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DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20251119T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20251119T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20250618T150359Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251022T213033Z
UID:13168-1763553600-1763559000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Gino Pauselli
DESCRIPTION:How does institutional design affect non-state actors’ preferences for international organizations (IOs)? We develop a theory of strategic forum shopping\, where non-state actors choose the most advantageous venue for litigation. While existing research highlights the importance of IO activity\, it often treats non-state actors as exogenous and their involvement as given. In contrast\, our approach considers these actors as strategic decision-makers\, choosing where to engage based on the costs and benefits associated with institutional design. We compare the Inter-American and the UN human rights treaty systems. Our findings show that actors are more likely to file petitions with organizations offering legally binding decisions and less likely with alternatives. Non-governmental organizations weigh time differently than individual petitioners and are more willing to wait for a binding decision. However\, longer wait times deter individual petitioners from filing complaints. This research shows the importance of considering outside options in regimes with overlapping institutions. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nGino Pauselli is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois\, Urbana-Champaign\, specializing in the intersection of human rights\, global governance\, and transnational advocacy. Previously\, Pauselli was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University (2023-2024). \n\n\n\n\nPauselli’s research uses rigorous statistical methods to analyze the dynamics of norms adoption and resistance within global governance systems\, with a focus on how international actors (including NGOs\, intergovernmental organizations\, and transnational networks) shape policy reform and accountability mechanisms.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-gino-pauselli/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20251112T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20251112T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20250618T150019Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251029T154052Z
UID:13165-1762948800-1762954200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Shauhin Talesh
DESCRIPTION:Despite the massive costs associated with data breaches\, ransomware\, viruses\, and cyberattacks\, most organizations remain thoroughly unprepared to safeguard consumer data. Over the past two decades\, the insurance industry has begun offering cyber insurance to help organizations manage cybersecurity and privacy law compliance\, while also offering risk management services as part of their insurance packages. These insurers have thus effectively evolved into de facto regulators — yet at the same time\, they have failed to effectively curtail cybersecurity breaches. \nDrawing from interviews\, observations\, and extensive content analysis of the cyber insurance industry\, this book reveals how cyber insurers’ risk management services convey legitimacy to the public and to insureds but fall short of actually improving data security\, rendering them largely symbolic. Speaking directly to broader debates on regulatory delegation to nonstate actors\, Prof. Talesh proposes a new institutional theory of insurance to explain how insurers shape the content and meaning of privacy law and cybersecurity compliance\, offering policy recommendations for how insurers and governments can work together to improve cybersecurity and foster greater algorithmic justice. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nShauhin Talesh is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work spans law\, sociology\, and political science. His research interests include the empirical study of law and business organizations\, dispute resolution\, consumer protection\, insurance\, and the relationship between law and social inequality. Professor Talesh is considered one of the leading scholars on organizational responses to law and compliance and the relationship between insurance\, regulation and inequality. \nTalesh’s empirical research addresses the intersection between organizations\, risk\, and consumer protection laws\, focusing on private organizations’ responses to and constructions of laws designed to regulate them\, consumers’ mobilization of their legal rights and the legal cultures of private organizations. His most recent research focuses on how cyber insurance and insurance companies shape cybersecurity and privacy law compliance among private organizations. He previously published multiple articles on how insurance companies\, through employment practice liability insurance\, construct the meaning of compliance with anti-discrimination laws.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-shauhin-talesh/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20251029T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20251029T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20250618T145713Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251002T171755Z
UID:13160-1761739200-1761744600@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Mugambi Jouet
DESCRIPTION:Why is abortion being recriminalized in the United States in sharp contrast to the historical evolution of reproductive rights? This presentation will explore how abortion exemplifies American exceptionalism in the original sense of the phrase that America is an “exception\,” especially within the Western world. Yet exceptionalism should not be misunderstood as historical determinism or cultural essentialism. By the early 1970s\, America was converging with peer Western democracies in liberalizing abortion. This process of convergence was ultimately halted by the mounting influence of the U.S. pro-life movement in an age when tolerance or support for reproductive rights increasingly became the norm abroad. \nWhile abortion is often analyzed in isolation\, this multidisciplinary article focuses on its interrelationship with wider features of American exceptionalism. A distinctive religious landscape sheds light on the intensity of opposition to abortion among the substantial minority of Americans who share a traditionalist worldview. This unique social environment has contributed to the resilience of the U.S. anti-abortion movement\, which has an outsized impact due to the exceptional weight of lobbying by special interests over American government. Organized opposition to abortion instead declined elsewhere in the West concurrently with the decline of organized religion\, especially traditionalist conceptions of Christianity. Modern America is now an outlier\, refighting and relitigating an endless battle over abortion. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nMugambi Jouet’s research focuses on American exceptionalism\, criminal justice\, and comparative history from a multidisciplinary perspective. He is an expert on the distinctive historical evolution of American law\, government\, and sociopolitical culture compared to other Western democracies. \nHis scholarship has notably analyzed the death penalty\, mass incarceration\, juvenile justice\, guns\, abortion\, and the historiography of key concepts\, from “American exceptionalism” to the “Western world.” In 2022\, he won the Brophy Prize for the article that “most significantly breaks new ground and adds new insights to the study and understanding of United States legal history.” In 2025\, he received the William A. Rutter Distinguished Teaching Award.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-mugambi-jouet/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20251022T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20251022T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20250925T165222Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251021T211308Z
UID:13801-1761134400-1761139800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Grigory Gorbun
DESCRIPTION:Moot courts—competitive legal simulations where law students argue fictitious cases before panels of judges—have experienced remarkable global growth in recent decades. They have become arenas of international prestige\, with law firms investing heavily in organizing and sponsoring competitions\, legal educators promoting them as powerful tools for reshaping professional culture\, and international institutions using them to advance their jurisdictional claims. My book project asks: why have these seemingly trivial role-play exercises become so central to global legal education\, and what does this tell us about how the authority of law itself is being reimagined in the world today? \nThis talk focuses on the book’s central theoretical contribution. I argue that moot courts shift the grounds of law’s authority away from state sovereignty and toward a transnational legal professional community. Drawing on ethnographic research at Russian moot court competitions\, I demonstrate how\, in a context where state legal institutions face crises of legitimacy\, legal professionals use these competitions to sustain their commitment to law as worth preserving and performing correctly. Moot courts become sites where international interactional professionalism defines what “good” law looks like\, in explicit contrast to failing state institutions. I call this dynamic “moot jurisdiction\,” a process of authorizing law in institutions that have no legal authority or political power. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nGrigory Gorbun (he/him) is a legal and linguistic anthropologist studying how the authority of law is produced and contested beyond conventional legal and political institutions. His research relies on ethnography\, interviews\, and interactional analysis to reveal how attitudes toward law are transferred\, upheld\, and anchored in socially recognizable patterns of communication. Gorbun completed his MA in Anthropology of Law from Université Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne and a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-grigory-gorbun/
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20251015T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20251015T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20250915T203303Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251014T203614Z
UID:13799-1760529600-1760535000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Kris Rosentel\, Anna Fox
DESCRIPTION:Kris Rosentel  \n \n\nCovalent Logics: Policing\, Family Values\, and the Reproduction of Inequality by Anna Fox \nHow do organizations justify their role in reproducing inequality when established institutional logics have been delegitimized? Police have historically relied upon seemingly colorblind logics of danger and criminality to frame their work\, yet mass movements like Black Lives Matter have revealed the racism implicit in these logics\, forcing police to adopt alternative frameworks to justify and legitimize police racism\, misconduct\, and violence. Drawing on interviews with 52 Chicago police officers and data from 552 police complaint files\, this article illustrates how police make use of a surprising framework—family values. Police compared the department to an idealized family to demand loyalty and suppress whistleblowing among police; blamed families of color for social disorder to displace responsibility for police violence; and framed themselves as surrogate parents to civilians to justify disciplinary intervention. By using family values\, police legitimized instances of police violence\, naturalized police power\, and obscured institutional racism and gender inequality. I argue that institutional actors may strategically deploy overlapping institutional logics—a phenomenon I term “covalent logics”–to obscure inequality and maintain legitimacy in the face of large-scale contestation.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-kris-rosentel-anna-fox/
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20251008T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20251008T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20250925T165317Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251006T215745Z
UID:13797-1759924800-1759930200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series:  Ellie Frazier
DESCRIPTION:Over the past three decades\, programs training nonlawyers\, such as limited licensed practitioners (LLPs) and community justice workers (CJWs)\, have arisen in the United State in response to access to justice gaps. This project will address two central questions about nonlawyer professionals in the United States: (1) How do they view formal legal education in relation to their justice work\, particularly when compared to other educational pathways for achieving access to justice and community activism goals? (2) How do structural\, socioeconomic\, and interpersonal factors shape their perceptions of and engagement with the legal profession? Expanding on comparative research in South Africa and Sierra Leone on nonlawyer programs\, this research will draw on theoretical frameworks from literatures on the legal profession\, access to justice\, legal consciousness\, and state capacity to move beyond describing what non-lawyers do to examine how they understand and articulate their position within the legal system. It aims to generate meaningful points of comparison between different categories of nonlawyers to illuminate how different professionalization pathways shape nonlawyers’ perceptions of their roles relative to attorneys and their connections to community activism and political change. The study’s findings will seek to contribute to scholarship on access to justice interventions\, professionalization processes\, and ongoing debates about legal education value and regulatory frameworks for nonlawyer practice. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nEllie Frazier (she/her) a political science and sociolegal studies scholar whose research and teaching focus broadly on access to justice\, social movements\, and comparative politics. Her dissertation investigates the political\, social\, and legal processes through which nonlawyer services emerged and evolved across colonial\, authoritarian\, and democratic state building in South Africa. By shedding light on these dynamics\, Frazier’s dissertation seeks to clarify the opportunities and challenges of integrating non-lawyers into democratic institutions as part of access to justice initiatives; it also broadly highlights how these forms of sociolegal assistance both challenge and reinforce the boundaries of the legal profession.  
