Advancing Interdisciplinary Legal Scholarship since 1978
Guest Speakers
The Baldy Center proudly sponsors a variety of speakers each year who share presentations of their ongoing work on important topics in law and society. The speakers provide an important catalyst for research and dialogue in The Baldy Center community.
Event presentations are typically 90-minutes in duration. Events as listed are subject to change.
SPRING 2025 SPEAKERS
To facilitate discussion at the event, The Baldy Distinguished Speakers generally provide in advance to the UB community, the working drafts of their papers.
Access the advance paper(s), here, if/when the file is provided by the speaker. If you would like further assistance in obtaining a paper, please contact us via telephone: 716-615-2102; or via email: baldycenter@buffalo.edu
After the event the draft papers are no longer available in recognition that the work is likely to change and the final version may be published elsewhere.
HYBRID EVENTS ARE HELD IN-PERSON AND VIA ZOOM WHEN INDICATED
Events listing the room location are held on campus, in-person. No advance registration is needed to attend in-person events.
REGISTER FOR ZOOM ACCESS TO EVENT
For events accessible via Zoom, please use the registration link for the event of interest. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with access details. (No registration needed to attend in-person events)
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February 21, 2025 Distinguished Speaker
Joni Hersch (Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Economics)
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.
APRIL 4, 2025 DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
Stephanie Plamondon (BYU Law)
How Poverty Leads to Under-Participation in Innovation
April 4, 2025
Friday, 509 O'Brian Hall
Noon Reception; 12:30 Presentation
Option to attend via Zoom, here.
Access paper in advance.
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.
APRIL 11, 2025 DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
Jeremy Kessler (Columbia Law School)
The Origins of “The Rule of Law”
Access the paper on SSRN
APRIL 11, 2025
Friday, 509 O’Brian Hall
Noon Reception; 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. Presentation
Option to attend via Zoom, here.
Speaker: Jeremy Kessler (Columbia Law School)
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.
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.
SPRING 2024
FALL 2024
SEPTEMBER 6, 2024 DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
Kate Cronin Furman (University College London)
Kate Cronin Furman
Documentation and Denial:
The Fight Over Evidence of Mass Atrocities
SEPTEMBER 6, 2024
Friday, 509 O'Brian Hall
Noon Reception; 12:30 p.m. Presentation
Option to attend via Zoom.
Kate Cronin Furman (University College London)
Abstract; In 2017, as three quarters of a million Burmese Rohingya fled across the border into Bangladesh, Burmese government officials insisted that the Rohingya were torching their own villages and fleeing to damage Burma’s international reputation. In 2009, with extensive photographic and video evidence circulating of mass civilian death caused by government shelling, Sri Lankan officials loudly touted their military campaign’s “zero civilian casualty” count, claiming any allegations to the contrary were terrorist propaganda.
State perpetrated mass atrocities are a devastatingly common feature of the international system, and in many cases, they are accompanied by a pattern of almost farcically implausible denials. Distinct from the protestations of the newly accused hoping to escape blame, these are denials that lack any facial credibility and persist long after the emergence of confirmatory evidence of guilt. But even though these denials do little to convince anybody of perpetrators’ innocence, they can form a core component of a strategy aimed at preventing international interference.
This project explores how state perpetrators of mass atrocities use denials alongside information access restriction to create a heightened burden of proof on the world stage for victims and their allies to demonstrate that actionable violations of human rights are occurring. Through a close examination of the tension between victims’ efforts to expose abuses and powerful perpetrators’ attempts to conceal them across cases including Tigray, Sri Lanka, and Burma, it illuminates the role that strategic contestation over information plays in facilitating the commission of atrocities and disrupting international will to intervene.
SEPTEMBER 20, 2024 DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
David Pozen (Columbia Law School)
David Pozen (Columbia Law School)
DISCONSENTS, a paper by Daryl Levinson and David Pozen
SEPTEMBER 20, 2024
Abstract: Consent is both an indispensable concept in a liberal legal order and an increasingly elusive ideal in myriad settings. Even as consent-based regulation has spread across field after field, the normative meaningfulness and empirical feasibility of many forms of consent have come under strain. The result is a systemic crisis of consent that crosses the public law/private law divide and imperils the legitimacy of both.
In this paper, we document how the rise of neoliberalism led to greater reliance on consent throughout the law as well as to greater doubts about its moral efficacy, so that some of the pathologies of consent that have been identified within particular domains now generalize broadly. We explain how this phenomenon and related ones have unsettled not only regimes of private ordering but also constitutional democracy and global governance. We offer a typology of legal strategies available to those who wish to shore up specific forms of consent against these threats. And we raise the question whether such strategies are enough to enable effective cooperation, protect vulnerable parties, and vindicate the values consent is meant to advance.
Bio: David Pozen teaches and writes about constitutional law, information law, and nonprofit law, among other topics. Pozen’s body of work includes dozens of articles, essays, and book chapters, as well as The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford, 2024). Pozen has also edited two volumes for Columbia University Press, on transparency (2018) and free speech (2020), and been a semi-regular contributor to the Balkinization and Lawfare blogs. A keynote speaker at numerous academic conferences, in the United States and abroad, Pozen’s scholarship has been discussed in outlets including the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, Harper’s, Politico, American Scholar, and NPR. Continue reading profile.
SEPTEMBER 27, 2024 FEATURED SPEAKER
THE BALDY CENTER MID-CAREER FELLOW
Jacob Eisler (Florida State University)
Jacob Eisler (Florida State University)
SEPTEMBER 27, 2024
The Rise of Populist Primacy
Friday, 509 O'Brian Hall
Noon Reception; 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. Presentation
Option to attend via Zoom.
Abstract: The Roberts Court is demolishing much of the modern Supreme Court’s legacy. Critics and scholars have claimed that this project is wholly political, under the sway of conservative forces. It is incontrovertible the current Court is sweeping away much of the legacy of the past 70 years of lawmaking. But is its project entirely destructive and fundamentally lawless, or is the Roberts Court advancing some alternative theory (which may or may not be morally desirable or conceptually sound)?
This article argues the Roberts Court is advancing an alternative theory with increasing coherence and vigor. This theory, populist primacy, asserts authority should be consolidated in the political actors who can claim to be most directly accountable to the dominant constituency. Populist primacy radically inverts the judicial role and substance of constitutional law that has guided the bench since the Warren Court, both in constitutional interpretation and as a steward of liberal democracy: defense of vulnerable groups and ensuring appropriate balance and moderation in the distribution of power. In consolidating political power in dominant entities, the Roberts Court rejects these principles, and is thereby deconstructs much of the infrastructure of modern constitutional law.
This article demonstrates the rising influence of populist primacy by considering its influence upon election law, particularly race and democratic process, the role of parties, and campaign finance. It shows that in each area the Roberts Court has pursued consolidation of power, a trend exemplified in the past terms Alexander v. NAACP, which instructed the federal judiciary to defer to the dominant actors in the districting process, state legislatures. Alexander turned against a long legacy of judicial intervention to moderate the power of majorities and privileged actors. This Article also shows how populist primacy synthesizes the broader trends of the Court particularly apparent in the recent terms (Loper Bright, Grants Pass, Jarkesy, Dobbs, Arthrex, West Virginia v. EPA; Seila Law). The Court has shown a novel preference for using constitutional law to centralize power, rather than balance and moderate it.
