Spring 2009

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

Friday, Feburary 6
Frank Dobbin, Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Sociology, Harvard University

"Some Unintended Consequences of Equal Opportunity Law"

In response to equal opportunity regulations of the 1960s, employers wrote personnel guidelines to discourage bias, formalized hiring and promotion systems to guarantee procedural fairness, and set up recruitment and management training programs oriented to substantive change in the workforce. Organizational institutionalists and labor economists question the efficacy of these innovations. Drawing on institutional theory, we develop hypotheses about when organizational innovations will succeed, when they will be decoupled, and when they will lead to unintended consequences.

We explore these hypotheses with workforce data from over 800 American workplaces between 1971 and 2002. We observe three kinds of innovations under two regulatory regimes; equal opportunity and affirmative action.

Simple guidelines are most likely to be decoupled, and show no effects on opportunity. New procedures are less likely to be decoupled, because they involve changing routines, but they are likely to lead to unanticipated consequences, in this case diminishing opportunity. Extra regulatory oversight can prevent those unanticipated consequences. Finally, innovations oriented to substantive change are most likely to bring results.

Bio: Frank Dobbin (Ph.D. Stanford) is professor of sociology at Harvard. He has studied corporate equal opportunity and diversity programs for more than two decades. In his most recent work, with Alexandra Kalev, he is developing an evidence-based approach to diversity management, using a large sample of firms and thirty years of data to analyze the effects of popular diversity programs on workforce integration. His Inventing Equal Opportunity, tracing the history of corporate response to civil rights law, will be published in the spring of 2009 by Princeton.

More information on Frank Dobbin

Friday, February 20
Mark C. Suchman, Professor of Sociology, Brown University

"Sharing is (S)caring on the Digital Frontier: Information Technology Governance in Health Care"

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Abstract: Clinical IT carries great promise for improving healthcare quality and reducing healthcare cost; however, many of these systems also raise the specter of new forms of competition, control and inequality. Consequently, the fate of these technologies may ultimately depend less on their technical performance characteristics than on the availability of appropriate "social governance mechanisms" -- laws, rules and norms -- to overcome ubiquitous challenges of system integration (including compatibility and comprehensiveness), system integrity (including privacy and reliability), and system control (including autonomy and transparency). To understand these dynamics, research must attend simultaneously to the economics of standardization, the sociology of trust, and the politics of accountability -- as well as to the endogenous, mutually constitutive relationship between technological, legal and organizational fields. This paper reviews the relevant conceptual issues and presents preliminary results from an ongoing multi-method study of clinical IT governance in American hospitals, suggesting that governance logics vary both across and within hospital organizations. In this milieu, the intra-organizational politics of compliance appear to color not only the legal consciousness of hospital staff but also the images of law that staff convey to the general public.

Mark Suchman is Professor of Sociology at Brown University and director of the Brown Legal Studies Seminar. He has also taught at the University of Wisconsin (1993-2008), and at Cornell Law School (2006-2007). From 1999 to 2001, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at Yale University, and in 2002-2003 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His research interests center on the relationship between law and organizations, particularly the role of legal institutions in formally and informally legitimating innovation and entrepreneurship in the information technology, nanotechnology, and healthcare sectors. In addition to his work on IT governance in healthcare, he has also written on the role of law firms in Silicon Valley, on organizational legitimacy, on the "internalization" of law within corporate bureaucracies, and on social science approaches to the study of contracts.

More information on Mark Suchman

Friday, March 6
Sharon Paynter, Taubman Center for Public Policy, Brown University

"Judicial Performance Evaluation: Policy Diffusion Across the American States"

Sharon Paynter is a postdoctoral fellow at the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University. She completed doctoral study at North Carolina State University where she studied public policy through state policy actions made by courts and legislatures. Sharon has also worked with state courts in Colorado and local government and nonprofits in North Carolina. She has published in Policy Studies Journal and the American Review of Public Administration.