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-ellie-frazier/
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20251001T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20251001T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20250925T165256Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250925T220921Z
UID:13795-1759320000-1759325400@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Christopher Robertson & Jane Y. Jeong
DESCRIPTION:Christopher Robertson \n \nAt the Borders of Belonging: Asian American Immigrant Families\, Disability\, and the Governance of Conditional Futures by Jane Y. Jeong \nAsian American immigrant students with disabilities and their families remain an understudied population in the sociolegal landscape of U.S. special education.  Their experiences are shaped by complex institutional dynamics: legal mandates\, administrative practices\, and shifting policy priorities converge to determine how rights are interpreted\, how services are delivered\, and how futures are envisioned. Yet\, little is known about how families navigate and make sense of this process — or how they respond when procedural requirements\, institutional expectations\, and family knowledge do not align. This dissertation examines how Asian American immigrant students with disabilities and their families encounter\, negotiate\, and contest the governance of transition planning as defined under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Conceptualizing transition as a legal and bureaucratic process — one that organizes access to federally guaranteed supports and shapes postsecondary trajectories — this study draws on sociolegal theory\, cultural citizenship\, and border epistemologies to understand how families engage with and reinterpret the state’s categories and procedures. By revealing how legal mandates are operationalized in practice\, this project advances a sociolegal account of transition planning as a site where governance\, institutional logics\, and family agency intersect. \n\nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-christopher-robertson-jane-jeong/
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250924T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250924T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20250618T145225Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250917T151323Z
UID:13153-1758715200-1758720600@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Gabriel Winant
DESCRIPTION:This presentation opens a new angle of inquiry on the brittleness of the institutions of the welfare state constructed during the New Deal. Whereas the traditional account of those institutions holds that they were the product of a “culture of unity” among the New Deal’s mass base\, and were vitiated at the elite level\, this paper explores a more complex and fractious dynamic at both levels of the liberal coalition. This approach suggests that the institutional contradictions that ultimately led to the defeat of New Deal liberalism were not external impositions only (from business or from the Dixiecrats)\, but arose in important ways from divisions within the “culture of unity” itself—the mass base of urban industrial workers in the North. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nDr. Gabriel Winant is a historian of the social structures of inequality in modern American capitalism. His work approaches capitalism as an expansive social order—not confined to the market alone but rather structurally composed of multiple\, heterogeneous spheres. He focuses on the relationship between economic production and formal employment on the one hand\, and the social reproduction and governance of the population on the other. Broadly\, he is interested in transformations in the social division of labor and the making and management of social difference through this process.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-gabriel-winant/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250917T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250917T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20250618T142605Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250910T153701Z
UID:13147-1758110400-1758115800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Michelle Brown
DESCRIPTION:In the United States\, the formation and ongoing articulation of tribal sovereignty has been inseparable from the logics and institutions of the settler colonial carceral state. This convergence—where Indigenous governance\, legal recognition\, and carceral power intersect—is not an aberration but rather a foundational structural nexus of U.S. law and carceral chokeholds\, and therefore of significance broadly for our understandings of US carceral power and social movement struggles aimed at transformation. The landmark decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020)\, which affirmed nearly half of Oklahoma as tribal territory\, exemplifies this paradox: sovereignty is recognized but on the terms of the carceral state and its expansion. Drawing on sociolegal analysis grounded in critical Indigenous studies\, carceral studies\, and abolitionist thought\, this paper traces how jurisdictional contests in Indian Country obscure the possibilities of ongoing Indigenous forms of governance rooted in relationality\, non-punitive accountability\, and deep forms of community safety. These legal border skirmishes raise urgent questions: What kind of sovereignty is affirmed when granted by the settler carceral state? How can Indigenous resurgence leverage sovereignty against carceral expansion? And what forms of justice might continue to emerge when Indigenous traditions and abolitionist geographies converge to imagine governance beyond and before the carceral state? \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \nTo read the related paper for Dr. Brown’s presentation\, reach out to Sophie Kofman or Dianna Garzón. \n\nDr. Michelle Brown is a criminologist and sociolegal scholar with a joint PhD in Criminal Justice and American Studies. A Professor of Sociology in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Tennessee\, Knoxville\, Dr. Brown also serves as Co-Director of the Appalachian Justice Research Center. Her research and teaching areas include abolition and emergent forms of justice; carceral studies; law & society; and media\, theory\, and digital culture. Her work focuses on the rise of the carceral state and attendant social movements directed at ending mass incarceration\, building more effective forms of community safety\, and shifting media narratives on crime and punishment. Dr. Brown is the author of The Culture of Punishment(NYUP); co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology\, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Crime\, Media\, and Popular Culture\, the Palgrave MacMillan Crime\, Media and Culture Book Series\, and she is the former editor of the leading journal on crime and media: Crime Media Culture. Dr. Brown also has a forthcoming volume\, Under the Gun: Criminology Goes Back to the Movies (NYUP). She was named Critical Criminologist of the Year in 2016 by the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice of the American Society of Criminology. She is a first generation student: an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation (Tahlequah\, OK) and of English-Scottish descent\, with deep lineages in Appalachia on both sides of her family.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-michelle-brown-2/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250910T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250910T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20250618T141424Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250908T210900Z
UID:13143-1757505600-1757511000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Zhandarka Kurti and Jarrod Shanahan
DESCRIPTION:In 2019\, after unyielding pressure from activists\, New York City seemed poised to close the detested Rikers Island penal colony. The local press dutifully reported that the end of Rikers was imminent\, and New Yorkers celebrated the closure of the country’s largest urban jail\, condemned as a moral stain on an otherwise great city. The problem\, however\, was that the city had not actually committed to closing Rikers. And at the same time\, it laid the groundwork for the construction of more jails\, a network of skyscraper facilities amounting to the largest carceral construction the city has seen in decades. \n\n\nHow did this happen? Scholars and organizers Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti detail how progressive forces in New York City appropriated the rhetoric of social movements and social justice to promise “downsized” and “humane” jails. The principal advocates of these new jails were not right-wing politicians\, but prominent city activists and progressive non-profit organizations. The story is at once a case study and a cautionary tale for what will be coming to cities and towns across the United States and beyond. \n To register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\n \nDr. Zhandarka Kurti is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Kurti received her PhD degree in Sociology from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Her research and teaching areas include race and criminalization\, mass supervision and contemporary politics of criminal justice reforms. She is the co-author of Skyscraper Jails: The Abolitionist Fight Against Jail Expansion in New York City (Haymarket 2025)\, and States of Incarceration: Rebellion\, Reform and the Future of America’s Punishment System (Field Notes/Reaktion 2022). \n \nDr. Jarrod Shanahan is the author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage (Verso\, 2022) and Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of Rebellion\, Reaction\, and Morbid Symptoms (PM Press\, 2025)\, and the co-author of States of Incarceration: Rebellion\, Reform and America’s Punishment System (Field Notes/Reaktion\, 2022)\, City Time: On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island (NYU Press\, 2025) and Skyscraper Jails: The Abolitionist Fight Against Jail Expansion in New York City (Haymarket\, 2025). He works as an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-zhandarka-kurti-2/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250521T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250521T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20241028T144334Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250327T175538Z
UID:11053-1747828800-1747834200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Jedidiah Kroncke
DESCRIPTION:The life of Chinese legal scholar Wu Jinxiong has long attracted the attention given his diverse intellectual interests and high profile in Chinese judicial politics and constitutional reform during the 1930s and 1940s. Like many of his generation\, Wu’s education combined traditional Confucian schooling with study at multiple Western-influenced institutions. During his first law degree\, he converted to Christianity and his religious journey ultimately led him to become one of the most notable Catholic Chinese intellectuals of this era. Episodes of his transnationalized life have been well-studied—from his relationship with Oliver Wendell Holmes to his engagement with numerous other Western intellectuals. \nYet\, Wu’s life after the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 has received less attention. During this period\, Wu spent fifteen years in the United States primarily teaching law at Seton Hall University before returning to Taiwan for the final years of his life. While the least studied time of his life\, Wu’s post-1949 life in the United States was a critical juncture in his ongoing quest to reconcile his Confucian sympathies with his Catholic faith and was a significant contributor to debates both about natural law and the relationship of Vatican II to Catholic legal thought. In particular\, he became closely associated with prominent Catholic scholars who fervently promoted Edmund Burke’s ideas\, such as Russell Kirk and Peter Stanlis\, and influenced his post-World War II elevation in conservative American legal thought. \nYet\, Wu’s return to Taiwan was impacted by the complications of these debates crosscut by Cold War geopolitical tensions and related racial politics. Recovering the transnational significance of this episode of Wu’s life is revealing not only as an example of the challenges diasporic Chinese intellectuals faced during this era but also how his relatively unique intellectual commitments shed light on less emphasized tensions in Catholicism and American Cold War geopolitics of this era. Amidst rising contemporary Sino-American tensions and renewed debates over the role of Catholic legal thinking in US politics\, Wu’s complex American experience as a transnational intellectual is newly provocative and probative. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nDr. Jedidiah Kroncke is an associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong\, joining the faculty in August of 2018. He currently teaches property\, equity and trusts\, as well as courses in common law reasoning for civil law students. \nPreviously\, he was a professor at FGV Sao Paulo School of Law\, and before this he was the Senior Fellow at the East Asian Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School. Dr. Kroncke garnered a range of awards and fellowships as he earned a B.A. in Asian Studies and Legal Studies from the University of California Berkeley\, a J.D. from Yale Law School\, and a Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology also from the University of California\, Berkeley. After graduate school\, he was awarded the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fellowship at Yale Law School\, the Samuel I. Golieb Fellowship in Legal History at NYU Law and the Berger-Howe Fellowship in Legal History at Harvard Law School. He has been a visitor at the International University College of Turin and the National University of Singapore. \nDr. Kroncke’s research centers on international legal history and the comparative study of alternative labor and property institutions. His interdisciplinary work draws on the US\, Chinese and Brazilian legal experiences\, and is devoted to the productive indigenization of comparative legal analysis. He routinely presents his work at leading law schools across the globe\, and is a reviewer for several leading international journals as well as the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-jedidiah-kroncke/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250514T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250514T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20241120T200106Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250428T155602Z
