Page 160 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

Indiana Jones and the Illicit Trafficking and Repatriation… 151

CONVENTIONAL VERSUS NON-CONVENTIONAL
SOURCES AND THE ILLICIT TRAFFICKING AND
REPATRIATION OF CULTURAL OBJECTS

The sources of the discipline of law and research are written. Writing
stands at the discipline‘s core as ―much of the common law tradition is
essentially a written tradition‖ [Cownie, Bradney, & Burton, p. 102]. [Vinson,
p. 507]. Legal research involves: ―identifying and retrieving information
necessary to support legal decision-making. In its broadest sense, legal
research includes each step of a course of action that begins with an analysis of
the facts of a problem and concludes with the application and communication
of the results of the investigation‖ [Myron, p. 1]. Legal writing then is the
communication of this research with reliance on and citation to the authorities
that legal research identifies and retrieves. The primary authorities that legal
research places emphasis on include cases, statutes and regulations while the
secondary authorities include law review articles and legal encyclopedias,
among others. Regardless of their primary or secondary nature, all of these
authorities represent traditional or conventional sources in legal research.
However, a host of sources exist beyond these traditional staples. Limited
only by their own boundaries and genres, non-conventional sources include
songs, literary sources, visual depictions, television and film. Yet the
discipline of law remains tentative if not hostile to the use of such sources
outside of its established repository despite the fact that these sources often
benefit legal research and public discourse. Melanie Williams explains
regarding the analysis of literary texts alongside more traditional sources in
relation to issues of law: ―juxtaposing jurisprudence alongside literature can
not only assist in making these difficult discourses more accessible and alive,
it can also, as with the particularities of life itself, ‗test‘ the viability of
jurisprudential claims‖[Williams, p. xix].
In particular, the legal discipline proves unreceptive to these
unconventional sources as they frequently form part of popular culture.
Popular culture refers to the panoply of beliefs, practices and wisdom of
ordinary people…. [that] may be implicitly distinguished from the more
intellectual, theoretical and scholarly pursuits associated with ‗high culture‘
[Thornton, p. 4]. Generally, the legal community regards popular culture with
suspicion if not outright contempt [Chase, pp. 538-41]. Indeed, the law‘s
resistance to popular culture and for that matter most ideas and values outside
of its confines, extends beyond that of most disciplines in the humanities and