Guest Speakers

OCTOBER 31, 2024
U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy: Shaping Trade Agreements with ASEAN and Taiwan
Thursday, 509 O'Brian Hall
Noon Reception; 12:30 Presentation
Option to attend via Zoom.
Access the advance paper when available. |
The seminar by Pasha L. Hsieh provides up-to-date analysis of the US/Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade within the context of both domestic and international law, examining its implications for Indo-Pacific regionalism. Specifically, it explores how the Initiative complements the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) and the broader Indo-Pacific strategy, with a focus on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in light of the emerging “China challenges.” First, it offers a theoretical framework that bridges international law and international relations perspectives on recognition and situates the Indo-Pacific strategy within a global context, rather than focusing narrowly on U.S.-China tensions. Second, it addresses constitutional issues related to the shared trade authority between Congress and the president, as well as controversies in trade and international law. Finally, it compares the Initiative with previous U.S.-Taiwan agreements and contemporary Indo-Pacific trade agreements, including the IPEF, ASEAN-Plus agreements, and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. The findings offer valuable insights into the transforming landscape of Indo-Pacific dynamics.

Bio: Pasha L. Hsieh is Jean Monnet Chair Professor and Lee Kong Chian Fellow at the Singapore Management University, Yong Pung How School of Law. He received his J.D. and LL.M. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he was a Senior Editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Additionally, he holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Free University of Brussels. Prior to academia, he served as a Legal Affairs Officer at the WTO Appellate Body Secretariat and as an associate at Shearman & Sterling LLP.

Hsieh’s teaching and research primarily focus on international economic law, public international law, and Asian legal studies. His monograph, New Asian Regionalism in International Economic Law, was published by Cambridge University Press and has been translated into Chinese and Japanese. He co-edited the book, ASEAN Law in the New Regional Economic Order: Global Trends and Shifting Paradigms, also published by Cambridge University Press. He was the Co-Chair of the American Society of International Law-Asia-Pacific Interest Group and is an Executive Council Member of the Society of International Economic Law.

NOVEMBER 1, 2024
Federalism, Democracy, and Populism: the German Case
Friday, 509 O'Brian Hall
Noon Reception; 12:30 Presentation
Option to attend via Zoom, here.
Presentation Abstract: Germany has always taken pride in the fact that it has an effective antidote to populism and authoritarian tendencies. We have always considered Germany to be a 'wehrhafte Demokratie“' or 'militant democracy'. And federalism was part of that concept. However, I will argue that federalism is part of the problem. It provides gateways for populist parties to undermine the very functioning of German consensus democracy and the rule of law. 

Documentation and Denial:
The Fight Over Evidence of Mass Atrocities 
SEPTEMBER 6, 2024 
Friday, 509 O'Brian Hall
Noon Reception; 12:30 p.m. Presentation
Option to attend via Zoom.

Kate Cronin Furman (University College London)
Abstract; In 2017, as three quarters of a million Burmese Rohingya fled across the border into Bangladesh, Burmese government officials insisted that the Rohingya were torching their own villages and fleeing to damage Burma’s international reputation. In 2009, with extensive photographic and video evidence circulating of mass civilian death caused by government shelling, Sri Lankan officials loudly touted their military campaign’s “zero civilian casualty” count, claiming any allegations to the contrary were terrorist propaganda.

State perpetrated mass atrocities are a devastatingly common feature of the international system, and in many cases, they are accompanied by a pattern of almost farcically implausible denials. Distinct from the protestations of the newly accused hoping to escape blame, these are denials that lack any facial credibility and persist long after the emergence of confirmatory evidence of guilt. But even though these denials do little to convince anybody of perpetrators’ innocence, they can form a core component of a strategy aimed at preventing international interference.

This project explores how state perpetrators of mass atrocities use denials alongside information access restriction to create a heightened burden of proof on the world stage for victims and their allies to demonstrate that actionable violations of human rights are occurring. Through a close examination of the tension between victims’ efforts to expose abuses and powerful perpetrators’ attempts to conceal them across cases including Tigray, Sri Lanka, and Burma, it illuminates the role that strategic contestation over information plays in facilitating the commission of atrocities and disrupting international will to intervene.

