Curators decry parody souvenirs, claim quasi-copyright

D 'n' me at the Accademia in June.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

David's genitals are all the rage in Florentine touristic fashion, and some observers see a kind of intellectual property (IP) problem.

Italian law has pioneered the protection of cultural heritage since the 15th century (Mannoni), centuries before Italian unification. Medici rulers limited the export of art in the 19th century (Calabi). In the 20th century, a 1909 law asserted a public interest in protecting items "at least 50 years old and 'of historical, archaeological, paleo-anthropological interest'" (N.Y. Times).

Italy continued to lead in protective legal measures in modern times. A public responsibility to safeguard the national patrimony was enshrined in the post-war constitution in 1948 and became the basis of a "complex public organization" (Settis). According to Giambrone Law, Italy was the first nation to have a police division specially assigned to protect cultural heritage. Italy embraced a 2022 European treaty on cultural protection with aggressive amendments to domestic criminal law (LoC). Woe be to the Kazakh tourist who carved his initials into a Pompeii wall this summer (e.g., Smithsonian).

Italian legal protection has extended beyond the physical. A 2004 code of cultural heritage limited visual reproductions of national patrimony without prior approval by the controlling institution and payment of a fee to the institution. 

That measure caused more than a little hand-wringing in copyright circles, as the law seemed to reclaim art from the public domain. The Italian Ministry of Culture doubled down with regulations in 2023, even as the EU moved to strengthen the single-market IP strategy.

Probably needless to say, images of famous works of Italian art are sold widely, in Italy and elsewhere, on everything from frameable prints to refrigerator magnets. Enforcement of the cultural heritage law is thin on the ground, but the government has scored some significant wins against high-profile violators.

A recent AP News story by Coleen Barry described the latest outbreak of this IP-vs.-free-speech conflict, this time over images of David. Cecilie Hollberg, director of the Galleria dell’Accademia, where David resides, has decried vendors who profit from "debase[ment]" of David's image.

Aprons for sale, 2010.
Willem via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

I saw David in late June. It was the second time I visited him; my first visit was in 1996. I don't well remember Florence from that long ago. But this time I surely was surprised by the quantity and variety of David gear available for sale on the streets around the Accademia, especially the sort of gear that Hollberg is talking about. David has become a character in every variety of indecent meme and crude joke about drinking and sex. David's penis is a favorite outtake.

These uses of David's image especially implicate moral rights in copyright law. Moral rights aim to protect the dignity of creators against distasteful uses and associations. However, as such, moral rights typically end with the life of the creator. Michelangelo died in 1564. The theory behind the cultural heritage code is indicated by the very word "patrimony": that there is a kind of inherited public ownership of classical works, thus entitling them to ongoing moral protection.

Copyright in U.S. law and in the common law tradition in the 20th century was slow to recognize moral rights, which have a storied history in continental law, especially in France and in the civil law tradition. But common law countries came around, at least most of the way. Broader recognition of moral rights was motivated principally by treaty obligations seeking to harmonize copyright. A secondary motivation might have been a proliferation of offensiveness in the multimedia age.

Hollberg has been the complainant behind multiple enforcement actions. Barry reported: "At Hollberg's behest, the state's attorney office in Florence has launched a series of court cases invoking Italy's landmark cultural heritage code .... The Accademia has won hundreds of thousands of euros in damages since 2017, Hollberg said." Not a bad side hustle.

David's shapely backside is not to be underestimated.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

EU regulators are looking into the legal conflict between free artistic expression and protection of cultural heritage, Barry wrote. My inclination to classical liberalism puts a thumb on the scale for me in favor of the commercial appropriators. I'm uncomfortable with inroads on the public domain. There already is excessive such impingement on creative freedom: inter alia, abusively lengthy copyright terms, chaos around orphan works, prophylactic notice and take-down, and publisher-defined fair use. The idea of removing permissible uses from the public domain is antithetical to liberal norms.

At the same time, I get the frustration of authorities. The average family visiting the dignified Accademia, eager to induce a much-needed appreciation for history and art in the youngest generation, first must navigate the cultural gutter.

Trademark feud centers on unsolved double murder

Lizzie Borden House, left; Miss Lizzie's Coffee, right.

