Monthly Archives: July 2015

What Zombies Can Teach Law Students

Professor Tom Simmons at the University of South Dakota just published a great law review article titled What Zombies Can Teach Law Students: Popular Text Inclusion in Law and Literature, 66 Mercer L. Rev. 729 (2015).  Drawing on popular works such as The Walking Dead and World War Z, Simmons shows how many legal issues can be illustrated and explained in the classroom using examples that are more interesting than the abstract “A sues B” type and more engaging than examples from more “serious” literature.

I applaud Prof. Simmons’s work, which follows and greatly expands upon some of my work in this area as well as the work of Prof. Adam Chodorow at ASU and the work of Lawrence M. Friedman at John Marshall.  Anyone interested in zombie fiction or novel legal teaching methods should give the article a read.

Ant-Man: Robbery vs Burglary vs Theft

I saw Ant-Man this weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it.  Appropriate to the title character, it’s a movie that deals in seemingly small things with larger implications.  Largely disconnected from the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe plot arc, Ant-Man is a pleasant break from the Dramatic Global Crisis or Dramatic Cosmic Crisis themes of the Avengers and their individual films.

But you didn’t come here to read a movie review.  So let’s take a closer look at a fine legal distinctions that the protagonist, Scott Lang, makes a few times in the movie: robbery versus burglary.  Some minor, early spoilers ahead.

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