Selected Publications

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.

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.

Robert Adelman (Editor), and Christopher Mele (Editor)

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

> 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

Jennifer L. Gaynor
Political and interethnic ties among Sulawesi’s littorals and land-based realms of 17th-century spice trade.

> 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

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

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

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

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

Irus Braverman
The book documents the emerging understanding in species conservation that all forms of wild nature may need to be managed in perpetuity.

Robert Mark Silverman (Editor), Kelly L. Patterson (Editor).

Rebecca Redwood French (Editor), Mark A. Nathan (Editor). This book challenges the concept of Buddhism as an apolitical religion without implications for law.

Leslie C. Levin (Editor) and Lynn Mather (Editor)