Distinguished Speakers

SEPTEMBER 5, 2025
Borders and Belonging: What Is Fair Immigration Policy in the Year 2025?
It can be daunting to think affirmatively about fair immigration policy in the year 2025. One might debate federal initiatives in the news, but what are the ideas that drive critiques (or praise)? What should the way forward look like? How might you go from what you’re against to what you’re for?

I hope that my new book, Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy (Oxford 2025), is a guide to answers. The book offers a comprehensive yet compact analysis of responses to human migration. It works primarily with trends in the United States, but the book interprets them for a worldwide audience.

By connecting questions rarely asked together, the book’s approach is unique. It starts by asking why national borders might be justified and then looks at objections to such borders. People might make claims based on their humanity, or they might make claims based on belonging to communities in a country. Borders and Belonging next applies these ideas to analyze admissions, both “temporary” and “permanent.” The book then looks at people without lawful status and at enforcement. The next two chapters explore skepticism about immigration and what it means to address migration’s root causes. The book ends by synthesizing its analysis of the injustices that borders enable, by suggesting how to make immigration decisions, and by assessing history’s role in policymaking.

Borders and Belonging reflects an synthesis of many perspectives -- all essential – on national borders and migration. I hope it also offers ways to understand current events and what they mean for the future of immigration policy in the United States and around the world.

Hiroshi Motomura (UCLA Law) is a teacher and scholar of immigration and citizenship, with influence across a range of academic disciplines and in federal, state, and local policymaking. His book, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (Oxford 2006) won the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PROSE) Award from the Association of American Publishers as the year’s best book in Law and Legal Studies, and was chosen by the U.S. Department of State for its Suggested Reading List for Foreign Service Officers. Motomura’s latest book is Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy (2025) is published by Oxford University Press.

Faculty Profile.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2025
Chapter: “Social Dominance Theory and the Supreme Court’s Federal Indian Law Jurisprudence” 
This chapter is part of a book bringing together a diverse set of scholars applying the lens of social dominance theory to the work of the Supreme Court. Social dominance theory examines the ways in which institutions reinforce and strengthen, or attenuate and reorder hierarchies. The book project applies this scholarly tool to evaluate the U.S. Supreme Court’s hierarchy reinforcing (and attenuating) decisions in the context of White supremacy. There are chapters looking at cases adjudicating the rights of Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American litigants. My chapter assesses the ways in which the Supreme Court’s Federal Indian law jurisprudence reflects (or upends) the narrative of White supremacy and colonialism.

Bio: Michalyn Steele is the BYU Marion G. Romney Professor of Law. Steele teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, Federal Indian Law, and Law and Leadership. After beginning her legal career with Sonosky, Chambers, Sachse, Endreson & Perry, a highly regarded D.C. firm specializing in the representation of Indian tribes, Professor Steele worked for six years as a Trial Attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division's Housing and Civil Enforcement section, where her work was honored with multiple Division awards. Beginning in late 2009, Professor Steele worked as a Counselor to the Assistant Secretary of Interior for Indian Affairs, Larry Echo Hawk. Professor Steele holds a B.A. ('92) and an M.A. ('94) in Humanities from BYU, with an emphasis in English literature and Native American studies. Faculty profile.

SEPTEMBER 26, 2025
Sustainability and socio-ecological transformation:
Why put work at the center of a Just Transition
There is a scientific consensus on the need to keep the global temperature increase below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Governments and capital focus on changing consumption and production patterns, but want to keep everything as it is. In production, the focus is on the “technological fix”. Technology and recycling are important for socio-ecological transformation. However, they have already failed as a solution to the environmental crisis. Changing production and consumption patterns alone will not lead to the necessary socio-ecological transformation. 

In continuity with my research and publications focusing on workers and communities, I propose putting work at the center of sustainability and the socio-ecological transition. Why focus on work when life is threatened by climate catastrophe? We live in a work society. Work is seen as a means to satisfy individual and social needs. Reconceptualizing, reorganizing, and valorizing work as sustainable work is a crucial tool from below to advance and ensure a just transition. Employment and labor markets are already changing, and we need to ensure that work itself becomes sustainable in all its aspects. We must also ask whether it is even possible to transform production and consumption patterns without transforming the working society (and vice versa).

Workers and related communities are potentially the only ones who have a real interest in sustainable and non-polluting production – and thus in overcoming labor society as we know it. And they are also the ones who will have to bear the brunt of the socio-ecological transformation. If they do not take the central role in defining and practicing the transformation, no such transformation will take place.

In my talk I will discuss why the focus on production and consumption alone is not effective, present a holistic concept of sustainable work, differentiate it from green jobs, provide examples for a working-class led socio-ecological just transition.