A museum and a coffee shop are locked in trademark litigation over the name of an heiress accused of an infamous double murder. (All photos by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

Last year, Williamsburg, Va.-based US Ghost Adventures, owner-operator of the Lizzie Borden House and Museum in Fall River, Mass., sued Miss Lizzie's Coffee and its owner-operator, Joseph M. Pereira. The coffee shop opened in a house next door to the museum on Second Street in Fall River. US Ghost Adventures accused Miss Lizzie's of infringing on its trademark in "Lizzie Borden" and profiting from consumer confusion over the coffee shop's ownership.

In October, the federal district court, per Judge Leo T. Sorokin, denied the plaintiff a preliminary injunction. US Ghost Adventures appealed, and the matter is now pending in the First Circuit.

In 1892, Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted of the axe murders of her father and stepmother. The brutality of the killings and the gender of the accused summed a blockbuster news event in the 1890s—not coincidentally, the pyrite age of yellow journalism—and the public followed the criminal trial breathlessly. No one ever was convicted of the crime, and Borden lived the remainder of her life under a cloud in Fall River social circles. The case has been a font of endless speculation in the popular culture, inspiring books, articles, films, TV shows, video games, songs, and nursery rhymes.

Lizzie Borden House and Museum

Opened to the public in 1996, the Lizzie Borden House and Museum, where the murders occurred and Lizzie lived at the time, features artifacts from the Bordens' life and the crime. The bed-and-breakfast part of the business capitalizes on the reputation of the property as haunted.

In August 2023, Pereira opened the coffee shop in a house adjacent to the Borden House. There is no confusion about what "Miss Lizzie's" refers to. The shop features images of Lizzie, boasts an overall theme of bloody death, and sells small souvenirs related to the Lizzie Borden story. US Ghost Adventures sued in September 2023.

"Hatchet blade" mark
registered to US Ghost Adventures
USPTO

While there is no confusion over the fact that both businesses aim to profit off the Lizzie Borden story, that overlap in itself does not constitute a trademark infringement. The defendants argued in federal district court, and the court agreed, that Lizzie Borden's name and image, and the story of the Borden murders are in the public domain. Trademark specifically protects only the brand name of the Lizzie Borden House and Museum as a hospitality service provider.

(UPDATE, Aug. 7: US Ghost Adventures has registered marks in "Lizzie Borden" and in its hatchet-blade graphic (pictured) for "hotel and restaurant services," which, I admit, comes closer to a coffee shop than mere hospitality. I would still draw the line. US Ghost Adventures also has registered "Lizzie Borden Museum" for "museum services" and the hatchet-blade image for key chains, jewelry, mugs, golf balls, hats, shirts, etc. Search "Lizzie Borden" at the USPTO for full details. HT@ Prof. Anoo Vyas.)

The trademark test for "consumer confusion" about who is the service provider presents, essentially, a frame-of-reference problem. US Ghost Adventures says that its trademark precludes another hospitality service provider from using the Lizzie Borden name, or anything confusingly similar thereto, and a coffee shop is a hospitality business. The defendants argued, and the court agreed, that a coffee shop is a sufficiently different enterprise from a bed and breakfast as not to induce consumer confusion.

Miss Lizzie's Coffee

It's not that a coffee shop could not infringe the trademark, but that this one has not, the trial court concluded. The plaintiff tried to tighten the connection between the two businesses by pointing to their proximate location and their common uses of hatchets in signs and promotional images. The court found neither proffer convincing. It makes sense to locate any Borden-themed business near the scene of the crime, and the hatchet images the businesses use are different. Lest there be any lingering doubt in a customer's mind, the coffee shop put up a sign avowing its non-association.

(There is some dispute as well about the difference between a hatchet and an axe, which was used in the murder, and which is depicted where. I don't have the bandwidth to, uh, chop through that thicket.)

Notwithstanding the plaintiff's appeal, I think the trial court got it right. Judge Sorokin convincingly suggested by way of example that trademark law does not preclude a business from using the historical name of Sam Adams, as long as the business isn't a brew works. In the same vein, in any close case, I prefer to see trademark law construed as not at cross-purposes with economic development, which Fall River can use. More touristic business floats all boats.