UID:11287-1747224000-1747229400@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Xin He
DESCRIPTION:How to understand the operation of Chinese courts\, especially after Xi Jinping took power and thoroughly reformed its judiciary? To what extent is it different from other judicial systems? Dr. Xin He presents a governance model. The courts have two overarching characteristics under this model: supporting the state’s goals of policy implementation and legitimacy enhancement. The various policies that the courts are tasked with implementing and the approaches the courts use for enhancing the judiciary’s legitimacy—and by extension\, that of the state—have played key roles in the courts’ evolution. This governance model is distinct from the dualism and order-maintenance theses which have been used to understand the Chinese legal system in the past. It also challenges the conventional wisdom of the rule-by-law and rights-based approaches to understanding the Chinese court system. Engaging extensively with the literature in law and politics\, law and society\, and institutional economics\, The Judicial System of China provides an understanding of the inner workings and day-to-day realities of the Chinese judicial system. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \nTo read the related chapter for Dr. He’s presentation\, reach out to Sophie Kofman or Dianna Garzón. \n\nProfessor Xin He studies China’s legal systems empirically. He is interested in supervising Ph.D. students in the fields of judicial process (criminal justice in particular)\, legal consciousness\, and law and gender in China. \nHis English monographs are: \nThe Judicial System of China (Oxford University Press\, 2024) \nDivorces in China: Institutional Constraints and Gendered Outcomes (NYU Press\, 2021) \nEmbedded Courts: Judicial System of China (coauthored with Kwai Hang Ng\, Cambridge University Press\, 2017) \nHe also published a Chinese book 《街頭的研究者：法律與社會科學筆記》(The Researcher in the Street) (Peking University Press 2021). \nAn avid Pingpong player\, he was the champion (men’s single) of the Central and Western District of his age group in 2019.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-he-xin/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250507T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250507T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20241029T164937Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250505T191715Z
UID:11109-1746619200-1746624600@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Alexandra Huneeus
DESCRIPTION:This paper analyzes the arguments used to advance claims of non-human rights (or rights of nature) in Latin America\, the region where they first emerged and have undergone the most development. Most studies to date treat rights of nature as a single movement. A review of judgments\, laws\, and social movements\, however\, reveals that justifications for extending legal rights beyond humans fall into three categories. First are claims based on the species-level attributes of an animal or other creature: there is a quality of the being in question that demands a certain type of ethical treatment. Second are claims based on legal pluralism. Law in a multicultural state should give voice to the views of indigenous and tribal peoples as well as Western legal traditions. If indigenous or other peoples so request\, states should grant legal personhood and rights to natural features or “earth beings” that non-Western peoples hold as persons\, or kin\, and with whom they live in relation. Third are claims based on a new ontology: Some argue that it is time to rethink the most fundamental commitments of Western thought and\, specifically\, to give a different moral meaning to the distinction and relation between humans and non-humans\, as well as the distinction and relation between the living and non-living. Each of the three types of claims is advanced by distinct social movements and plays out in different ways in its relationship to existing laws. While the first and second can be cast as extensions of existing human rights doctrine\, the third aims to radically shift our major premises but is struggling to find legal coherence. The chapter’s main contribution is to introduce a typology of nature rights and use it to analyze the relation of nature rights and human rights. Scholarship needs to consider these differences in the argumentative structure because they have implications for many of the questions that we are asking of this emerging body of law\, including questions of effectiveness\, implementation\, and impact on other areas of law. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \nTo read the related paper for Dr. Huneeus’s presentation\, reach out to Sophie Kofman or Dianna Garzón. \n\nAlexandra Huneeus’ scholarship focuses on international law and human rights\, with emphasis on Latin America. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of International Law\, Harvard International Law Journal\, Law and Social Inquiry\, Yale Journal of International Law\, Leiden International Law Journal\, and by Cambridge University Press. She is Evjue Bascom Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Law\, Society and Justice at the University of Wisconsin\, Madison. She received her PhD\, JD and BA from University of California\, Berkeley\, and was a post-doc at Stanford University’s Center on Development\, Democracy and the Rule of Law. \nIn 2017\, Professor Huneeus was named to serve a ten-year term as Foreign Expert Jurist in the Colombian Jurisdicción para la Paz (JEP)\, a court created as part of the Colombian peace process. At UW\, Professor Huneeus currently serves as Director of the Center for Law\, Society and Justice. She is Co-Chair of the University of Wisconsin Human Rights Program\, which she co-founded\, and Director of the Global Legal Studies Program. She is a member of the American Society of International Law and the Law and Society Association. She has served on the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law\, and of Law and Social Inquiry. Previously\, she has served on the Board of Trustees of the Law and Society Association and the American Society for Comparative Law\, and as section chair for the Midwest Political Science Association (Law and Courts) and for the ASIL Midwest Interest Group on International law.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-alexandra-huneeus/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250430T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250430T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20241029T164246Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250424T194651Z
UID:11100-1746014400-1746019800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Kamaria Porter
DESCRIPTION:Black and Latina women experience higher rates of unwanted sex\, assault\, and harassment\, yet rarely report these incidents to police or campus officials (Harris\, 2023: Slatton & Richard\, 2020; Washington\, 2001). To date\, most research on campus sexual assault reporting focuses on white\, heterosexual\, cis-gendered women at elite institutions (Brubaker et al.\, 2017; Sabina & Ho\, 2014). In this study\, Dr. Porter examined factors that influenced Black and Latina women and non-binary students’ decision to report sexual assault to police and/or university officials. Dr. Porter used a conceptual framework that combines intersectionality and the theory of legal consciousness. Instead of examining the effects of racism or sexism in isolation\, intersectionality holds that these systems of power interlock and shape each other (Crenshaw\, 1989\, 1991). Black women\, being marginalized by anti-Black racism and sexism\, experience particular forms of exclusion at the intersection of racism and sexism (P. H. Collins\, 2000; Crenshaw\, 1991). The theory of legal consciousness explores how people perceive the legal system and use concepts associated with the law to interpret everyday experiences\, particularly when they are harmed (Ewick & Silbey\, 1995; Marshall\, 2003). This presentation focuses on the 15 of 66 participants who entered a criminal or university grievance process\, exploring their evaluation of reporting processes based on interactions with police\, complaint officers\, the legal system\, and Title IX policy procedures. This research has implications for policy implementation and exploring legal cynicism among university student survivors.  \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nKamaria B. Porter\, PhD. (she/her) joined the Office of the Ombudsperson as Associate Ombudsperson in July 2024. Prior to joining Northwestern University\, Kamaria served as an Assistant Professor of Higher Education at Penn State University. There she taught a range of courses related to higher education\, including administration and organizational theory\, history and critical issues in higher education\, and research methods. Kamaria’s research broadly explores inequities in higher education\, focusing on faculty experiences on the tenure track\, graduate student success in STEM departments\, and Title IX policy. She earned her PhD in Higher Education at the University of Michigan. While there\, she managed a research lab on university policy responses to sexual harassment and assault\, investigated practices to prevent harassment in academic units\, and organized interdisciplinary learning and mental health programming for graduate students.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-kamaria-porter/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250423T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250423T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20241107T194600Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250307T214519Z
UID:11168-1745409600-1745415000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Shitong Qiao
DESCRIPTION:Based on six-year fieldwork across China including over 200 in-depth interviews\, this book provides an ethnographic account of how hundreds of millions of Chinese homeowners practice democracy in and beyond their condominium complexes. Using interviews\, survey data\, and a comprehensive examination of laws\, policies and judicial decisions\, this book also examines how the party-state in China responds to the risks and benefits brought by neighborhood democratization. Moreover\, this book provides a framework to analyze different approaches to the authoritarian dilemma facing neighborhood democratization which may increase the regime’s legitimacy and expose it to the challenge of independent organizations at the same time. Lastly\, this book identifies conditions under which neighborhood democratization can succeed. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nShitong Qiao is Professor of Law and the Ken Young-Gak Yun and Jinah Park Yun Research Scholar at Duke Law School. He also holds the title of Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong and is a core faculty member of the Asia/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University. He was previously a tenured professor at the University of Hong Kong\, a Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) fellow at Princeton University\, and the inaugural Jerome A. Cohen Visiting Professor of Law at NYU. \nHe is primarily interested in the relationship between political power\, law\, and private ordering. His first monograph\, Chinese Small Property: The Co-Evolution of Law and Social Norms (Cambridge University Press\, 2017)\, investigates how a real estate economy took off without legal titles. His second monograph\, The Authoritarian Commons: Neighborhood Democratization in Urban China (Cambridge University Press\, forthcoming 2025)\, provides an ethnographic account of how hundreds of millions of Chinese homeowners practice democracy in and beyond their condominium complexes\, within and beyond the boundaries of law. \nProfessor Qiao has also published numerous articles in top American and Chinese law journals. In addition\, he has served as an expert witness on the Chinese property regime in China\, Canada\, and the U.S. He holds degrees from Wuhan University (LL.B.)\, Peking University (MPhil)\, and Yale University (LL.M.\, J.S.D.). \n 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-shitong-qiao/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250416T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250416T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20241028T144319Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250410T184431Z
