Fall 2008

The Brown Legal Studies Seminar ("BLSS") continues in Fall 2008. 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.)

*Lunch provided with RSVP. Email Ellen_White@brown.edu to attend.

The 2008 Brown Legal Studies Seminar is sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Watson Institute for International Studies.

Most seminars take place at noon at the Brown University Faculty Club, 1 Magee Street.
Please see individual session listings for exceptions.

View past Seminars

Friday, September 12
Dan Danielsen, Senior Lecturer in Law and Public Policy at Brown University

"Conflict Management: Foreign Investment, Violent Conflict and the Regulatory Construction of the Development State"

In prior work, I have looked at corporate power and how it shapes transnational regulation and social welfare, particularly in the context of developing countries. One of the more significant ways in which multinational corporations shape local conditions in the developing world is through foreign direct investment (or the threat of withholding investment or disinvesting if business needs are not accommodated by the developing host state). In the last 15 years, a significant literature has emerged from development economists and international financial institutions (IFIs) like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund about the legal and institutional preconditions necessary to attract foreign direct investment-preconditions such as formal property and contract regimes, functioning courts, honest civil servants, low levels of government corruption and a business friendly regulatory environment. Against this backdrop, I became interested in exploring circumstances in which foreign direct investment continued in contexts in which these preconditions were not met-if foreign direct investment persists in conflict-ridden developing countries, what systems of regulation or governance ameliorate the investors' risk in the absence of functioning institutions of the developing state?

The project looks at a wide array of material from a range of disciplines including historical material regarding the protection of foreign investors under colonialism and the subsequent period of decolonization and the current legal regime of investor protection through Bilateral Investment Treaties. I juxtapose illustrative examples from these regimes with some of the latest governance thinking from the IFIs and leading NGOs on the relationship between conflict and persistent underdevelopment and how foreign investment lead growth might provide the answer to both conflict and chronic poverty. Interestingly, the regime for investor protections tends to assume that the interests of the foreign investor and the developing state are so adverse that extraordinary legal protections need to be put in place to protect the investor from exploitation or expropriation by the state. By contrast, the regime for foreign investment led conflict reduction assumes that the interests of foreign investors and developing states are so much in harmony that multinationals might helpfully assume many of the traditional state functions including economic policy development, infrastructure development and the provision of social goods like education and healthcare. Despite these apparent contradictions in the two perspectives on the relations between the foreign investor and the developing state, one of my principle findings so far is that both the legal regime of investor protections and the more diffuse governance mechanisms of investor lead growth proposed by the IFIs and NGOs are, for quite different reasons, advocating the empowerment of multinational corporations vis-à-vis developing states.

More information on Dan Danielsen

Friday, September 26
Marc Perlman, Associate Professor of Music at Brown University

"Normative Regimes of Music-Sharing in the Internet Age"

This is a time of normative turmoil for the communities and market actors involved with music. In the 1990s, the culture industries successfully lobbied for proactive legal protections against digital "piracy"; however, the 2000s have seen a profusion of technological tools that have popularized the "sharing" of recorded music and movies.

Meanwhile, activists alarmed by the tightening grip of intellectual- property rights have promoted the democratized creativity of a "free culture." Although music fans have long shared records and tapes within their network of friends, Napster and other file-sharing software has expanded such copying networks to global dimensions - while also exposing them to surveillance by the recording industry. Technology has thus brought the informal norms of musical sharing into conflict with the legal norms of copyright. To resolve the tension between the two, social actors resort to some of the classic "techniques of neutralization" identified by sociologists. But they also rely on a conceptual distinction that has long been evident in both aesthetics and the law: the separation of "commerce" from "art." Basing a normative order on the commercial/noncommercial binary is problematic, however, because both terms are unstable and contestable. I illustrate these difficulties using two sets of examples: disputes over the blameworthiness of file-sharing, and arguments over Creative Commons licenses that restrict only commercial uses.

More information on Marc Perlman

Friday, October 10
David Wilkins, Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law at Harvard University

Topic to Be Announced

More information on David Wilkins

Friday, October 24
David Kertzer, Provost and Paul Dupee University Professor of Social Science at Brown University

"Amalia's Tale: A Poor Peasant, an Ambitious Attorney, and a Fight for Justice"

A quintessential David versus Goliath saga, Amalia's Tale tells of a wholly unexpected triumph of the poor against the rich and of a crusading city attorney who fought on behalf of an impoverished peasant. Amalia Bagnacavalli, an illiterate young woman from the mountains near Bologna, is forced by poverty to take in a child from the city's foundling home to wet-nurse. When she contracts syphilis from the sickly and mal-formed baby given to her, the city fathers callously dismiss her pleas for treatment and restitution. Bewildered and frightened, Amalia seeks out Augusto Barbieri, an ambitious attorney looking to make a name for himself. The young lawyer takes up her cause, fighting the case for years through the Italian court system before winning an unprecedented victory for his by-now broken client. Amalia's Tale is the story of a rural woman whose life was ruined, and the man from the city who would not stop -- or so it seemed -- until he had seen justice done.

Recommended reading: Amalia's Tale: A Poor Peasant, an Ambitious Attorney, and a Fight for Justice, pp. 1-54 and 151-156.

Location: McKinney Conference Room, 3rd Floor of the Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street

More information on David Kertzer

Friday, November 14
Susan Silbey, Goldberg Professor of Humanities and Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at M.I.T.

