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Spring 2010
The Brown Legal Studies Seminar ("BLSS") continues in Spring 2010. Speakers from Brown and beyond will present cutting-edge scholarship on law and legal institutions as seen from a wide range of vantage points across the social sciences and humanities. Sessions will meet over lunch* and will offer an opportunity for participants to engage in lively and open dialogue about matters legal. Faculty and graduate students are particularly encouraged to attend. (Note: Advance reading may be expected for some meetings; see individual session listings for details.)
The Brown Legal Studies Seminar (BLSS) is an interdisciplinary colloquium series, featuring cutting-edge research on law and legal institutions, from a wide range of vantage points across the social sciences and humanities. Sessions are open to the entire Brown community, but we particularly welcome faculty and graduate students, from all fields. BLSS is sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Watson Institute for International Studies.
BLSS sessions meet from 12:00 to 1:30 pm, over lunch* at the Brown Faculty Club, 1 Magee Street
*Lunch provided with RSVP. Email Ellen_White@brown.edu to attend.
View past Seminars:
EVENT CANCELLED
Friday, February 12
Friday, February 19
Yasunori Kasai, Professor of Law and Classics, Otsuma University and Institute of Advanced Studies,
Niigata University
Emi Matsumoto, Professor of Legal History and Comparative Law, School of Law, Niigata University
"Why the History of Japanese Law has not been Written"
The title of this paper is adapted from that of Professor Sir John Baker's inaugural lecture delivered in 1998(Why the History of English Law has not been finished). Sir John draws our attention to the interrelationship between sources and methodologies in making legal history. What kind of sources is relevant to legal history is determined by the methodology employed and the methodology is again shaped by the sources.
Although the Japanese law has a long history since Ritsu-Ryo system was adapted from China in 7th and 8th Century, Legal History as an academic discipline was established in Japan under the exclusive influence of German scholarship soon after the codifications of modern Japanese laws around 1900. The methodology of the history of Japanese law has been again developed under the close connection with German (legal) history. This parallelism, having taken various kinds of form, from 19th Century retrospective dogmatism, Marxism, to constitutional and conceptual history (Verfassungs-und Begriffsgeshichte), and also to some extent expanded to other countries (e.g., Britain, France and China ) than Germany, is always dominant in the history of the scholarship of Legal History in Japan (please visit the home page of Japan Legal History Association, and most apparent in the works of Japanese medieval (legal) historians.
Then, what is the substance of the history of Japanese law? In English terms, what is Common Law in Japan? Is the Japanese legal history all but parallels with others? In more sophisticated terms, is it a kind of comparative legal history?
In this paper, the speakers suggest two points. The first is about methodology. What does the parallelism miss out from the history of Japanese law? In this respect the legal history of corporation will be discussed. The second is about sources. The hitherto inaccessible documents (Database of Civil Judgements files) is now open for the research in the law and legal practice in the early period of modernisation in Japan.
It is hoped that this paper will provide Japanese law specialists and non specialists alike with a new perspective for Japanese legal history and legal histories of other jurisdictions alike.
Friday, February 26
Robert W. Gordon, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History, Yale University Law School
"The Role of Lawyers in Producing the Rule of Law: Some Critical Reflections"
LOCATION HAS BEEN CHANGED to the McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute, 111 THAYER STREET
Projects (such as those of the World Bank, USAID, and ABA) to export the "Rule of Law" to developing or ex-Communist societies count on new cadres of honest, competent and independent judges to administer frameworks of rules and rights and of lawyers to transmit them to individual and business clients. But are legal professions reliable promoters of the Rule of Law? This paper summarizes some of the historical and comparative evidence on the role of lawyers in building different forms of liberal legality: legalism (regular and predictable procedures; following rules laid down in advance); political liberalism (basic frameworks of rights to speech, press, assembly, petition, free elections and political party organization, protection against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment; protection of minorities from persecution and discrimination; and economic liberalism (basic frameworks of liberal capitalism: markets, property rights, contract enforcement, efficient forms of business organization; and more ambitiously broad state policies to provide security and opportunity). The conclusion is that this evidence is distinctly mixed, indicating that lawyers often subvert or impede the formation of norms, institutions and procedures supporting liberal legality as well as promoting them; and suggesting some caution in designing projects relying on them.
 "The Role of Lawyers in Producing the Rule of Law: Some Critical Reflections," Robert W. Gordon
Friday, March 12
To Be Announced
Friday, March 19
12:30pm, 117 MacMillan Hall, 167 Thayer Street
Lex Through Text: Law, Culture and Humanities Scholars Discuss the Texts that Shape Their Scholarship
Panelists:
- William MacNeil, Professor of Law and Deputy Dean of Research, Griffith University
- Bonnie Honig, Roland Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University, and Senior Research Professor, American Bar Foundation
- Karl Shoemaker, Associate Professor of History, University of Wisconsin
- Kay Warren, Tillinghast Professor of International Studies and Anthropology, Brown University
- George Pavlich, Professor of Law and Sociology, University of Alberta
Friday, April 9
Andrew V. Papachristos, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
"Rules of the Game: Dominance Hierarchies and the Creation of Gang Violence Networks in Chicago"
The modern street gang exists in a social milieu where social status is determined by the manner in which individuals and groups handle violence and the threats thereof. Gang members frequently refer to street life-and the norms that guide it-as simply "the game." Like other games, successfully participating in the street game demands adherence to certain rules, such as the willingness to violently redress a threat, the avoidance of "weak" behaviors, the protection of one's friends, and so on. This paper combines ethnographic data and detailed police records to ascertain if the rules of the street game described by gang members in fact contribute to the relative social standing and perceived dominance of groups. Qualitative data are used to devise theoretically relevant rules of the street game and, then, exponential random graph models are used to test the relatively prevalence and importance of said rules on observable patterns of gang violence. Results suggest that while some of the rules of the game are indeed good predictors of observable patterns of violence, many of the prized norms of gang members have little empirical relation to group identity and status.
Friday, April 23
John D. Skrentny, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego
"After Civil Rights: Law and Race in the New American Workplace"
Friday, April 30
Glenn C. Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Economics, Brown University
"Mass Incarceration and the Quality of American Democracy"
Among the preeminent moral challenges for our time is the fact that incarceration on a massive scale has become a central component of social policy in this country. What is more, the demographic profile of prisoners in the U.S. is highly skewed - most being young, male, poorly educated and members of racial minority groups. The emergence of a hypertrophied punishment infrastructure has garnered public support sometimes because of, and at other times despite, its racial disproportionality. And, whether one wants to call it 'racist' or not, it is surely arguable that our practice of managing social dysfunction through imprisonment has now become a principal means by which racial hierarchy is reproduced. The core of the problem, this talk will suggest, is that the socially marginal are not seen as belonging to the same general public body as the rest of us. We have inherited a system of racial caste in the center of our great cities, where millions of stigmatized, feared, and invisible people are to be found. And yet, Americans on the whole have concluded, in effect, that those languishing at the margins of our society are simply reaping what they have sown.
Friday, May 7
Lynn M. Mather, Professor, University at Buffalo Law School
"How and Why Do Lawyers Misbehave? Formal Discipline and the Informal Norms of Legal Practice"
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