What Zombies Can Teach Law Students: Popular Text Inclusion in Law and Literature
| Publication year | 2015 |
What Zombies Can Teach Law Students: Popular Text Inclusion in Law and Literature
Thomas E. Simmons
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The recent spike in tales about zombies has generated inspired responses from legal scholars.2 Films, such as World War Z3 (based on
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a fan-favorite novel),4 and television series, such as The Walking Dead5 (based on a comic book that routinely flies off the shelves),6 have captured the imaginations of viewers.7 These and other zombie stories make for productive legal critiques.
Zombies offer some of the same possibilities for exploring the application of legal principles as caped superheroes or Frankenstein's monster.8 While zombies are horrifying, infectious, flesh-eating ghouls, zombies as a construct are one-dimensional relative to the complex dualism of a werewolf or the variegated sexuality of a vampire. A world where humans face a zombie apocalypse, however, presents a rich tableau for exploring fundamental principles of legal organization, structure, and procedure. This Article teases out some of that potential, suggesting teaching techniques and methodologies that demonstrate the possibilities of the judicious and meaningful inclusion of references and texts,9 such as The Walking Dead television and comic book series, in a law school curriculum.
As an assistant professor at a law school, I occasionally sprinkle references to zombie narratives in place of the standard players: "A", "B", and "C." For example, to illustrate the present-interest concept for annual exclusion gifts in trust, I display comic book representations of key characters, provide their names and relationships to one another, then outline a scenario from The Walking Dead where Rick Grimes makes a gift in trust to Shane Walsh as trustee to pay to Rick's wife, Lori, for life, remainder to son, Carl.10 The point here is that the remainder gift to Carl, while a completed gift and a vested interest,
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would not qualify as a present interest for annual exclusion purposes.11 I point out that this is true even though we all know that Lori's term of enjoyment from the trust is going to be abbreviated, given that she dies in episode four of season three.12 I have only had one complaint from students related to this particular hypothetical. A student raised his hand, and frowning, said, "I haven't seen that episode yet." Spoiler alerts may therefore be in order.
Educational benefits are achieved from employing references to popular-culture plots or characters with which students have familiarity and share with other students, even students with diverse cultural, social, and geographical backgrounds. The visual cues that accompany a hypothetical that utilizes actual imagery of those characters enhances learning for many students.13 The technique of mapping fictional realities as frameworks for exploring new legal concepts forges connections with students, while allowing the exploration of the new and novel against a background of the familiar.14 It grabs the attention of students.15 It grounds new concepts in recognizable contexts.16 It cultivates a shared narrative as common ground for students of various worldviews and experiences.
In addition to utilizing popular narratives in illustrative hypotheticals as an educationally sound technique for introducing legal concepts, "what if scenarios from popular texts can be framed as a way of testing the limits of a doctrine once it has been effectively mapped out for students. This Article's various suggestions may be employed by law school professors by incorporating lessons from the exploration of the zombie mythos within an existing, recognized hornbook course-specifically, by referencing zombies or particular zombie texts to
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further illustrate various points. While teaching public health law, for example, a professor may incorporate discussions about how existing policy and governmental infrastructure may respond to a zombie outbreak.17 In a contracts course, students may puzzle over whether a zombie attack could constitute a force majeure. In an estate tax course, the impact of the undead on a transfer tax system, which relies on decedents, could be explored.18 These examples of uses of zombie texts suggest possibilities within the established curriculum, distilling lessons and discussion points relative to doctrines and procedures from a popular literary narrative.19
The productive use of zombies in a law school curriculum is not limited to hypothetical scenarios and posing "what if" questions. The content of an interdisciplinary law and literature course could be expanded to include consideration of texts that reference zombies.20 While serious, canonical works such as Dickens's Bleak House,21 Otto
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Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder,22 and Kafka's The Trial23 constitute examples of literature and film that merit serious study in a course in law and literature, I will assert that lesser texts should also be included, both as a way to highlight why Martin Scorsese24 outshines George Romero25 (even if one prefers repeat viewings of Romero)26 and to permit students to engage with less challenging works that still contain significant "teaching moments" about the law.27 The willingness to include lesser works of popular culture in a law and literature course alongside the greats, like Dickens and Kafka, underscores the fact that the primary thrust of a law and literature course taught to law students should be the law. Texts should be selected by law professors not for aesthetic achievements or historical importance, but for a text's suitability in positing the study of law within a fictional narrative.28 Law should not be incidental to the study of literature; literature should serve the study of law. Recent scholarship under the rubrics of "law and
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popular culture" or 'law and culture" supports this assertion.29 In some ways, the law and culture movement is an outgrowth of law and literature; in others, law and culture is its antithesis.30 First, however, to lay the groundwork for illustrations of a law and literature approach to zombie texts, an outline of the zombie mythos (for those unfamiliar with the great films of George Romero) and a brief summary of law and literature methodologies is in order.
