The Baldy Center supports UB faculty research

Conferences, Workshops, Distinguished Speakers, and other events

Our events cover a broad array of topics including but not limited to human rights, courts, environmental governance, legal geography, international trade, intellectual property, social inequality, administrative regulation, state and urban government, the legal profession, family, religion, and cultural understandings of law.

Selected Publications

This page shows a list of selected publications by our faculty authors. The representative listing is updated occasionally as forthcoming books and articles are published.

Research publications supported in part by The Baldy Center

Springer Discussion Piece: A new critical social science research agenda on pesticides

The paper (link above) emerged from workshop, Global Glyphosate: New Challenges in Regulating Pervasive Chemicals in the Anthropocene, sponsored by The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, and the Community for Global Health Equity. Research was supported by US National Science Foundation (Grant #BCS2026088 - The Generic Herbicide Industry) and Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant #204766 - Making Herbicide Markets). Open access funding provided by University of Zurich.

Faculty publication spotlight

The Big Thaw
7/6/26
Explores the unprecedented and rapid climate changes occurring in the Arctic environment.
Blue Legalities
7/6/26
“Not a minute too early, the ‘blue turn’ finally takes pride of place in legal thinking. Blue Legalities balances the legal and the liquid in all their emanations. The contributions span from the oceanic depths of our planet to the glimmering surface of our limited comprehension, combining in an undeniably poetic whole, law, politics, science, anthropology, history, and philosophy amongst other epistemes. The feat of this book is diving headlong in the fathomless challenge of treating the material and the textual as one ontological ripple.” — Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, author of Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere
Newsworthy: The Supreme Court Battle over Privacy and Press Freedom
7/6/26
In Newsworthy the legal historian Samantha Barbas challenges the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Time, Inc. v. Hill (1967), the case that established the newsworthy standard. Her earlier book, Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America (2015), explored the laws governing the use an individual's name, image, or likeness. Placing Time, Inc. v. Hill in its legal and cultural context illuminates an underexamined period in the development of privacy law and questions current privacy standards in the United States. -- Tim Gleason, Journal of American History
Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan
2/14/23
The University of California Press has announced the publication of Samantha Barbas' latest book, Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan (2023). The book is a deeply researched legal drama that documents this landmark First Amendment ruling—one that is more critical and controversial than ever.

Lawyers in Practice: Ethical Decision Making in Context (Chicago Series in Law and Society)
7/6/26
Leslie C. Levin (Editor) and Lynn Mather (Editor)
Buddhism and Law: An Introduction
7/6/26
Rebecca Redwood French (Editor), Mark A. Nathan (Editor). This book challenges the concept of Buddhism as an apolitical religion without implications for law.
Fair and Affordable Housing in the US: Trends, Outcomes, Future Directions (Studies in Critical Social Sciences
7/6/26
Robert Mark Silverman (Editor), Kelly L. Patterson (Editor).
Wildlife: The Institution of Nature
7/6/26
Irus Braverman
The book documents the emerging understanding in species conservation that all forms of wild nature may need to be managed in perpetuity.
Gene Editing, Law, and the Environment: Life Beyond the Human (2017)
7/6/26
Irus Braverman, Editor
Technologies like CRISPR and gene drives are ushering in a new era of genetic engineering, wherein the technical means to modify DNA are cheaper, faster, more accurate, more widely accessible, and with more far-reaching effects than ever before. In this publication, distinguished scholars from law, the life sciences, philosophy, environmental studies, science and technology studies, animal health, and religious studies examine what is at stake with these new biotechnologies for life and law, both human and beyond.
Routledge
Chokepoints: Global Private Regulation on the Internet (2016)
7/6/26
Natasha Tusikov
Drawing on extensive interviews, Tusikov details the emergence of a global regime in which Internet firms act as regulators for powerful intellectual property owners, challenging fundamental notions of democratic accountability.
UC Press
Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power (2016)
7/6/26
Anna Su
Religious freedom is widely recognized today as a basic human right, guaranteed by nearly all national constitutions. Exporting Freedom charts the rise of religious freedom as an ideal firmly enshrined in international law and shows how America’s promotion of the cause of individuals worldwide to freely practice their faith advanced its ascent as a global power.
Harvard University Press
Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties (2016)
7/6/26
Kathleen Biddick
With this formidable reminder that "we have never been secular"...Kathleen Biddick expands the historical and theoretical horizon of our reflections on sovereignty and the biopolitical, opening anew the "medieval archives of violence."
punctum books
The Myth of the Litigious Society: Why We Don’t Sue (2016)
7/6/26
> David M. Engel
Why do Americans seem to sue at the slightest provocation? The answer may surprise you: we don’t! See more: University of Chicago Press
Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia: Submerged Genealogy and the Legacy of Coastal Capture (2016)
7/6/26
Jennifer L. Gaynor
Political and interethnic ties among Sulawesi’s littorals and land-based realms of 17th-century spice trade.
Newsworthy: The Supreme Court Battle over Privacy and Press Freedom (2017)
7/6/26
> Samantha Barbas
This is a story of how American law and culture struggled to define and reconcile the right of privacy and the rights of the press. See more: Stanford University Press
Race and the Politics of Deception: The Making of an American City (2017)
7/6/26
Christopher Mele
What is the relationship between race and space, and how do racial politics inform the organization and development of urban locales?
Learn more.
Shrinking Cities: Understanding urban decline in the United States (2017)
7/6/26
Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen
The text offers a contemporary look at patterns of shrinkage and decline in the United States. The book juxtaposes the complex and numerous processes that contribute to these patterns with broader policy frameworks that have been under consideration to address shrinkage in U.S. cities. This timely contribution contends that an understanding of what the city has become, as it faces shrinkage, is essential toward a critical analysis of development both within and beyond city boundaries.
Routledge CRC Press
International & Interdisciplinary
7/6/26
The Buffalo Legal Studies Research Paper Series, hosted by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), provides an international, interdisciplinary audience for UB faculty and visiting scholars.
> Access the series on the SSRN.
Insiders, Outsiders, Injuries, and Law: Revisiting 'The Oven Bird's Song' (2018)
7/6/26
Mary Nell Trautner, Editor
A central theme of law and society is that people's ideas about law and the decisions they make to mobilize law are shaped by community norms and cultural context. But this was not always an established concept. Among the first empirical pieces to articulate this theory was David Engel's 1984 article, 'The Oven Bird's Song: Insiders, Outsiders, and Personal Injuries in an American Community'. Over thirty years later, this article is now widely considered to be part of the law and society canon. This book argues that Engel's article succeeds so brilliantly because it integrates a wide variety of issues, such as cultural transformation, attitudes about law, dispute processing, legal consciousness, rights mobilization, inclusion and exclusion, and inequality.
Cambridge University Press
Law and Revolution: Legitimacy and Constitutionalism after the Arab Spring (2018)
7/6/26
Nimer Sultany, Baldy Postdoctoral Fellow, 2012-13; 2018 winner of the ICON-S Book Prize, and, Society of Legal Scholars' Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship.

