Tempering Power

Mary Anne Bobinski is a Professor at the Allard School of Law, where she served as Dean from 2003 to 2015. Before joining UBC, she was the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Law and Director of the Health Law and Policy Institute at the University of Houston Law Center. Professor Bobinski's research and teaching interests include torts, health law, health care finance, bioethics,  legal aspects of HIV infection, and reproductive health law issues.

Susan Bibler Coutin holds a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology and is professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, where she served as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the Graduate Division from 2010-2017.  Her research has examined social, political, and legal activism surrounding immigration issues, particularly immigration from El Salvador to the United States. 

Jessica R. Greenberg is Director of Undergraduate Studies, and Associate Professor, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, University of Illinois. Her research interests include Anthropology of democracy, legal anthropology, postsocialism, youth, social movements, revolution, Serbia/Balkans, Europe.

Heinz Klug is Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School and an Honorary Senior Research Associate in the School of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Growing up in Durban, South Africa, he participated in the anti-apartheid struggle, spent 11 years in exile and returned to South Africa in 1990 as a member of the ANC Land Commission and researcher for Zola Skweyiya, chairperson of the ANC Constitutional Committee. He was also a team member on the World Bank mission to South Africa on Land Reform and Rural Restructuring.

Martin Krygier is the Gordon Samuels Professor of Law and Social Theory, and Co-Director, Network for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law, UNSW Sydney (the University of New South Wales). His areas of expertise include: law and social theory; legal theory; law after communism; rule of law; normative social theory; and interactions between state and non-state law.

Kwai Ng is Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, Sociology Department, UC San Diego. Kwai Ng’s research interests are sociology of law, legal language, and social theory. He has conducted field research on the grassroots courts in China and the bilingual courtrooms in Hong Kong. He has recently completed a book manuscript on the Chinese courts.

Nimer Sultany is Senior Lecturer in Public Law, School of Law, SOAS University of London. He has published extensively on constitutional theory, comparative constitutionalism, and Israeli jurisprudence. His book Law and Revolution: Legitimacy and Constitutionalism After the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2017) won the 2018 Book Prize awarded by the International Society of Public Law and the 2018 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship awarded by the Society of Legal Scholars.

David A. Westbrook, is Louis A. Del Cotto Professor,and  Director of the New York City Program on Finance and Law, University at Buffalo School of Law. Westbrook thinks and writes about the social and intellectual consequences of contemporary political economy. His work influences numerous disciplines, including law, economics, finance, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and design. He has spoken on six continents to academics, business and financial leaders, members of the security community, civil institutions and governments, often with the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department. 

Cynthia Williams is Professor (Osler Chair in Business Law), York University. Williams writes in the areas of securities law, corporate law, corporate responsibility, comparative corporate governance and regulatory theory, often in interdisciplinary collaborations with professors in anthropology, economic sociology, and organizational psychology. 

Peer Zumbansen is Professor of Transnational Law & Director of the TLI, The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London. Zumbansen’s research is focused on private law theory, comparative and transnational law. One of his longstanding research interests has been in legal education and legal curriculum reform, with a particular emphasis on the enhancement of a more foundational as well as practice-oriented law training. 

About the illustration: Image courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress. "The Tantalus of to-day" by J.S. Pughe, for Puck Magazine, 1897.  Published by Keppler & Schwarzmann, 1897. DK Remix 2018 for The Baldy Center.

The original print shows Uncle Sam as Tantalus, bound with ropes to posts labeled "High Protective Tariff" and "Free Silver Agitation" by two men labeled "Protected Manufacturer" and "Silverite"; they are preventing him from satisfying his desires for "Prosperity", depicted as a female figure holding a cornucopia, standing among factories spewing smoke, along the waterfront, across an "Ocean of Politics". Visit the LOC website.