UID:11050-1744804800-1744810200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Jerry Kang
DESCRIPTION:At a time when the Right attacks implicit bias as liberal propaganda and some on the Left dismiss it as a distraction from structural racism\, this Article [to be discussed] offers a different take: implicit bias actually helps us see and respond to structural racism. It is a powerful diagnostic and prescriptive tool. Kang and Carbado argue that the supposed tension between individual and structural accounts of racial inequality is misguided. Implicit bias\, Kang and Carbado contend\, both reflects and reinforces structural racism. More than that\, implicit bias education—when done right—can catalyze structural reform. \nPart I begins with what most readers already know about implicit bias but then adds a surprising twist: when we aggregate individual bias scores across cities\, counties\, and states\, we discover striking correlations with racial disparities in everything from health outcomes to police violence. This recent “structuralizing” of implicit bias data has escaped the attention of legal academics. \nPart II tackles head-on the Left’s concern that implicit bias isn’t “structural enough.” Kang and Carbado agree that structural forces are primary and introduce the concept of “racial sedimentation” to make that point clear. However\, they push back against the puzzling claim that implicit bias frameworks reinforce the “intentional discrimination” mindset that Critical Race Theory has long criticized and show that just the opposite is true. \nPart III showcases how implicit bias education can advance structural reform in three important domains. Theoretically\, it provides empirical support for Critical Race Theory’s claim that race is socially constructed. Practically\, through what Kang and Carbado call the “Quadrants of Responsibility” framework\, it motivates law firms to tackle structural barriers they’d otherwise write off as beyond their institutional responsibility and control. And doctrinally\, it nudges courts to think more structurally about everything from capital punishment to jury selection. Kang and Carbado think this matters. By showing how implicit bias operates as both symptom and cause of structural racism\, they offer a new way to understand—and do something about—America’s enduring racial hierarchy. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \nTo read the related paper for Professor Kang’s presentation\, reach out to Sophie Kofman or Dianna Garzón. \n\nJerry Kang is the Ralph and Shirley Shapiro Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA. He graduated magna cum laude from both Harvard College (physics) and Harvard Law School\, where he was a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals\, he started his professorship at UCLA in 1995. A leading scholar on implicit bias\, critical race studies\, and communications law\, Professor Kang collaborates broadly across disciplines and industries on scholarly\, educational\, and advocacy projects. An inspiring teacher\, he has received UCLA’s highest recognition: the Eby Art of Teaching Distinguished Teaching Award. During 2015-20\, he served as the UCLA’s Founding Vice Chancellor for Equity\, Diversity and Inclusion.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-jerry-kang/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250409T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250409T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20241120T152413Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250401T142523Z
UID:11277-1744200000-1744205400@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Taisu Zhang
DESCRIPTION:This article argues that legal professions\, regardless of socioeconomic\, political\, cultural\, or ideological context\, naturally drift towards jurisprudential internalism. Zhang defines “legal internalism” as a behavioral paradigm in which legal actors treat legal rules as normative\, epistemologically self-contained\, and systemically coherent. Such a paradigm is deeply controversial within the legal academy: formalists embrace it as objectively “correct\,” whereas realists reject it as empirically false and conceptually incoherent. \nRegardless of what scholars believe\, he argues—first at the level of behavioral theory\, then through empirical illustration—that internalism naturally appeals to lawyers and judges due to the socioeconomic incentive structures they face. Once socially accepted\, internalism greatly increases the legal knowledge gap between specialists and non-specialists\, rendering legal comprehension easier for trained lawyers and but more difficult for laymen. This enhances the legal profession’s functional dominance over legal interpretation\, which in turn enhances its prestige\, sociopolitical stature\, and earning power. As a result\, legal professionals will tend to behaviorally embrace internalism regardless of its intellectual merits. Legal scholars\, in contrast\, have different incentive structures that significantly dilute the appeal of internalism. \nThese are universalist theoretical claims that should apply in nearly every socioeconomic and political context. Although a full empirical proof is clearly impossible in a single article\, we demonstrate their applicability to six of the world’s most important legal systems: the United States\, China\, Germany\, England\, Japan\, and India. In all six countries\, which otherwise diverge dramatically in wealth\, size\, politics\, culture\, and institutions\, legal professionals behaviorally drift towards internalism over time. They do so despite some significant political and intellectual obstacles\, and often in an explicitly self-interested manner. In contrast\, legal scholars in several of these countries are visibly more skeptical towards internalism. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nTaisu Zhang is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School and works on comparative legal and economic history\, private law theory\, and contemporary Chinese law and politics. He is the author of two books\, The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems\, Politics\, and Institutions (Cambridge University Press\, 2023)\, and The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press\, 2017). These are the first two entries in a planned trilogy of books on the institutional and cultural origins of early modern economic divergence. He is currently writing two other books: the first\, The Authoritarian Functions of Law (And Their Application to Contemporary China)\, is under contract with Harvard University Press and examines the political and socioeconomic logic of legalization in China. The second\, tentatively titled The Cultural-Legal Origins of Economic Divergence\, completes the trilogy mentioned above. Zhang’s academic articles and essays have recently appeared in journals such as the Journal of Legal Studies\, the Journal of Legal Analysis\, the Yale Law Journal\, and the Harvard Law Review. His work has won awards and prizes from a number of academic organizations. \nZhang is a Global Faculty member at Peking University Law School and holds secondary appointments at Yale in the History Department and the Jackson School. He has also taught at the Duke University School of Law\, the University of Hong Kong\, Brown University\, and the Tsinghua University School of Law. He serves as co-editor of Studies in Legal History\, the book series of the American Society for Legal History (published by Cambridge University Press). He is a regular commentator on law and politics in media outlets\, in both English and Chinese.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-taisu-zhang/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250402T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250402T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20241028T144302Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250328T205701Z
UID:11047-1743595200-1743600600@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Tristin Green
DESCRIPTION:In February 2025\, the Trump Department of Education issued a Dear Colleague letter to universities and K-12 schools in which it insisted that teachings that trigger feelings of guilt or “moral burden” because of race amount to discrimination by “deny[ing] students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school.” Several years earlier\, the Executive Office of the President under then-president Donald Trump issued a letter directing all federal agencies to “cease and desist” in their workplaces from funding diversity training sessions that teach “divisive concepts\,” including any trainings “suggesting that any individuals should feel discomfort\, guilt\, anguish\, or any other form of psychological stress on account of his or her race.” The common idea across these directives is that teaching about racial bias\, systemic racism\, racial history\, or injustice amounts to discrimination against whites solely because it imposes harms related to race in the form of psychological stress or emotional anguish. Feeling badly about race\, in other words\, renders the teachings discriminatory without any further inquiry. \nThese directives build from a larger shift in antidiscrimination law over the past several decades toward measuring individual harm in determining whether discrimination occurred. The shift\, what Tristin Green calls “centering personal offense\,” is particularly evident in the area of employment discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Judges during this time began to see and emphasize individual\, psychological harm as a principal discrimination harm and at the same time to raise concerns about claims for mere trifles\, creating legal doctrines designed to protect employers from liability through judgments about individuals’ harms where no such doctrines existed before. \nAs the anti-DEI directives so starkly illustrate\, centering personal offense in antidiscrimination law deforms and decontextualizes the discrimination inquiry by burying normative determinations in individualized measurements of harm. In this way\, it dovetails with (though is distinct from) calls for formal equality and colorblindness. What’s more\, once measuring harm is part of the discrimination inquiry\, it appears natural for judges to weigh individual harms against each other in deciding whether discrimination took place: One individual’s judicially declared affront to dignity is put up against another individual’s judicially declared much ado about nothing. \nIn this project\, Tristin Green exposes the turn in antidiscrimination law toward centering personal offense (a turn that has been implicitly embraced by progressives and conservatives alike) and illustrates why it is problematic. Looking to the future\, she then shows how a seemingly narrow recent Supreme Court decision\, Muldrow v. City of St. Louis\, can be understood to upend it. With antidiscrimination law under attack\, re-centering institutions and normative debates about what amounts to discrimination and why is more crucial than ever. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nTristin Green is a sociolegal scholar interested in the role of institutions—such as workplaces\, educational systems\, and legal frameworks—in perpetuating discrimination. Her work critically examines how prevailing ideologies about discrimination shape legal doctrines and\, in turn\, influence the potential for law to effect substantive and meaningful social change. Her work pushes against narrow frames of discrimination to instead emphasize institutional and organizational decisions\, especially as they affect the context for day-to-day relations. \nProfessor Green is the author of dozens of scholarly journal articles and book chapters\, as well as two books: Racial Emotion at Work: Dismantling Discrimination and Building Racial Justice in the Workplace (University of California Press\, 2023) and Discrimination Laundering: The Rise of Organizational Innocence and the Crisis of Equal Opportunity Law (Cambridge University Press\, 2017).