"Governing Green Labs: Trust and Surveillance in the Cultures of Science"

Over the last 30 years, social studies of science have produced a rich literature documenting the ways in which the cultures of science vary, from their internal social organization and external social embeddedness to the relevance of space, the meaning of data, the relationship among theory, experiment and technology, and the construction of truth. This paper expands the repertoire of variation by describing the different ways in which scientists are legal subjects.

Using ethnographic data from several years of fieldwork observing a new system for managing environmental health and safety hazards in research laboratories, this paper describes noteworthy divergences in how biologists and chemists, respectively, respond to the prospect of legal regulation, increased surveillance, and additional training, all in the name of environmental health and safety. The paper suggests that the disciplinary histories, structures and epistemologies of these two fields have generated differences in the meaning and relevance of contamination and hazard, producing different constructions of safety as being within or outside the boundaries of science, and thus fostering different understandings of the legal subjectivity and social responsibility of the scientific researcher.

Susan Silbey holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, with post-graduate training in Sociology from Brandeis University. She is Past President of the Law & Society Association, former editor of the Law & Society Review and Studies in Law, Politics and Society, and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She has written extensively on the social organization of law in diverse formal and informal settings, including prosecutors' offices, courts, schools, private homes, businesses and research laboratories; she has also studied alternative dispute resolution, including negotiation and mediation. In 1998, she published The Common Place of Law (with Patricia Ewick), a highly influential account of how Americans imagine, use, and construct the rule of law. An article from this project, "Narrating Social Structure: Stories of Resistance to Legal Authority," received the American Sociological Association's 2004 prizes for best article in Sociology of Culture and best article in Political Sociology, as well as the 2005 prize for best article in Sociology of Law. Professor Silbey's current research looks at the roles of law in scientific laboratories, and she is also conducting a six year longitudinal study of the socialization of undergraduates in four different engineering schools.

Location: McKinney Conference Room, 3rd Floor of the Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street

More information on Susan Silbey

Friday, November 21
Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College

Hollywood's Law: Film, Fatherhood, and the Legal Imagination

Fathers and fatherhood have long played an important role in the way we think about law, and in exemplifying the various faces of law's power. From the Bible to contemporary Supreme Court decisions and classics in legal theory images of law as the father abound. In all these places, imaging law as a father or the law of the father rightly arouses both desire and anxiety, hope and fear. At least since Freud legal scholars have portrayed a deep-seated longing for paternal power and the overwhelming power that fathers exercise as basic to legal authority. One of the most famous of these formulations is found in Jerome Frank's Law and the Modern Mind. There Frank suggested that law, like religion, is a projection of a widely shared human need for certainty and security in a world of danger, and he invited us to think of law as the father or, more precisely, as the father-substitute. "To the child," Frank argued, "the father is the Infallible Judge, the Maker of definite rules of conduct....The Law....inevitably becomes a partial substitute for the Father-as-Infallible-Judge...."

In this paper I offer a reading of a classic law film, TWELVE ANGRY MEN, as a vehicle to explore the association of law and fatherhood in the legal imagination. This film displays the ubiquitous presence of tropes of fatherhood in popular culture iconography about law. It reminds us that fatherhood is one terms through which law is mythologized and through which fantasies and anxieties about law are expressed. It treats fatherhood and law as complex discursive (and therefore social) productions marked by absence as well as a haunted and haunting presence. It engenders fear and doubt by examining many of the ways that fathers fail their children, themselves, and the law. In addition, TWELVE ANGRY MEN identifies a methodology through which we might re-imagine the law of the father, by focusing on fragmentation, plurality, and contingency in our relation to fathers and to law.

I turn to film because law exists in a world of images whose power is not located primarily in their representation of something exterior, but instead is found in images themselves. I also turn to the moving image because, as a medium, it reminds us of the contingencies of our legal and social arrangements. Today, I argue, we have law on the books, law in action, and now, law in the image.

More information on Austin Sarat

Friday, December 12
Ravit Reichman, Robert and Nancy Carney Assistant Professor of English at Brown University

"'Nothing to show for it': Identity Theft, Narrative, and Social Bonds"

Recent discussions of identity theft tend to note the phrase's misleading nature, pointing out that technically, the so-called theft is in fact fraud. Yet the fact that we seem to be talking about-and by implication, experiencing-this fraud as theft reveals something peculiarly modern about the relation between individuals and their things, and more trenchantly, about the relationship between the modern sense of self and the worry (and near-paranoia) over self-possession. This relation might best be described as a condition of reproducibility, a feeling that one is never fully in possession of one's own self and a fear that, in spite of all sentimental or Romantic ideals, one might be fungible after all. Taking this worry as its point of departure, this talk engages the contemporary rise in, and anxiety over, identity theft through Ford Madox Ford's novel The Good Soldier (1915). Famous for its near-perfect aesthetic balance and its intricate relation of surface and depth-"the finest French novel in the English language," as one critic called it-Ford's novel can also be understood as a narrative about identity theft. More often read as a story about the decline of traditional notions of Englishness, The Good Soldier sets this decline in the framework of this crime, specifically the theft of Edward Ashburnham's life (his manners, tastes, and ultimately, his home) by his friend (and the novel's narrator), John Dowell. Approaching the novel from this perspective, and reading it against contemporary accounts and depictions of identity theft (as well as some of its precursors), this talk will address the question of what we lose when we lose our identity at the hands of another.

More information on Ravit Reichman