One of the most unsettling sections of Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men is “The Laws” in which the author inventories various discriminatory laws against the Chinese immigrants in the USA from 1868 to 1978. Juxtaposed with other stories, this section poses a number of intriguing questions and challenges. This essay explores the interaction between law and literature in this peculiar work. It demonstrates how the author appropriates and chronicles the laws in her creative writing and how literature sets down laws and generates performative effects. By telling and inventing stories about the adventures, suffering, and perseverance of her male family members . in Hawaii and the American continent over four generations, Kingston . elevates these stories to the status of family saga, an epic of Chinese ‘diaspora, and a new mythology of Chinese American.

Man-slaughtering or the murdering of husbands by women has attracted increasing social and scholarly attention recently. In the West, literary texts depicting the oppression of women in the family and work place and their act of revolt through killing their oppressors are being rediscovered and reexamined. In a growing body of feminist texts of the non-Western counterparts, similar motif of man-killing has become a symbolic gesture of the victimized women’s resistence toward patriarchal domination in cultures which legally sanction exploitation of women. This paper compares three representative works involving manslaughtering by feminist writers, namely, Li Ang’s Butcher's Wife from Taiwan, Nawai El Saddawi’s Woman at Point Zero from Egypt, and Bessie Head’s “The Collector of Treasures” from Botswana, to shed light on the underlying subversive nature of these literary texts. It adopts the feminist approach across cultural boundaries to reread the three fiction from the non-Western cultures of China, the Arab world, and South Africa. In terms of feminism, the personal/political/legal struggles between the “muted” and the “dominant” groups, between the “female killer’ and the patriarchal “symbolic order” are explored. In terms of comparative study, the similarities and differences with regard to the heroines’ oppression adrebellion, as well as the writers’ literary representation and vision are examined.

This essay discusses general philosophical questions on the issue of pornography and their special applicability to the internet environment. It argues that the issues raised by internet accessibility to pornography are unique to this environment and make the issue of censorship particularly urgent. In the four main sections of this paper, the author discusses 1) the ways studies on pornography in general incorporate psychoanalytic theory to interpret the psychic apparatus of male audiences as they see pornographic representations; 2) the issue of social classes in discussing net pornography and their unique manifestations on the internet; 3) the ineffectiveness of censorship of pornography in general, which compels the interventions of psychoanalysis, and 4) the technological and legal difficulties of net censorship especially in regard to pornography. Despite the difficulties in censoring pornographic materials, the essay argues that some attempt to regulate net pornography must be made. Though it will never be wholly effective, the attempt to censor pornography remains a move in a general dialectic on sexuality without which the monological perspective of pornographers would perhaps become normative.

The first part of this essay lays out the literary debates on Ezra Pound’s politics. Literary critics regard Pound’s fascism as the signatory act of collusion between modernist poetics and right-wing politics. Charles Bernstein, for instance, typifies the harsh criticism that justifying Pound’s fascism is justifying fascism. I argue for historicizing Pound’s ideas of fascism, a mixture of guild socialism and social credit theory, which does not fall into easy categories of either left or right. Furthermore, in the true libertarian spirit, defending Pound’s right of anti-Semitic speech does not necessarily mean that one has to agree with his politics. This stance can be substantiated with the Skokie case (1977), which rules that even anti-Semitic statements are protected by the First Amendment. We should exclude the issue of anti-Semitism from Pound’s treason case. It is time to render to the law the things that are the law’s, and to literature the things that are literature’s. Examining the legal aspect of the treason charge against Pound in light of the United States Constitution and relevant precedents reveals that because the treason charge requires both an overt act of either “levying war’ against the government or “adhering” and “giving aid and comfort” to the enemies, and the intent of betraying one’s country, Pound’s radio speeches do not show sufficient evidence that Pound intended to betray his country. From the perspective of the common law and the precedents, the treason charge against Pound was insufficiently founded. A genealogical study of the evolution of treason clause demonstrates that the U.S. treason clause was intended to be restrictive and narrow, a departure from the broader constructive treason in British common law. U.S. court opinions have interpreted the treason clause narrowly. Based on both the intent of the Constitution’s framers and the judicial precedents, Pound should have been acquitted of treason. Perhaps the best way to examine the Pound case as it relates to law and literature is to separate the moral verdict on Pound’s politics in today’s literary discussion from the legal discussion, and, at the same time, to bring light into literary discussion from legal discipline. This will help us also contemplate further whether law and literature, as quite distinct disciplines, can enrich each other, or, as Judge Richard Posners claims, that they cannot be applied to each other.