Populist primacy is the polestar of the Roberts Court, but it has not yet been fully realized. This Article anticipates what areas of election law may face further radical change, and suggests how jurists and scholars should engage with this new direction by the Court. One person, one vote (the previously sacrosanct bedrock of modern election law) and the Section 2 Voting Rights Act test both retain significant. It also identifies the tensions, both legal and jurisprudential, populist primacy may face as the Roberts Court continues to advance it. Vigorous interpretation of the Constitution, including in an originalist mold, often distributes rather than centralizes power through core principles such as federalism and separation of powers. The consolidating impulse of populist primacy will inevitably generate tensions with the substance of the Constitution, particularly as understood by its plainest meaning. Effective engagement with the bench will require negotiating these tensions as well as framing arguments through appeals to the best understanding of centralized constituent authority.
OCTOBER 31, 2024, FEATURED SPEAKER
Pasha L. Hsieh (Singapore Management University, Yong Pung How School of Law)
Pasha L. Hsieh
OCTOBER 31, 2024
U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy: Shaping Trade Agreements with ASEAN and Taiwan
Thursday, 509 O'Brian Hall
Noon Reception; 12:30 Presentation
Option to attend via Zoom.
Access the advance paper when available. |
The seminar by Pasha L. Hsieh provides up-to-date analysis of the US/Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade within the context of both domestic and international law, examining its implications for Indo-Pacific regionalism. Specifically, it explores how the Initiative complements the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) and the broader Indo-Pacific strategy, with a focus on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in light of the emerging “China challenges.” First, it offers a theoretical framework that bridges international law and international relations perspectives on recognition and situates the Indo-Pacific strategy within a global context, rather than focusing narrowly on U.S.-China tensions. Second, it addresses constitutional issues related to the shared trade authority between Congress and the president, as well as controversies in trade and international law. Finally, it compares the Initiative with previous U.S.-Taiwan agreements and contemporary Indo-Pacific trade agreements, including the IPEF, ASEAN-Plus agreements, and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. The findings offer valuable insights into the transforming landscape of Indo-Pacific dynamics.
Bio: Pasha L. Hsieh is Jean Monnet Chair Professor and Lee Kong Chian Fellow at the Singapore Management University, Yong Pung How School of Law. He received his J.D. and LL.M. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he was a Senior Editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Additionally, he holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Free University of Brussels. Prior to academia, he served as a Legal Affairs Officer at the WTO Appellate Body Secretariat and as an associate at Shearman & Sterling LLP.
Hsieh’s teaching and research primarily focus on international economic law, public international law, and Asian legal studies. His monograph, New Asian Regionalism in International Economic Law, was published by Cambridge University Press and has been translated into Chinese and Japanese. He co-edited the book, ASEAN Law in the New Regional Economic Order: Global Trends and Shifting Paradigms, also published by Cambridge University Press. He was the Co-Chair of the American Society of International Law-Asia-Pacific Interest Group and is an Executive Council Member of the Society of International Economic Law.
NOVEMBER 1, 2024 FEATURED SPEAKER
THE BALDY CENTER SENIOR FELLOW, 2018
Werner Reutter (Humboldt University)
Werner Reutter (Humboldt University)
NOVEMBER 1, 2024
Federalism, Democracy, and Populism: the German Case
Friday, 509 O'Brian Hall
Noon Reception; 12:30 Presentation
Option to attend via Zoom, here.
Presentation Abstract: Germany has always taken pride in the fact that it has an effective antidote to populism and authoritarian tendencies. We have always considered Germany to be a 'wehrhafte Demokratie“' or 'militant democracy'. And federalism was part of that concept. However, I will argue that federalism is part of the problem. It provides gateways for populist parties to undermine the very functioning of German consensus democracy and the rule of law.
SPRING 2024
MARCH 1, 2024 DISTINGUISHED SPEAKERS
Kim Scheppele and John Morijn
EU flags in front of European Commission in Brussel; image courtesy of European Union.
Money for Nothing? Freezing EU Funds to Generate Compliance with EU Values
The widely used flag of Europe shows a five-pointed 12-star circle centered on a field of dark blue. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton)
John Morijn (Groningen and Princeton Universities)
March 1, 2024
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus
Money for Nothing? Freezing EU Funds to Generate Compliance with EU Values
Since 2010, the European Union has coped with rogue Member States that reject its fundamental values. For more than a decade, the European Commission cajoled, expressed concern and occasionally brought infringement actions, but made little difference. Finally, the EU passed a set of regulations with the new EU budget cycle that explicitly permit the Union to freeze funds to Member States that do not honour EU values. In 2022, the EU then froze all non-agricultural funds to Hungary and Poland. But did these funds freezes restore EU values? The results are mixed.
Poland’s 2023 election, run centrally on Poland’s place in the EU, brought a pro-EU coalition to power pledging to restore rule of law to Poland. Hungary’s government passed a flurry of laws that appeared to, but did not, fix the problems that the EU institutions had identified. More than any other mechanism that the EU has tried, however, the funding freezes spurred action and moved rogue states’ publics to criticize their own governments. As we write, however, there are worrisome signs that the EU will cave into pressure from the rogue states before the benefits of budgetary conditionality have been realized.
Kim Lane Scheppele
Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her primary field is the sociology of law and she specializes in ethnographic and archival research on courts and public institutions. Scheppele also works in sociological theory, comparative/historical sociology, political sociology, sociology of knowledge and human rights.
John Morijn
John Morijn, University of Groningen, Professor of law and politics in international relations was recently appointed Fellow in Law and Public Policy at Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He engages in research and teaching in the fields of rule of law protection and democracy, European human rights law, EU Charter of Fundamental Right); international human rights law; and, human rights protection in The Netherlands Morijn currently holds a chair endowed by the Netherlands Association for International Affairs (NGIZ), and is a member of the Dutch Advisory Council on Migration and the Scientific Committee of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency. Morijn serves as a reserve officer in the rule of law platoon in the Royal Dutch Army. At the University of Groningen, he is the founding mentor of "Our Rule of Law", a for-students-by-students initiative that creates opportunities for students to learn about democracy and rule of law protection in Europe.
March 25, 2024 Featured Speakers
Join The Baldy Center on March 25 for two special events. At noon we sponsor the lecture by Jiří Přibáň (Cardiff) on constitutional populism and explosive communities. At 4:00 p.m. we host the book talk by Paul Linden-Retek (School of Law), author of Postnational Constitutionalism: Europe and the Time of Law (Oxford UP, 2023).
SPEAKER MARCH 25, 2024
NOON, 12:00 p.m, 509 O'Brian Hall
Jiří Přibáň (Cardiff)
Constitutional populism and explosive communities: Identity politics and authenticity in a global society
Abstract: Populist politics shows that the imaginary of the authentic polity existing truthfully and in harmony with its 'real' collective identity is common to the great variety of populist politics and continues to play a profound role in the contemporary globalised political condition including the post-national condition of the European Union. The paradox of modern constitutional democracy in which constituent power of the sovereign people, by definition unlimited, can materialise only through constituted power of a limiting legal constitution subsequently finds its specific form in the imaginary of the authentic polity by stretching the first constitutional question Who is the people as a political sovereign? into a pre-political question of What is the true and honest voice and will of this people? Searching for sociological answers to these political and legal problems associated with the recent resurgence of populism, Bauman, in the spirit of the classic distinction between community and society, described new forms of identity politics as communal responses to the process of societal globalisation. Communitarian identity politics confronts the void of meaning created by globalisation and constitutes specific globalised forms of affective tribalism labelled by Bauman as 'explosive communities'. These are disruptive and even violent responses to the growing social insecurity and instability caused by global social and political developments. The world is imagined as out of control and suffering from chaos and decline which can be reverted only by a radical action and reassertion of the commonly shared values and meaningful existence. Explosive communities are thus defensive mechanisms constituting the shared identity as a shield against what Bauman described as 'terrors of the global' and effects of 'negative globalisation'.
