Speakers: 2020 to 2016

February 7, 2020
Friday, 12:30pm, 509 O'Brian Hall

Janet Halley’s paper, Towards the Liberal Family,  offers some thinking at the theoretical level about how the rise of political and market liberalism reframed the possibilities for thinking the family and its relationship to the state and/or the emerging phenomenon of the market.

About the speaker: Janet Halley is the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from UCLA and a J.D. from Yale Law School. She has taught at Tel Aviv Buckmann School of Law and in the Law Department of the American University in Cairo. A prolific author, Halley was recently awarded the Career Achievement Award for Law and the Humanities by the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities. She teaches Family Law, Gender and the Family in Transnational Legal Orders, Gender in Postcolonial Legal Orders, Trafficking and Labor Migration, and courses on the intersections of legal theory with social theory.

February 21, 2020
Friday, 12:30pm, 509 O'Brian Hall

Abstract: This paper (which is actually a version of the first chapter of an in-progress book project) argues that contemporary networked internet "platforms" (of which the most prominent, though not exclusive, examples are the big three social media companies Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube [Google]) bear an important functional isomorphism to key forms of political organization such as cities and states in that platforms, like polities, provide their members or users an infrastracture to afford opportunities for open-ended multi-party interactions, with increasing returns to scale both for members/users and for those who control the infrastructure. This core feature generates distinctive properties of the activity over that infrastructure, including a high degree of diversity, high-speed change, and unanticipated and unanticipable novelty (both positive and negative).  This, in turn, generates distinctive governance difficulties which have been observed worldwide in recent years on social media.

That observation suggests that efforts, whether governmental or private, to build institutions capable of shaping aggregate behavioral outcomes on networked internet platforms can benefit from drawing on the insights of the literature on political and legal institutions.  Theoretical approaches to political and legal institutional analysis such as the new economics of organization associated with Douglass North and the ecological approach to public goods problems associated with Elinor Ostrom may help us understand the problems of networked internet platforms. And the institutional tools of polities, such as the rule of law and techniques associated with urban design, may help us alleviate them.

About the speaker: Paul Gowder teaches constitutional law and torts. He also taught professional responsibility and the policy lab. His research spans a broad territory in constitutional law, legal data science, ethics, normative and conceptual jurisprudence, political philosophy, democratic theory, and game theory. 

Gowder's first book, The Rule of Law in the Real World (Cambridge University Press, February 2016), draws on philosophical argument, historical research into the law in seventeenth-century England and classical Athens, and political science tools such as statistics, simulation, and formal modeling, all directed at making sense of government under law in real-world societies, and its relationship to social equality.

February 28, 2020
Friday, 12:30pm, 509 O'Brian Hall

Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire
In the talk based on the book, Erman lays out the tragic story of how the United States denied Puerto Ricans full citizenship following annexation of the island in 1898. As America became an overseas empire, a handful of remarkable Puerto Ricans debated with U.S. legislators, presidents, judges, and others over who was a citizen and what citizenship meant. This struggle caused a fundamental shift in constitutional jurisprudence: away from the post-Civil War regime of citizenship, rights, and statehood and toward doctrines that accommodated racist imperial governance. Erman’s gripping account shows how, in the wake of the Spanish–American War, administrators, lawmakers, and presidents, together with judges, deployed creativity and ambiguity to transform constitutional law and interpretation over a quarter century of debate and litigation. The result is a history in which the United States and Latin America, Reconstruction and empire, and law and bureaucracy intertwine.

About the speaker: Sam Erman is a scholar of law and history, whose research and teaching focuses on citizenship, the Constitution, empire, race, and legal change. Erman is the author of Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018). The book lays out the tragic story of how the United States denied Puerto Ricans full citizenship following annexation of the island in 1898. As America became an overseas empire, a handful of remarkable Puerto Ricans debated with U.S. legislators, presidents, judges, and others over who was a citizen and what citizenship meant. This struggle caused a fundamental shift in constitutional jurisprudence: away from the post-Civil War regime of citizenship, rights, and statehood and toward doctrines that accommodated racist imperial governance. [...] Erman’s prize-winning work appears in leading legal and peer-reviewed journals, including Michigan Law Review, California Law Review, and the Journal of American Ethnic History.