As the appeal unfolds in the First Circuit, an unfortunate and layered backstory is coming to light. For reasons unstated in the record—one might fairly speculate the burden of attorney fees—Pereira discharged his two lawyers, who withdrew from the case in April 2024. In July 2024, Pereira responded pro se to the appellant-plaintiff's brief. 

US Ghost Adventures was able to sue both Pereira and Miss Lizzie's because, according to the allegations, Periera opened the shop about a month before his business registration was formalized. The plaintiff therefore demanded that Pereira personally disgorge ill-gotten profits from that first month.

The problem now on appeal is that a corporation cannot be represented pro se, and Pereira is not an attorney. So his responsive brief, already shaky on legal formalities, cannot represent the position of Miss Lizzie's. The court accordingly ordered that Miss Lizzie's would not be permitted to argue on appeal. In an August 1 reply, the plaintiff then asked the court to decline oral argument entirely, as Pereira inevitably would argue Miss Lizzie's position in violation of the court's order. 

As I said, I think the plaintiff is wrong on the merits, so the First Circuit should affirm. And that would be the safe bet in ordinary circumstances.

But the plaintiff's reply fairly faults Pereira for thin legal arguments in the pro se brief. That puts the appellate court in an awkward position. Even if the plaintiff bears the burden of persuasion on appeal, the First Circuit is looking at a record short on effective counterargument. 

Considering the preliminary disposition of the proceeding in the trial court, the appellate court might err on the side of reversing and remanding, to develop a fuller trial record. The defendants' pro se bind will persist, though, and would threaten an outcome dictated by access to counsel rather than the case on the merits.

There's a deeper layer yet. It happens that Pereira has a troubled history with the law. According to The Standard-Times, in 1996, he "pleaded guilty to stealing more than $119,000 from 15 people after posing as a lawyer and mortgage broker." Appearing as an attorney in a 1993 housing matter, Pereira "was so good, witnesses say, that ... he stood up to a judge, a clerk and another attorney without even raising an eyebrow," The Standard-Times reported in 1995. A veteran attorney said that "he never suspected a thing," and that Pereira "was very polite and seemed pretty knowledgeable about the lead-paint law."

Pereira's record did not improve subsequently. In 2010, he was sentenced to three to five years' imprisonment after "he pleaded guilty to 13 counts of larceny, one count of practicing law without a license and one count of committing that offense after being convicted of the crime in 1996," Wicked Local reported in 2012. As The Herald News put it upon an arrest in 2019: "Since 1982, Pereira has been arraigned approximately three-dozen times on larceny-related charges. His most recent arrest added another 17 larceny charges to his record." He did beat some charges.

To Pereira's credit, I did not think his response in the First Circuit was as devoid of reasoning as US Ghost Adventures alleged. Albeit in improper form, the appellee's brief more or less rehashed the core arguments in the case. If in proper form, that's what the appellant's brief did, too.

Certainly Pereira's criminal history should have no bearing on the trademark case. The case also, ideally, should not be decided based on either party's access to counsel, though such immateriality of resources is not the way of the American legal system, especially on the civil side.

Whatever comes to pass procedurally, I stand by my assessment of the merits. On Friday morning, I picked up a cup of coffee at Miss Lizzie's.

The appellate case is US Ghost Adventures, LLC v. Miss Lizzie's Coffee LLC, No. 23-2000 (1st Cir. filed Nov. 27, 2023). The case in the trial court is US Ghost Adventures, LLC v. Miss Lizzie's Coffee LLC, No. 1:23-cv-12116-LTS (D. Mass. Oct. 27, 2023) (CourtListener).

Wood wins Rappaport Fellowship

Rebecca Wood
BC Law

Rebecca Wood, a survivor of my 1L torts classes, has won a prestigious Rappaport Fellowship in law and public policy.

Wood became active in politics after the premature birth of her daughter raised urgent questions for her family about the inadequacies of insurance and healthcare in America. Check out her story as told while working on Medicare-for-all legislation with Bernie Sanders in 2017. She testified movingly before the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee in 2019. 

Wood enrolled in law school as a Public Interest Fellow to attain a law degree that will arm her for public policy work. She was a pleasure to have in class, because she is insightful and sensitive to the powerful public policy implications of tort law. She will be a formidable force for good, and I'm privileged to be a part of her education.