Sultany's work facilitates access to a wide range of primary sources previously unavailable to anglophone readers, including court rulings in several Arab countries and the first thorough discussion of the trials and seizure of property of former regime officials in Egypt and Tunisia.
Oxford University Press
Anniversary Monograph – 40 Years at the Baldy Center: A Law and Society Hub in Buffalo (2018)
7/6/26
The Baldy Center is pleased to be celebrating its 40th Anniversary this year. To help commemorate this anniversary, The Baldy Center commissioned Luke Hammill, a Buffalo-based journalist and writer (and UB alumnus) to chronicle the Center’s history, from its foundation as a socio-legal research institute in 1978 to its development into a wide-ranging facilitator of multidisciplinary research, writing and events at UB and beyond.
The Big Thaw: Policy, Governance, and Climate Change in the Circumpolar North (2019)
7/6/26
Ezra B. W. Zubrow, Editor
Errol Meidinger, Editor
Kim Diana Connolly, Editor
Climate change, one of the drivers of global change, is controversial in political circles, but recognized in scientific ones as being of central importance today for the United States and the world. In The Big Thaw, the editors bring together experts, advocates, and academic professionals who address the serious issue of how climate change in the Circumpolar Arctic is affecting and will continue to affect environments, cultures, societies, and economies throughout the world. The contributors discuss a variety of topics, including anthropology, sociology, human geography, community economics, regional development and planning, and political science, as well as biogeophysical sciences such as ecology, human-environmental interactions, and climatology.
Order via SUNY Press
Race, Space and Exclusion: Segregation and Beyond in Metropolitan America (The Metropolis and Modern Life)
7/6/26
Robert Adelman (Editor), and Christopher Mele (Editor)
Rachael Hinkle co-authors book on Supreme Court
7/6/26
Persuading the Supreme Court: The Significance of Briefs in Judicial Decision-Making, co-authored by Rachael K. Hinkle and Morgan L. W. Hazelton, aims to shed light on one of the more mysterious and consequential features of Supreme Court decision-making. Hinkle's research for the book was sponsored, in part, by a grant from The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy. Faculty profile.
Elgar publishes book of essays by Charles Whalen
7/6/26
Reforming Capitalism for the Common Good, Essays in Institutional and Post-Keynesian Economics (2022 ) by Charles Whalen presents a constructive analyses of vital economic problems confronting the United States since the 1970s, giving special attention to challenges facing working families. Whalen is currently a research fellow at The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy. Learn more.