Law Professor Comic Books

Opening up a new genre of legal scholarship, James Boyle (Duke), Jennifer Jenkins (Duke) & Keith Aoki (Oregon) have published a comic book, Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain.

From press reports:

Why a comic book? “We care about the subject and, for some strange reason, none of our intended audiences seemed eager to read scholarly law review articles,” Boyle said. “What’s more, there is something perverse about explaining a visual and frequently surreal reality in gray, lawyerly prose.”

The book will be launched on April 6 at Durham’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. An expanded version, with exclusive textual commentary from notable artists and culture critics, will be available in bookstores later this year, published by Soft Skull Press.

“Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain” is the first in a series of comic books planned by Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation funded the project, which is published under a Creative Commons license. The next comic in the series will deal with music and copyright.

(Hat Tip:  JD2B.)