At Boston College, "[t]he Rappaport Fellows Program in Law and Public Policy provides gifted students committed to public policy careers with opportunities to experience the complexities and rewards of public policy and public service within the highest levels of state and municipal governments." Wood spent the summer as an intern at the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office.

New book examines 'rise of classical legal thought' through experience of South Asia, British Empire

Professor Chaudhry
UMass Law

Professor Faisal Chaudhry has published a book on history and the development of classical legal thought.

South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Toward a Historical Ontology of Law (2024) is available now from Oxford University Press. Here is the publisher's description:

This book delves into the legal history of colonial governance in South Asia, spanning the period from 1757 to the early 20th century. It traces a notable shift in the way sovereignty, land control, and legal rectification were conceptualized, particularly after 1858. During the early phase of the rule of the East India Company, the focus was on 'the laws' that influenced the administration of justice rather than 'the law' as a comprehensive normative system. The Company's perspective emphasized absolute property rights, particularly concerning land rent, rather than physical control over land. This viewpoint was expressed through the obligation of revenue payment, with property existing somewhat outside the realm of law. This early colonial South Asian legal framework differed significantly from the Anglo-common law tradition, which had already developed a unified and physical concept of property rights as a distinct legal form by the late 18th century. It was only after the transfer of authority from the Company to the British Crown, along with other shifts in the imperial political economy, that the conditions were ripe for 'the law' to emerge as an autonomous and fundamental institutional concept. One of the contributing factors to this transformation was the emergence of classical legal thought. Under Crown rule, two distinct forms of discourse contributed to reshaping the legal ontology around the globalized notion of 'the law' as an independent concept. The book, adopting a historical approach to jurisprudence, categorizes these forms as doctrinal discourse, which could articulate propositions of the law with practical and administrative qualities, and ordinary language discourse, which conveyed ideas about the law, including in the public domain.

Professor Chaudhry is a valued colleague of mine. I admire his critical and historical approach to first-year property, with which he complements my social and economic emphases in teaching torts.

'Faculty are the least important people on a campus,' but don't worry; administrators will be all right

Adaptation of Joe Loong via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

A recent item in The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription), excerpted by Paul Caron on TaxProf Blog, well captures what it feels like to be a professor in American higher ed nowadays.

The Chronicle item, by Beckie Supiano, talks about tenured and tenure-track professors leaving the "dream job" of academia. Author and consultant Karen Kelsky founded a private Facebook group, now counting 33,000 members, as a virtual home for the disillusioned: "The Professor is Out."

Supiano quoted Kelsky:

"The faculty are the least important people on a campus right now," Kelsky says. If colleges valued their work, she says, they wouldn't have allowed "adjunctification" to happen in the first place. The current wave of faculty departures—which colleges don't even seem to have acknowledged—is simply the latest twist in a decades-long deterioration.

"Institutions' indifference to faculty leaving," she says, "is a reflection of their indifference to faculty's being there."

To some professors, the job they've worked so hard for feels untenable. And that's particularly true for those who ... pour themselves into their positions and strive to connect with students on a personal level. That's something that colleges sell to students, but it's not something they seem actually willing to invest in.

Right: especially that first line about faculty being the least important people on campus. Though "right now" might erroneously suggest a new condition. Rather, this lament is the familiar theme of the widely referenced book by Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, in 2011, when the data already were ample.

Despite Ginsberg calling out the trend more than a decade ago, nothing has changed. Faculty governance is practically a dead letter. Faculty work not only for provosts and chancellors, but for every support service office on campus, such as information technology and human resources. We're told when and where, and increasingly how and what to show up and teach. Worse, we're loaded down with hamster-wheeling administrative work. It seems that every new administrator means more work for me, too. I feel ever more like Lucy on the assembly line.

This state of affairs was a refrain at last week's Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing (more to come about the conference here at The Savory Tort). In the same vein, I heard mounting faculty anxiety over AI. If universities, as the bottom-line businesses they've become, care about the delivery of services almost to the exclusion of quality, then they will gravitate to the worker that never sleeps and never whines about the rising costs of housing, healthcare, and college for our own kids.

