One question to consider before our event on January 19, 2006, is the way in which the artist sees the law, and the legal system, in ways that are different from lawyers, judges, and law professors. Clearly the artist, from Sophocles to Shakespeare, and to Dickens to Dostoyevsky, are concerned with other values, more moral in nature, than the ordinary concerns of those who practice the law, and are the guardians of the law. What are artists looking at that judges and lawyers miss all of the time?

featuring Tony Kushner and E. L. Doctorow, moderated by Thane Rosenbaum

Before O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson were ever defendants in a court of law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg found themselves the object of national obsession and legal scrutiny. The fate of the Rosenbergs, accused of being spies on behalf of the Soviet Union, continues to inspire the artistic imagination.

What is it about the trial, the judgment, and the execution of the accused that made the Rosenberg case one of the most famous, morally scrutinized, and culturally observed legal trials of the 20th century? And what is it about the legal system that so reliably inspires the artistic imagination?

About the Artists

Tony Kushner was born in Manhattan and grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He earned a bachelors degree from Columbia University and later did postgraduate work at New York University. In the early 1980s, he founded a theater group and began writing and producing plays. In the early 1990s, he scored a monster hit with the epic, seven-hour, two-part, Broadway blockbuster Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes which earned Kushner a plethora of commendations—including the Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, and two Drama Desk Awards—and was subsequently adapted into the Emmy and Golden Globe Awards winning HBO film adaptation directed by Mike Nichols. Kushner has also written A Bright Room Called Day and Slavs!, as well as several adaptations including Goethe’s Stella, Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan, Corneille’s The Illusion, and S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk. He most recently co-wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s current film, Munich.

Named for Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in New York City, attended the Bronx High School of Science, graduated with honors from Kenyon College, and did graduate work at Columbia University. He began to devote himself full time to writing and teaching in 1969, and today is generally considered to be among the most important novelists of the second half of the 20th century. He has received the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. Doctorow’s third novel, The Book of Daniel, was adapted in 1983 into the film, Daniel, starring Timothy Hutton and directed by Sidney Lumet. His subsequent novel, Ragtime, was named one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by the editorial board of the Modern Library and was adapted into a successful Broadway musical in 1998. His most recent novel, The March, was published in 2005 and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

A discussion will follow on this site, http://fordhamlawandculture.blogspot.com, following the event; as with any posting here, everyone is invited to participate by way of the “Comments” links.

Fordham’s Forum on Law, Culture, & Society is a public humanities program that offers a respectful engaging town hall setting for the general public to satisfy their intellectual curiosity on matters of law, justice, and civil society. The Forum unites influential artists and leading public figures in conversation with the general public to explore ideas of law and justice, and how they are integrated into the broader culture.

Moving beyond this surface obsession with the legal system, the Fordham Forum explores the general public’s longing for a deeper sense of justice that is moral and makes sense. Each forum focuses on a provocative legal issue and provides a space where diverse minds can address the ambiguities, moral mysteries and uncertainties of the law and the society that sanctions it.

The Forum engages guests in far ranging conversations and stimulates audience participation that promotes meaningful dialogue. After each Forum, the conversation continues in cyberspace via podcasting and an interactive blog at http://fordhamlawandculture.blogspot.com

Forum Director Thane Rosenbaum, the John Whelan Distinguished Lecturer of Law at Fordham, is a recognized public intellectual whose novels, essays and nonfiction address matters of human dignity, historical memory, Holocaust and post-atrocity restitution and reconciliation, law, and culture. Rosenbaum’s novels have all been critically acclaimed and widely reviewed, and his most recent non-fiction work, The Myth of Moral Justice, was on the San Francisco Chronicle’s list of Best Books for 2004.