By Jason Wilson
Prof. Kim Chanbonpin of The John Marshall Law School recently posted her latest paper Legal Writing, the Remix: Plagiarism and Hip Hop Ethics on SSRN (to be published in the Mercer Law Review) with the stated purpose of placing “hip hop music and culture at the center of [the] discussion about plagiarism and legal writing pedagogy”. [1] No homie, you read that right. Hip hop culture, plagiarism, and legal writing.
Significant parallels exist between the cultures of U.S. legal writing and hip hop, although attempting direct analogies would be absurd. Chief among these similarities is the reliance of both cultures on an archive of knowledge, borrowing from which authors or artists build credibility and authority. Whether it is from case law or musical recordings, the necessary dependence on a finite store of information means that the past work of others will be frequently incorporated into new work. The ethical and professional danger inherent in this type of production is that one who borrows too freely from the past may be merely copying instead of interpreting or innovating. In the academic world, this is plagiarism. Members of the hip hop community call this “biting.” In neither culture is this mode of production celebrated.
(Citations omitted.)
The paper is broken down into two primary subjects. First, Chanbonpin addresses plagiarism in law school, which includes copying outright, failure to attribute, and cut-and-pasting, and hip hop remix culture, particularly the mortal sin of “biting.” Second, Chanbonpin attempts to compare and draw parallels between the citation systems of hip hop culture and legal writing in the classroom in a bold move to show how professors might create a “democratic space for students where they can be encouraged to participate in the creation and critique of legal discourse.” [2]
I could quote from the paper at length, but I won’t.[3] Go read it yourself. But I will mention two things.
One. All you white, upper-middle, hetero, male professors are called out. Chanbonpin writes:
Social constructivists posit that the goal of teaching legal writing is “the socialization or acculturation of the novice legal communicator into the legal ‘discourse community’ through the learning of legal vocabulary, legal customs, and legal culture.” The law professor’s job, then, is to teach her students how to think, act, and talk “like a lawyer.” Professor Kathryn M. Stanchi has cautioned, however, that the relentless process of assimilation to which law students are encouraged to succumb often sacrifices the voices of law students who enter into legal culture from outsider positions. The audience for most memo assignments are legal “insiders”—supervising attorneys or judges. According to Stanchi, “[s]tatistically, white, upper-middle class, heterosexual men tend to be overrepresented in these positions.”
Acknowledging this potential downside to the acculturation to law practice is the first step in avoiding it. Legal writing professors must be conscientious of the danger in muting outsider voices, so that they can pursue alternative techniques of socializing novices into the knowledge community of lawyers. If one of the normative goals of a legal writing course is to teach how legal language and discourse is situated in the larger society (not just within the discourse community of lawyers), then we should teach our students about law’s impact on culture and vice versa. Novice lawyers will undertake a variety of different professional roles in the public sphere, as counsel to clients, whether they be multinational corporations or small business owners or criminal defendants or the public at large. Students, then, need to be exposed to an array of different epistemological exercises.
(Read: “Relax your mind, let your conscience be free/and get down to the sounds of [KDC].”)[4]
Two. Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist as a quintessential example of a mixtape? [5] Are you kidding me? First of all, even though it wasn’t in the original movie, everyone knew that Lloyd Dobler (John Cusak) in Say Anything made mixtapes, and sure as shit he made one for Diane Court (Ione Skye) for her trip to England after their second date. And even if we didn’t know that until the DVD release, what about Rob Gordon (John Cusak, again) in High Fidelity. Hell , the entire movie was about how to make a proper mixtape. Sheesh.
Anyway, go read the paper. And remember, plagiarism is bad.
[Image (CC) by MIKELIKEBIKE]
- [1] To make sure I was in the right mood while writing this post, I cued up The Beastie Boys, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two (Capitol Records 2011), which is definitely citation heavy. ↩
- [2] Crap , I hope I got that right. ↩
- [3] Like “[a] good lawyer should engage in a transformative use of the case law in the same way a hip hop artist manipulates existing samples to create new music.” Truth. ↩
- [4] Boom. ↩
- [5] See footnote 101 of the article. ↩
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