BOOK TALK MARCH 25, 2024
4:00 p.m, 509 O'Brian Hall
Paul Linden-Retek (School of Law) Postnational Constitutionalism: Europe and the Time of Law (Oxford UP, 2023)
At a time when the integration of the European Union's peoples through the rule of law is faltering, this book develops a critical theory of postnational constitutionalism. Today, widely held conceptions of EU law continue to mislead citizens about the nature of political identity, sovereignty, and agency. They lose sight of a critical idea on which post-nationalism depends-that constitutional self-authorship is narrative, and the polity is a subject whose identity, history, and legacy are still in formation. Absent this vision, EU law reproduces crises of legitimacy: the depoliticization of public life; emergency rule by executive decree; a collapse of solidarity; and the rise of nativist movements. The book diagnoses this impasse as the product of a problem familiar to modernity: reification--a process in which social and historical relationships are misattributed as timeless relations among things.
Reification's shrinking of social dilemmas, moral principles, and political action to narrow perceptions of the present explains law's role in perpetuating crisis. But this diagnosis also points to a remedy. It suggests that to sustain the emancipatory potential of EU constitutionalism we must recover law's relationship to time. Postnational Constitutionalism: Europe and the Time of Law proposes a temporally-attuned constitutional theory with principles of anti-reification, narrative interpretation, and non-sovereign agency at its centre. These principles reimagine essential domains of constitutional order: social integration, constitutional adjudication, and constituent power. Spanning various bodies of EU jurisprudence, the book devotes particular attention to migration and asylum--struggles where questions of solidarity, law, and belonging are most generative and acute.
Postnational Constitutionalism: Europe and the Time of Law (Oxford UP, 2023)
- Proposes a synthetic, critical theory of the structure and spirit of EU integration and constitutional order.
Argues that refugee and migration law and policy have a particularly salient role to play in a revived and renewed narrative of EU integration. - Constitutes an innovative, multidisciplinary work that incorporates a wide array of perspectives, such as Frankfurt School critical theory, critical legal studies, democratic and constitutional theory, postmodern ethical thought, comparative constitutional law, and EU legal doctrine and legal development.
- Revives EU law's emancipatory and transformative potential.
March 29, 2024 Featured Speaker
Melissa Crouch, The Baldy Center Fellow, 2024
Melissa Crouch
Melissa Crouch, PhD, is a senior research fellow at The Baldy Center. While in residence here, Dr. Crouch will be working on a manuscript about constitutional endurance and how past constitutions matter to contemporary reform debates in Myanmar. Based on her field research, the manuscript offers a constitutive approach to the relationship between constitutions and societies in the postcolony, with a focus on how periods of military rule and unconstitutional rule shape constitutional futures.
As a professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, Dr. Crouch's research contributes to the interdisciplinary fields of law and society; comparative constitutional law, with a focus on Asia. In 2022, she won the Podgorecki Prize for outstanding scholarship of an early career socio-legal scholar, awarded by the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law, the International Sociological Association. Dr. Crouch is the president of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (2023-2024), the peak academic body for the study of Asia in Australia.
SPEAKER PRESENTATION AT THE BALDY CENTER, MARCH 29, 2024
"The Military Turn in Comparative Constitutional Law: Constitutions and the Military in Authoritarian Regimes"
Abstract: In this article I argue that studies of constitutions in authoritarian regimes reveal a new finding hiding in plain sight: that the military is often a pivotal constitutional actor. The question of how the military uses law and constitutions to enable and facilitate its influence in constitution-making and constitutional practise is under-researched. The military demands scholarly attention because of the unprecedented opportunities for the military as a constitutional actor due to the rise of populism and the decline of democracy; an increase in civil conflict; intensified efforts at counter-terrorism and anti-trafficking; and the COVID-19 global pandemic.
I review the literature across law and the social sciences on the military and the constitution in authoritarian regimes. In doing so, I demonstrate that the military is an important, yet overlooked, constitutional actor; that civilian control of the military is never absolute but a matter of degree and changes over time; and that histories of military rule and military use of law and constitutions matter. I call for a turn to the study of the military as a constitutional actor in comparative constitutional law.
APRIL 12, 2024 DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
Umut Özsu (Carleton University, Ottawa)
Umut Özsu
Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960-8 (Cambridge, 2023)
Umut Özsu (Carleton University, Ottawa)
April 12, 2024
Friday, Noon, 509 O'Brian Hall
Abstract: After the Second World War, the dissolution of European empires and emergence of 'new states' in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and elsewhere necessitated large-scale structural changes in international legal order. In Completing Humanity, my new book, I recount the history of the struggle to transform international law during the twentieth century's last major wave of decolonization.
Commencing in 1960, with the General Assembly's landmark decolonization resolution, and concluding in 1982, with the close of the third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea and the onset of the Latin American debt crisis, my book examines the work of elite international lawyers from newly independent states alongside that of international law specialists from 'First World' and socialist states. A study in modifications to legal theory and doctrine over time, it documents and reassesses post-1945 decolonization from the standpoint of the 'Third World' and the jurists who elaborated and defended its interests.
Preview the book on Academia, here.
Speaker Bio: Umut Özsu is a scholar of public international law, the history and theory of international law, and Marxist critiques of law, rights, and the state. He is the author of Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960–82 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Recounting the struggle to transform international law during the last major wave of decolonization, the book documents and reassesses post-1945 decolonization from the standpoint of the “Third World” and the jurists who elaborated and defended its interests.
Özsu is the author of Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (Oxford University Press, 2015), which situates “population transfer” within the broader history of international law by examining the interwar exchange of minorities between Greece and Turkey—the first legally structured large-scale endeavour in compulsory population exchange in modern international history. Özsu is also co-editor of the Research Handbook on Law and Marxism (Edward Elgar, 2021) and The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge, 2019), as well as several journal symposia.
APRIL 26, 2024 DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
Michelle S. Phelps (University of Minnesota)
Michelle S. Phelps
The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America (Princeton UP, 2024)
Michelle Phelps (Author)
APRIL 26, 2024
Noon Reception
12:30 p.m. Lecture
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus
Attend in-person or via Zoom.
Abstract: In the summer of 2020, the city of Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) became a national emblem of both the persistence of racialized police violence and the failures of liberal police reform. Thrust into the national spotlight, city leaders pledged to “end” the MPD. Yet as The Minneapolis Reckoning traces, nearly four years later, the MPD remains intact, protected by the complex racial politics of policing that position the MPD as both the cause and solution to the problem of violence.
