Senior and Mid-Career Fellows

Nick Cheesman, The Baldy Center Senior Fellow Fall 2022, is a Fellow in the Department of Political & Social Change and a Fellow in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. He holds a Master’s Degree in Education from University of Western Australia and a PhD from the Department of Political and Social Change at Australian National University. He currently is a series co-editor for the ASAA Southeast Asian Publications Series, and he holds an Australian Research Council grant to study the relation of torture to political order in mainland Southeast Asia. Cheesman has received numerous awards and prizes for his scholarship and writing. His next book, Myanmar: Politics and society is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. 

Dr. Cheesman’s areas of expertise include law and society, government and politics of Asia and the Pacific, and political theory and political philosophy. His current major project is entitled “Rules of Law in Thailand and Myanmar in comparative historic perspective.” While in residence at The Baldy Center, Cheesman plans to analyze interdisciplinary legal studies on torture, law, and politics. His research “seeks to account for the properties of torture by reference to the political order in which it is imbricated, and in turn, to reveal otherwise obscured particulars of that political order through study of the torture situation, and seeks to develop an interpretation of how torture is made possible in the contemporary world through a variety of juridical and political arrangements.” He plans to offer a new interpretation of the constitutive relationship between torture, law and politics.

Miriam Driessen, 2022-2023 Baldy Center Senior Fellow, is an anthropologist trained at Oxford. Her work explores local courts as global actors. Based on more than a decade of research on Ethiopian-Chinese interactions, she examines the role of lower courts in Ethiopia in disciplining Chinese capital and containing its excesses. At the Baldy Center, she will also work on a second, collaborative project that examines the transnational reach of China’s courts through the analysis of cross-border labor disputes. Dr. Driessen is the author of Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia and The Restless Earth: Rural China in Transition.

Marie Jauffret-Roustide, 2021-2022 Baldy Center Senior Fellow, is a Research Fellow at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) in France, Paris. She has a multidisciplinary background: she holds a Master’s Degree in Political Science, a PhD in sociology and social science and an “Habilitation” to supervise research in public health and social science. She is the leader of an international comparative research on the history of harm reduction between France and the United States. Dr. Jauffret-Roustide will analyze three representative contemporary drug policy issues affecting both North America (specifically the United States) and partially Europe (France) during her Baldy Center fellowship: the history of opioid substitutive treatments, the opioid overdose crisis, and the controversy on drug consumption rooms. 

Jauffret-Roustide's research focuses on drug policy and harm reduction paradigm, ethnicity and gender issues, laws, and regulations, structural inequalities in health and social policies, and patient groups’ and users’ involvement in drug policy changes, including analyses of the biomedicalization process of addiction. She has been designated by Inserm to evaluate the implementation of drug consumption rooms in Paris. She coordinates the D3S research program ("Social Sciences, Drugs and Society") for the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. The aim of the D3S research program is to increase the visibility of social science research on drug policy at the national and international levels and to facilitate dialogue between researchers and civil society. Jauffret-Roustide is an Awardee of the 2019 French Scholar Lecture Series, Peter Wall Institute, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Khohchahar Chuluu, 2019-2020 Senior Fellow, is Associate Professor in the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies and the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo. He received an LL.D. and an LL.M. from the Graduate School of Law at Kyoto University. His research centers on comparative Asian law and history, with a focus on Mongolian legal history and hunting law. His research has culminated in many published articles, including work appearing in Inner Asia, the Journal of Korean Legal History and Forest Economy. He is also the co-editor of the book Status and Economy (with Takeshi Sasaki, Kumi Takada, and Yumiko Marumoto: Jigakusha, December 2019). His work at The Baldy Center during Spring 2020 will include a study of laws regulating hunts in Eurasian history, focusing specifically on the hunting institutions (organizations) and their associated rules, from northeast Asia to some kingdoms in Western Europe. This study aims to clarify how hunting laws related to laws in general and how they promoted socio-political order throughout history.

