Spring 2008
Spring 2008 brings a new interdisciplinary colloquium to Brown - the Brown Legal Studies Seminar ("BLSS"). 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* at the Faculty Club 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.)
*Lunch provided with RSVP. Email Ellen_White@brown.edu to attend.
All seminars take place at noon at the Brown University Faculty Club, 1 Magee Street
February 22
Gordon Wood, Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History at Brown University
"Chief Justice John Marshall and the Origins of Judicial Review"
Professor Wood will discuss a chapter in his Oxford History of the United States, entitled "Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815." The book is due out in 2009. The chapter follows a chapter on Law and the Judiciary, which deals with the Judiciary Act of 1789 and the Jeffersonian Republicans' efforts to curb the Supreme Court in Jefferson's first term, including the impeachment of Justice Chase. He will talk about Marshall's career up to 1815 and his shrewd pulling in of the Court's judicial horns in the face of Jeffersonian opposition. The chapter deals with Marbury v. Madison and with the early contributions of the practice of judicial review.
Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History at Brown University. He received his B.A. degree from Tufts University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969. He is the author of many works, including The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969), which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 1993. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004) was awarded the Julia Ward Howe Prize by the Boston Authors Club in 2005. Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different was published in 2006 He is currently working on a volume in the Oxford History of the United States dealing with the period of the early Republic from 1789 to 1815. Professor Wood is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. His new book, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History, will be published this spring.
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March 7
Carol Heimer, Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University
"Soft Law, Hard Science, and the Politics of Health:
From Scientific Claims about HIV to a Moral Obligation to Treat"
Ph.D. University of Chicago 1981. Areas of interest include organizations, sociology of law, medical sociology. Heimer is also a Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. She has taught at the University of Arizona and had research appointments at Australian National University (Law Program in the Institute for Advanced Study), the Institute for Industrial Economics in Norway, and Stanford University. Her research has focused on the intersection of normative systems, on organizations, and on risk and uncertainty. She (together with Lisa Staffen) has recently published For the Sake of the Children (University of Chicago Press, 1998),a book on the social organization of responsibility in infant intensive care units. Other publications include Reactive Risk and Rational Action (University of California Press, a study of how insurers think about and manage risks and how those strategies are represented in other areas of social life), Organization Theory and Project Management (Norwegian University Press, a collection of papers with Arthur Stinchcombe), and papers on medical social workers (with Mitchell Stevens), on the sociology of risk, on institutional competitions inside organizations, and on universalism and particularism. Heimer is currently working on a book about the "legalization" of medicine. The book will be based on her research in AIDS clinics in the US, Thailand, Uganda, and South Africa.
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Accompanying table 1.
Accompanying table 2.
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April 11
John Hagan, Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University
"Darfur and the Crime of Genocide:
The Collective Dynamics of Racial Dehumanization and Genocidal Victimization"
Co-sponsored by Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences
John Hagan is John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University and Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago. He is the Editor of the Annual Review of Law & Social Science. His research with a network of scholars spans topics from causes of crime to war crimes and human rights. He is the author most recently with Alberto Palloni of "Death in Darfur," which will appear in a September issue of Science. Hagan developed an early interest in the social organization of subjective justice that is continued in his 2005 American Sociological Review article with Carla Shedd and Monique Payne on "Race, Ethnicity and Youth Perceptions of Criminal Injustice." His articles and book, Structural Criminology, present a power-control theory of crime and delinquency. This theory emphasizes the roles of patriarchical families and states in shaping patterns of criminality. The application of this theory is broadened in a 2005 Criminology article with Wenona Rymond-Richmond and Patricia Parker on the patrimonial patterning of genocide in Darfur. Power-control theory also plays a role in his research on lawyers and the legal profession, including his book with Fiona Kay on Gender in Practice and in work with Holly Foster in their 2001 American Sociological Review paper on "The End of Adolescence." Hagan's Presidential Address to the American Society of Criminology underlined the role of poverty in crime. This theme is central to his research