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-tristan-green/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250312T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250312T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20241028T144246Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250307T215340Z
UID:11044-1741780800-1741786200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Ji Li
DESCRIPTION:Immigrant lawyers represent a rapidly growing yet understudied segment of the U.S. legal profession. This article examines the career trajectories of Chinese immigrant lawyers\, the largest ethnic subgroup within this population\, through a dual institutional perspective that situates their professional experiences within both home-state and host-state institutional contexts. Applying the forms of capital framework\, this study empirically analyzes how these lawyers navigate the devaluation of their human and cultural capital\, limited access to social capital\, and systemic biases within the American legal market. Despite these structural barriers\, Chinese immigrant lawyers exercise considerable adaptive agency by specializing in China-related legal work\, a strategy that enables them to reconfigure and mobilize their capital in ways that mitigate structural disadvantages. By shifting the analytical focus beyond a U.S.-centric lens\, this study advances socio-legal scholarship by proposing a transnational approach that captures both institutional constraints and agentic responses shaping immigrant lawyers’ careers. More broadly\, it contributes to ongoing debates on the legal profession\, immigrant incorporation\, and first-generation Asian American professionals\, while extending the application of the forms of capital framework to transnational legal careers. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nProfessor Li joined UCI Law in July 2019 as the John S. and Marilyn Long Professor of U.S.-China Business and Law. Prior to this appointment\, he was a Professor of Law and a Zhuang Zhou Scholar at Rutgers University\, where he also served as a member of the Associate Faculty of the Division of Global Affairs. \n\n\nProfessor Li received his Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University and his J.D. from Yale Law School\, where he was an Olin Fellow in Law\, Economics\, and Public Policy. After law school\, he worked for several years at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York. \n\n\nProfessor Li’s teaching and scholarship cover a broad range of topics\, including Chinese law and politics\, international business transactions\, contracts\, comparative law\, and empirical legal studies. He has published two books with Cambridge University Press: Negotiating Legality (2024) and Clash of Capitalisms (2018)\, both of which examine how Chinese multinational companies\, including those owned by the Chinese state\, adapt to U.S. legal and regulatory institutions. During the 2018-2019 academic year\, Professor Li was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is currently working on two book projects that investigate the interactions between China and the international legal order\, as well as the ways transnational legal actors are coping with the U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry. \n\n 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-ji-li/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250305T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250305T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20250205T153751Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250218T194405Z
UID:11935-1741176000-1741181400@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Hila Keren
DESCRIPTION:Statutory bans on providing necessary treatments to trans minors are already in place in about half of the nation’s states. Although many courts have found such treatment bans unconstitutional\, the Sixth Circuit affirmed bans enacted by Tennessee and Kentucky in L.W. v. Skrmetti. The decision rejected two separate constitutional challenges under the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause. However\, when the challengers petitioned for the Supreme Court’s review\, the Court only agreed to consider the argument—made by the Government as an intervening plaintiff—that the treatment bans discriminate on the basis of sex and transgender status in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. It took no action on the private plaintiffs’ petitions—minors\, parents\, and doctors—who argued that the treatment bans not only discriminate but also infringe on parental rights in violation of the Due Process Clause. \nThis Article is the first to analyze the adverse ramifications of such a selective review of the treatment bans. It argues that deciding Skrmetti without considering parental rights is a flawed way to adjudicate the constitutionality of the bans. Far from being merely a procedural issue\, narrow consideration stands to skew the substantive outcome of the litigation\, allowing the bans to survive despite their striking conflict with the Constitution. This is a possible result not due to a weakness of the legal arguments regarding discrimination: The bans explicitly target transgender adolescents\, preventing only them from undergoing treatments that cisgender minors are permitted to receive. Rather\, as this Article shows\, it is the conservative orientation of the Court that makes the invalidation of the bans under the Equal Protection Clause an unlikely result. \nYet\, this Article offers more than an analysis of how selective consideration begets injustice. Because it acknowledges that treating trans youth touches ideological nerves that impact adjudication\, it takes on an original task: uncovering arguments that would justify invalidating the bans outside of the liberal framework. By uniquely examining the issue from a conservative perspective\, this Article aspires to help persuade enough Republican appointees on the Court that the treatment bans are unconstitutional for reasons independent of their discriminatory intent and content. It canvasses multiple resources to show how conservatives are less united with regard to state intrusion into parental rights than they are in their resistance to gender identity issues. Based on this study\, the Article argues that the main path to saving minors’ access to gender-affirming care is to find common ground between liberals and some conservatives on the Court around the bans’ impact on the fundamental rights of parents to direct the upbringing\, including healthcare needs\, of their children free of government intervention. \nDelving even deeper in search of such a coalition\, this Article highlights conflicting priorities on the right side of the political map\, analyzing how the treatment bans contradict key principles of the libertarian and neoliberal strands within the conservative movement. This nuanced understanding might persuade some Justices\, who are more committed to limiting state power than to promoting religious values\, to be more skeptical of the bans and join their liberal colleagues in invalidating them as a display of unprecedented government overreach. \nTherefore\, there might currently be a narrow window of opportunity to invalidate the bans and resume trans minors’ access to the treatments their doctors advise and their parents agree they need. This insight should lead the Court to broaden its review and consider the threat to parental rights before deciding Skrmetti. Yet\, if this does not transpire due to excessive partisanship\, the Article’s long-term contribution is identifying—for future litigation—how the treatment bans clash not only with trans rights but also with conservative principles. As this Article shows\, due care for all minors\, regardless of their gender identity\, could and should be within reach even in a conservative Court. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nHila Keren brings a unique global perspective on contracts and business law to the classroom\, having studied\, taught and practiced law in Israel for more than two decades. She served on the Faculty of Law of her alma mater\, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem\, from 2005 until her appointment to Southwestern in Fall 2010. At Hebrew University\, she taught basic and advanced courses in contracts as an Assistant Professor of Law and earned the Outstanding Teaching Award. In 2006\, Professor Keren was elected by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities to be a member of its Young Researchers’ Forum. Professor Keren was appointed Associate Dean for Research in 2019. \nAt Southwestern\, Dean Keren teaches in the areas of contracts and business law. In addition to earning her LL.B. and Ph.D. degrees in Israel\, Dean Keren completed two years of post-doctoral studies at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California\, Berkeley in 2005. During her studies\, she was awarded the Birk Foundation Award for Distinguished Research in the Field of Law\, the Alice Shalvi Scholarship for Original Feminist Legal Studies\, the Rector’s Prize for Outstanding Doctoral Students and the Golda Meir Fellowship. She returned to UC Berkeley in 2007-2008 to teach Contracts and Challenges to Legal Rationality as a Visiting Professor. \n 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-hila-keren/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250226T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250226T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20241029T164645Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250224T201319Z
UID:11106-1740571200-1740576600@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Calvin John Smiley
DESCRIPTION:Reentry after release from incarceration is often presented as a story of redemption. Unfortunately\, this is not the reality. Those being released must navigate the reentry process with diminished legal rights and amplified social stigmas\, in a journey that is often confusing\, complex\, and precarious. Making use of life-history interviews\, focus groups\, and ethnographic fieldwork with low-income urban residents of color\, primarily Black men\, Calvin John Smiley finds that reentry requires the recently released to negotiate a web of disjointed and often contradictory systems that serve as an extension of the carceral system. No longer behind bars but not fully free\, the recently released navigate a state of limbo that deprives them of opportunity and support while leaving them locked in a cycle of perpetual punishment. Warning of the dangers of reformist efforts that only serve to further entrench carceral systems\, this book advocates for abolitionist solutions rooted in the visions of the people most affected. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \nTo read the related paper for Dr. Smiley’s presentation\, reach out to Sophie Kofman or Dianna Garzón. \n\nCalvin John Smiley received his PhD from The Graduate Center-CUNY in 2014. His work focuses on issues related to race\, inequality\, and social justice. More specifically\, as a critical sociologist and criminologist\, he has studied mass incarceration and prisoner reentry\, particularly for urban inhabitants. \nSmiley has been published in a number of academic peer-reviewed journals and book chapters. In addition\, his research has been cited in notable publications such as The Washington Post and Le Monde (France). He is the co-editor of Prisoner Reentry in the 21st Century: Critical Perspectives of Returning Home published by Routledge Press. Finally\, Smiley is working on a book-length manuscript on his work on prisoner reentry\, specifically examining many of the intricacies and complications of prisoner reentry and how men and women navigate and negotiate reentry space\, moving from confinement to community\, with diminished legal rights and amplified social stigmas. \nExplore Dr. Smiley’s research\, teaching\, and publications on his website. \n 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-calvin-john-smiley/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250219T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250219T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20241028T144129Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250219T002114Z
UID:11036-1739966400-1739971800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Rabiat Akande
