The Baldy Center Blog Post 61
Blog Author: Christen Civiletto, Adjunct Professor, School of Law, University at Buffalo

Blog Post Title: Niagara Falls’ Chemical Kingpins: An Immigration Story

Dr. Milton Plesur was a giant among UB’s faculty. Back in 1986, when I was eighteen and squinting to see the chalkboard in his crowded twentieth-century history lecture, I was transfixed by his vivid depictions of how the Gilded Age of the post–Civil War 1800s ushered in a rapid increase in industrialization. That ramp-up was followed in short order by mass immigration from Europe and beyond. Scores of those new Americans, he said, filled the factory jobs.

I quickly realized something. Those immigrants he was referencing were my grandparents and great-grandparents. All of my great-grandparents, as well as my Noni Josephine, were born in Italy or Sicily. (Those are two separate places for my family.) They came here because conditions there were increasingly violent and unstable. I never knew their larger immigration story until that history course prompted me to ask about it.

As it turns out, Niagara Falls’ story is deeply intertwined with that of its immigrants and Black migrants. Niagara Falls, by virtue of its rushing waters and proximity to salt, was the birthplace of the commercial electro-chemical industry. By 1930, Niagara Falls was home to thousands of eastern and southern European immigrants. They hailed from Poland, Russia, Armenia, and Italy. African American men from the South in search of jobs were also being recruited by the burgeoning power and chemical industries. Those blue-collar laborers were eager to work and support their families. Conveniently, many of them ended up living just yards away from Chemical Road—with its choking pollution—in the worker community dubbed Echota.

World War II and the Cold War spurred the production of chemicals and the further hiring of immigrants and others to work in the ever-growing electro-chemical industry. Those factories were not just producing chemicals. Carborundum Company and other chemical plants secretly converted some of their operations to perform steps in the uranium refining process. They became essential to the Manhattan Project and other World War II research projects.

My grandpa’s father was born in Cerda, Italy. He logged an astonishing forty-four years at Carborundum. It was hot, dirty, and hard work, but it provided a means for him to support his family. That was money he likely could not have earned otherwise because he lacked formal education.

His son—my grandfather—had always wanted to be a forest ranger, but he felt obligated post-WWII to take a job at the massive Carborundum complex on Buffalo Avenue. It was expected because his dad worked there and helped secure the position. For forty-six years, my grandpa shoveled silica in overheated furnace rooms at Carborundum. I remember driving with my grandma to pick him up from work. The plant was a hazy, foul, and extremely busy facility amid countless other factory complexes and stacks. I remember a stream of men exiting at shift’s end. I can still smell the stinging odors clinging to my grandpa’s clothes when he got in the car.

My dad wanted to do things differently. He worked at Carborundum only as long as it took to put himself through UB and graduate school. (He, too, had the privilege of sitting in Professor Plesur’s history classes as he earned his own history degree).

None of the combined ninety-six years or so that my family gave to that filthy place could have been easy. Yet I never heard any of them complain. They actually never said anything about their work, ever. But knowing what I do now, I realize why my grandpa liked to sit outside when he got home from work. His favorite activity during the few years between his retirement and his death from cancer at sixty-six was to sit in the backyard listening to New York Yankees games or tending his garden.

My father did not even make it that long.

Most workers, including my grandfather and father, did not know what they were handling or being exposed to. These were extremely toxic or radioactive wastes. They had no protective gear. Many immigrant families regarded their work in contaminated environments as part of their patriotic duty to their new country. Despite knowing some of the dangers of these poisons, the chemical kingpins continued to rely heavily upon the Falls’ workforce and failed to provide adequate notice about the dangers. They earned billions of dollars in profits over the decades.

As in other things, the brunt of the harm from exposure to toxic and radiological chemicals fell upon the immigrants, persons of color, and the poor—many of them lacking formal education—who broke their backs for these corporations or lived nearby. That pattern has not changed. According to Public Health Watch, New York State found that a bladder carcinogen released by the Goodyear plant was reaching nearby Niagara Falls neighborhoods at levels up to seven times the state’s safety guideline. Public Health Watch reports: “Forty-three percent of those residents are low-income, 28% are people of color and 27% are between one and 18 years old, according to the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screen of the facility.”

This history and its continuing consequences lie at the heart of Thundering Waters: The Toxic Legacy of Niagara Falls, where I highlight the contributions of and harms to my family and our larger immigrant community as they worked in the Falls' chemical factories, built power tunnels, and helped shape this city.

Keywords: Moral Psychology, Law and Society, Legal and Professional Ethics, Justice; Culture and Society, Social Justice and Social Change, Accountability, Reflection

The Baldy Center Blog Post 60
Blog Author: Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Professor in Moral and Political Philosophy (Jurisprudence), School of Law, University of Surrey 

Post Title: Do We Need to Know Ourselves to Be Just? 