Nancy S. Marder, Spring 2019 Senior Fellow, is Professor of Law at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, where she also serves as the Director of the Justice John Paul Stevens Jury Center and Co-Director of the Institute for Law and the Humanities. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, and is also an Academic Fellow of the Pound Civil Justice Institute. Her areas of expertise include juries, judges, and courts.  She is the author of forty law review articles, two books, nine book chapters, twenty-five essays, and eleven book reviews. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, and has a M.Phil. from Cambridge University, where she was a Mellon Fellow, and a B.A. from Yale. Her Baldy Center research will focus on a book, The Power of the Jury: Transforming Citizens into Jurors, which examines how every stage of the jury process—from voir dire to post-verdict interviews—helps to transform ordinary citizens into responsible jurors. Marder's theory of jurors starts from the premise that citizens can be complicated and have biases, as all people do, rather than assuming a simplistic model of jurors who are either biased or unbiased, as the traditional view does. This new theory nonetheless allows for understanding the creation of impartial jurors through the jury process. The approach Marder posits will give judges, lawyers, academics, legislators, and concerned citizens a new way to evaluate jury reforms. 

Werner Reutter, Fall 2018 Senior Fellow, is a research fellow of political science at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, the University of Potsdam, the University of Bonn, the University of Jena, Humboldt-University of Berlin, and the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. His major publications include books and articles on interest groups, international trade union politics, constitutional politics, German federalism, and state constitutional courts. He studied public administration and political science at the University of Applied Sciences in Kehl/Rhine, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the Free University Berlin. As a senior fellow at The Baldy Center, he will explore whether, and to what extent, decisions of a German subnational constitutional court and an American state supreme court infringe on the competencies of state legislatures.

Nora V. Demleitner, 2017-18 Senior Fellow, is Roy L. Steinheimer Jr. Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, where she previously served as dean of the law school. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, the European Law Institute, and the International Academy of Comparative Law. She has authored over sixty articles, published in leading U.S. law journals, is the lead author of Sentencing Law and Policy (Wolters Kluwer), and an editor of the Federal Sentencing Reporter. She is a graduate of Yale Law School and holds an LL.M. in International and Comparative Law from Georgetown Law Center.

Her Baldy Center research will outline the pressing need to dismantle mass imprisonment and provide proposals on how to achieve that goal. It is based on personal, theoretical, and practical accounts of the U.S. criminal justice system, which engulfs everyone and taints all with its inhumanity. The work builds on Demleitner’s comparative work in criminal justice, sentencing, and post-sentence collateral consequences.

Antonio María Hernández, 2017-18 Senior Fellow, is Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of Public Provincial Law and Municipal Law at the National University of Córdoba and Director of the Institute of Federalism of the National Academy of Law and Social Sciences of Córdoba University.  He is currently Honorary President of the National Association of Constitutional Law of Argentina and Member of the Board of Directors of the International Association of Centers for Federal Studies.  He has authored and co-authored over fifty books on constitutional law, federalism, state constitutional law and municipal law. He holds a Ph.D. in Law and Social Sciences from the National University of Córdoba, Argentina.

At The Baldy Center, his research focused on a constitutional comparative vision on American and Argentinian federations. Using an interdisciplinary approach, he analyzed the similarities and differences between the two, taking into account that the model for the original Argentina Constitution of 1853 was the Philadelphia Constitution of 1787. This research builds on his previous work comparing Mexican and Argentinian federalism. See the results of this work in the Buffalo Legal Studies Series.

Professor Catherine Connolly (Senior Fellow, 2016-17) is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wyoming (UW), where she served nine years as the department director.  Dr. Connolly earned a J.D. (cum laude, 1991) and a Ph.D. (Sociology, 1992) from the University at Buffalo. As a graduate student at UB, she was a Baldy Center fellow.