Dario Azzellini, professor, researcher and documentary director, holds a PhD in political science and a PhD in sociology. His research and writing focuses on labour, Just Transition, platform work, workers' struggles, worker’s and local self-management, and social movements. He published several books, journal articles and documentaries. 

Presentation paper: 
Azzellini, Dario; Brandl, Sebastian; Matuschek, Ingo. 2025. “Sustainable work and industrial relations in Europe.” Industrielle Beziehungen. 31:1. 85-107. 

Related links:

• ResearchGate.
  
• Personal website.

OCTOBER 3, 2025
The Haitian Revolution and the Concept of the Legal Form: Capitalism, Slavery and the Universality Paradigm 
A widely recognized interpretation of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) posits that it played a central role in the genesis of human rights and universalism, owing to its unparalleled abolition of the foremost example of particularism: the institution of slavery. However, this interpretation, which may be referred to as the ‘universality paradigm,’ has prompted a wave of ‘sceptical responses’ that emphasize authoritarianism and inequality.

Building on E. B. Pashukanis’s concept of the legal form, this article examines the significance and limits of other Marxist interpretations of the Haitian Revolution, while challenging both advocates and critics of the universality paradigm. It argues that the Haitian Revolution recalibrated the pre-revolutionary imbalance between the dominance of the commodity form and the underdevelopment of the legal form, and that its outcomes align more closely with the age of the legal form under capitalism than with the era of overt privilege.

Ultimately, a Pashukanian account of the Haitian Revolution suggests that universalism and rights anchored in the legal form of capitalism do not so much contradict as conform to – and reflect – structural inequality and the relationship between labour power and capital.

Personal Profile: I hold a PhD in sociology and my dissertation, entitledInterpreting the Haitian Revolution: From the Rights of man to Human Rights, was completed in 2022. I am employed as a postdoctoral researcher in Human Rights studies, and affiliated with Sophiapol (Sociologie, Philosophie et Anthropologie Politique) at Université Paris Nanterre. 

My research interests include marxist as well as non-marxist critique of right, the history and contemporary status of human rights, the Haitian Revolution, Marxist theory, social movements, revolution theory, and methodological issues relating to ideoogy critique. I have taught sociology at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, supervised bachelor's theses, and have also taught at the masterprogram in psychology and at the teacher education programs, as well as providing instruction on the history and theory of science to students in the natural sciences.

I am a member of the editorial board for the journal Röda rummet, and of the advisory board of the journal Fronesis. 

OCTOBER 10, 2025
In Defense of Protest
In this article, I defend fifteen years of racial justice protests against critiques that they were unproductive, unsophisticated, and unpopular—that they failed and even invited backlash. I advance arguments about meaning, success, and failure.

First, cycles of protest point to popular discontent with the status quo institutional arrangements under which we live. It is time to reject the default presumption in so much legal scholarship that protest is meaningless or irrational or counterproductive and instead to read protest as important social phenomenon.

Second, racial justice movements were successful by many metrics. They shifted elite discourse and popular attitudes about race, police, law, and protest. They created a sufficient crisis or threat to the status quo power arrangements to promulgate reforms and policy changes of the reformist and non-reformist or abolitionist variety. They raised consciousness and built capacity and organization for new possibilities.

Third, to the extent movements did fail—and they did—it was a familiar story of any ambitious movements for popular emancipation and enfranchisement. Their failures were less about popularity and more a reflection of the extent of organized wealth and organized money invested in thwarting or channeling any such change. This is retrenchment or revanchism advanced by organized powerful interests – frontlash or top lash rather than backlash.

This a story about democracy in the United States: serving the few while blaming the whole. 

Amna A. Akbar (Minnesota Law) is a scholar of contemporary social movements, policing, race, capitalism, and inequality. With a focus on protest and organizing, she is interested in understanding law as a dynamic terrain of social, economic, and political contestation, and in how institutions and discourses of law define and delimit possibilities of emancipation. She was most recently the Charles W. Ebersold & Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Professor of Law at The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law. Akbar's research has appeared in prestigious legal and social science journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Harvard Law Review Forum, California Law Review, and NOMOS. She serves on the editorial board of the Law and Political Economy Blog and regularly writes for popular audiences in outlets like The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Dissent, and N+1.  Faculty Profile.

How Poverty Leads to Under-Participation in Innovation
April 4, 2025
READ POST-EVENT BLOG

Speaker: Stephanie Plamondon
Abstract: The U.S. is an innovation-based economy. To grow and thrive, the country depends on continued creative contributions from its citizens and the transformation of those contributions into innovative products and services. For much of the past century, with the U.S. considered the world leader in innovation, this growth was a given.