At the same time, Minneapolis’ residents and leaders have fought aggressively for new models of public safety, including alternative emergency response and violence prevention systems, transforming the city. Phelps' talk will consider both the failures and wins of the radical demands of 2020 to better understand the possibilities and limits of challenging police power today.
New from Princeton: preview the book here.
Author Bio: I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. My research is in the sociology of punishment, focusing in particular on the punitive turn in the U.S. through the lenses of policing, probation, and prisons. Recent work from these projects has been published in interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journals, including American Journal of Sociology (Phelps, Robertson, & Powell 2021), Sociology of Race & Ethnicity (Phelps & Hamilton 2021), Social Problems (Phelps & Ruhland 2022), Mobilization (Phelps, Ward, & Frazier 2021), Law & Society Review (Powell & Phelps 2021), Law & Social Inquiry (Piehowski & Phelps 2023), and Annual Review of Criminology (Phelps 2020).*
Together with Philip Goodman (University of Toronto) and Joshua Page (University of Minnesota), I am the author of Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice (Oxford, 2017), which traces the history of U.S. criminal justice reforms from the birth of the penitentiary to contemporary struggles to end mass incarceration. My second book, The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America, will come out in May 2024. To learn more, visit personal website.
FALL 2023
THE BALDY CENTER DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
Claire Priest (Yale)
Claire Priest (Yale Law School)
"From Invasion to Formalization: The Peruvian Origins of the Property Titling Movement"
NOVEMBER 3, 2023
Friday, Noon, Reception
12:30 p.m. Lecture
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus
Request the paper in advance via email to baldycenter@buffalo.edu
Speaker Bio: Claire Priest is the author of Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America (Princeton University Press). The book describes how even before the United States became a country, laws prioritizing access to credit set colonial America apart from the rest of the world.
THE BALDY CENTER DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
Tao L. Dumas (TCNJ Political Science)
Tao Dumas
“Anyone but the Lawyer: Race, Gender, and Misattribution in the Legal Profession”
NOVEMBER 17, 2023
Noon Reception, 12:30 p.m. Lecture
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus
Attend in-person or via Zoom.
Speaker Bio: Tao Dumas is associate professor of political science at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). Dumas' research focuses on the political role of U.S. courts and the ways lawyers shape and work within the legal system. She is interested in how institutional differences across states condition winners and losers in the courts and how attorneys’ experience, expertise, and demographics impact their legal practices. (Paper made available prior to event.)
THE BALDY CENTER MID-CAREER FELLOW
Greta LaFleur
DECEMBER 1, 2023 SPEAKER
Greta LaFleur, The Baldy Center Mid-career Fellow
"Sex Panics and Risk Metrics: Law, Propensity, and the History of Sexuality"
Noon, Friday, 509 O'Brian Hall
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS EVENT
Library of Congress webinar on Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan
SEPTEMBER 14, 2023
(Livestreamed 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. ETThe Library of Congress presents Constitution Day 2023, featuring UB School of Law Professor Samantha Barbas who will discuss the roots of the U.S. Supreme Court’s New York Times v. Sullivan decision, which created the “actual malice” standard that a public official must prove in a successful suit for defamation. Learn more about the book.
DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER — SEPTEMBER 22, 2023
Cynthia Estlund (NYU Law)
Cynthia Estlund (NYU, Law)
SEPTEMBER 22, 2023
“Democratic Contestation Rights for the Workplaces We Have”
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus
Noon, Reception
12:30 p.m., Lecture
Attend in-person or via Zoom registration.
Speaker Bio: Cynthia Estlund is the Catherine A. Rein Professor at NYU School of Law. Her most recent book is Automation Anxiety: Why and How to Save Work (Oxford, 2021). She has published widely on the law and regulation of work, including three earlier books: A New Deal for China’s Workers? (Harvard, 2017); Regoverning the Workplace: From Self-Regulation to Co-Regulation (Yale, 2010); and Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy (Oxford, 2003).
Estlund's lecture draws from her recent book, Automation Anxiety: Why and How to Save Work (Oxford 2021). The book confronts the prospect of mounting job losses from automation and proposes a strategy to move forward from the shrinking demand for human labor. Estlund offers a multifaceted strategy centered on conserving, creating, and spreading work to ensure broad access to adequate incomes, more free time, and decent remunerative work in a world with less of it. Addresses growing economic inequality and persistent racial stratification as we face the prospect of net job losses
From Oxford University Press: Are super-capable robots and algorithms destined to devour our jobs and idle much of the adult population? Predictions of a jobless future have recurred in waves since the advent of industrialization, only to crest and retreat as new jobs-usually better ones-have replaced those lost to machines. But there's good reason to believe that this time is different. Ongoing innovations in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics are already destroying more decent middle-skill jobs than they are creating, and may be leading to a future of growing job scarcity. But there are many possible versions of that future, ranging from utterly dystopian to humane and broadly appealing. It all depends on how we respond.
This book confronts the hotly-debated prospect of mounting job losses due to automation, and the widely-divergent hopes and fears that prospect evokes, and proposes a strategy for both mitigating the losses and spreading the gains from shrinking demand for human labor. We should set our collective sights, it argues, on ensuring access to adequate incomes, more free time, and decent remunerative work even in a future with less of it. Getting there will require not a single "magic bullet" solution like universal basic income or a federal job guarantee but a multi-pronged program centered on conserving, creating, and spreading work. What the book proposes for a foreseeable future of less work will simultaneously help to address growing economic inequality and persistent racial stratification, and makes sense here and now but especially as we face the prospect of net job losses.
THE BALDY CENTER SENIOR FELLOW ALAN CLARKE
Alan W. Clarke
Alan W. Clarke, professor emeritus in the Integrated Studies Program, Utah Valley University, is a senior fellow at The Baldy Center, Fall, 2023. Clarke holds a Juris Doctor from the College of William and Mary, an LLM from Queen’s University, and a PhD from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. He practiced law after graduating from William and Mary, with a focus on social justice broadly construed, including, civil rights, voting rights, labor organizing, poverty law, and death penalty post-conviction process.
Clarke’s academic research since 1997 has revolved around several broad, connected themes in international and transnational criminal law and human rights, criminology and criminal justice policy, civil rights, legal history, law and society, and critical legal studies, climate change and survival refugees.
Clarke plans to analyze interdisciplinary legal studies on the boundaries of human rights, international criminal law, immigration law, demography, human and cultural geography, political science, during the term of The Baldy Center senior fellowship. He has published extensively in law reviews and social science journals and has authored or co-authored three books:
- Laurelyn Whitt and Alan W. Clarke, North American Genocides: Indigenous Nations, Settler Colonialism and International Criminal Law, Cambridge University Press (2019)
- Alan W. Clarke, Rendition to Torture, Rutgers University Press (2012)
- Alan W. Clarke & Laurelyn Whitt, The Bitter Fruit of American Justice: International and Domestic Resistance to the Death Penalty, Northeastern University Press (2007)
Clarke's recent focus on policy and legal responses to human migration and refugees influenced by climate change has been published in an article Climate Change, Migration and Pandemics: Human Rights in the Anthropocene, in 47 Vermont Law Review 1 (2022). While continuing to work in the area of survival migrants Clarke will also investigate international legal issues revolving around the evolving legal issues surrounding Russia’s war of aggression with a particular focus on the need to create a hybrid international court.
