Fall 2009

The Brown Legal Studies Seminar ("BLSS") continues in Fall 2009. 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.

Friday, September 25
Laura Braslow, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Sociology, City University of New York
Ross E. Cheit, Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, Brown University

"Judicial Discretion and (Un)equal Access: A Systematic Study of Motions to Reduce Criminal Sentences in Rhode Island Superior Court (1998-2003)"

Friday, October 9
Elizabeth Mertz, John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin Law School; Research Professor, American Bar Foundation

"The Myth of Transparent Translation: Legal Epistemology and Social Science"

Using an in-depth study of the language found in U.S. first-year law school classrooms, Mertz will discuss fundamental aspects of the epistemology conveyed to law students. At two levels, she examines the "myth of transparent translation" -- first, within the law school classroom, and then in efforts to translate between law and social science.

Friday, October 23
Jacob Gersen, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School

"Unbundled Powers"

If the dominant aspiration of constitutionalism is to constrain government, avoid tyranny, and produce desirable public policy, then separation of powers and elections are surely the mechanisms of choice in United States. The U.S. Constitution, of course, adopts the Madisonian variant on separation of powers: (1) dispersion of government authority, accomplished by (2) allocating the functions of government or, equivalently, types of government power, into (3) three branches, the (4) leadership of which is selected via different mechanisms, each with (5) more or less balanced powers to be exercised in accordance with (6) checks, whereby one institution can raise the costs of action by another. The costs and benefits of separating and combining government functions in this way have been well canvassed over the years in debates between presidentialists and parliamentarists. These debates presuppose, however, that if government authority is to be separated and allocated to different branches, the only or at least the best way to do so is by government function (executive, legislative, judicial). In the United States, government functions are separated, but the functional authority of each branch includes the power to act over all policy domains, at least as a default. There is one Congress that exercises the legislative function for all policy domains rather than two Congresses, one for foreign affairs and one for domestic affairs. Functions are separated and substantive powers are bundled together within each function. These debates often obscure alternative regimes, however, by making what is actually a design choice seem like an inevitable feature of the institutional landscape. In fact, structural separation of functions across branches was originally described as an auxiliary precaution; electoral mechanisms were to be the primary control on the government. On the auxiliary precaution view, it is necessary to separate functions and allocate them to different branches precisely because elections are an imperfect check on government action. And the effectiveness of elections is itself a function of the structure of topical government authority. The more policy responsibility is unbundled, the more electoral mechanisms constrain the government, and the less the need to separate functions. This paper presents a general theory of unbundling government powers as a substitute for separating government functions.

"Unbundled Powers," Jacob E. Gersen

Friday, November 6
Sandra R. Levitsky, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Michigan

"What Rights? The Construction of Political Claims to American Health Care Entitlements"

Abstract: Despite well-documented-and rapidly growing-unmet health care needs, Americans have been notoriously reluctant to treat health security as a right of citizenship. This paper argues that the ambivalence of the American public toward "health security" entitlements can be attributed to the way in which new claims for entitlements emerge in response to new social risks. Drawing on data from a qualitative study of individuals caring for adult family members with chronic diseases, I examine the effect of unmet health care needs on the beliefs that individuals hold about family, market, and state responsibility for health security. I find that when imagining solutions to unmet long-term care needs, individuals evaluate a range of alternative social arrangements, but they select the model that is most consistent with their prior beliefs about the family, the market, and the state. This process of discursive assimilation, of integrating new needs for public provision with more familiar ways of thinking and talking about social welfare, produces rights-claims that challenge existing social arrangements, but within a framework that allows for only a minimal state role in safeguarding social welfare.

Friday, November 20
Annelise Riles, Jack G. Clarke '52 Professor of Far East Legal Studies, Cornell Law School; Professor of Anthropology, Cornell University

"The Anti-Network: Private Global Governance, Legal Knowledge, and the Legitimacy of the Regulatory State in International Finance"

Abstract: Drawing from her forthcoming book, Collateral Knowledge, Professor Riles explores the work of lawyers and the documents in the back offices of derivatives units of global banks, to consider what kind of knowledge and forms of subjectivity are being produced under the guise of "collateral." The function of collateral is to hold back risk, i.e., to place limits on the indeterminacies associated with social, political, economic and temporal relations. How does collateral accomplish something so grand as this? This talk explores how collateral is sometimes a legal theory, sometimes a material object, sometimes a person, and sometimes an institution. In each case, however, collateral is a set of "routinized knowledge practices." The talk examines the role of these routinized practices in resolving, or at least obviating the complex political and epistemological questions that surround derivatives trading. The title of the talk refers to the pervasive view that the proliferation of global private law institutions of this kind have dealt a blow to the legitimacy and authority of the regulatory state. But if one understands global private law as a set of routinized ways of doing knowledge work, then its relationship to state law becomes far more complicated and ambiguous.

Friday, December 4
CANCELLED

Friday, December 11
Robert J. Sampson, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University

"Social Altruism and the Good Community"

PLEASE NOTE NEW LOCATION:  PSTC Seminar Room, 2nd floor, Mencoff Hall, 68 Waterman Street. RSVP to Ellen_White@brown.edu.

Co-sponsored by the Brown Legal Studies Seminar (BLSS) and the Program on Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4).

Robert J. Sampson is Chair of the Department of Sociology and Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. His research focuses on crime and deviance, the life course, neighborhood effects, and the social organization of cities. Much of his work on neighborhood effects stems from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, for which he served as Scientific Director. With John Laub he has also carried out a long-term study from birth to death of 1,000 disadvantaged men born in Boston during the Great Depression era, including two award-winning books-Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points through Life and Shared Beginnings, and Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70.