But the privileged position of the U.S. in the global innovation landscape is under threat. In recent years, the U.S. has fallen out of the top ten innovative countries in the Bloomberg Innovation Index. Commentators and scholars lament the country’s stalled productivity and declining ability to compete against international cities for venture-capital backed startups and creative talent. As other countries learn and implement lessons about innovation from the U.S., global competition threatens to leave the one-time leader behind.

In the face of this shift of fortunes, there is no shortage of proposed solutions. But in the midst of this discussion, one topic that has been largely overlooked is the potential role that poverty and inequality play in a country’s ability to produce socially beneficial innovation.

To this end, innovation scholars have recently made a concerning discovery: those raised at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in the U.S. innovate at much lower rates than those raised in more affluent circumstances. While there are many possible causal contributors to this result, in this chapter I draw on a wealth of psychological and neuroscientific evidence to make the case for one such contributor: the profound impact growing up in poverty has on brain development. Poverty changes brain developmental trajectories in ways that negatively impact present and future creative and innovative potential. Additionally, the circumstance of poverty affects adult decision-making in ways inimical to creativity.

This analysis suggests that a large percentage of the U.S. population is failing to meet its innovative potential because of poverty. Economist Raj Chetty, whose group identified this innovation gap between rich and poor, refers to the children who could be innovating as adults (but are not) as “lost Einsteins.” Further, the innovation gap, though at least partially driven by socioeconomic status, also has racial and gender components that overlap with socioeconomic factors. Given the importance of innovation for our economy and the general welfare, this missed innovation is a loss not only for individual lost Einsteins, but also for the country. The Chetty study estimates, for example, that if “women, minorities, and children from lower-income families were to invent at the same rate as white men from high-income (top-quintile) families, the total number of inventors in the economy would quadruple.”

This chapter helps set the stage for my larger argument that poverty- and inequality- reduction, in the form of guaranteed income, is a viable and sensible innovation policy that will help the U.S. reclaim its position as a global innovation leader.

Speaker Bio: Stephanie Plamondon joined the BYU Law faculty in 2015. Her research focuses on mind sciences, innovation, and the law. She is particularly interested in applying empirical work in psychology and neuroscience to current legal and policy challenges in innovation law, intellectual property law, criminal law, public health law, and other areas. Her recent research has explored how poverty and adversity impact decision-making and what this means for innovation, creation, and distributive justice. She is currently working on a book project that explores the potential of poverty-reducing policies to bring more underrepresented persons into the innovator pool and improve the quality of innovative and creative output in the U.S.

Prior to joining BYU's faculty, Plamondon was the resident academic fellow with Stanford's Program in Neuroscience and Society (SPINS), a joint initiative of Stanford Law School and Stanford Department of Psychology. She also spent time as a patent litigation attorney at Goodwin Procter in Boston, and as a law clerk for the Honorable Raymond C. Clevenger III on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. In Fall 2018, she was a visiting professor at Notre Dame Law School.

Plamondon holds a J.D. (cum laude) from Harvard Law School, a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Utah School of Medicine, and an undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Prince Edward Island in her hometown of Charlottetown. Her legal writing (some of which has been published under the name Stephanie Plamondon Bair) has appeared in the Northwestern University Law Review, the Boston University Law Review, the BYU Law Review, the Ohio State Law Journal, the University of Illinois Law Review, and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, among other outlets. Her science writing has appeared in Nature, Animal Behaviour, and the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

Speaker Profile.

Color, Race, and Employment Discrimination
February 21, 2025
Thursday, 509 O'Brian Hall
Noon Reception; 12:30 Presentation
Option to attend via Zoom, here.

Access the advance paper(s) here.

Speaker: Joni Hersch (Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Economics)

Abstract: There is substantial evidence of discriminatory treatment of persons with darker skin color. Immigrants with darker skin color in particular suffer a substantial earnings penalty that has not diminished over time or with duration in the United States. Legal charges of color discrimination in employment have also increased substantially over time. Color discrimination is likely to become increasingly relevant as the United States continues to become more racially and ethnically diverse through immigration and a growing multiracial and multi-ethnic population. Although Title VII does not prohibit claims of discrimination between parties of the same identifiable race, courts are typically skeptical of intra-racial claims even when color is alleged as the source of discriminatory treatment. In light of the newly-mandated addition of the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) reporting category for US government surveys, color discrimination claims may become more viable as those of MENA ancestry will no longer be automatically categorized as White. Furthermore, the new Federal combined question for collecting racial and ethnicity data highlights the importance of recognizing color as well as race in monitoring enforcement of civil rights laws.