Related Links
- The Baldy Center Blog features Alan Clarke
- Alan Clarke presentation at The Baldy Center, October 6, 2023
“North American Genocides: Indigenous Nations, Settler Colonialism, and International Law” - Alan Clarke profile on Wikipedia.
SCHOLARS AT RISK — SPEAKER OCTOBER 24, 2023
Mihreteab Tsighe Taye (School of Law)
“Vulnerability of Academic Freedom in Countries under Violent Conflict”
OCTOBER 24, 2023
Tuesday, 3:00 p.m.
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus
Attend in-person or via Zoom
Join us for a presentation by Dr. Mihreteab Tsighe Taye (School of Law) a native of Ethiopia, who came to UB through the university’s Scholars at Risk fellowship program, which provides a safe and supportive academic home to scholars who face threats in their country of origin. At the school of law, Taye's research focuses on human rights law and international courts, specifically the African Human Rights Court and the East African Community Court.
Prior to coming to UB, Taye was at New York University School of Law as a Research Scholar from 2022-2023, and, a Hauser Postdoctoral Global Fellow from 2021-2022. Professor Taye received his Ph.D. in Law from the University of Copenhagen, an LL.B. from Addis Ababa University, and a master’s in international law from Erasmus University Rotterdam. Taye's research has focused particularly on law and politics in regional human rights and economic courts in Africa.
RELATED LINKS:
- Read an interview with Taye published by the School of Law, here.
- Read about the Scholars at Risk fellowship program in UBNow.
- Read Taye's recent article, published by OpenGlobalRights, Backlash against individual access to the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights.
Academic freedom is a cornerstone of knowledge advancement and dissemination, democratic societies, and the protection of human rights. This fundamental right is protected under international law, playing a pivotal role in the broader human rights and freedoms. Documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenants emphasize its significance, anchoring it in the rights to freedom of opinion and expression, education, and the benefits of science. The enjoyment of the right to education is intrinsically linked to the academic freedom of both educators and students. This legal framework extends to Africa and is reinforced by the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, the Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility, and the Dar es Salaam Declaration on Academic Freedom and Social Responsibility of Academics. These binding and soft laws all underscore the importance of academic freedom.
However, academic freedom faces distinct challenges on the African continent. The Scholars at Risk (SAR) Annual Report "Free to Think 2022" revealed 391 documented attacks on higher education communities across 65 countries, including African nations like Egypt, Ethiopia, Guinea, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Sudan. Attempts by governments to undermine academic freedom were reported in Algeria, Ghana, and Kenya. These challenges become even more pronounced in regions marred by violent conflicts, where academia becomes a battleground, threatening the essence of free inquiry and expression. Ethiopia's ongoing conflict stands out as a critical concern, with an alarming escalation of attacks and violence, resulting in a grave threat to the academic community and institutions.
The situation in Ethiopia raises key questions regarding the nation's adherence to international legal obligations and underscores the urgent need to address these grave threats to academic freedom. It serves as a poignant example of the broader global challenge of preserving academic freedom in today's world. The protection of this fundamental right is not only a matter of principle but also a necessity for advancing knowledge and the flourishing of democratic societies, which calls for immediate attention and action.
SPRING 2023
Dr. Mary Frances Berry
History Teaches Us to Resist: Struggles and Progress in Challenging Times
Dr. Mary Frances Berry, portrait courtesy of APB.
SEE PHOTO GALLERY OF EVENT
APRIL 5, 2023, Co-Sponsored Speaker
Dr. Mary Frances Berry (University of Pennsylvania)
Hybrid event, in-person and via Zoom.
Dr. Mary Frances Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought, History and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She insists that each generation has the responsibility to make a dent in the wall of injustice. In her latest book, History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times, Dr. Berry recounts many of the protests in which she was active, analyzes their organizing strategies, and considers the lessons we can learn from them.
For event details, visit the website:
UB CAS Department of Africana and American Studies
The event is co-sponsored by the Department of Africana and American Studies, and The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, School of Law, with support provided by the Department of History, the Gender Institute, and, the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Michael Levien
A Green New Deal in Red States? Towards a Sociology of Energy Transition
Michael Levien, PhD
APRIL 6, 2023, Co-Sponsored Speaker
Michael Levien (Johns Hopkins University)
Thursday, 3:00 pm ET
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus
The hybrid event is held in-person and via Zoom.
A Green New Deal in Red States?
Towards a Sociology of Energy Transition
Abstract: Averting catastrophic climate change requires winding down fossil fuel production over the next few decades. Although renewable energy will create “green jobs,” these are thus far more poorly paid and less unionized than those in fossil fuel industries. They are also unlikely to employ the exact same workers in the same regions. Without major efforts to the contrary, a renewable energy transition is thus likely to deindustrialize fossil fuel producing regions, generating a familiar pattern of job loss, social dislocation and political resentment. Adding to the political challenge, a majority of fossil fuel production in the United States occurs in red states and disproportionately employs white men without college degrees—the constituency that has proven most receptive to right-populist appeals, including to protect fossil fuel industries. While most climate and energy policy completely neglects the regional political economy of fossil fuel production, I argue that current left theories of climate politics—including those concerned with “Just Transition” and a Green New Deal—are also so far inadequate to the problem. Drawing on preliminary ethnographic and interview research in West Virginia and Louisiana, I demonstrate the limitations of these proposals to overcome local fossil fuel hegemonies and to build the needed political coalitions for a renewable energy transition. While drawing some tentative conclusions about how these political programs might be strengthened, I argue that doing so requires more sociological and specifically ethnographic research on comparative energy transitions.
Bio: Michael Levien is associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013. His research falls within the fields of development sociology, political sociology, agrarian political economy and social theory. The main focus of his research has been on the drivers, consequences, and politics of land dispossession. This research has been largely ethnographic and focused on India, but has also included cross-national comparisons. Additional research interests have included the expansion of land-related corruption and criminality in post-liberalization India, and global trends in public opinion towards markets and inequality over the past three decades. His new research focuses on climate change and the politics of energy transition in fossil fuel producing regions in the U.S.
The event is hosted by the Critical Ecologies Research Collaborative through a grant made possible by the UB Office of International Education. Co-sponsors include The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy.
Veronica L. Horowitz
Incarceration during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Compounding the Pains of Imprisonment.
Veronica Horowitz, PhD
APRIL 21, 2023 — UB FACULTY SPEAKER
Veronica L. Horowitz (Sociology)
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus
Noon, Reception;
12:30 pm, Lecture.
Attend in-person or via Zoom.
Presentation: Incarceration during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Compounding the Pains of Imprisonment.
Co-Authors: Veronica L. Horowitz, Synove Anderson and Jordan Hyatt
Abstract: For people in prison, incarceration can be both intentionally difficult (as part of retributive punishment) and experienced in less purposeful or justified ways. Beginning with Sykes, scholars have long sought to classify the various “pains of imprisonment” into a theoretical taxonomy. Within the modern carceral environment, however, the way these pains are both applied and lived has become increasingly dynamic. The experience of, and fallout from, the COVID-19 global pandemic, which uniquely affected prison communities, has additionally compounded these shifts. To critically examine these theoretical and practical relationships, we conducted semi-structured interviews with incarcerated men (n=58) who were imprisoned in a medium security prison in a Northeastern state throughout the pandemic. Qualitative analyses explore the perceived painfulness of incarceration in this context as well as throughout their sentences. We find that COVID-19 amplified, diversified, and compounded both new and classic pains of imprisonment. Beyond the pandemic, these findings expand our understanding of how carceral punishments are experienced, highlighting the fluid and interconnected relationship between simultaneous pains and providing a more generalizable framework for understanding the lived experience of incarceration.