Williams' Starting Point: Moral Luck

Williams drew a pointed distinction between two questions: "What shall I do?" and "How should one live?" The second is the Socratic question: it demands reflection, self-examination, a view of one's whole life. The first is immediate. It confronts you in the kitchen, the street, the office, as a particular person with a particular history, not as an abstract moral reasoner.

His famous example is Gauguin. When the painter abandoned his wife and children for art in Tahiti, no moral formula could settle whether he was right. His justification was not available in advance, as it depended entirely on whether he succeeded as an artist. If his work changed the world, the choice might be retrospectively vindicated. If he failed, it was simply catastrophe. Williams calls this "moral luck": the unsettling reality that the justification for our most consequential choices only becomes visible after the fact, shaped by contingencies we could not control.

The political implication follows directly. If moral luck undermines any clean account of "reasoning out" our desires and shaping our characters, then justice cannot rest on such an account. When we deal with strangers under shared law, what matters is whether someone breached an objective standard of conduct—not whether they achieved inner self-cultivation. The law does not care about your journey toward wisdom. It cares whether, for example, you burned someone's hand due to your negligence or intentional action.

Williams' argument rests on three claims. First, there is no psychologically realistic account of how we reason out our desires while actually immersed in the question "What shall I do?" Second, this failure scales up: there is equally no plausible account of collective desire-reasoning when we ask, "What shall we do?" Third, a truly mature agent owns responsibility spontaneously. The moment someone publicly demands you "take responsibility," they have already revealed you are not yet mature, and so maturity cannot belong to the political, public sphere at all.

Together, these three claims generate the conclusion that civic maturity and justice must remain separate. But each contains a fundamental error.

Desires Are Not Fixed Objects

Williams’ first claim rests on a hidden assumption: that desires are fixed inner objects which reason must locate and redirect. If moral luck contaminates this process at every stage, the project is indeed hopeless. But the picture is wrong. Our desires are not inner objects—they are thought-dependent. They are shaped, and reshaped, by the descriptions we bring to bear on them and by the language we inherit from our communities and experiences.

Iris Murdoch makes this vivid. A mother-in-law, M, initially views her daughter-in-law as common and undignified. Over time, with no change in the daughter-in-law’s actual conduct, M’s vision transforms. She comes to see the same person as spontaneous, youthful and warm. What changed was not the daughter-in-law. What changed was M's attention, the descriptions she brought to bear. Moral attitudes do not shift by detecting a fixed inner state and adjusting it. They shift through careful, imaginative, honest looking. There is no single act of will that flips the switch; there is only the sustained discipline of paying attention. 

We Reason Together, Not in Isolation

If desires are constituted through description rather than given as fixed objects, then the question of how we reason about them is not about locating a hidden thing—it is about an ongoing process of learning that happens in relationship with others. This dismantles Williams' second claim as well.

Stanley Cavell illustrates the point through a slave owner who hunts alongside his slaves, lets his children play with theirs, and calls them good men and good fathers, yet still denies them freedom and dignity. How long can this dissonance hold? The slave owner already sees his slaves as persons in every domain except justice. At some point the accumulated weight of description, good man, good father, human being, forces a confrontation. The demands of justice are not separate from the exchange of perspectives. They grow out of it. We are never deliberating from scratch as isolated individuals; we are always already inside shared languages and inherited concepts of value. The "together" in "What shall we do together?" is not an extra ingredient—it is the medium in which deliberation occurs. 

What Justice Actually Looks Like From the Inside

Return to the burned hand: Williams would say that the injurer breached an objective standard; justice is satisfied when they are held accountable. But how does the injurer know she has breached that standard? Williams can only answer: because of social convention. This is unsatisfying. It drains the concept of rights of almost all its content, reducing "you had no right to hurt me" to "people around here don't do that."

Something richer is happening when the injured person makes her claim. She is presenting her pain, her disrupted projects, her capacity to pursue what matters to her. She is presenting herself as a person. The injurer who genuinely grasps this, who can say, “I can see what I have taken from you, and I understand why you have a claim on me,” has made an act of moral attention. That act is just civic maturity. Justice at its most basic requires this exchange of practical thoughts.

As for Williams' third claim, that being called to account publicly proves you are not yet mature, it rests on a false binary between mature and non-mature agents. Moral growth is not a destination but a direction of travel. Shame, regret, and the articulated demands of those we have wronged are not external impositions on a complete moral self. They are among the principal means by which we become more complete. The public sphere is not the enemy of self-knowledge. It is one of its primary schoolrooms. 

Conclusion

Williams’ separation thesis has surface plausibility. There is something right about the concern that justice systems shouldn’t require everyone to be a philosopher before they can be held accountable. But taken to its logical conclusion, the thesis describes a form of justice so thin and so indifferent to the inner lives of those subject to it that it can barely carry the weight of the concept.

