Dimick named director of Baldy Center

The Baldy Center is an endowed academic center for interdisciplinary research on law and legal institutions. Its mission is to advance interdisciplinary research on law, legal institutions and social policy. We bring in scholars and speakers from around the country — and the world — to present their research and get feedback from our smart and talented faculty and students. The Baldy Center provides funding for research grants and for hosting conferences, and we provide financial support for early, mid-career and senior scholars so they can develop both their research and careers. Among many other things!

It’s an impressive range of programming. To me, The Baldy Center is one of the best things about being a faculty member at UB School of Law. I want to build on what we do to make sure the center and UB get recognition for this amazing work. We’ve supported outstanding scholarship and have hosted some phenomenal guests, and I’m afraid too often those things fly under the radar.

It’s a commonplace that the world is more interconnected than ever. And yet those interconnections are under incredible strain. Issues like world trade, immigration and nationalism are front and center. The Baldy Center recently held a conference, hosted by faculty member Jorge Fabra-Zamora, on transnational legal and political theory, which addressed topics like indigenous and customary law, international law, and international and regional human rights law. So these are topics of direct concern to the center.

At the same time, the local can often illuminate the global, and vice versa. For example, one of our long-serving faculty members, Jack Schlegel, recently completed a book about the history of the Buffalo economy. It’s a topic near and dear to us as Buffalonians, but the book also impressively illuminates universal concerns about law, economic development and urban space. We have many other faculty members who are intensively involved with local issues that nevertheless speak to worldwide needs. The Baldy Center helps support that work, and it provides a model for what the center can strive to build on: locally rooted but globally conscious.

Certainly, one of the most important roles of the law school and legal education is training the next generation of lawyers. But we’d be failing in our mission — especially here at the state’s only public law school — if we didn’t recognize our obligation to the larger public. We want to teach our students how to be zealous advocates for their clients, but legal scholars also want to know if the law is actually working for everyone in society. Is the law helping society be more equitable and prosperous? Is it helping everyone reach their individual potential?

 The social sciences — sociology, political science, economics and anthropology, but also philosophy and the humanities — provide the tools to help legal scholars study those questions, sometimes in a critical but also constructive way. And The Baldy Center helps bring people together from across these diverse scholarly backgrounds to engage, debate and discuss solutions to social problems and whether the law can — or can’t — help address them.

Popular outlets are concerned with the most topical questions of the day, and it is incumbent upon legal scholars to explain how their research answers those questions. There’s unfortunately a wide divide — larger, perhaps, than I’ve seen it before — between academia and the public at large. Sometimes, I admit, I wish the public would work a little harder to peek behind the sound bites and shock-value headlines to understand the value scholars see in their own work. But, to be sure, scholars don’t always make it simple for the public to do that. Sometimes it’s easier for scholars to get absorbed only in what other members of their discipline are doing or saying, especially when the world doesn’t seem to be listening. My hope is that explaining and providing context for your research in popular outlets helps to close that divide.

Absolutely! Both in the more traditional sense, with The Baldy Center and associated scholars engaging with economists from economics departments, but also in other ways as well. New scholarly avenues have opened up just in the past decade that seek to look at the economy from alternative perspectives. One of these goes under the name of law and political economy. Economists often take the economy as simply given, starting with individuals, their preferences and technology, and then ask which legal rules would serve predefined economic goals, like efficiency. Scholars in law and political economy want to flip the script, so to speak. They point out, “Hey, we wouldn’t even have an economy without the law!”

Property, contract, corporate law, intellectual property and so forth, all provide the essential legal infrastructure needed for the economy to function. These scholars ask how the law shapes and constitutes the economy, rather than the other way around. Some of our current and former faculty members here at UB — Athena Mutua and Martha McCluskey, among others — were crucial in founding these efforts and in keeping the flame alive before these perspectives became more popular.

I want to stress, too, that while some of these competing perspectives are debates about advancing knowledge and truth — who has the “right” answers about how the economy works? — economics and law and political economy can work together, too. Different problems require different tools. Too often, when you have a hammer, everything becomes a nail. But that’s not how the world works.