vivat Wrecks
As you’ll have seen in Part 1, the Atocha shipwreck salvage story is a humdinger. It has it all: adventure, wealth, greed, betrayal, violence . . . constitutional interpretation . . . civil procedure . . .
When you’re up to your a** in alligators (or allegations, or litigators), you may not notice the mosquitoes right away, but they’re biting you all the same. While all the federal-court Atocha lawsuits were working their way to the Supreme Court and back, Treasure Salvors, Inc. (TSI) had several investor-contract disputes demanding its attention as well, mostly in state court. Most of theopinions were unpublished or outside the scope of my database subscriptions, and I welcome comments from anyone who knows more about them.
Curse of the Atocha, Part 1: In Rem, Ad Nauseam
26 Apr 2007 1 Comment
in Vivat Wrecks
This is me in 1994 with treasure hunter Mel Fisher, who salvaged the wreck of the Spanish treasure ship Nuestra Senora de Atocha. Mrs. Fisher customarily took pictures like these whenever a visitor to their Treasure Museum (now the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Museum) in Key West* bought a gold 8-reale coin (“piece of eight”) from the ship’s haul while she and Mel happened to be in town. That was what I’d just done; that’s my “I’ve been SCUBA diving all morning, wandering around in the sun all afternoon, and now I just spent a pretty big (for me) wad of cash” slightly poleaxed smile. That’s also one of the Atocha‘s gold chains around my neck (just for the picture); who knew the Spaniards of 1622 blinged themselves out like the rappers of 1985?
Not until ten years later, in law school, did I learn that this shipwreck was the centerpiece of a litigation train-wreck. There were too many lawsuits to describe in even one of my awfully-long posts, so I’m having to serialize. In stories, sunken and buried treasures are often cursed (I mean “with bad mojo,” not “by people trying unsuccessfully to find them”). But the usual curse symptoms are violent death, or insanity, or something similarly speedy and dramatic. Upon reflection, though, “a long, tangled string of lawsuits on whomsoever disturbs this place” is a pretty good curse.
And, like someone seeing a train wreck, I couldn’t look away.
Truth or Scare? Old Lawyers’ Tales
20 Apr 2007 Leave a Comment
Stories handed down orally are a form of cultural property that international organizations like WIPO and even the WTO are working on protecting. I’ll go into that some more in later posts. Today, it’s the slab of concrete on which I’ll set up a small soapbox (which I promise not to do very often).
Professions have subcultures of their own. My former profession, engineering, didn’t have much folklore (aside from the occasional hero or trickster legend) back when I started. Since the advent of Dilbert, it has developed a fairly large body of humor that is often self-deprecating. See also User Friendly. When I changed careers to law later, I was fascinated to learn that the American legal culture is very rich in folklore. . . but my fascination took on morbid overtones when I realized that most of the folklore was of a very specialized kind.
A Clash of Symbols: Commodification of Cultural and Religious Images
17 Apr 2007 2 Comments
in Craven Images, Splitting Heritage
Appropriation of minority religious or other cultural images by outsiders – often, though not always, as a status symbol or fashion statement – is a sharpening point of controversy in some parts of the world. People from the originating cultures are upset for any or all of a number of reasons:
- Some images are traditionally classified “eyes only” for certain individuals or subgroups under certain circumstances.
- The right to display some images traditionally had to be earned rather than bought.
- Outsiders displaying the images often do not know or care about their meanings or the traditional rules for how they are to be displayed.
- Some images are traditionally not intended for fixation in some types of media, or for any type of permanent fixation at all.
- Even if none of the above objections apply and the image may be embodied in a commodity and sold, people who believe they should be entitled to a share of the proceeds aren’t getting any.
Baby Naming Laws: Grin and “Bjorn” It?
10 Apr 2007 5 Comments
Well, OK, I’ve already broken my rule about spending more than 4 hours on a post. I set out to write about something told to me orally by a usually reliable source, but despite Googling my fingers to the bone I can’t seem to verify it anywhere – at least not online, for free, in a language I can read. However, in my science life I found that we often learn more from a failed experiment than a successful one, and maybe that will happen here too. Readers, please help me if you can!
Established: In some countries – reputedly “free” countries at that - you can’t name your baby just anything you want. You have to choose from an approved list or get an authority, such as a court or a church, to grant an exception. (Some in the U.S., where celebrities have counted on giving their babies weird names as a source of free publicity since the late, celebrated musician Frank Zappa named his first two children “Dweezil” and “Moon Unit,” are appalled by the existence of these laws, possibly because it creates a trade deficit in weird-baby-name jokes).
In question: Whether Norway has recently dropped some extremely traditional names, such as “Bjorn” (which means “bear”) from the approved list. Can anyone tell me whether this is or isn’t true (and preferably supply a reference)?
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Landraces: On the “verge” of becoming crops
03 Apr 2007 Leave a Comment
in Distressed Genes, Tales of "Terroir"
Road verges. Windbreaks. The vicinities of abandoned fields, market grounds, and storage sheds. When most people think of biodiversity conservation, these are not the places that come to mind. Much more familiar are wild-land conservation areas – rainforests, wetlands, tundra, even tidepools and undersea canyons – places virtually untouched by human occupation. However, the smaller, humbler areas around traditional farming communities are sources of agricultural biodiversity (“agro-biodiversity”). Agro-biodiversity hasn’t had as much global press as wild-land biodiversity – it’s less photogenic, for one thing – but it affects the security of the food supply in agricultural societies. As climates, soil compositions, and local dominant wild species (both crop-eating pests and competing weeds) change, a crop is only as resilient as its gene pool is deep.
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