DESCRIPTION:The final years of British imperial rule in Northern Nigeria witnessed efforts to source appropriate models of legal modernization from the Muslim world. The models afloat in constitutional discourse\, those of Libya\, Sudan\, Pakistan\, and Egypt\, were held up by respective proponents as ideal for resolving the long-fraught question of the relationship between Islam and public law in a modern state. Yet\, the evocations of these foreign models were idealized imaginaries; by framing these models as settled facts\, the Northern Nigerian evocations flattened the constitutional experience of these states and obscured unfolding struggles over the nature of legal modernity. Against the backdrop of contestations between juristic and political elites\, colonial officials\, and other actors\, this paper chronicles the outsourcing of Northern Nigeria’s legal modernization to foreign imaginaries. Even as the Northern Nigerian legal borrowing debate fielded competing visions of decolonization and modernization\, that discourse limited the realm of possibilities to an uncritical and\, in the end\, imaginary copying from postcolonial jurisdictions. The ultimate consequence was the trumping of juristic power by political authority and the foreclosure of emancipatory possibilities for the future of law. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nRabiat Akande (she/her) joined the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law in 2024. She works in the fields of legal history\, law and religion\, constitutional and comparative constitutional law\, Islamic law\, international law\, and (post)colonial African law and society. \nProfessor Akande is the author of Entangled Domains: Empire\, Law\, and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge University Press: 2023). Her work has also appeared in the American Journal of International Law\, the Journal of Law and Religion\, Law and History Review\, the Supreme Court Review\, and in volumes by Cambridge University Press\, University of Toronto Press\, and University of Virginia Press. Currently\, she is co-editing an encyclopedia of law and religion (Elgar Publishing: under contract)\, an African international law reader\, and a volume on African international legal history. She is also at work on a book exploring Malcolm X’s intellectual legacy titled Malcolm X\, Black Globalism\, and the Human Rights Critique of Imperialism. \nProfessor Akande chairs the international legal history project at the African Institute of International Law in Arusha with the support of the African Union and the Gerda Henkel Foundation\, among other institutions. \n 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-rabiat-akande/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250205T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250205T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20241210T163553Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250205T154010Z
UID:11358-1738756800-1738762200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Aaron Pitluck
DESCRIPTION:In the United States and in much of the world\, our lives are directly or indirectly dependent on financial markets to access key resources such as an automobile or home\, to move money into the future so that we can stop working before we die\, and to access fundamental needs such as healthcare and an education. Unfortunately\, even highly regulated financial markets are saturated with financial professionals’ exploitation of information and power asymmetries\, conflicts of interest\, and financial instruments designed with negative externalities. Moreover\, many financial markets are lightly regulated and rely on self-regulation. In an aspiringly democratic society\, how can outside critics—such as social movements\, policy makers\, politicians\, academics\, and even regulators—understand financial markets and instruments sufficiently to morally and normatively evaluate them? Even more challenging\, how can outsiders use their hard-won understanding to advocate for and create normatively and morally better forms of finance\, particularly when the social change may not be in financial insiders’ short-term interest? To explore questions such as these\, Dr. Pitluck will describe his research in global Islamic investment banks in Malaysia to understand how moral critics such as Shariah scholars are engaging with financial expert communities and conducting a deep structural change of financial markets. The presentation will outline how this organizational and institutional structure allows Shariah scholars to induce an understanding of what Islamic finance is and to pragmatically co-produce with investment bankers a movement towards this moral and normative vision.\n\nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. \n\n\nAaron Z. Pitluck (he/him) is a Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and currently serves on the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association. \nDrawing on economic sociology\, anthropology\, and cultural analysis\, his research interests center on financial actors\, organizations\, markets\, and institutions\, particularly in the Global South. \nWhile at the ABF\, he is writing an interdisciplinary book describing how investment bankers\, Shariah scholars\, and the state are co-producing Islamic banking and finance in Malaysia. By investigating this case study\, the book seeks to distinguish empowering from exploitative finance and to contribute to understanding how to alter the trajectory of finance towards the former. 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-aaron-pitluck/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250129T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250129T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20250107T155832Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250124T174013Z
UID:11487-1738152000-1738157400@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Carol Heimer
DESCRIPTION:Regulators have long worried about how much to trust those they regulate. Trust can be efficient\, allowing regulators to expend fewer resources on expensive\, labor-intensive inspections. But trust also carries substantial risks. A regulator’s vote of confidence can open the door for shirking\, inappropriate bending of rules\, or even misrepresentation and deceit. For this reason\, many regulatory systems make trust contingent on verification\, as the Russian proverb advises.\nThis imperative to limit trust often leads to the creation and institutionalization of obligations for layered verification of one component after another. Such regulatory regimes create considerable work both for regulated entities\, who must demonstrate that they have followed the rules\, and for regulators\, who must verify compliance.\nBut as accountability and verification regimes attempt to solve one set of problems — those arising from too fully trusting regulated entities’ compliance claims — these regimes risk creating fresh problems. Building on organizational research on “routine dynamics\,” the article shows how regulatory regimes with detailed rules and elaborate verification routines may inadvertently reinscribe patterns of privilege and disadvantage as regulators enforce rules and guidelines that inevitably have biases built into them. The article also shows how the official\, scripted universalism of regulatory stances can be diminished or magnified by the unscripted interactional stances of monitors and inspectors.\nDrawing on research conducted in HIV clinics in the US\, Thailand\, South Africa\, and Uganda\, the article looks at regulatory encounters in healthcare and biomedical research. The regime of institutionalized skepticism\, developed for oversight of clinical research\, assumes that it is necessary to cast a distrustful eye on each stage of the research process. Yet it turns out that institutionalized skepticism is not always implemented or experienced the same way. Crucially\, it is more likely to be coupled with disrespect in poorer countries than richer ones.\n\nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nCarol A. Heimer is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. She received her BA from Reed College and her PhD from the University of Chicago. Heimer has written on risk and insurance (Reactive Risk and Rational Action)\, organization theory (Organization Theory and Project Management\, co-authored with Stinchcombe)\, the sociology of law and the sociology of medicine (For the Sake of the Children\, co-authored with Staffen\, winner of both the theory and medical sociology prizes of the American Sociological Association). A recipient of the Ver Steeg Award for graduate teaching\, she usually teaches courses on law\, medicine\, and qualitative methods\, with occasional forays in to topics such as the sociology of moral experience. She spent 2007-08 as a Visiting Fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton. Heimer is currently writing a book from her NSF-funded comparative study of the role of law in medicine. In recent years\, American medicine has been “legalized” as relatively informal regulation by professional peers has been supplanted by an increasingly rule-based system. By no means confined to the US\, this rule-based regulation has diffused widely\, sometimes freely adopted by medical workers eager for the legitimacy conferred by American medical science\, at other times imposed on foreign scientific colleagues by American funding agencies and research organizations. The Legal Transformation of Medicine will be grounded in ethnographic work and interviews on the use of rules (broadly conceived) in HIV/AIDS clinics in the US\, Uganda\, South Africa\, and Thailand.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-carol-heimer/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250122T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250122T130000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20241210T163217Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250117T211555Z
UID:11356-1737547200-1737550800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: John Eason
DESCRIPTION:During the prison boom—from 1970 to 2000 when facilities tripled across the US\, prisons were more likely to be constructed in rural towns in the South with higher rates of poverty\, and Black and Latino residents. By examining the period we call the prison “bust”—between 2000-2023–when prison closures eclipsed openings\, we reveal how prison closures impact schools and racial equity across rural communities. Using Community Engaged Methods (CEM) we demonstrate multiple adverse effects of prison closure on rural communities of color including school closures. We argue that these findings implore us to find responsible ways of curbing demand to close prisons and reduce harm to rural communities of color. We assert this move from prison abolition as advocacy to prison abolition as policy will bear more fruit in reducing our overreliance on mass incarceration.\n\nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. \n\n\nJohn M. Eason (he/him) is the Watson Family University Associate Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He also works as a Senior Fellow at the Justice Policy Center/Office of Race and Equity Research at the Urban Institute. \nHe holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. Eason\, a native of Evanston\, Illinois\, received a bachelor’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a M.P.P. from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. \nBefore entering graduate school\, Eason was a church-based community organizer focused on housing and criminal justice issues. He also served as a political organizer for then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama. \nEason’s research interests challenge existing models and develop new theories of community\, health\, race\, punishment and rural/urban processes in several ways. First\, by tracing the emergence of the rural ghetto\, he establishes a new conceptual model of rural neighborhoods. Next\, by demonstrating the function of the ghetto in rural communities\, he extends concentrated disadvantage from urban to rural community process. These relationships are explored through his book\, “Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation” (University of Chicago Press\, 2017).
