Archival Foreclosure: A Scholar's Lawsuit Against the Estate of James Joyce

The increasing scope and duration of copyright protection have had a noticeable impact on archive-based scholarship. More than a few literary estates have hampered scholars' efforts to quote from important documents freely accessible to the public in libraries but not fully usable in published scholarship due to copyright restraints. This paper tells the story of one scholar who fought back by suing the Estate of James Joyce for a judicial declaration that what she planned to do with archival materials was fair use and what the Joyce Estate had been doing to interfere with scholarship was copyright misuse.