DISCONSENTS, a paper by Daryl Levinson and David Pozen
SEPTEMBER 20, 2024 
Abstract: Consent is both an indispensable concept in a liberal legal order and an increasingly elusive ideal in myriad settings. Even as consent-based regulation has spread across field after field, the normative meaningfulness and empirical feasibility of many forms of consent have come under strain. The result is a systemic crisis of consent that crosses the public law/private law divide and imperils the legitimacy of both.

In this paper, we document how the rise of neoliberalism led to greater reliance on consent throughout the law as well as to greater doubts about its moral efficacy, so that some of the pathologies of consent that have been identified within particular domains now generalize broadly. We explain how this phenomenon and related ones have unsettled not only regimes of private ordering but also constitutional democracy and global governance. We offer a typology of legal strategies available to those who wish to shore up specific forms of consent against these threats. And we raise the question whether such strategies are enough to enable effective cooperation, protect vulnerable parties, and vindicate the values consent is meant to advance.

Bio: David Pozen teaches and writes about constitutional law, information law, and nonprofit law, among other topics. Pozen’s body of work includes dozens of articles, essays, and book chapters, as well as The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford, 2024). Pozen has also edited two volumes for Columbia University Press, on transparency (2018) and free speech (2020), and been a semi-regular contributor to the Balkinization and Lawfare blogs. A keynote speaker at numerous academic conferences, in the United States and abroad, Pozen’s scholarship has been discussed in outlets including the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, Harper’s, Politico, American Scholar, and NPR. Continue reading profile.

SEPTEMBER 27, 2024 
The Rise of Populist Primacy
Friday, 509 O'Brian Hall
Noon Reception; 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. Presentation
Option to attend via Zoom.
Abstract: The Roberts Court is demolishing much of the modern Supreme Court’s legacy. Critics and scholars have claimed that this project is wholly political, under the sway of conservative forces. It is incontrovertible the current Court is sweeping away much of the legacy of the past 70 years of lawmaking. But is its project entirely destructive and fundamentally lawless, or is the Roberts Court advancing some alternative theory (which may or may not be morally desirable or conceptually sound)?

This article argues the Roberts Court is advancing an alternative theory with increasing coherence and vigor. This theory, populist primacy, asserts authority should be consolidated in the political actors who can claim to be most directly accountable to the dominant constituency. Populist primacy radically inverts the judicial role and substance of constitutional law that has guided the bench since the Warren Court, both in constitutional interpretation and as a steward of liberal democracy: defense of vulnerable groups and ensuring appropriate balance and moderation in the distribution of power. In consolidating political power in dominant entities, the Roberts Court rejects these principles, and is thereby deconstructs much of the infrastructure of modern constitutional law.

This article demonstrates the rising influence of populist primacy by considering its influence upon election law, particularly race and democratic process, the role of parties, and campaign finance. It shows that in each area the Roberts Court has pursued consolidation of power, a trend exemplified in the past terms Alexander v. NAACP, which instructed the federal judiciary to defer to the dominant actors in the districting process, state legislatures. Alexander turned against a long legacy of judicial intervention to moderate the power of majorities and privileged actors. This Article also shows how populist primacy synthesizes the broader trends of the Court particularly apparent in the recent terms (Loper Bright, Grants Pass, Jarkesy, Dobbs, Arthrex, West Virginia v. EPA; Seila Law). The Court has shown a novel preference for using constitutional law to centralize power, rather than balance and moderate it.

Populist primacy is the polestar of the Roberts Court, but it has not yet been fully realized. This Article anticipates what areas of election law may face further radical change, and suggests how jurists and scholars should engage with this new direction by the Court. One person, one vote (the previously sacrosanct bedrock of modern election law) and the Section 2 Voting Rights Act test both retain significant. It also identifies the tensions, both legal and jurisprudential, populist primacy may face as the Roberts Court continues to advance it. Vigorous interpretation of the Constitution, including in an originalist mold, often distributes rather than centralizes power through core principles such as federalism and separation of powers. The consolidating impulse of populist primacy will inevitably generate tensions with the substance of the Constitution, particularly as understood by its plainest meaning. Effective engagement with the bench will require negotiating these tensions as well as framing arguments through appeals to the best understanding of centralized constituent authority.

Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton)
John Morijn (Groningen and Princeton Universities)
March 1, 2024
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus 
Money for Nothing? Freezing EU Funds to Generate Compliance with EU Values
Since 2010, the European Union has coped with rogue Member States that reject its fundamental values. For more than a decade, the European Commission cajoled, expressed concern and occasionally brought infringement actions, but made little difference. Finally, the EU passed a set of regulations with the new EU budget cycle that explicitly permit the Union to freeze funds to Member States that do not honour EU values. In 2022, the EU then froze all non-agricultural funds to Hungary and Poland.  But did these funds freezes restore EU values? The results are mixed.

Poland’s 2023 election, run centrally on Poland’s place in the EU, brought a pro-EU coalition to power pledging to restore rule of law to Poland. Hungary’s government passed a flurry of laws that appeared to, but did not, fix the problems that the EU institutions had identified. More than any other mechanism that the EU has tried, however, the funding freezes spurred action and moved rogue states’ publics to criticize their own governments. As we write, however, there are worrisome signs that the EU will cave into pressure from the rogue states before the benefits of budgetary conditionality have been realized.  

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her primary field is the sociology of law and she specializes in ethnographic and archival research on courts and public institutions. Scheppele also works in sociological theory, comparative/historical sociology, political sociology, sociology of knowledge and human rights. 

John Morijn, University of Groningen, Professor of law and politics in international relations was recently appointed Fellow in Law and Public Policy at Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He engages in research and teaching in the fields of rule of law protection and democracy, European human rights law, EU Charter of Fundamental Right); international human rights law; and, human rights protection in The Netherlands Morijn currently holds a chair endowed by the Netherlands Association for International Affairs (NGIZ), and is a member of the Dutch Advisory Council on Migration and the Scientific Committee of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency. Morijn serves as a reserve officer in the rule of law platoon in the Royal Dutch Army. At the University of Groningen, he is the founding mentor of "Our Rule of Law", a for-students-by-students initiative that creates opportunities for students to learn about democracy and rule of law protection in Europe.

Join The Baldy Center on March 25 for two special events. At noon we sponsor the lecture by Jiří Přibáň (Cardiff) on constitutional populism and explosive communities. At 4:00 p.m. we host the book talk by Paul Linden-Retek (School of Law), author of Postnational Constitutionalism: Europe and the Time of Law (Oxford UP, 2023).

SPEAKER MARCH 25, 2024
NOON, 12:00 p.m, 509 O'Brian Hall

Jiří Přibáň (Cardiff)
Constitutional populism and explosive communities: Identity politics and authenticity in a global society

Abstract: Populist politics shows that the imaginary of the authentic polity existing truthfully and in harmony with its 'real' collective identity is common to the great variety of populist politics and continues to play a profound role in the contemporary globalised political condition including the post-national condition of the European Union. The paradox of modern constitutional democracy in which constituent power of the sovereign people, by definition unlimited, can materialise only through constituted power of a limiting legal constitution subsequently finds its specific form in the imaginary of the authentic polity by stretching the first constitutional question Who is the people as a political sovereign? into a pre-political question of What is the true and honest voice and will of this people? Searching for sociological answers to these political and legal problems associated with the recent resurgence of populism, Bauman, in the spirit of the classic distinction between community and society, described new forms of identity politics as communal responses to the process of societal globalisation. Communitarian identity politics confronts the void of meaning created by globalisation and constitutes specific globalised forms of affective tribalism labelled by Bauman as 'explosive communities'. These are disruptive and even violent responses to the growing social insecurity and instability caused by global social and political developments. The world is imagined as out of control and suffering from chaos and decline which can be reverted only by a radical action and reassertion of the commonly shared values and meaningful existence. Explosive communities are thus defensive mechanisms constituting the shared identity as a shield against what Bauman described as 'terrors of the global' and effects of 'negative globalisation'.