September 6, 2019
Friday, 12:30 pm, 509 O’Brian Hall

About the speaker: Stuart Banner teaches Property, the Supreme Court Clinic, and a variety of other courses. Professor Banner, as the director of UCLA’s Supreme Court Clinic, has represented parties in several recent U.S. Supreme Court cases. A Stanford Law School graduate, he was articles editor of the Stanford Law Review, and clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court. He practiced law at Davis Polk & Wardwell, and at the NY Office of the Appellate Defender. Banner received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Fulbright Scholar Program, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

September 20, 2019
Friday, 12:30 pm, 509 O’Brian Hall

About the speaker: Alexandra Natapoff's expertise is in criminal law and procedure, misdemeanors, informants, public defense, law and inequality. Her scholarship has won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Law and Society Association Article Prize, and, two Outstanding Scholarship Awards from the AALS Criminal Justice Section. Her new book, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (Basic Books, 2018), describes the powerful influence that misdemeanors exert over the entire U.S. criminal system. It was selected by Publishers Weekly as a Best Book of 2018. 

December 6, 2019
Friday, 12:30 pm, 509 O’Brian Hall

About the speaker: Christian Burset teaches and writes about civil procedure and legal history. His research focuses on the development of English and American legal institutions, including the interaction between law and economic change, the history of arbitration, and the place of specialized courts in the Anglo-American legal tradition. His current book project explores debates in the eighteenth-century British Empire about what kinds of cases and litigants belonged in common-law courts. Before coming to Notre Dame in 2018, Burset was a Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law and a clerk to the Hon. José A. Cabranes of the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Burset holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an articles editor for the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of International Law; a Ph.D. in history, also from Yale; and an A.B. in history, with highest honors, from Princeton University.

About the speaker: Catherine Fisk is the author of five books and scores of articles. Her recent books include Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue (Harvard University Press 2016), and two casebooks: Labor Law in the Contemporary Workplace (2d ed. West, 2014) and The Legal Profession (West 2014). She is also the author of Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (UNC Press 2009), which won two book prizes of the American Historical Association and the American Society for Legal History. Her recent articles cover a wide range of subjects including police unions, the history and current experiences of unionized writers in the entertainment industry, labor protest and the First Amendment, the governance of worker center and labor unions, class action employment claims, and the theory and methods of sociolegal history. Her current book project, a legal history of lawyers for the labor movement in the mid-twentieth century, examines the challenges faced by lawyers and labor unions as the courts and Congress steadily increased restrictions on labor protest between 1940 and 1990.

About the speaker: András Sajó recently completed his term as a judge on the European Court of Human Rights, Strasbourg (2008-2017). He is a prominent constitutionalist, and a distinguished scholar in the human rights field, including media regulation.He is a University Professor at CEU and Global Visiting Professor of Law at New York University Law School. Professor Sajó was the founding dean of Legal Studies at CEU. In addition to his stature as a prominent constitutionalist, he is also a distinguished scholar in the human rights field, including media regulation. Professor Sajó has been extensively involved in legal drafting throughout Eastern Europe. In addition, he participated and/or advised in drafting the Ukrainian, Georgian, and South African constitutions. 

About the speaker: Cristina Bicchieri's intellectual affinities lie at the border between philosophy, game theory and psychology. Her primary research focus is on judgment and decision making with special interest in decisions about fairness, trust, and cooperation, and how expectations affect behavior. A second research focus examines the nature and evolution of social norms, how to measure norms and what strategies to adopt to foster social change. This research is more applied, and forms the core of the newly created Penn Social Norms Group (PennSONG). A third, earlier research focus has been the epistemic foundations of game theory and how changes in information affects rational choices and solutions. 