In my workplace, "adjunctification," as Kelsky put it, manifests as noncompetitive compensation for both part-time and full-time faculty. A first-year attorney in Big Law makes substantially more than any of the teaching faculty at the law school where I work—

—excluding deans. A university's priorities ring clear when one compares the qualifications and salaries of teaching faculty with salaries in the bureaucracy. Judge my shop for yourself with a recent top-100 round-up at South Coast Today (or look up anyone in the Massachusetts public sector). Be wary of listed titles. At no. 32, I'm the top paid, still serving, and exclusively teaching "professor." Other "professors" at nos. 5-30 had or have admin roles that fattened the bankroll. The money is in admin and overhead, even while students strain to see the return on that investment.

Indeed, as Kelsky suggests, most of us, teaching faculty, still "strive to connect with students on a personal level," despite lack of incentives to do so. That's probably because it's the character flaw of human compassion that draws us to teaching. I'm working on it: trying to be a good worker by caring less and keeping the assembly line moving. "Speed it up a little!" Maybe, for students' sake, AI will meet us halfway in the humanity game.

Rule of law seems absent, western powers impassive, as civil war inflicts horrific suffering in Sudan

I know it's hipster hot right now to be up in arms over Gaza and lukewarm over Ukraine. I'd like for a moment to set aside both those conflicts and ask for your consideration of Sudan.

I've written previously about Sudan, from the time of development optimism that was dashed and broken by catastrophic civil war. I was enamored of the country and its people upon visiting there in 2020, and I watched the war unfold with profound sadness.

The war in Sudan rages on, so long since its April 2023 eruption that even I back-burnered it among my conscious anxieties in recent months. It was brought to the front again when I read a Friday story from NPR: Why Sudan Is Being Called a "Humanitarian Desert," by Fatma Tanis.

The story relates a report from Doctors Without Borders: "The report states that bombing and shelling of civilian areas killed thousands of people, including women and children. Civilians were consistently attacked and killed by armed groups in their own homes, at checkpoints, along displacement routes and even in hospitals and clinics."

Horrifyingly, "'a characteristic feature' of the war, the report states ... that women and girls were raped in their homes and along displacement routes. Of 135 survivors of sexual violence who were interviewed by MSF, 40% said they were assaulted by multiple attackers."

Democrats and (too many) Republicans disagree over support of Ukraine. The Republican platform specifically references Israel, and Ukraine's omission is contentiously purposive. The draft Democrat platform for 2024 mentions Israel, Ukraine, and Sudan. American involvement in the latter context looks limited to the present "Special Envoy," charged with making peace, along with a more nebulous commitment to support Africa in solving its own problems. 

I'm reminded of an exercise in university journalism class in which we examined the newspaper column-inches (these were the days of actual newspapers) afforded to global crisis reporting to witness the greater-than-linear, inverse relationship with distance from the United States. Yet, as one might have noted then, too, Khartoum is not that much farther from Washington than Tel Aviv and Kyiv.

Is our commitment to the people of Sudan sufficient? I don't purport to know what the policy of "the most developed nations" should be concerning civil war in Sudan. I do worry that prioritizing international conflicts based on strategic imperatives while paying little more than lip service to our values sends the wrong message to aggressors in a world in which nations, including the United States, are ever more inextricably interdependent.

1901: Disgruntled laborer shoots, kills President

Assassination of President McKinley by T. Dart Walker, c. 1905
Library of Congress

In Buffalo, New York, this week, I felt obliged by recent events to seek out the place where Leon Czolgosz fatally shot President William McKinley in 1901.

Contemplating Thomas Crooks's still unknown motive for shooting President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on July 13, I thought about something Bill O'Reilly told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last week: that every U.S. presidential assassin has been mentally ill.

I wasn't sure about that. After some looking into it, I suppose the accuracy of the assertion depends on what one means by mentally ill.

One could argue that anyone with ambiguous motive to murder a President is mentally unwell. Indeed, an "insanity" argument was made in the criminal defense of Czolgosz for the 1901 shooting of McKinley. The defense hardly slowed the conviction. Inside of two months from the shooting, Czolgosz was executed.