BOOK TALK MARCH 25, 2024
4:00 p.m, 509 O'Brian Hall

Paul Linden-Retek (School of Law) Postnational Constitutionalism: Europe and the Time of Law (Oxford UP, 2023)

At a time when the integration of the European Union's peoples through the rule of law is faltering, this book develops a critical theory of postnational constitutionalism. Today, widely held conceptions of EU law continue to mislead citizens about the nature of political identity, sovereignty, and agency. They lose sight of a critical idea on which post-nationalism depends-that constitutional self-authorship is narrative, and the polity is a subject whose identity, history, and legacy are still in formation. Absent this vision, EU law reproduces crises of legitimacy: the depoliticization of public life; emergency rule by executive decree; a collapse of solidarity; and the rise of nativist movements. The book diagnoses this impasse as the product of a problem familiar to modernity: reification--a process in which social and historical relationships are misattributed as timeless relations among things.

Reification's shrinking of social dilemmas, moral principles, and political action to narrow perceptions of the present explains law's role in perpetuating crisis. But this diagnosis also points to a remedy. It suggests that to sustain the emancipatory potential of EU constitutionalism we must recover law's relationship to time. Postnational Constitutionalism: Europe and the Time of Law proposes a temporally-attuned constitutional theory with principles of anti-reification, narrative interpretation, and non-sovereign agency at its centre. These principles reimagine essential domains of constitutional order: social integration, constitutional adjudication, and constituent power. Spanning various bodies of EU jurisprudence, the book devotes particular attention to migration and asylum--struggles where questions of solidarity, law, and belonging are most generative and acute.

Postnational Constitutionalism: Europe and the Time of Law (Oxford UP, 2023) 

• Proposes a synthetic, critical theory of the structure and spirit of EU integration and constitutional order.
  Argues that refugee and migration law and policy have a particularly salient role to play in a revived and renewed narrative of EU integration.
• Constitutes an innovative, multidisciplinary work that incorporates a wide array of perspectives, such as Frankfurt School critical theory, critical legal studies, democratic and constitutional theory, postmodern ethical thought, comparative constitutional law, and EU legal doctrine and legal development.
• Revives EU law's emancipatory and transformative potential.

Melissa Crouch, PhD, is a senior research fellow at The Baldy Center. While in residence here, Dr. Crouch will be working on a manuscript about constitutional endurance and how past constitutions matter to contemporary reform debates in Myanmar. Based on her field research, the manuscript offers a constitutive approach to the relationship between constitutions and societies in the postcolony, with a focus on how periods of military rule and unconstitutional rule shape constitutional futures.

As a professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, Dr. Crouch's research contributes to the interdisciplinary fields of law and society; comparative constitutional law, with a focus on Asia. In 2022, she won the Podgorecki Prize for outstanding scholarship of an early career socio-legal scholar, awarded by the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law, the International Sociological Association. Dr. Crouch is the president of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (2023-2024), the peak academic body for the study of Asia in Australia.

SPEAKER PRESENTATION AT THE BALDY CENTER, MARCH 29, 2024

"The Military Turn in Comparative Constitutional Law: Constitutions and the Military in Authoritarian Regimes"

Abstract: In this article I argue that studies of constitutions in authoritarian regimes reveal a new finding hiding in plain sight: that the military is often a pivotal constitutional actor. The question of how the military uses law and constitutions to enable and facilitate its influence in constitution-making and constitutional practise is under-researched. The military demands scholarly attention because of the unprecedented opportunities for the military as a constitutional actor due to the rise of populism and the decline of democracy; an increase in civil conflict; intensified efforts at counter-terrorism and anti-trafficking; and the COVID-19 global pandemic.

I review the literature across law and the social sciences on the military and the constitution in authoritarian regimes. In doing so, I demonstrate that the military is an important, yet overlooked, constitutional actor; that civilian control of the military is never absolute but a matter of degree and changes over time; and that histories of military rule and military use of law and constitutions matter. I call for a turn to the study of the military as a constitutional actor in comparative constitutional law.

Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960-8 (Cambridge, 2023)
Umut Özsu (Carleton University, Ottawa)
April 12, 2024
Friday, Noon, 509 O'Brian Hall
Abstract: After the Second World War, the dissolution of European empires and emergence of 'new states' in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and elsewhere necessitated large-scale structural changes in international legal order. In Completing Humanity, my new book, I recount the history of the struggle to transform international law during the twentieth century's last major wave of decolonization.

Commencing in 1960, with the General Assembly's landmark decolonization resolution, and concluding in 1982, with the close of the third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea and the onset of the Latin American debt crisis, my book examines the work of elite international lawyers from newly independent states alongside that of international law specialists from 'First World' and socialist states. A study in modifications to legal theory and doctrine over time, it documents and reassesses post-1945 decolonization from the standpoint of the 'Third World' and the jurists who elaborated and defended its interests.

Preview the book on Academia, here.

Speaker Bio: Umut Özsu is a scholar of public international law, the history and theory of international law, and Marxist critiques of law, rights, and the state. He is the author of Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960–82 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Recounting the struggle to transform international law during the last major wave of decolonization, the book documents and reassesses post-1945 decolonization from the standpoint of the “Third World” and the jurists who elaborated and defended its interests.

Özsu is the author of Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (Oxford University Press, 2015), which situates “population transfer” within the broader history of international law by examining the interwar exchange of minorities between Greece and Turkey—the first legally structured large-scale endeavour in compulsory population exchange in modern international history. Özsu is also co-editor of the Research Handbook on Law and Marxism (Edward Elgar, 2021) and The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge, 2019), as well as several journal symposia.

The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America (Princeton UP, 2024)
Michelle Phelps (Author)
APRIL 26, 2024 
Noon Reception
12:30 p.m. Lecture
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus 
Attend in-person or via Zoom.
Abstract: In the summer of 2020, the city of Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) became a national emblem of both the persistence of racialized police violence and the failures of liberal police reform. Thrust into the national spotlight, city leaders pledged to “end” the MPD. Yet as The Minneapolis Reckoning traces, nearly four years later, the MPD remains intact, protected by the complex racial politics of policing that position the MPD as both the cause and solution to the problem of violence.

At the same time, Minneapolis’ residents and leaders have fought aggressively for new models of public safety, including alternative emergency response and violence prevention systems, transforming the city. Phelps' talk will consider both the failures and wins of the radical demands of 2020 to better understand the possibilities and limits of challenging police power today.

New from Princeton: preview the book here.

Author Bio: I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. My research is in the sociology of punishment, focusing in particular on the punitive turn in the U.S. through the lenses of policing, probation, and prisons. Recent work from these projects has been published in interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journals, including American Journal of Sociology (Phelps, Robertson, & Powell 2021), Sociology of Race & Ethnicity (Phelps & Hamilton 2021), Social Problems (Phelps & Ruhland 2022),  Mobilization (Phelps, Ward, & Frazier 2021), Law & Society Review (Powell & Phelps 2021), Law & Social Inquiry (Piehowski & Phelps 2023), and Annual Review of Criminology (Phelps 2020).* 

Together with Philip Goodman (University of Toronto) and Joshua Page (University of Minnesota), I am the author of Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice (Oxford, 2017), which traces the history of U.S. criminal justice reforms from the birth of the penitentiary to contemporary struggles to end mass incarceration. My second book, The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America, will come out in May 2024. To learn more, visit personal website.

"From Invasion to Formalization: The Peruvian Origins of the Property Titling Movement"
NOVEMBER 3, 2023
Friday, Noon, Reception
12:30 p.m. Lecture
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus 
Attend in-person or via Zoom.
Request the paper in advance via email to baldycenter@buffalo.edu

Speaker Bio: Claire Priest is the author of Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America (Princeton University Press). The book describes how even before the United States became a country, laws prioritizing access to credit set colonial America apart from the rest of the world.