with Bill McCarthy on homeless youth for their book, Mean Streets. They most recently published a paper extending this work on "The Decision to Offend" in 2005 Social Forces. As a Guggenheim Fellow, Hagan studied the migration of American Vietnam war resisters to Canada that is described in the book Northern Passage. Although these resisters saw themselves as observing principles established after World War II at Nuremberg, they nonetheless were liable to prosecution in the United States. This book documents the successful lives of these "new immigrant" resisters who received refuge in Canada, establishing benefits of humane immigration and refugee policies. Today many of these same issues confront American Iraqi war resisters seeking sanctuary and refuge in Canada. Hagan's recent work has focused on the international tribunal where Slobodan Milosevic was tried. His book, Justice in the Balkans, is a social history of The Hague Tribunal, and this project is further developed in 2006 Law & Society Review and Law & Social Inquiry articles with Sanja Kutnjak Ivokovic, Ron Levi and Gabrielle Ferrales. Hagan's research continues to fuse crime and justice issues, examining the projection of human rights advocacy in an era characterized by the increasing perpetration of war crimes. His current work on Darfur argues that criminology has too long neglected crimes against humanity and genocide, "the crime of crimes." A chapter in the 2006 Annual Review of Sociology with Heather Schoenfeld and Alberto Palloni outlines their argument for a public sociology of crime.
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EVENT CANCELLED April 18
Rogers Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
"Constitutional Democracy and the Obligation to Include"
Cosponsored by the Political Philosophy Workshop
This paper explores whether constitutional democracies are morally obligated to become more inclusive over time, and to whom those obligations extend. The central argument is that constitutional democracies are obligated to include as equal citizens all persons with legally recognized statuses and identities that have in significant measure been constituted by the democracies' coercively enforced policies, should those persons wish to be citizens. This formula includes obligations to many to whom no reparations for injustices are owed; the formula does not, however, mandate obligations to all persons. Instead, the degree of this obligation is roughly proportional to the extent to which a constitutional democracy has constituted the status of the persons in question. Even for those with strong claims, this obligation to include is qualified by two limits: (1) when incorporating new members would create divisions severe enough to destroy the regime; and (2) when incorporating new members would expand the polity so greatly as to render it impossible for the regime to provide any real semblance of democratic self-governance. It is then obligatory for leaders to devise and support institutional arrangements that can provide defensibly democratic governance for an enlarged populace over time. These limits do not mean that obligations to include can be minimized; instead, they set continuing tasks for democratic statesmanship that are likely to endure for many generations.
Rogers Smith is Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses on American constitutional law and political thought, with special attention to issues of citizenship and racial, gender, and class inequality. He has written over 90 essays and five books, including the 1997 volume Civic Ideals, which received six "best book" awards from divisions of the American Political Science Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Social Science History Association, and the Association of American Publishers, and was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History. Smith was president of the Politics and History section of APSA for 2001-2002 and served on the APSA Council in 2005 and 2006. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.
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NOTE DATE CHANGE
May 5 at 6:30pm, Brown University Faculty Club
David Kennedy, Vice President for International Affairs, Brown University
"The Mystery of Global Governance"
David Kennedy is Vice President for International Affairs, University Professor of Law and David and Marianna Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University. At Brown, he has responsibility for the university's international strategy, for oversight of the Watson Institute for International Studies, and for strengthening programs of education in research and in the field of legal studies. Kennedy is also the Manley O. Hudson Visiting Professor of Law and Director of the European Law Research Center at Harvard Law School, where he taught for more than twenty five years before moving to Brown, and Visiting Professor of Law at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. He teaches international law, international economic policy, European law, legal theory, and law and development. He has practiced law with various international institutions, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Commission of the European Union, and with the private firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton in Brussels. His work with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton combined European antitrust litigation, government relations advising and general corporate law. He is the author of various articles on international law and legal theory, and founder of the New Approaches to International Law project.
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