Prof. Margaret A. Shannon (Senior Fellow, 2014-2019) is a widely published and highly regarded scholar of forest and natural resources governance, law, and policy. She recently completed five years as the Director of the European Forest Institute’s “Forest Policy, Economics, and Governance Education and Research Program” (FOPER) in the Western Balkans. She coordinated a team of over one hundred researchers and educators in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Serbia in an intensive process of building academic capacity and research institutions.

She currently serves as Professor in Honor in the Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her previous positions include Professor and Associate Dean of the Rubenstein School of Natural Resources at the University of Vermont; Research Professor at SUNY Buffalo Law School; Associate Professor of Public Administration at Syracuse University; Corkery Professor of Forest Policy at the University of Washington; Associate Professor of Natural Resources Policy and Sociology at the SUNY School of Environmental Sciences and Forestry, Syracuse; and Senior Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor at Lewis and Clark Law School, Portland, Oregon.

Her current research topics include participation and adaptation in environmental governance; place-making and social conflict; and the changing nature of sustainable forestry. Her work at Baldy Center focuses on changing roles and interaction patterns in transnational environmental governance.

Prof. Kathleen Biddick (Senior Fellow, 2012-13) is Professor Emeritus of History at Temple University. She has authored books in the fields of medieval studies, critical historiography, and theory: The Other Economy; The Shock of Medievalism; The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology and History. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships: Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Stanford Humanities Center, Dartmouth Humanities Center, National Science Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies Curriculum Development Award. Her current book project, Entangled Sovereignty: A Study in Premodern Political Theology, delves into the return of the miracle in contemporary theories of sovereignty and discusses its importance for premodern scholars and for contemporary theory.

She traces the links between the discourse of the most powerful abbey of twelfth-century Christendom, Cluny in Burgundy, which defined miracle-making in terms of its declared enemies, Jews and Muslim, and the theoretical writings of Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy. The project argues that these medieval dead neighbors of Cluny remain undead and driven in the drive of contemporary theory, until their archive is recognized and embraced. During her stay at The Baldy Center in Spring 2013, she worked to turn her studies into a monograph.

Her time at The Baldy Center has already borne fruit and the following essays have recently appeared. "What does “Deconstructing Christianity” Want?" Minnesota Review, (Special Issue on Medieval Studies and Theory) No. 80 ( 2013): 83-94. (4) “Transmedieval Mattering and the Untimeliness of the Real Presence,” Postmedieval, 4 (2) 2013: 238-252. “How do New Things Come into the World of Feminist History?” invited review essay,Journal of Social History,46 (4) 2013:1060-1065. “Zombie Flesh and Blood and the Real Presence (then and now), Theory@Buffalo, issue # 17 (Fall 2013)

Prof. Angela Harris (Senior Fellow, 2009-11) Professor Angela P. Harris joined the U.C. Davis School of Law faculty in 2011. She began her career at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law in 1989, and has been a visiting professor at the law schools of Stanford, Yale, and Georgetown and vice dean of research and faculty development at the SUNY Buffalo Law School. She writes widely in the field of critical legal theory, examining how law sometimes reinforces and sometimes challenges subordination on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other dimensions of power and identity.

Harris is also a prolific co-author of casebooks, including Criminal Law: Cases and Materials; Race and Races: Cases and Materials for a Diverse America; Gender and Law; and Economic Justice. Her writings have been widely anthologized and have been translated into many languages, from Portuguese to Korean. Harris received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in social science (with a specialization in the sociology of culture) from the University of Chicago, where she also received her J.D. She clerked for Judge Joel M. Flaum on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and then briefly practiced with the firm of Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco before making her way to Berkeley.

At the University at Buffalo, along with Professor Stephanie Phillips, she pioneered a seminar called “Mindfulness and Professional Identity: Becoming a Lawyer While Keeping Your Values Intact.” She is the recipient of the Rutter Award for Distinction in Teaching from Berkeley Law, and received the 2008 Clyde Ferguson Award from the Minority Section of the Association of American Law Schools for her mentorship of students and junior faculty.