“Anyone but the Lawyer: Race, Gender, and Misattribution in the Legal Profession”

NOVEMBER 17, 2023
Noon Reception, 12:30 p.m. Lecture
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus 
Attend in-person or via Zoom.
Speaker Bio: Tao Dumas is associate professor of political science at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). Dumas' research focuses on the political role of U.S. courts and the ways lawyers shape and work within the legal system. She is interested in how institutional differences across states condition winners and losers in the courts and how attorneys’ experience, expertise, and demographics impact their legal practices. (Paper made available prior to event.)

Bio: Greta LaFleur, an associate professor of American Studies at Yale University, has been awarded a mid-career research fellowship at The Baldy Center for Fall 2023. LaFleur’s research and teaching focus on eighteenth-century North America, with special emphasis on the histories of science, the histories of race, the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer & trans studies. Author of The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). LaFleur's fellowship at The Baldy Center will be dedicated to working on a second scholarly monograph, tentatively titled How Sex Became Good: The Feminist Movements and Racial Politics that Made Modern Sexuality (under contract with The University of Chicago Press). The work tracks how cultural and legal responses to the problem of sexual violence shaped the politicization of sexuality in the modern period.  

LaFleur is also the editor of: a special issue of American Quarterly, “Origins of Biopolitics in the Americas”  (2019, with Kyla Schuller); a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly on “Trans Exclusionary Feminisms and the Global New Right” (2022, with Serena Bassi); and, a special issue of GLQ on “The Science of Sex Itself” (2023, with Benjamin Kahan).  

LaFleur’s research has been supported by several fellowships, including those at: the Institute for Advanced Study (School of Social Sciences); the American Council of Learned Societies; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the William Andrews Clark Library at UCLA; the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University; The Clement Library at The University of Michigan; the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA; and, The Newberry Library in Chicago. LaFleur holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and a JD from The University of Connecticut.

SPECIAL EVENT, DECEMBER 1, 2023
Greta LaFleur, The Baldy Center Mid-Career Fellow
"Sex Panics and Risk Metrics: Law, Propensity, and the History of Sexuality"
Paper available in advance if the event.
Friday, Noon, 509 O'Brian Hall
Attend in-person or via Zoom.

Library of Congress: Watch a Recording of our 2023 Constitution Day Event | In Custodia Legis (loc.gov)

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023
(Livestreamed 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. ETThe Library of Congress presents Constitution Day 2023, featuring UB School of Law Professor Samantha Barbas who will discuss the roots of the U.S. Supreme Court’s New York Times v. Sullivan decision, which created the “actual malice” standard that a public official must prove in a successful suit for defamation. Learn more about the book.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2023
“Democratic Contestation Rights for the Workplaces We Have” 
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus
Noon, Reception
12:30 p.m., Lecture
Attend in-person or via Zoom registration.

Speaker Bio: Cynthia Estlund is the Catherine A. Rein Professor at NYU School of Law. Her most recent book is Automation Anxiety: Why and How to Save Work (Oxford, 2021). She has published widely on the law and regulation of work, including three earlier books: A New Deal for China’s Workers? (Harvard, 2017); Regoverning the Workplace: From Self-Regulation to Co-Regulation (Yale, 2010); and Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy (Oxford, 2003). 

Estlund's lecture draws from her recent book, Automation Anxiety: Why and How to Save Work (Oxford 2021). The book confronts the prospect of mounting job losses from automation and proposes a strategy to move forward from the shrinking demand for human labor. Estlund offers a multifaceted strategy centered on conserving, creating, and spreading work to ensure broad access to adequate incomes, more free time, and decent remunerative work in a world with less of it. Addresses growing economic inequality and persistent racial stratification as we face the prospect of net job losses

From Oxford University Press: Are super-capable robots and algorithms destined to devour our jobs and idle much of the adult population? Predictions of a jobless future have recurred in waves since the advent of industrialization, only to crest and retreat as new jobs-usually better ones-have replaced those lost to machines. But there's good reason to believe that this time is different. Ongoing innovations in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics are already destroying more decent middle-skill jobs than they are creating, and may be leading to a future of growing job scarcity. But there are many possible versions of that future, ranging from utterly dystopian to humane and broadly appealing. It all depends on how we respond.