The alternative is not to demand perfect self-knowledge before anyone can act justly. It is simply to recognise that responding to another person's claim of right already draws us into an exchange that requires seeing them as a person—and that this seeing is both the beginning of civic maturity and the beating heart of justice itself.

Editor's note: The Baldy Center's Distinguished Speaker Series, Spring 2026, featured Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco's presentation "The Politics of Civic Maturity vs. the Politics of Justice: Reflecting on Bernard Williams’ Separation Thesis."

Keywords: Family and Family Law, Gender, Law, and Society, Public Policy, Legislation, Social Justice and Social Change, Education Policy

The Baldy Center Blog Post 59
Blog Author: Judith Olin, Clinical Professor; Director, Family Violence and Women’s Rights Clinic

Blog Post Title: Advocating for Survivors: The Family Violence and Women's Rights Clinic

The Family Violence and Women's Rights Clinic (FVWRC), in its 34th year, is the oldest UB law clinic and the longest-running gender violence law clinic in New York State. Student attorneys, who receive a limited license to practice law under the close supervision of clinical faculty, enjoy a unique experience that combines work on individual client cases, policy analysis, and community service. The FVWRC is lucky to enjoy significant financial assistance from the New York State Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence.

FVWRC clients are mainly single working mothers who earn too much income to qualify for a free attorney but cannot afford to pay for the services of private counsel. Over the last several years, student attorneys have represented more clients in divorce cases, in part because, under New York State's assigned counsel statute, low-income divorce clients are not entitled to a no-cost assigned attorney. Student attorneys zealously represent their clients on issues ranging from custody and visitation to equitable distribution of marital property, as well as child and spousal support.

Every year, student attorneys attend the Legislative Day of Action in Albany, organized by the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence. In preparation, they learn about new legislation aimed at reforming systemic problems impacting domestic violence survivors. Students make legislative visits during which they educate legislators and key staff on proposed legislation. They are introduced on the floor of the New York State Assembly and have the opportunity to observe the legislature in action. Student attorneys also write policy papers on various key topics involving domestic violence.

For example, a recent student project involved a paper informed by national research on mandatory domestic violence training for judges. Currently, twenty states in the United States mandate domestic violence training for specific judges and court personnel who are involved in the adjudication of domestic violence–related cases. Of concern is the fact that New York State does not have such a training requirement. Between 2022 and 2024, there was a 16.2% increase in domestic violence crimes in Erie County, as reported by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. Domestic violence–related homicides have increased while non-DV-related homicides have fallen. We have seen a rash of intimate partner violence homicides this year in Erie County, one of which involved the murder of a mother and her two children by her estranged partner. The student paper has been shared with key New York State legislators, and we look forward to seeing a bill drafted mandating this training for judges who preside over domestic violence–related cases.  

Turning to service, student attorneys have a long-standing project in which they deliver presentations to local high school students on teen dating violence prevention. High school students are receptive to presentations made by law students. In addition to the content on teen dating violence, high schoolers interested in applying to law school get the opportunity to ask questions about law school admissions and attendance. Student attorneys leave the FVWRC with practical skills that aid them in their search for legal employment and future law practice.

Looking towards the fall, a record number of fourteen student attorneys—ten new students and four returning students—will carry on the critical work of the FVWRC. An incoming student attorney, Bella LaFraniere, who is the FVWRC Summer Fellow, brings experience working with survivors of human trafficking. We will explore potential partnerships with organizations serving this population.

Keywords: AI, art, media, copyright, creativity

The Baldy Center Blog Post 58
Blog Author: Lauren Wilson,  Asssociate Professor of Law, School of Law, University at Buffalo

Blog Post Title: New Technologies, Old Fears: AI, Copyright, and the Question of Artistic Value

"AI generated stuff generally looks ugly and disrespects talented actors, writer[s], artists, and people in general."
     –Anonymous, comment to the U.S. Copyright Office on      the copyrightability of AI-generated artwork (2023)

"I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations."
     –John Philip Sousa, The Menace of Mechanical Music (1906)

The above two quotes, written more than a century apart, share a common throughline: art made with a particular technology should not be afforded copyright protection because the art made with the technology is aesthetically bad. When the United States Copyright Office requested public comments as it prepared its report on copyright and artificial intelligence in 2023, it received over 10,000 responses from creators, industry players, politicians, and other members of the public. [1]

The comment above was not an outlier. While many comments wrestled with whether AI-generated art could meet the requirements for copyright protection—“independently created” by a human author and having a “minimal degree of creativity” [2] —many others said things like “AI is ruining real artists. I am sick of seeing everything fake”; [3] or AI art will “literally take the soul out of everything. They’ll [sic] be no human connection and that is sad and scary.” [4] 