Site of President McKinley assassination, Buffalo, N.Y., 2024
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

So in informal terms, O'Reilly probably is right. In clinical terms, we don't have enough data to be sure of the mental state or diagnosis of past assassins. Experts have disagreed about Czolgosz. Then there's the legal concept of "insanity," having to do with capacity to differentiate right from wrong. Czolgosz knew what he was doing; I don't think O'Reilly meant to say otherwise.

Czolgosz was attracted to radical socialism and then anarchism because he lost his job in an economic crash when he was 20—the same age as Crooks when his life ended. Czolgosz couldn't find consistent work amid the labor turmoil of the ensuing depression in the 1890s. Born into a Polish-immigrant family, he became convinced that the American economic system was rigged to favor the establishment over the working class. Hm.

Czolgosz learned that socialists and anarchists in Europe were struggling with similarly entrenched economic inequality as royals endeavored to maintain their traditional grip on social order. European anarchists had resorted to assassination as a means to express their displeasure and spark reform. However, bolstering O'Reilly's theory on Czolgosz's mental state, even American socialists and anarchists raised, no metaphorical pun intended, red flags over Czolgosz.

Pan-American Exposition, by Oscar A. Simon & Bro., 1901
Library of Congress

In his second term as President, McKinley was in Buffalo for the Pan-American Exposition, a kind of world's fair. He was riding a wave of national optimism upon consolidation of American power in the hemisphere. It was in McKinley's first term that the United States seized Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain after substantially prevailing in the Spanish-American War. 

McKinley was keen to attend the exposition, because he saw political promise in associating himself with American prosperity and invention. The 342-acre exposition featured the latest engines, the hydroelectric power of nearby Niagara Falls, and an "Electric Tower" framed by the newly proliferating magic of light bulbs. 

No doubt McKinley's exposition strategy galled Czolgosz. In a morbid irony, when Czolgosz was executed in October 1901, it was by electric chair.

Reenactment in Porter's Execution of Czolgosz (1901).
Library of Congress

Like President Trump, McKinley liked being up close and in person with his public, despite the exposure to risk. McKinley's security staff, of course, knew of the anarchist assassinations in Europe and the organization of anarchism in the United States. McKinley's top adviser twice canceled the appearance of the President at the exposition's Temple of Music, for fear he could not be protected there. McKinley overruled the cancellations. That's where he was shot.

Like Crooks, Czolgosz intended to shoot the President while he was giving a speech, the day before the Temple of Music event. But the crowd at the speech was too dense, and Czolgosz didn't think he could make the shot. So instead, he approached the President in a receiving line at the Temple of Music and shot him at close range. Czolgosz's first shot only grazed the President. The second struck McKinley in the abdomen and resulted in death two days later.

Fordham Drive, Buffalo, N.Y., 2024
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Like Crooks, Czolgosz was recognized as a potential threat. But security blunders—for example, he should not have been permitted in the receiving line with the closed and covered hand that concealed a gun—let him reach the President. After the shooting, he was tackled by a heroic but later undersung African-American man standing nearby, then pummeled by security staff. Czolgosz might have been killed right then, but McKinley himself called off the beating.

Many Americans no doubt saw the assassination of McKinley as signaling a tragic inevitability of the times. President Lincoln had been assassinated in 1865, and President Garfield in 1881. Director Edwin S. Porter made a creepy, one-minute silent film for the Thomas Edison company in 1901 about the assassinations; The Martyred Presidents is available online at the Library of Congress. Present in Buffalo to film the exposition and yet early in his prolific career, Porter also made a four-minute film featuring a reenactment of Czolgosz's execution.

President Roosevelt at the Wilcox House, 2024.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Another assassination attempt did follow, injuring President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Roosevelt had been inaugurated in Buffalo in succession of McKinley in 1901. The location of the hasty inauguration, the then-private Ansley Wilcox House, is now a National Historic Site in Buffalo; I stopped by there, too.

Me'n'T.R. meet inside the Wilcox House.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Roosevelt's survival seemed to break the generational cycle, at least until the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. A more entertaining explanation for the abatement of presidential assassinations is featured in Sarah Vowell's characteristically superb book Assassination Vacation (2006): the Robert Todd Lincoln "jinx." The eldest son of President Abraham Lincoln was present at the assassinations of his father, President James Garfield, and President McKinley, but not for the attack on T.R.