This book confronts the hotly-debated prospect of mounting job losses due to automation, and the widely-divergent hopes and fears that prospect evokes, and proposes a strategy for both mitigating the losses and spreading the gains from shrinking demand for human labor. We should set our collective sights, it argues, on ensuring access to adequate incomes, more free time, and decent remunerative work even in a future with less of it. Getting there will require not a single "magic bullet" solution like universal basic income or a federal job guarantee but a multi-pronged program centered on conserving, creating, and spreading work. What the book proposes for a foreseeable future of less work will simultaneously help to address growing economic inequality and persistent racial stratification, and makes sense here and now but especially as we face the prospect of net job losses.

Alan W. Clarke, professor emeritus in the Integrated Studies Program, Utah Valley University, is a senior fellow at The Baldy Center, Fall, 2023. Clarke holds a Juris Doctor from the College of William and Mary, an LLM from Queen’s University, and a PhD from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. He practiced law after graduating from William and Mary, with a focus on social justice broadly construed, including, civil rights, voting rights, labor organizing, poverty law, and death penalty post-conviction process.

Clarke’s academic research since 1997 has revolved around several broad, connected themes in international and transnational criminal law and human rights, criminology and criminal justice policy, civil rights, legal history, law and society, and critical legal studies, climate change and survival refugees.

Clarke plans to analyze interdisciplinary legal studies on the boundaries of human rights, international criminal law, immigration law, demography, human and cultural geography, political science, during the term of The Baldy Center senior fellowship. He has published extensively in law reviews and social science journals and has authored or co-authored three books:

• Laurelyn Whitt and Alan W. Clarke, North American Genocides: Indigenous Nations, Settler Colonialism and International Criminal Law, Cambridge University Press (2019)
• Alan W. Clarke, Rendition to Torture, Rutgers University Press (2012)
• Alan W. Clarke & Laurelyn Whitt, The Bitter Fruit of American Justice: International and Domestic Resistance to the Death Penalty, Northeastern University Press (2007)

Clarke's recent focus on policy and legal responses to human migration and refugees influenced by climate change has been published in an article Climate Change, Migration and Pandemics: Human Rights in the Anthropocene, in 47 Vermont Law Review 1 (2022). While continuing to work in the area of survival migrants Clarke will also investigate international legal issues revolving around the evolving legal issues surrounding Russia’s war of aggression with a particular focus on the need to create a hybrid international court.

• The Baldy Center Blog features Alan Clarke
• Alan Clarke presentation at The Baldy Center, October 6, 2023
  “North American Genocides: Indigenous Nations, Settler Colonialism, and International Law”
• Alan Clarke profile on Wikipedia.

“Vulnerability of Academic Freedom in Countries under Violent Conflict”
OCTOBER 24, 2023
Tuesday, 3:00 p.m.
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus 
Attend in-person or via Zoom
Join us for a presentation by Dr. Mihreteab Tsighe Taye (School of Law) a native of Ethiopia, who came to UB through the university’s Scholars at Risk fellowship program, which provides a safe and supportive academic home to scholars who face threats in their country of origin. At the school of law, Taye's research focuses on human rights law and international courts, specifically the African Human Rights Court and the East African Community Court. 

Prior to coming to UB, Taye was at New York University School of Law as a Research Scholar from 2022-2023, and, a Hauser Postdoctoral Global Fellow from 2021-2022. Professor Taye received his Ph.D. in Law from the University of Copenhagen, an LL.B. from Addis Ababa University, and a master’s in international law from Erasmus University Rotterdam. Taye's research has focused particularly on law and politics in regional human rights and economic courts in Africa. 

RELATED LINKS:

• Read an interview with Taye published by the School of Law, here.
  
• Read about the Scholars at Risk fellowship program in UBNow.
  
• Read Taye's recent article, published by OpenGlobalRights, Backlash against individual access to the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights.