Spring 2022 Magazine

Human rights have always varied from nation to nation. Disability rights are no different. The divergence widens from global to local levels – from international agreements, to national policies, to funding, to local implementation. The global strive toward equality remains uneven. Continue reading.

In 1998, the international NGO Global Witness published a report called A Rough Trade. This report outlined the diamond industry’s role during the decades of civil war in Angola, and called on companies, such as DeBeers, to be more accountable and transparent while enforcing the embargo on conflict diamonds.  Continue reading.

“Attacks on health care are part of Russian strategy, with Ukrainian civilians used as "chess pieces," explains World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on March 30, 2022.  Continue reading.

Buffalo is more diverse in 2020 than in 2010, and immigration is a driving force in that change. Buffalo reached its peak population in the 1950 census, with the number of inhabitants declining for the next six decades. Continue reading.

Dr. Jacqueline Campbell, PhD,MSN,RN, recently wrote a short piece in the Domestic Violence Report in which she reminds us that rates of intimate partner violence (IPV) homicides in the United States have been increasing since 2014. Continue reading.

Current efforts are being conducted to develop models that can adequately simulate the nearshore regions of the lake, which typically exhibit algae-related problems, along with the deeper water environment, where the concern is primarily for fish. These models are continually evolving. Continue reading.

Around the world, countries and companies are committing to net-zero targets, which are rapidly becoming a global norm. Reaching net-zero emissions by midcentury is in line with what the science says needs to be done to curb warming to safer levels. Continue reading.

Engineering education has historically been limited in developing students’ awareness of social justice issues, even though research tells us that students who are underrepresented (by class, race, gender, etc.) can be empowered and retained when participating in social justice projects related to engineering. Read more.

Why is it so difficult to ensure equality of access to public toilets for all? To find pleasant facilities? To implement design practices that support safety, health, and function? Public toilets have been around for over 2000 years! In recent years, restrooms have become the major spatial locus of conflict over trans* rights. But the trans* population is not the only one that has problems with restrooms. Human rights advocates recognize the importance of access to public toilets for dignity, health, and social participation. In low-income countries, providing safe and secure public toilets to reduce the spread of disease is a major public health initiative, especially important to support access to education and social participation by girls and women. Read more.

Some legal scholars have responded to the liberal, autonomous subject by theorizing a vulnerable subject. In doing so, they recognize vulnerability as a universal and constant characteristic of the human condition. Alternatively, many humanists use a different conceptual frame which follows Judith Butler’s distinction between precariousness as universal human vulnerability and the political state of precarity. Precarity is a useful critical tool because the rhetorical constructions of precarity demonstrate how activists and politicians create worldviews and assemble publics. Political cultures construct precarity, shifting the precarity of different people fluidly. On what days does the precarity of Afghan women exceed that of US soldiers?   In an earlier study of the discourses surrounding Buffalo’s refugees, I suggest that precarity is often denied or ignored, not just because people wish to be competent, but because dominant discourses obscure our ability to recognize precarity and its causes. Over a decade ago, Buffalo media occasionally worried about the precarity of refugees and their economic cost to the county. Now, it reports that refugees have stabilized the city’s shrinking population, revitalized the city’s West Side, and provided an inteRrnational economic network. Read more.

Republicans wonder how New Yorkers could have ever supported disgraced New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, amazed that his polling among state voters remained so high throughout almost the entirety of the scandals of 2020-21. Meanwhile, Democrats are flabbergasted at the strong levels of support former President Donald Trump continues to receive from conservative voters, despite his numerous moral miscues. The rise and fall of these politicians (as well as that of countless others) offers fascinating evidence on the ethics of our elected officials, and other things that don't exist. Read the blog.

The devastating images of chaos and suffering in Afghanistan have left an indelible mark on citizens and policy-makers in the West. They have made the evacuation of those Afghans who served alongside U.S. and European militaries a moral obligation—and raised the question whether that obligation must extend, as well, to any and all Afghans who are imperiled by the return of Taliban rule. Read blog here.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, a grassroots movement to remove, and in some cases reimagine, Confederate monuments has refocused national conversations about racial justice, memory, and public space. While some have lamented these removals as an effort to “erase history,” others point out that these edifices represented only a mythologized past that itself erased the experiences of enslaved people and their descendants. Read blog here.

On March 31, 2021, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the New York Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act into law. The new law is designed to establish a framework for regulating the cannabis industry in New York and to providing adult access to recreational cannabis. The retail market likely will be launched in 2023, following the establishment of the Office of Cannabis Management and other necessary entities. Read blog here.

The American Bar Association’s (ABA) National Taskforce on Lawyer Well-Being released the The Path to Lawyer Wellbeing Report (2017). The report begins, “To be a good lawyer, one has to be a healthy lawyer. Sadly, our profession is falling short when it comes to well-being.” The report cites studies that reveal the high rates of chronic stress, depression and substance abuse among lawyers and law students, what they describe as the toxicity of the profession, and the stigma associated with help seeking behaviors. The report held as its central guiding principle that well-being is an indispensable part of a lawyer's duty of competence.

October 25, Monday, 684 Baldy Hall; 12:00 (Lunch) 12:30 p.m. (Speaker): Join us for the presentation by Ehlimana Memišević (University of Sarajevo),Transitional Justice and Reconciliation: Challenges in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her research concerns the 1992–1995 war which involved systematic violence against the ethnic ‘other’ through the genocidal campaigns of ‘ethnic cleansing 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. Memišević will discuss how genocide committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina is now used as an inspiration for terrorists and far-right extremists around the world. Learn more.  The event is free and open to the public with advance registration.

China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermaths

November 3, Wednesday at noon, join us for a presentation by Wang Feng, PhD (UC Irvine). Professor Wang Feng is a 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, presented by the UB Confucius Institute, is co-sponsored by The Baldy Center.  Learn more about this event.

After Genocide: Memory and Reconciliation in Rwanda
February 18, 2022, 12:00pm
509 O’Brian Hall and via Zoom

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.  

March 11, 2022, 12:30pm ET
509 O’Brian Hall

"The Double Lives of Police Professionalism: Police Reform in Practice and in Court"
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. Read more.

April 1, 2022, 12:30pm ET
509 O’Brian Hall

The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary
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. Learn more.

April 15, 2022, 12:30pm ET
Via Zoom (only)

"Workplace Injury, Social Murder, and Law"
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. Continue reading.