Wednesday, March 18
Justice Manuel Cepeda

To Be Announced

Friday, April 3
Owen D. Jones, Professor of Law and Biological Sciences, Vanderbilt University

"This Is Your Brain on Law: The Neural Correlates of Third-Party Punishment"

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Legal decision-making in criminal contexts includes two essential functions performed by impartial third parties: assessing responsibility and determining an appropriate punishment. To explore the brain activation underlying these processes, we scanned subjects with fMRI while they determined the appropriate punishment for crimes that varied in perpetrator responsibility and crime severity.

There are long-running debates about the proper roles in law of 'cold' analysis and 'hot' emotion. Our results suggest that, in normal punishment decisions, the distinct neural circuitries of both processes may be jointly involved but separately deployed. Specifically, activity within regions linked to affective/emotional processing (amygdala, medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortex) predicted punishment magnitude for a range of criminal scenarios. By contrast, activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex distinguished between scenarios on the basis of criminal responsibility, suggesting that it plays a key role in third-party punishment. The same prefrontal region has previously been shown to be involved in punishing unfair economic behavior in two-party interactions, raising the possibility that the cognitive processes supporting third-party legal decision-making and second-party economic norm enforcement may be supported by a common neural mechanism in human prefrontal cortex.

More info on Owen Jones

Friday, April 17
Jedediah Purdy, Associate Professor of Law, Duke University Law School

"The Politics of Nature: Restoring Democracy to Environmental Law"

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Legal scholars' discussions of climate change assume that the issue is one mainly of engineering incentives, and that "environmental values" are too weak, vague, or both to spur political action to address the emerging crisis. This paper gives reason to believe otherwise. The major natural resource and environmental statutes, the acts creating national forests and parks to the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, have emerged from exactly the activity that discussions of climate change neglect: democratic argument over the value of the natural world and its role in competing ideas of national purpose, citizenship, and the role and scale of government. This paper traces several major episodes in those developments: the rise of a Romantic attachment to spectacular places, a utilitarian ideal of rational management of resources, the legal and cultural concept of "wilderness," and the innovation of "the environment" as a centerpiece of public debate at the end of the 1960s. It connects each such development to changes in background culture and values and the social movements and political actors that brought them into public debate and, eventually legislation. The result is both a set of specific studies and the outlines of an account of the ways in which the argument and self-interpretation of a democratic community have created and contested new ideas of "nature" throughout American political history. The paper then shows how past episodes cast light on the present: today's climate politics, including the seemingly anomalous (even "irrational") choices by municipalities to adopt the Kyoto carbon-emissions goals, make most sense when understood as extensions of a long tradition of political argument about nature, which does not simply take "interests" as fixed, but changes both interests and values by changing how citizens understand themselves, the country, and the natural world.

More info on Jedediah Purdy

Friday, April 24
Michael Brown, Lambert Prof. of Anthropology & Latin American Studies, Williams College

"Culture in an Iron Cage: Cultural Appropriation and the Governance of Indigenous Heritage"

Discussants:

Jane E. Anderson is a major authority on intellectual property law in the Australia Aboriginal context. She holds a PhD in Law from the University of New South Wales. She has been a Rockefeller Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, and a research associate at the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the Institute for Law and Society of the New York University School of Law, and the Duke University School of Law. She is the author of Law, Knowledge, Culture: The Production of Indigenous Knowledge in Intellectual Property Law (2009).

Carol M. Rose is the Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor Emeritus of Law and Organization at Yale Law School and holds the Lohse Chair in Water and Natural Resources at the Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. She is a major authority on property law, land use, environmental law, natural resources law, and intellectual property law. She is the author of Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory and Rhetoric of Ownership (1994), and co-author of Perspectives on Property Law (2000). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Kay Warren, Charles B. Tillinghast Jr. '32 Professor of International Studies and Anthropology, Brown University

More information on Michael Brown

Friday, May 15

A Selection of Presentations from the Upcoming Law & Society Association Meetings