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-john-eason/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250115T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250115T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20241028T144048Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250106T154904Z
UID:11029-1736942400-1736947800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Samuel Fury Childs Daly
DESCRIPTION:Beginning in the 1960s\, many African governments were taken over by their armies. “The Soldier’s Creed” describes how law and militarism intersected in postcolonial Africa. In Nigeria and other former British colonies\, military officers believed they could remake their countries in the image of an army. Soldiers tried to condition civilians to think like they did—and when that failed they tried to beat the bad habits out of them by force. Military-style discipline became a political philosophy\, and some soldiers came to believe that making Africa into a vast open-air barracks was what would make it truly “free.” In Nigeria and elsewhere\, soldiers saw judges as partners in their attempts to “discipline” their countries\, but law wasn’t the disciplinary tool they thought it was. Civilians could turn law back on them\, they discovered\, and only some judges shared their world-making aspirations. Using an original collection of legal records\, documents\, and memoirs\, Samuel Fury Childs Daly shows how law facilitated militarism and\, at times\, worked against it. \n\n\nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\n\n\nSamuel Fury Childs Daly is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago’s Department of History. Professor Daly writes about law\, warfare\, and the politics of military regimes. Most of his work describes the history of Africa since independence. He asks how soldiers and judges think: how do military dictatorships use law\, and how do judiciaries check their powers – or enable them? He also studies what warfare does to legal systems. Armed conflict degrades normative orders\, and sometimes it creates new ones. How do people make order and resolve disputes in wartime? His first book\, A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law\, Crime\, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press\, 2020)\, connects the Nigerian Civil War to the fraud and violent crime that wracked Nigeria in its wake. Using an original body of legal records from the secessionist Republic of Biafra\, it traces how technologies\, survival practices\, and moral codes that emerged during the fighting lasted long after the war was over. The line between martial violence and violent crime can blur on the battlefield\, and once that line is gone it is hard to redraw it. \nHe is currently conducting research for two projects – a global history of military desertion\, and a book about military imposters and role-players. His work has been published in venues including Past & Present\, Comparative Studies in Society and History\, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in History from Columbia University\, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge\, and an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies\, University of London. He previously taught at Duke University. \n 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-samuel-fury-childs-daly/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20241204T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20241204T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20240709T163120Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20241119T153054Z
UID:10338-1733313600-1733319000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen
DESCRIPTION:Using 60 ethnographic interviews with a range of minority law students and early career legal professionals\, this Article illuminates the cruciality of eCRT tools to understand the experience of individual deviance and the usefulness of a queer theory lens in aiding such an effort. Analysis from these narrative data show that students with different kinds of peripheral identities experience professional spaces in many uniquely different ways but that narratives across minority categories (primarily differentiated by race\, gender identity\, religion\, and disability) also overlapped in important ways. Particularly\, the data show a clear pattern among these differently peripheral actors of what I call “blasé” dismissal and denial of discrimination. Unlike microaggressions which might have resonance in common cultural parlance as an operationalization of structural violence\, what distinguishes blasé discrimination\, I argue\, is the ordinariness of the act in common interactional parlance alongside its relative unlikeliness to be seen as problematic when confronted. It is this possibility of defense and even justification in the face of being questioned about the violence that makes blasé discrimination and its ambiguous parameters worthy of our attention in identity jurisprudence. This exploration of the blasé response to discrimination sheds light – borrowing from queer theory – on the opportunities available for theory building when difference is analyzed across narrative to focus on the commonalities of deviance across sub-categories of assumed identity. In turn\, it offers a framework for considering what I am framing as the “QuEer-CRT” approach for law and society scholarship. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nSwethaa S. Ballakrishnen (they/them) is a socio-legal scholar whose research examines the intersections between law\, globalization and stratification from a critical feminist and global south perspective. Particularly\, across a range of sites and different levels of analysis\, their work interrogates how law and legal institutions create\, continue\, and counter different kinds of socio-economic inequalities.  \nScholarship from Professor Ballakrishnen’s research projects has appeared in\, among other journals\, Law and Society Review\, Law and Social Inquiry\, Fordham Law Review\, International Journal of the Legal Profession\, and the Journal of Professions and Organization. Their first book\, Accidental Feminism (Princeton University Press: 2021)\, unpacks the case of unintentional gender parity among India’s elite legal professionals; a second book Invisible Institutions (Hart Publishing: 2021\, ed. with Sara Dezalay) brings together cross-subjective perspectives on legal globalization; and a third book\, Gender Regimes and the Politics of Privacy (Zubaan Books\, with Kalpana Kannabiran) investigates the gendered legacies of India’s privacy jurisprudence. These strains of research have received a range of honors and awards\, including from the National Science Foundation\, the American Sociological Association\, and the Law and Society Association; and in 2022\, Ballakrishnen was awarded the campus-wide UCI Distinguished Early-Career Award for Research. You can read more about their research praxis and commitments here.  \nAlongside this scholarly output\, Professor Ballakrishnen’s research has been featured in a range of professional and popular media including Harvard Business Review\, Stanford News Report\, Above the Law\, Bloomberg Law\, Quartz\, Law School Transparency Radio\, The Practice\, New Books Network\, and WPR. They have presented research at over 100 conferences worldwide\, delivered over 50 invited talks in a range of academic and professional settings\, and their legal opinions on family and financial laws have been cited by the Probate and Family Court of Massachusetts and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit respectively.  \nProfessor Ballakrishnen is committed to building and serving socio-legal communities\, especially ones that focus on critical questions concerning legal education and the profession. At UCI\, they co-run the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession\, the Socio-Legal Studies Workshop\, and the Law\, Society\, and Culture Emphasis. In addition\, beyond UCI\, they are affiliated faculty at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession\, on the board of trustees of the Law and Society Association (LSA) and the ISA Research Committee on Sociology of Law\, a co-founder of the LSA Collaborative Research Network on Legal Education\, and on the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Empirical Study of Legal Education and the Legal Profession. In 2017-18\, they were the AccessLex Visiting Scholar on Legal Education at the American Bar Foundation. In 2020\, Professor Ballakrishnen was named a AALS Teacher of the Year.  \nFor over a decade before entering academia full-time\, Professor Ballakrishnen was a legal intern to Hon’ble Justice Arijit Pasayat of the Supreme Court of India\, an international banking associate in Mumbai\, and an external consultant for cross-border litigation financing in New York City.  \n 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-swethaa-s-ballakrishnen/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20241023T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20241023T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20240709T162252Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20241017T181450Z
UID:10332-1729684800-1729690200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Ke Li
DESCRIPTION:Drawing on archival and ethnographic research\, this talk presents a case study of legal workers in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Empirically\, it marks the key moments in the PRC’s development of a legal services industry during the reform era. It does so by tracing how a particular group of law practitioners\, known as basic-level legal workers\, rose to prominence in the socialist era and then fell from favor in the new millennium. The fact that the PRC’s top decision-makers have struggled to transform the group of practitioners and that they have mishandled attempts to harness a burgeoning services industry testifies to the limits of authoritarian regimes—and especially the challenges in instrumentalizing law\, legal professions\, and judicial institutions. Theoretically speaking\, this case study foregrounds an understudied theme in the literature. True\, legality has become an integral part of autocrats’ ruling methodologies in many parts of the world. Their endeavors to deploy legal techniques and personnel to resolve emerging problems in ruling\, however\, do not always deliver. Thus\, it is crucial for researchers to heed—and explicate—when and why autocrats do not always get what they want.\n  \nTo read the related paper for Dr. Li’s presentation\, reach out to Sophie Kofman or Dianna Garzón. \n\n\nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nKe Li (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the John Jay College of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on law and society\, knowledge practices\, and gender politics in contemporary China. In a decade or so\, she has had articles published in the Law & Society Review\, Law & Policy\, and Sociological Forum. Her book\, Marriage Unbound: State Law\, Power\, and Inequality in Contemporary China\, was published by Stanford University Press in 2022.   \nDrawing on extensive archival and ethnographic data\, Marriage Unbound shows how women’s legal mobilization and rights contention can forge new ground for our understanding of law and politics\, as well as power and inequality\, in an authoritarian context. In 2023\, this book received several awards\, including Herbert Jacob Book Prize for the best book on law and society and Victoria Schuck Award for the best book on women and politics.  \nIn recent years\, she has branched out into new research areas. In one project\, she examines LGBTQ activism and impact litigation in Chinese society; and\, in a related project\, studies how state- and society-sponsored knowledge moves come to shape judicial decision-making\, respectively. Together\, these two inquiries\, she hopes\, will allow her to connect several adjacent research areas: law and society\, the sociology of knowledge\, and science and technology studies. 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-ke-li/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20241016T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20241016T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20240923T174431Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20241011T232526Z
