Law, Culture, and the Humanities is sponsoring a symposium via Zoom, Wheels and Wings: Law, Regulation, and Mass Mobility in the 20th Century, on November 20 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm. Eva Vaillancourt (History, UC Berkeley) and Joanna Grisinger (Law, Northwestern University) bring their recent research projects into conversation. Register here.
Eva Vaillancourt, Dept. of History, UC Berkeley. "The Birth of the British Crosswalk: Mystical Lines, Mechanical Obedience, and the Puzzle of Law-as-Infrastructure”
When the first pedestrian crosswalks appeared in Britain in 1934, most people found them baffling, if not a little absurd: how do painted lines on the pavement protect you from oncoming cars? They don’t, one comedian remarked: “But if a car kills you while you are standing in it, the police won’t blame you.” This paper follows the crosswalk’s early career in British tort law, where the meaning of this new technology was hashed out over a series of cases in the late 1930s and 40s. Debate turned on questions of the body in time and space (e.g. How close to the crosswalk does a car have to be before the pedestrian’s decision to assert her right-of-way becomes “unreasonable?”), but also on wider questions about law itself. Is following the state’s rules enough to satisfy your duty of care to your fellow man? Can state regulation replace moral and situational judgment, effectively “automating” the unstable human relationships on which social reproduction depends? Finally, can we rely on legal rules to deliver a person safely from one side of the street to the other, in the same way we’d trust a bridge to deliver us safely across a river? In short, are legal rules a form of infrastructure?
Joanna Grisinger, Center for Legal Studies, Northwestern University. “The Highs and Lows of Airline Travel: Consumer Rights, Airlines, and the Civil Aeronautics Board”
In the 1960s and 1970s, as soon as Americans began traveling by air in record numbers, they began complaining about it. Passengers took offense at race discrimination, sex discrimination, discrimination against physically disabled passengers, discrimination against non-VIPs, delayed and cancelled flights, lost luggage, the lack of seatbelts in airplane bathrooms, and the absence of hot dogs from airline menus. Aggrieved passengers turned to the federal Civil Aeronautics Board, demanding that the federal government put passengers at the center of its regulatory efforts. This clash between competing definitions of the public interest forced the board to reorient its traditional reactive approach to enforcing the law, and to adopt more proactive measures that established rules for passengers and airlines alike.