About the speaker: Matthew D. Adler is the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy at Duke University, and is the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy. His scholarship is interdisciplinary, drawing from both welfare economics and normative ethics.  Adler’s current research agenda focuses on “prioritarianism”—a refinement to utilitarianism that gives extra weight (“priority”) to the worse off. 

 

About the speaker: John J. Donohue III has been one of the leading empirical researchers in the legal academy over the past 25 years. Professor Donohue is an economist as well as a lawyer and is well known for using empirical analysis to determine the impact of law and public policy in a wide range of areas, including civil rights and antidiscrimination law, employment discrimination, crime and criminal justice, and school funding. Professor Donohue previously was a member of the law school faculty from 1995–2004. 
 

About the speaker: Steven Boutcher is Executive Officer of the Law and Society Association and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Previously, Steve was a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center, an assistant professor of sociology and public policy at UMass, and the Executive Director of the Center for Employment Equity at UMass. Steve received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine in 2010. Steve’s scholarship focuses on the relationship between law, organizations, and social change, particularly focusing on law and social movements and the legal profession. He is currently co-PI on several multi-year projects investigating sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in the workplace, precarity in public sector employment, and social networks of law students. 

About the speaker: Allison K. Hoffman, an expert on health care law and policy, is a Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania Law School. Professor Hoffman’s work examines some of the most important legal and social issues of our time, including health insurance regulation, the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and retiree healthcare expenses, and Medicaid and long-term care. She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of U.S. Health Law (2007).

Professor Hoffman graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College and from Yale Law School, where she was Submissions Editor for the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics. She currently teaches classes on Health Care Law and Policy, Torts, and a seminar on Health Insurance and Reform and is the Chair of the Insurance Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools.

About the speaker: Professor Talesh is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work spans law, sociology, and political science. His research interests include the empirical study of law and business organizations, dispute resolution, consumer protection, insurance, and the relationship between law and social inequality. Professor Talesh’s most recent empirical study addresses the intersection between organizations, risk, and consumer protection laws, focusing on private organizations' responses to and constructions of laws designed to regulate them, consumers' mobilization of their legal rights and the legal cultures of private organizations. Professor Talesh’s scholarship has appeared in multiple law and peer-reviewed social science journals including Law and Society Review and has won multiple awards in Sociology, Political Science and Law & Society.

About the speaker: Harold Hongju Koh, Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, is one of the country’s leading experts in public and private international law, national security law, and human rights. Koh has received seventeen honorary degrees and more than thirty awards for his human rights work and lifetime achievements in international law. He has authored or co-authored eight books, published more than 200 articles, testified regularly before Congress, and litigated numerous cases involving international law issues in both U.S. and international tribunals. Koh is a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a member of the Council of the American Law Institute. 

About the speaker: Christine Desan teaches about the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory.  She is the co-founder of Harvard’s Program on the Study of Capitalism, an interdisciplinary project that brings together classes, resources, research funds, and advising aimed at exploring that topic.  With its co-director, Prof. Sven Beckert (History), she has taught the Program’s anchoring research seminar, the Workshop on the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism, since 2005. Desan will be a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study during the 2015-2016 academic year and at the Massachusetts Historical Society in the fall of 2016. 

About the speaker: Mitra Sharafi is a legal historian of South Asia. She holds law degrees from Cambridge and Oxford (the UK equivalent of a JD and LLM) and a doctorate in history from Princeton. Sharafi's book, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) won the Law and Society Association's J. Willard Hurst Prize for socio-legal history in 2015. The book explores the legal culture of the Parsis or Zoroastrians of British India, an ethno-religious minority that was unusually invested in colonial law. Her research interests include South Asian legal history; the history of the legal profession; the history of colonialism; the history of contract law; law and society; law and religion; law and minorities; legal consciousness; legal pluralism; and the history of science and medicine. Sharafi is a regular contributor to the Legal History Blog. Since 2010, her South Asian Legal History Resources website has shared research guides and other tools for the historical study of law in South Asia.

About the speaker: Erin Delaney is an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University Law School with a courtesy appointment in political science.  In 2014, she held the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism at McGill University.   Her research focuses on constitutional design and comparative constitutional law, with particular attention to the role of courts in multi-level governance systems.