Humans have a long history of hating new technology. In a recent book, Techno Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, Thomas DeKeyser writes that “an undercurrent of refusal . . . permeates the history of technology, at every step and turn." [5] When a new creative technology is introduced, questions quickly surface on whether art made with that technology is eligible for copyright protection. Conversations about these questions might begin with how the technology interacts with human authorship or other requirements for copyright protection, but they often get existential very fast. In his testimony before Congress on the copyrightability of sound recordings in 1906, John Philip Sousa—known primarily as a composer of patriotic marches like The Stars and Stripes Forever—stated that “these talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country.” [6] Even more explicit, in a comment to the Copyright Office that opens by explaining that works created by AI should not receive copyright protection because AI authors are not human (a reasonable position, as far as copyright law is concerned), Eric Kristen closes by imploring the Office to “ensure humanity’s continued survival, because that is literally what’s at stake”. [7]

Although comments like this could be correct from an artistic point of view, they cannot be the reason that works created with new artistic technologies will or won’t receive copyright protection. Indeed, throughout the life of a copyrighted work, arbiters of copyright law expressly deny the law’s ability to make artistic judgments. At the registration stage, the Copyright Office states that it “will not consider the author’s skill, experience, or artistic judgment.” [8] Rather, the Office is “solely” concerned with “whether the work satisfies the originality requirement.” [9] In the courts, jurists have insisted for more than a century that it “would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of [insert any type of copyrightable art].” [10] Even in a case concerning a work that the presiding judge found offensive, the judge conceded that “[w]e are not called upon . . . to judge the quality of Defendant’s song, and whether we personally regard it as repulsive trash or a work of genius is immaterial to a determination of the legal issues presented to us.” [11] Yet this clearly established legal position does not prevent audiences from interpreting copyright decisions as judgments on the artists or works themselves. 

Even though comments like those I’ve mentioned here are not great arguments against copyright protection for technology-assisted works, they do offer a window into the public’s perceptions of the intersections between art, technology, and copyright. They reveal that, for many stakeholders, these intersections provoke major questions about the purpose of art, what it means to be creative, and even what it means to be human. Throughout history, new creative technologies have incited existential dread in creators and audiences of art, and the copyrightability of artwork created with new technologies seems to be an outlet for people to channel their fears about the changes the art that they hold dear may undergo. Former Register of Copyrights Barbara Ringer speculated in her lecture “The Demonology of Copyright” (incredible title) on whether there was “something special about copyright that provokes these strong and diametrically opposed expressions of feeling” so often voiced in debates about changes to copyright law. [12]

New technology draws us to feel big feelings, and AI is no exception. I think that both history and our present moment show that copyright law is often a place toward which to channel our anxieties about change. If we can just outlaw something, as many comments request of the Copyright Office, we won’t have to adapt to it, try to understand it, fight against it, or question the circumstances and corporations that have put us in this position of panic in the first place. There are certainly aspects of people’s concerns that copyright is well-positioned to handle. The Office can provide, for example, clarity on human authorship questions, or on the fair use of artists’ work in training data. It cannot, though, make commenters like those I quote here feel better about what art will look or sound like in 10 years or whether jobs in making incidental music for commercials or stock images for calendars will still exist. I hope they do. I also hope, though, that the conversations now focused on opposing copyright protection for AI-generated art on aesthetic or moral grounds might instead shift toward disciplines better positioned to handle them. When it comes to questions about our artistic and humanistic future, the humanities themselves might offer much more satisfying ideas.

ENDNOTES 

[1] U.S. Copyright Office, Notice: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright, Regulations.gov, here.

[2] Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340, 345 (1991).

[3] Stacie Stroup, Comment on Notice of Inquiry and Request for Comments on Artificial Intelligence and Copyright (Sep. 4, 2023), here.

[4] Charlene Chew, Comment on Notice of Inquiry and Request for Comments on Artificial Intelligence and Copyright (Aug. 31, 2023), here.

[5] Thomas Dekeyer, Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine 2 (2026).

[6] To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright: Hearing on S. 6330 and H.R. 19853 Before the Committees on Patents, 59th Cong. 24 (1906) (statement of John Philip Sousa, composer; emphasis added).

[7] Eric Kristen, Comment on Notice of Inquiry and Request for Comments on Artificial Intelligence and Copyright (Aug. 30, 2023), here.

[8] U.S. Copyright Office, Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices § 310.6 (3d ed. 2021).

[9] Id.

[10] Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co., 188 U.S. 239, 251 (1903).

[11] Parks v. LaFace Recs., 329 F.3d 437, 463 (6th Cir. 2003).

[12] Barbara A. Ringer, The Demonology of Copyright: Second of the R.R. Bowker Memorial Lectures 5 (1974).