Bio: Veronica L. Horowitz, recipient of a research grant from The Baldy Center, is an assistant professor in the department of sociology, University at Buffalo. Her research focuses on American criminal punishment broadly, with subfocuses on gender, stratification, and mercy. Faculty profile.
FALL 2022 SPEAKERS
Nick Cheesman (The Baldy Center Senior Fellow)
Nick Cheesman
A Political Concept of Torture
DECEMBER 9, 2022 — SENIOR FELLOW
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus
12:30 p.m., Lecture.
Abstract: A Political Concept of Torture. What is torture? My answer to the question, as it currently stands, is that in torture torment addressing an outward purpose is delivered pedagogically on a person dominated totally in the name of public authority. In this paper, I concentrate on three traits that inhere to this concept, and that give it political qualities: its pedagogy of torment; its outwardly expressed purposes; and, how torturers totally dominate captives by group work. I juxtapose them with traits found in other concepts of torture that have informed my own thinking, namely, torture’s epistemology of pain; its apparent purposefulness; and, the absolute powerlessness of the person tortured. I conclude by considering the question of whether tortured people are dehumanized or merely rendered human through the degradation of torture, shifting attention from the traits of the concept to look toward its limits.
Nick Cheesman is associate professor, Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and Senior Fellow, The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo (Fall 2022). His research is on torture in Thailand and Myanmar. Cheesman's 2022 publications include “Torture in Thailand at the limits of law” (Law and Social Inquiry), and “Law and order” (Annual Review of Law and Social Science).
Pornpen Khongkachonkiet (Cross Cultural Foundation, Bangkok)
Pornpen Khongkachonkiet, Lawyer and human rights defender
NOVEMBER 3, 2022 — GUEST SPEAKER
509 O’Brian Hall; 3:30pm ET (in-person only, no zoom)
Lecture: A new law to prevent torture and enforced disappearances in Thailand
After 15 years of advocacy, research and interventions by civil society groups, Thailand at last has an anti-torture and enforced disappearances law, which will take effect after four months. The law criminalizes and penalizes acts of torture, enforced disappearance, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; establishes a committee to oversee implementation, and determines preventative and reparation measures for victims to allow different authorities to prosecute offenders.
What are the strengths and limitations of the law? Why did it take so long to draft and pass, after Thailand ratified the UN Convention against Torture in 2007? What lessons were learned through the campaigning and drafting process? And, how effective is the law likely to be in preventing torture and forced disappearances, and providing redress to victims?
In this discussion, Pornpen Khongkachonkiet will respond to these and other questions and comments by Nick Cheesman about the context in which the law was introduced; the human rights and legal reform process through which it has passed, and about her hopes and prospects for the protection of civil and political rights, and for the rule of law and democracy in Thailand.
Pornpen Khongkachonkiet is Director, Cross Cultural Foundation, Bangkok, and former Chair of Amnesty International - Thailand. A lawyer and human rights defender she is currently serving as an advisor to the Subcommittee on Justice Reform under the Thai Parliamentary Committee on Law, Justice and Human Rights. She previously served as a member of the extraordinary committee on drafting of the Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearances Bill. She has worked on a range of United Nations and European Union funded projects on torture prevention, access to justice and legal protection in Thailand.
Nick Cheesman is Associate Professor, Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University and currently Senior Fellow, The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo (Fall 2022). His ongoing research is on torture in Thailand and Myanmar. He did fieldwork at the Cross Cultural Foundation in 2018-19. His latest publications include “Torture in Thailand at the limits of law” (Law and Social Inquiry), and “Law and order” (Annual Review of Law and Social Science), both in 2022.
Ewa Górska, PhD
Exploring Islamophobia and Islam in Poland through analysis of court decisions
SEPTEMBER 23, 2022 — GUEST SPEAKER
509 O’Brian Hall; 12:30pm ET
Lecture: Exploring Islamophobia and Islam in Poland through analysis of court decisions
Lecture Abstract: What can we learn from judicial opinions about the minority community, societal perceptions of religion and culture, stereotypes, or discrimination? Especially when studying such decisions in the case of an (almost) invisible minority? This project focuses on popular narratives about Islam expressed in a particular context and form (textual opinions of courts) and pronounced by a particular group (professional judges) in Poland. The research is based on a thematic analysis of judicial opinions issued by the Common Courts in Poland, available online, in which Islam or being Muslim was mentioned as a circumstance of the case.
Bio: Ewa Górska holds a PhD in Law and a MA in Middle Eastern Cultural Studies, both from the Jagiellonian Universityz. She specializes in sociology of law and culture & law studies and her research is focused on legal systems in the Middle East. Her PhD on contemporary Islamic law and bioethical issues was published as a monograph.
She is active in civil society organizations both in Poland and internationally. She worked in Development and Humanitarian Cooperation sectors and is a member of International network for Human Rights in Palestine/Israel (FFIPP). Since 2020 Górska is developing her own project — a science podcast reorient.pl - aiming at popularizing knowledge and breaking stereotypes about other cultures and religions in Poland.
To be Governed by a Text
OCTOBER 7, 2022 — DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus
Reception, 12:00 p.m.; Lecture, 12:30 p.m. ET
Paul W. Kahn (Yale Law School)
Lecture: "To be Governed by a Text"
Bio: Paul W. Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities, and, Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. Professor Kahn teaches in the areas of constitutional law and theory, international law, cultural theory and philosophy.
Discussion: I am looking forward to discussing my current project with you on October 7. That project is a successor volume to Origins of Order: Project and System in the American Legal Imagination. The earlier book studied the legal imagination in the first hundred years of our national life. It traced the movement in 19th-century constitutionalism from narratives of project to those of system. The new book continues the story, exploring what happens to these narratives over the course of the 20th century.
For our discussion, I am sending the preface and opening chapter of the new work, which remains at an early stage. The preface locates this work in relation to the earlier one. The first chapter starts by exploring the importance of narrative in a constitutional democracy. To be governed by a constitutional text is to have a practice of legitimation that rests on interpretation. Interpretation begins with a choice of basic narrative form. Project and system were the forms available in 19th century practice. In the 20th century, these narratives remain ready to hand, capable of fueling conflicting interpretations in contested cases. The latter part of the first chapter places these competing models of order in a broader frame, which I intend to use in the book.
I argue that they are two moments of Trinitarian thought, corresponding to the Father and the Holy Spirit. To the Father, creation is a project from which he stands apart. The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, is a source of order immanent in creation. To these we must add the third moment, the Son. This third moment sees creation as a sort of divine doubling. To the legal imagination, the third moment is the instantiation of the Popular Sovereign in a contemporary majority: individuals take on the body of the People. The book will argue that this moment fuels an antinomian element in the legal imaginary. This third moment grows in strength over the course of the 20th century, even as legal argument deploys the narratives of project and system. Chapter one’s largest goal is to show the importance of political theology to constitutional interpretation.