About the speaker: Douglas NeJaime is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and Faculty Director of the Williams Institute. He teaches in the areas of family law, law and sexuality, constitutional law, and legal ethics. NeJaime is on leave for the 2016-17 academic year. He is the Martin R. Flug Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School (Fall 2016) and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (Spring 2017).

NeJaime is the co-author of Cases and Materials on Sexual Orientation and the Law (with William Rubenstein, Carlos Ball, and Jane Schacter) (5th ed. West 2014).  His recent scholarship includes "Marriage Equality and the New Parenthood," 129 Harvard Law Review 1185 (2016); “Conscience Wars: Complicity-Based Conscience Claims in Religion and Politics,” 124 Yale Law Journal 2516 (2015), with Reva Siegel; “Before Marriage: The Unexplored History of Nonmarital Recognition and Its Relationship to Marriage,” 102 California Law Review 87 (2014); “Constitutional Change, Courts, and Social Movements,” 113 Michigan Law Review 877 (2013); “Marriage Inequality: Same-Sex Relationships, Religious Exemptions, and the Production of Sexual Orientation Discrimination,” 100 California Law Review 1169 (2012); “Winning Through Losing,” 96 Iowa Law Review 941 (2011); and “Lawyering for Marriage Equality,” 57 UCLA Law Review 1235 (2010), with Scott Cummings.

NeJaime is a two-time recipient of the Dukeminier Award, which recognizes the best sexual orientation legal scholarship published in the previous year.  He is also the 2014 recipient of UCI Law’s Professor of the Year Award and the 2011 recipient of Loyola Law School’s Excellence in Teaching Award. 

About the speaker: Hiroshi Motomura is an influential teacher and scholar of immigration and citizenship law.  His book, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (Oxford 2006) won the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PROSE) Award from the Association of American Publishers as the year’s best book in Law and Legal Studies, and was chosen by the U.S. Department of State for its Suggested Reading List for Foreign Service Officers.  He is a co-author of two immigration-related casebooks: Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy (8th ed. West 2016), and Forced Migration: Law and Policy (2d ed. West 2013), and he has published many widely cited articles on immigration and citizenship.  His most recent book, Immigration Outside the Law (Oxford 2014), won the Association of American Publishers' Law and Legal Studies 2015 PROSE Award and was chosen by the Association of College and Research Libraries as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.  

About the speaker: Kenneth Abbott’s teaching and research focus on the interdisciplinary study of international law and international relations, including public and private institutions, environmental issues, development policy, global health, and international trade and economic law. He also has a faculty appointment in the ASU School of Global Studies, where he co-directs the global environmental governance program.

About the book: International Organizations as Orchestrators reveals how IOs leverage their limited authority and resources to increase their effectiveness, power, and autonomy from states. By 'orchestrating' intermediaries - including NGOs - IOs can shape and steer global governance without engaging in hard, direct regulation. This volume is organized around a theoretical model that emphasizes voluntary collaboration and support. An outstanding group of scholars investigate the significance of orchestration across key issue areas, including trade, finance, environment and labor, and in leading organizations, including the GEF, G20, WTO, EU, Kimberley Process, UNEP and ILO. The empirical studies find that orchestration is pervasive. They broadly confirm the theoretical hypotheses while providing important new insights, especially that states often welcome IO orchestration as achieving governance without creating strong institutions. This volume changes our understanding of the relationships among IOs, nonstate actors and states in global governance, using a theoretical framework applicable to domestic governance.

About the speaker: Ahmed White joined the faculty at the Colorado Law School in 2000, after spending three semesters as a visiting professor at Northwestern University Law School. Professor White's interest in legal scholarship and teaching was first developed during his time as a student at Yale Law School and during a two-year research fellowship that followed. Before entering teaching, he served as a legal analyst at the Louisiana State Senate. His scholarship centers on the intersection of labor and criminal law and on the concept of rule of law. 

Organized by the UB Department of Sociology.
Co-sponsored by The Baldy Center.