A. Zombies 101
Zombies in mythology and culture can be traced back to voodoo religious practices in Haiti and elsewhere.31 In early films, such as White Zombie, a voodoo master transforms an innocent victim into a zombie with a potion or magic incantation.32 In a more contemporary film utilizing the "old school" voodoo context, The Serpent and the
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Rainbow, a pharmaceutical company investigates a drug used in Haitian voodoo for use as an anesthetic.33
The modern zombie has only existed since George A. Romero's influential 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead.34 Additional Romero films followed, constituting a canonical trilogy against which all other zombie films are measured.35 With Romero's trilogy, the basic "rules" for zombie fiction were laid down: zombies are re-animated corpses hungering for human flesh, which transform their victims into zombies.36 An infected individual typically becomes a zombie by one of two paths: dying from zombie-inflicted wounds and then re-animating postmortem, or suffering a non-lethal zombie infection (for example, from a superficial bite) and transforming into a zombie.37
Zombies retain little or nothing of the humanity, personality, or identity of the person whose body has been reanimated; they are not themselves human. Zombies feel no pain, fail to take evasive actions to avoid harm, and are not capable of being cured. The only way a zombie can be de-animated is by a traumatic blow to the head.38 The cognitive functioning of a zombie is profoundly impaired relative to an individual. Zombies are non-verbal, their fine motor skills are nearly non-existent, and their gross motor skills are significantly impaired. They shuffle and lurch about awkwardly and without any trace of elegance or coordination.
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They are, quite simply, a mass of moving rot.39 The origin or cause of this affliction is typically vague or unimportant.40
Subsequent films have toyed with these basic Romero conventions, but left them largely intact. For example, Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead introduced brain-eating (that is, not simply flesh-eating) zombies.41 28 Days Later portrayed fast-moving zombies.42 Director Peter Jackson's Braindead utilized zombies who could not be dispatched by the typical methods and who could love one another.43
Despite these variations, of critical importance to the zombie mythos in connection with the law are the basic precepts of zombie lore. Zombies are not human; in fact, the human whose shell has been reanimated is deceased and cannot be revived. Typically, a corpse only reanimates as a zombie several minutes or hours after medical death has occurred.44
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Second, zombies possess few, if any, human traits-they operate on a level akin to a dog in terms of their ability to reason or respond to their environment. However, zombies possess an un-dog-like singularity of purpose and lack any compassion, affection, or attachment. They are imperfectly animated-shuffling and disengaged. Zombies do not partake of the human and yet this fact underscores their ability to shock and to intimidate. They look like humans, perhaps humans that we knew and loved, but they are not human. The human whose shell a paltry zombie consciousness inhabits is dead. Whatever animates a zombie (a virus perhaps) has entirely displaced the former person, and that person is, in fact, deceased. Zombies, therefore, invoke nothing in the way of sympathy or humanity, although they do seem to enjoy some basic level of...
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