Whither the Green New Deal? The Rise and Fall of a Working Class Climate Politics
OCTOBER 13, 2022 — COSPONSORED SPEAKER
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus
Thursday, 1:30 - 3:00 p.m. ET
Matthew T. Huber, Professor of Geography in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
Title: "Whither the Green New Deal? The Rise and Fall of a Working Class Climate Politics"
Abstract: In the wake of the election of Donald Trump -- alongside eight years of relatively ineffectual climate action during the Obama administration -- climate advocates realized we needed a bolder approach to climate policy (or what some called a 'Medicare for all'-like demand for the climate). By 2018, that framework exploded onto the scene under the banner of a "Green New Deal" (GND) aiming to tackle inequality and climate change with rapid, public-sector-led decarbonization and broad, universal working class gains after decades of austerity and wage stagnation. Yet, by 2020, the GND movement sputtered into disarray. The recently passed "Inflation Reduction Act" might lead to decarbonization, but a Green New Deal it is not. What happened and why? What prospects for a working class climate politics remain?
The event is hosted by the UB Critical Ecologies Research Collaborative, a new collaborative of UB social scientists interested in critical environmental issues.
SPRING 2022 SPEAKERS
After Genocide: Memory and Reconciliation in Rwanda
Nicole Fox
FEBRUARY 18, 2022 — DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
509 O’Brian Hall; 12:00pm ET
Co-sponsored by UB Department of Sociology
Title: After Genocide: Memory and Reconciliation in Rwanda
Abstract: Memorials are powerful mechanisms for societies transitioning from mass atrocity to more peaceful ones. In this talk, Dr. Nicole Fox analyzes how memorials impact the aftermath of atrocity, documenting how state narratives to remember the past often marginalize financially distressed survivors, women, and orphans. Drawing on extensive interviews with Rwandan genocide survivors, and a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Dr. Fox reveals survivors’ relationship to these spaces and how they impact various reconciliation processes. By analyzing the varied perspectives, decisions, and actions that create collective memories, Dr. Fox illustrates how the amplification of inequality over time shapes present-day crime, victimology, and law.
Speaker Bio: Nicole Fox is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at California State University Sacramento. Her research centers on how racial and ethnic contention impacts communities, with a focus on how remembrances of adversity shape social change and collective memory. Her most recent project examines individuals who conducted acts of rescue during episodes of mass violence, theorizing the social factors that shape such high-risk actions. Her 2021 book (University of Wisconsin Press) focuses on how memorials to past atrocity impacts community development and reconciliation for survivors of genocide and genocidal rape. Her work has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Prevention Innovation Research Center, and the American Sociological Society’s Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline, among others. Her scholarship has been published in Social Forces, Social Problems, Signs, Sociological Forum, Deviant Behavior, Journal of Genocide Research and others.
Anna Lvovsky (Harvard Law School)
The Double Lives of Police Professionalism: Police Reform in Practice and in Court
Anna Lvovsky
MARCH 11, 2022—DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
12:30pm ET; 509 O’Brian Hall
Title: The Double Lives of Police Professionalism: Police Reform in Practice and in Court
Abstract: Ever since police professionalism rose to the center of debates about police reform in the mid-twentieth century, courts have invoked that concept as a reliable check on police misconduct. Whether trusting internal discipline to scour out misconduct or crediting professional training and norms with ensuring good judgment in the field, judges tout the central platforms of professionalism as bulwarks of legal compliance, supplanting the need for more intrusive remedies. Training a deeper lens of police professionalism, not as a set of top-down tools for constraining police behavior but as a sociological process that shapes officers’ identities and attitudes, this article argues that the central platforms of professionalism—including the same ones celebrated by the courts—have not reliably mitigated police misconduct. They have also, in their own way, themselves exacerbated the leading causes of such abuse, increasing pressures to cut corners, deepening wellsprings of pride and violence, distorting the accuracy of police judgment, and breeding contempt for constitutional rules. Recognizing how professionalism’s positive legacies may be offset and undercut by its less savory psychological effects offers a novel challenge to a range of judicial doctrines resting on faith in professionalized police departments. It also illuminates today’s broader debates about police misconduct, expanding our understandings of the operational downsides of incrementalist reform. Not least, the historical example of police professionalism exemplifies the extent to which the central function of police reform has never simply been to shift police practices. It has always been, simultaneously, to mediate officers’ relationship with other legal actors, in those theaters of accountability where they are called to answer for their conduct. In a system that tasks multiple actors with ensuring that the law is properly enforced, experimenting with technocratic police reform does not simply risk failing to refine the daily operations of policing, or even making those operations worse. It risks reassuring the judges who oversee police behavior that their oversight is no longer necessary, obstructing what existing legal avenues for imposing accountability on the police.
Bio: Anna Lvovsky is an Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she teaches American legal history, the history of policing, criminal law, and evidence. Professor Lvovsky’s scholarship focuses on the legal and cultural dimensions of policing, judicial uses of professional knowledge, and the regulation of gender, sexuality, and morality. Her articles on policing and criminal procedure have appeared or are forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
Professor Lvovsky's book, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall, recently published by the University of Chicago Press, examines the daily realities and legal contests surrounding the policing of gay communities in the mid-twentieth century. As a dissertation, the project received the 2016 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.
RELATED EVENT: March 10, 2022 6:30pm
Lvovsky book talk, Vice Patrol at Fitz Books.
Michael J. Nelson (Pennsylvania State University)
The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary
Michael J. Nelson
APRIL 1, 2022—DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
12:30pm ET; 509 O’Brian Hall
Co-sponsored by UB Department of Political Science
Title: The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary
Abstract: Prominent explanations for appellate review prioritize the ideological alignment of the lower and reviewing courts. We suggest that interpersonal relationships play an important role. The effect of an appellate judge's ideology on her decision to reverse depends on the level of interpersonal contact between the trial and appellate judge due to information provided by social and professional interactions. Relying on a dataset of all published Fourth Amendment search and seizure decisions from 1953-2010, we find that interpersonal relationships can dampen the effect of ideology in appellate review. When an appellate and trial court judge have frequent contact, the effect of ideology on the appellate judge's decision to reverse is essentially imperceptible. These findings speak to the importance of relationships in principal-agent arrangements generally and have implications for the structure of the federal judiciary and our understanding of the limits of ideological judicial decisionmaking.
Speaker Bio: Michael J. Nelson is Jeffrey L. Hyde and Sharon D. Hyde and Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor in Political Science and associate professor of political science at the Pennsylvania State University. His research, funded by the National Science Foundation and Russell Sage Foundation, examines the causes and consequences of judicial power. He is the author of Judging Inequality and The Politics of Federal Prosecution. Faculty profile.
Nate Holdren (Drake University)
Workplace Injury, Social Murder, and Law
Nate Holdren
April 15, 2022—DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
12:30pm ET; ONLINE VIA ZOOM (only)
Title: Workplace Injury, Social Murder, and Law
Abstract: The United States has long been gripped by an economy which injures and kills many people in varying ways and with grim regularity, as have all capitalist societies. In the 1840s Friedrich Engels called this tendency social murder. The COVID-19 pandemic is the latest and most widely noted expression of this tendency. Legal and policy responses to the awful reality of social murder are pulled between a substantive effort to save lives, and a realpolitik aimed primarily at minimizing the consequences such killing has for institutionally powerful actors. Even when the priority of saving lives does prevail, that priority is often forced into compatibility with the imperatives of profit, resulting in people being consigned to poverty and exclusion, which has especially affected disabled people. In this talk Holdren takes his historical scholarship on the origins and immediate aftermath of workers’ compensation laws in the early twentieth century United States as a point of entry to examine these tendencies in capitalism, then turns to current work-in-progress attempting to theorize these tendencies via the intellectual resources offered by the Marxist tradition. He argues that these aspects of capitalist society raise critical questions about how movements for justice should understand the legal system and what the actual relationship is between law and the conditions which make justice possible.
