I recently had a comic published by The Rumpus, in their Spotlight series. I started this two years ago, then put it in a box for a year, finally pulling it out and getting enough courage to send it out.
It’s called “Everyone Wants to Know” and I’m glad to have released it into the world!
I drew my way through Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor’s dissent on whether the Court can review and temporarily stop the Texas abortion ban (Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson). Normally the court would stop such a law, but Texas designed this so that it would be easier to claim the Court can’t review the law beforeit goes into effect (even though the law clearly violates current Supreme Court precedent). Decisions based on the process a legal question can be reviewed by a court conveniently allow a court to decide something without deciding the core issue, which is what happened here. That said, all indications are that that core issue will be decided and reversed later this year, as many of us have been dreading since November 2016 (and even more so when RBG died last year). My scraggly drawings with the text of the dissent are below. You can read the dissent in its original format here.
#letsdrawlaw #scotus
My local bar association (Hennepin County Bar Association) did an issue all about “art, literature, and the law,” which just came out. It includes one of my “We will get through this” illustrations and some of my thoughts on being a lawyer who can speak are and law. I love how it turned out and it was so fun to be included!
It is fun to page through the issue and see so much creativity from members of a profession that is viewed as being anything but creative. I can’t quite put my finger on it yet, but it is weird to me how much law and art seem like total opposites but also very related. I think there may be a lot of creative people underneath the formal training and expectations of lawyers. That creative side just isn’t valued or encouraged unless it is in the form of making an innovative argument or, in the rare cases, writing a witty footnote.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Venn diagram of art and law and what it means to inhabit parts of both of those spaces. I have no answers, but I do find it interesting to explore…we’ll see where that thread goes!