Speaker Bio: Joni Hersch is an economist who works in the areas of employment discrimination and empirical law and economics. Professor Hersch joined Vanderbilt Law School as a professor of law and economics in 2006, with secondary appointments in the Department of Economics and the Owen Graduate School of Management. That same year, she and W. Kip Viscusi co-founded Vanderbilt’s Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics. 

Hersch is a research fellow with IZA Institute for Labor Economics and was co-editor of the peer-reviewed IZA Journal of Labor Economics from summer 2015 through summer 2018. She also serves as associate editor of the Review of Economics of the Household. 

Hersch has published numerous articles in leading peer-reviewed journals and law reviews. She is the author of Sex Discrimination in the Labor Market (Foundations and Trends in Microeconomics, 2006) and co-editor of Emerging Labor Market Institutions for the Twenty-First Century (University of Chicago, 2004).

Before joining Vanderbilt’s faculty, Hersch was an adjunct law professor at Harvard Law School. She was a professor of economics at the University of Wyoming from 1989 to 1999 and has been a visiting professor of economics at Northwestern, Caltech, Duke, and Harvard.

Hersch’s research focuses on the influence of gender, race, national origin, skin color, and family background on labor market outcomes, higher education and inequality. Her research has received international media attention and has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Vox, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and the L.A. Times.

Speaker Profile.

The Origins of “The Rule of Law”
APRIL 11, 2025
LISTEN TO POST-EVENT PODCAST

Speaker Bio: A noted legal historian, Jeremy Kessler writes primarily about First Amendment law, administrative law, and legal theory. His forthcoming book, Conscription and Constitutional Change in Twentieth Century America (Harvard University Press, 2025) explores how the contested development of the military draft transformed the relationship between civil liberties law and the American administrative state. Speaker Profile.

Access the paper on SSRN

Abstract: The Article offers a novel account of the origins of “the rule of law” in the English-speaking world. The phrase itself likely entered the language as a literal translation of the Latin regula juris. Prior to the early seventeenth century, however, the phrase appears to have been used exclusively to refer to the specific legal rule or maxim most relevant to the resolution of a particular kind of dispute. The more general and abstract use of the phrase – to refer to an ideal of political morality or an ideal type of governance – first appeared in the public record around 1610. It did so in the context of English common lawyers’ criticism of royal economic regulation limiting commodity production and circulation. The ideal type of governance that these common lawyers had in mind was the rule of common-law rules. They believed that the “chief subject or object” of these rules was the freedom of Englishmen to dispose of their possessions and professional skills as they wished, and to profit thereby. The earliest advocates of “the rule of law” thus found themselves in the vanguard of a cross-class project that sought to privilege the equal liberty of commodity exchangers over other long-recognized political, religious, and economic entitlements. Consequently, the original rule of law – the rule of common-law rules – came with a set of libertarian and egalitarian expectations, in addition to expectations of publicity, clarity, regularity, and so on. 

When A.V. Dicey popularized “the rule of law” in the late nineteenth century, he claimed to be restating age-old English common sense. While this claim exaggerated the continuity and coherence of English legal history, Dicey’s conception of the rule of law did indeed track the original, early-seventeenth-century conception in significant respects, including its libertarianism, its market-oriented egalitarianism, and its commitment to the supremacy of the common law. For both Dicey and his early modern precursors, the key to the equal liberty of English subjects was the centrality of common law courts to the settlement of disputes, whether between private parties, or between private parties and public officials. Contemporaneous critics of Dicey’s conception thus rightly understood him to be defending a legal worldview that dated to the early days of competitive capitalism. Yet the appeal of that worldview persists.

In the middle of the twentieth century, Anglophone legal philosophers did craft an alternative: a more austere and generalizable conception of the rule of law, one freed from the libertarian, egalitarian, and common-law sensibilities of Dicey and his precursors. While an intellectual coup, this minimalist conception has proven unsatisfying not only to legal practitioners but also to a growing number of legal theorists, including some of the minimalist conception’s erstwhile defenders. For these critics, Jeremy Waldron foremost among them, the minimalist conception fails to capture common-sense understandings of both law and the rule of law. But why does the contemporary common sense to which Waldron appeals so closely echo the concerns of common lawyers in 1610? 

This Article argues that the answer lies in the limited yet significant socio-economic context shared by early modern common lawyers, late nineteenth century jurists, and contemporary legal theorists. That shared context is the dominance of commodity exchange, which has characterized capitalist societies since their emergence in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. The common lawyers who first used the phrase “the rule of law” to denote an ideal of political morality were responding to a profound and lasting social and economic transformation. That transformation – the penetration of commodity exchange into ever more domains of social life – gave rise to demands for the rule of law four hundred years ago, and continues to shape discourse about the rule of law today.