Nate Holdren is an Associate Professor in the Program in Law, Politics, and Society at Drake University. He is a legal historian of capitalism in the United States and holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota. Faculty profile.
Related writing:
> Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era
> Marxist Theories of Law Past and Present (co-authored with Eric Tucker)
> The Reproduction of Moral Economies in Capitalism
Related image:
Image courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress.
FALL 2021
Ehlimana Memišević (University of Sarajevo; Fulbright Scholar, Vanderbilt University)
Transitional Justice and Reconciliation: Challenges in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Ehlimana Memišević, PhD
CO-SPONSORED SPEAKER
OCTOBER 25, 2021
Monday, 12:00 to 2:00 PM (ET)
Location: 684 Baldy Hall, North Campus
Zoom Alternative (see details below).
Abstract: The 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina – which involved systematic violence against the ethnic ‘other’ through the genocidal campaigns of ‘ethnic cleansing’– resulted in more than 100,000 deaths, some 2.5 million displaced, 800,000 destroyed homes and the widespread abuse of human rights. Denial of the crimes committed, including genocide, started immediately after or even during the genocide, and it changed forms over the time. In recent years genocide and the war crimes are not only denied, but celebrated and glorified along with its perpetrators. By dehumanising the victims and rehabilitating the perpetrators, denial prevents the wounds inflicted by the genocide from healing and obstructs the reconciliation process. In the words of the prominent genocide scholar, Israel W Charny, in addition to denial responsibility, denials are celebrations of destruction, renewed humiliations of survivors, and metaphorical murders of historical truth and collective memory that increase the risk of the future genocides. Genocide committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina is now used as an inspiration for terrorists and far-right extremists around the world.
Speaker Bio: Ehlimana Memišević, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Legal History and Comparative Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Sarajevo. She holds her B.A., M. A. and PhD in Law from the University of Sarajevo. She is currently a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the College of Arts and Science, at the Vanderbilt University. Her major research fields include genocide studies and legal history.
Speaker's related articles:
- Višegrad’s rape camps: Denial and erasure.
- Why we need to challenge genocide denialism in the Balkans.
- Promoting a Bosnian War ‘Rape Hotel’ Means Erasing History.
Co-sponsors: The Baldy Center and UB Institute for Sustainable Global Engagement (ISGE), School of Social Work
Contact: Filomena M. Critelli, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Coordinator of Undergraduate Studies, Co-Director Institute for Sustainable Global Engagement, UB School of Social Work
Email: fmc8@buffalo.edu
Phone: 716 645-1250
Wang Feng (UC Irvine)
China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermaths
Wang Feng, PhD
CO-SPONSORED SPEAKER
November 3, 2021, Wednesday, 12:00 p.m.
509 O’Brian Hall, UB North Campus
Join us for a presentation by Wang Feng, PhD (UC Irvine). Professor Wang is leading expert on Chinese demography and economic inequality. His research interests include comparative demographic, economic, and social processes, social inequality in state socialisms, and, contemporary Chinese society. The event is co-sponsored UB Confucius Institute, The Baldy Center, and CAS Department of Sociology and is free and open to the public.
Contact The Baldy Center or Confucius Institute with questions.
Recent Publication: Convergence to Very Low Fertility in East Asia: Processes, Causes, and Implications. (Noriko O. Tsuya, Minja K. Choe, and Wang Feng). Springer. 2019.
Speaker Bio: Wang Feng is professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and an adjunct professor of sociology and demography at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. He has done extensive research on global social and demographic changes, comparative population and social history, and social inequality, with a focus on China. He is the author of multiple books, and his research articles have been published in venues including Population and Development Review, Demography, Science, The Journal of the Economics of Aging, The Journal of Asian Studies, The China Journal, and International Migration Review. He has served on expert panels for the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and as a senior fellow and the director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy. His work and views have appeared in media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Guardian, Economist, NPR, CNN, BBC, and others. Speaker profile.
SPRING 2021
Hadar Aviram, Online Book Talk
Yesterday's Monsters The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole
March 5, 2021, Friday, 12:00 PM
Online Book Talk by Hadar Aviram. The online event is free and open to the public with advance registration.
The Book Talk is co-sponsored by UB Department of Sociology.
Hadar Aviram specializes in criminal justice, civil rights, law and politics, and social movements, and her research employs socio-legal perspectives and methodologies. Her first book Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment (UC Press, 2015, winner of the CHOICE Award for Academic Titles) analyzes the impact of the financial crisis on the American correctional landscape. Her second book The Legal Promise and the Process of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is an anthology of studies inspired by the work of Malcolm Feeley. Her third book Yesterday’s Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole (UC Press, 2020) examines the California parole process through 50 years of parole transcripts in the Manson Family cases. One of the leading voices in the state and nationwide against mass incarceration, Prof. Aviram is a frequent media commentator on politics, immigration, criminal justice policy, civil rights, and the Trump Administration. Her blog, California Correctional Crisis, covers criminal justice policy in California.
Prof. Aviram holds LL.B. and M.A. (criminology) degrees from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from UC Berkeley, where she studied as a Fulbright Fellow and a Regents Intern. She is a member of the California and Israel Bars. Prior to joining the Hastings faculty in 2007, she practiced as a military defense attorney in Israel and taught at Tel Aviv and Haifa Universities. See faculty profile.
About the book: In 1969, the world was shocked by a series of murders committed by Charles Manson and his “family” of followers. Although the defendants were sentenced to death in 1971, their sentences were commuted to life with parole in 1972; since 1978, they have been regularly attending parole hearings. Today all of the living defendants remain behind bars.
Relying on nearly fifty years of parole hearing transcripts, as well as interviews and archival materials, Hadar Aviram invites readers into the opaque world of the California parole process—a realm of almost unfettered administrative discretion, prison programming inadequacies, high-pitched emotions, and political pressures. Yesterday’s Monsters offers a fresh longitudinal perspective on extreme punishment.
MARCH 11, 2021 — ONLINE BOOK TALK
William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen
From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century
Joun us for the online book talk by William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen, co-authors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century (UNC PRess, 2020). Their work confronts racial injustices head-on, and make the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery. The book contains a stark assessment of the intergenerational effects of white supremacy on black economic well-being. Darity and Mullen examine past and present to measure the inequalities borne of slavery. Linking monetary values to historical wrongs, they assess the literal and figurative costs of justice denied in the 155 years since the end of the Civil War. The co-authors offer a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program, including payment to each documented U.S. descendant of slavery. The event is sponsored by the UB Center for Diversity Innovation. Co-sponsors include The Baldy Center and UB's Office of Inclusive Excellence.
William A. Darity, PhD
A. Kirsten Mullen