The Pan-American Exposition is long gone. The land where the incident occurred became a residential development. A small plaque and garden, and a flagpole and flag in the roadway median of Fordham Drive in Buffalo mark the approximate location of the fatal shooting in 1901.

A nearby high school is named for McKinley. Buffalo, N.Y., 2024.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Greenland opens new capital airport terminal, hopes to boost tourism, increase economic autonomy

I was among the first passengers at the new Nuuk terminal today.

Today a new international airport terminal opened at Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, and I was among its first passengers. (All photos by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

A couple of days ago I wrote about Greenland's autonomy from Denmark, observing that tourism and fisheries, at present levels, might not be enough to sustain the economy of an independent Greenland, notwithstanding popular support for the proposition. The new terminal and runways at Nuuk, co-located with the older facility, are a calculated measure to amp up tourism and ween off Greenland of dependence on Danish aid.

The old Nuuk GOH terminal, closed today, is adjacent to the new.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Greenland infrastructure is still marked by U.S. defensive developments during World War II. The Kingdom of Denmark was occupied by the Nazis and turned over the protection of Greenland to the United States. Part of that American legacy is the country's international airport at Kangerlussuaq, a village deep in the fjords north of Nuuk and well inland, eastward, of second-city Sisimiut. 

Constructed as a military air base in 1941, Kangerlussuaq airport was a strategic refueling point. It was therefore equipped with a runway that could handle large aircraft. After the war, and for decades since, Kangerlussuaq's capacity made it the international hub for Air Greenland.

A larger-than-most Air Greenland plane prepares to fly from Kangerlussuaq to Copenhagen.

Landing at Nuuk is not for the faint of heart.

But Kangerlussuaq makes no sense for civilian use, much less for tourism. Only about 500 people live there, compared with about 17,500 in Nuuk. So intercontinental passengers traveling to or from Nuuk, such as me today, must also make the short hop between Nuuk and Kangerlussuaq. With limited flights in and out of Greenland to begin with, the cost and inconvenience of an added leg is an impediment to the tourism market that Greenland sorely wishes to develop.

As well, the old Nuuk runway was not designed for volume or large aircraft. Because of surrounding mountains and frequent cloud cover, the approach is notoriously challenging for pilots. In fact, when I landed at Nuuk a couple of days ago on a domestic flight, my Air Greenland pilot aborted landing northbound in the dense fog. We circled round and sailed alongside snowy mountain peaks—a bit unnerving—to land in the clearer southbound direction.

New Nuuk's first guests got gift bags.

Today's opening at Nuuk is a soft one, of the terminal only. The bigger, new runways are still under construction, the old runway still in use. Intercontinental passengers such as me still must fly to Kangerlussuaq. That will change when the new Nuuk airport becomes fully operational; plans aim for later this year. In fact, the runway at Kangerlussuaq has become degraded by subsiding permafrost, and the plan is to scuttle that airport for non-military use.

The great hall of the new Nuuk airport is not yet ready for prime time. A plastic sheet covers the escalator, and limited strips of seating equipped with electrical outlets are not yet plugged in to anything. There are not yet any concessions; free coffee and breads were on offer this morning.

For the time being, all roads lead to Kangerlussuaq.

The place looks promising. Warmly enthusiastic representatives this morning awarded the terminal's first 200 passengers "Greenland Airports" "goodie bags" containing travel-size containers and "Greenland airports" luggage tags.

For now, Nuuk airport will retain its IATA code, GOH, which was derived from the Danish name for Nuuk: Godthåb, or "Good Hope."

UPDATE, Aug. 5, 2024: One of my favorite YouTube channels, the B1M, has posted an excellent video with more detail and context than I had about the expansion of Greenland's airports, albeit with production dating to 2023. If you want to learn more, I recommend B1M, How to Build an Arctic Airport, YouTube (posted July 24, 2024).

The Nuuk tarmac at GOH: new runways lie beyond the old, where a plane taxis.

Air Greenland operates a diverse fleet of planes and helicopters to connect the largely roadless country.

Greenland celebrates 'National Day,' ever growing autonomy, but dependence on Danish aid persists

Greenland flags celebrate National Day, Qaqortoq.

Yesterday I was in Qaqortoq, Greenland, for Greenland National Day, June 21. (All photos by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

Greenland is a territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. But a visitor might miss that: Greenland flags fly in all parts, and Danish ones are few. Signs increasingly employ the Greenlandic language—which Google Translate does not yet have—without a Danish translation. And though the currency remains the Danish krone, electronic transactions render notes seldom seen.

Americans built a radio station at Narsaq Point. The pictured building
is long abandoned, but the station still broadcasts.

From 1814 to World War II, Greenland was under Danish control, but not formally a part of the kingdom. When Denmark was occupied by the Nazis in World War II, the displaced Danish government signed Greenland over to the protection of the United States. Disused U.S. military installations still dot landscapes. With a new constitution for Denmark after the war, in 1953, Greenland formally became part of the kingdom.

A home rule initiative in 1979 afforded Greenland greater autonomy, but left Denmark in control of foreign affairs, banking, and the legal system. With 75% approval in a 2008 referendum, Greenland claimed further autonomy over its legal system and law enforcement. On National Day in 2009, the official language of Greenland was changed from Danish to Greenlandic.

Qaqortoq

The self-rule law of 2009 allows Greenlanders to declare full independence upon another referendum. And the Danish government has suggested that Greenlanders ought to decide one way or the other. Polls consistently suggest a comfortable majority of Greenlandic support for independence. However, it depends how one asks the question. 

As a county of Denmark, Greenland receives an annual block grant of about US$511 million, which, according to the International Trade Administration, accounts for more than half of Greenland's public budget and 20% of GDP. Greenlandic support for autonomy polls poorly if the question is qualified by a risk to the standard of living. It seems doubtful that the presently leading industries of fisheries and tourism can sustain Greenland's economy without Danish aid.

Qaqortoq "then and now" (image at left from Qaqortoq Museum)

National Day musicians at Hotel Qaqortoq

"Loading," a Nuuk mural by Greenlander Inuk Højgaard,
comments on economic migration from villages to city.

Tourism in the Nuuk fjords, aboard the ferry Sarfaq Ittuk

Law class visits Constitutional Court of Portugal

Law students and Dean Sam Panarella (left)
visit the Constitutional Court. © RJ Peltz-Steele

Since last week, ten talented U.S. law students have been making the most of Lisbon, Portugal, in UMass Law's first class abroad.

In our maiden venture, we are studying comparative data protection law in the United States, European Union, and Portugal. We have been treated to superb lectures by law faculty of our partner institution, the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP).

Today, a UCP faculty member welcomed us to the home of the Portugal Constitutional Court, where he also serves as Vice-President. Justice Gonçalo de Almeida Ribeiro spoke to us there about constitutional conflict in the EU legal system.

The justice had instructed students to prepare by reading Digital Rights Ireland, a 2014 case in the EU Court of Justice (CJEU), and the "Metadata Ruling," a 2019 decision of the Constitutional Court of Portugal. In Digital Rights, the CJEU had struck down an EU directive on data retention as inconsistent with fundamental rights under the European Charter. 

Justice Gonçalo de Almeida Ribeiro addresses law students.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The case marked a recognition of the CJEU's own power of judicial review. But it also raised a confounding question. The CJEU lacks authority to review national legislation directly. So what would become of national, domestic laws that had been enacted already pursuant to the stricken EU directive? 

The Portuguese Constitutional Court in Metadata construed Portuguese constitutional law in harmony with the EU Charter to strike down as well the problematic provisions of Portuguese law that had been enacted pursuant to the directive. The responses of the Portuguese and other national constitutional courts to Digital Rights thus marked a pivotal point in the evolution of the EU's peculiar brand of "federalism" (to jam a square peg into a round word).

All of the law students in the class deserve praise for being good-natured and flexible in the face of a fluctuating itinerary for this fledgling Portugal project. They all assert, nonetheless, that they are here first and foremost for this remarkable learning opportunity, and not for myriad other benefits, for example, to see Taylor Swift at Benfica Stadium at what are by U.S. standards bargain ticket prices. That was icing.

UMass law students with me at Universidade Católica Portuguesa
© Prof. Sofia Pinto (licensed)