UID:10861-1729080000-1729085400@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: 2024-26 Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellows
DESCRIPTION:To register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n  \nSino Esthappan: “The Institutionalization of Algorithmic Risk Assessments in US Pretrial Hearings”\nAcross fields\, organizations now increasingly adopt predictive algorithmic scoring systems to improve decision-making processes. Some studies find that these systems discipline workers by evaluating and directing their behaviors. Others show how\, rather than unwittingly abiding by algorithmic directives\, workers may appropriate these tools to accomplish specific goals and tasks. Yet the relational conditions under which actors follow or reject scores are not well understood\, and we know little about how organizational networks shape algorithmic decision-making practices in multiprofessional expert fields. In this presentation\, I will describe my dissertation project\, which examines how actors in the US criminal court policy field negotiate different kinds of expertise to institutionalize risk assessment tools in pretrial hearings. I will explain my plans to use archival records\, interviews\, observations\, and court transcripts to analyze how a wide multiprofessional field of national policy stakeholders and local criminal court officials makes sense of and justifies the use of varied risk assessment practices in pretrial hearings. I will conclude by discussing the implications of this research for criminal court policies and practices and scholarship on law\, organizations\, punishment\, and technology. \nSino Esthappan is an ABF/Northwestern University Doctoral Fellow in Law & Social Science. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. \n____________________________________________________________ \nRobert Gelles: “Originalism in the Making: Language\, Knowledge Practice\, and Constitutionalism in the Conservative Judicial Audience”\nDespite significant successes in pursuing its agenda\, there remains dissent among the ranks of the Conservative Legal Movement (CLM). Intellectuals in the Movement have criticized the Supreme Court judgments that seem to achieve Conservatives’ political and legal priorities. One of their central criticisms is that the Court did not use the appropriate method of legal interpretation—it failed to abide by an Originalist Constitutional Theory. Recent social science scholarship has shown that intellectuals like these play a key role in CLM. As institution builders\, conveners\, teachers\, and authors\, Conservative legal scholars help to create and disseminate intellectual resources for litigation and judicial decisions\, train a group of attorneys to take up the cause\, and act as an audience for the judiciary and profession. At the heart of their activities is a discussion about the appropriate means of interpreting law\, often centered on an argument about the nature of language. Drawing from participant observation\, interviews with members of the Movement\, and publicly posted footage of major events\, I analyze the linguistic beliefs and behaviors by which these scholars perform their roles. By taking a semiotic approach\, I aim to show how their linguistic beliefs and knowledge practices play a key role in shaping their particular and influential legal consciousness\, as well as shaping their responses to ongoing legal action. Doing so\, I suggest\, offers an opportunity to re-conceptualize a defining feature of constitutionalism: the relationship between law and politics. \nRobert Gelles is an ABF/University of Chicago Doctoral Fellow in Law & Social Science. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Chicago.  \n_________________________________________________________________ \nKyneshawau Hurd: “3D of Racial Justice: Diversity\, Dominance & Discrimination. Implicit Social Dominance & The Diversity Principle-Policy Gap”\nThis work delves into the discord between the widely professed commitment to diversity\, equity\, and inclusion (DEI) in the United States and the persistent maintenance of racial hierarchies\, a phenomenon described as the principle-policy gap. Challenging traditional notions of discrimination that link it solely to overt racism or covert prejudice\, this study posits that the drive for hierarchy (or preservation of caste) is a subtler and perhaps more foundational force perpetuating racial inequalities. Further\, this works argues that this hierarchy-preservation motivation may be especially important for understanding persistent inequality in outwardly egalitarian\, pro-diversity\, and racially positive contexts.\nThus\, through a socio-psychological perspective\, the research spotlights “implicit social dominance orientation” (ISDO)—an unconscious preference for hierarchical structuring of social groups—as a significant factor contributing to this gap. Across several studies\, this work investigates the nuanced relationship between explicit and implicit social dominance orientations (SDO and ISDO\, respectively) and their impact on support for racial diversity and justice policies. Drawing from Social Dominance Theory and recent advancements in implicit cognition\, I develop a measure of ISDO and create four “Dominance Profiles”—a typology of group-based dominance motivations with implicit and explicit dimensions—to examine decision-making of those who explicitly disavow social dominance but implicitly endorse it.\nThis work further suggests that that diversity ideology\, particularly when framed instrumentally\, appeals to implicit dominance motivations and helps explain the principle-policy gap observed among egalitarians. We find evidence for the existence of ISDO and its influence on the decision-making of self-professed egalitarians. Those with higher levels of implicit social dominance (but not necessarily higher levels of racial antipathy) endorse policies that undermine racial justice efforts compared to True Egalitarians. Specifically\, policy support of Implicit Dominants\, those who explicitly endorse diversity and egalitarianism but implicit support hierarchy\, is driven by perceptions of dominant-group benefit.\nOur research highlights the importance of considering both implicit motivations and dominance motivations in understanding decision-making and behavior\, particularly among self-identified egalitarians. These findings contribute to the broader discourse on diversity to advance a 3D framework for understanding racial inequality. This framework seeks to better account for Discrimination and the ways Diversity and Dominance contribute to contemporary manifestations of it that current legal frameworks may not appreciate.\n\n\nKyneshawau Hurd is the ABF Postdoctoral Fellow in Law & Inequality. She is a social psychologist and psychology and law scholar studying the intersections of diversity\, dominance and discrimination. \n\n\nTo read the related paper for Dr. Hurd’s presentation\, reach out to Sophie Kofman or Dianna Garzón. 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-2024-26-doctoral-and-postdoctoral-fellows/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20241002T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20241002T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T083633
CREATED:20240708T203001Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240904T165419Z
UID:10315-1727870400-1727875800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Yuan Yuan
DESCRIPTION:When soldiers fight justly in a just war waged by their state\, they may nonetheless kill or maim innocent civilians unexpectedly or in terms of expected collateral damage in overall justified assaults. Such incidents often inflict severe moral injuries on those soldiers in the form of immense guilt\, shame\, and remorse\, which Yuan Yuan calls “the moral injuries of soldiering.” \nThese injuries appear to have a fatalistic flavor\, representing a wound at the heart of soldiering itself as they haunt soldiers even though they have done the right thing in light of the morality of soldiering. In this paper\, Yuan contends that soldiers do not kill in their personal capacity when they fight justly in a just war initiated by their state. Instead\, they kill on behalf of and in the name of the people. While their state—representing the citizenry—wronged the innocent war victims\, the soldiers carrying out the killings did not wrong them\, thanks to the exclusionary power of the rules of engagement. While the soldiers share the responsibility for the killings as citizens of the warring state\, their responsibility is no more and no less than that of any other citizen. Only if the citizenry takes up the moral responsibilities for the unavoidable killings of innocents in a just war\, through public apology\, collective mourning\, and fair compensation\, can soldiers be liberated from the crushing emotional burdens of harming the victims. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nYuan Yuan (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California\, San Diego. Prior to this appointment\, she was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at NYU Shanghai. She received her PhD in Philosophy from Yale University in 2020. Her primary areas of research are ethics\, political philosophy\, and philosophy of law\, with an emphasis on the interface between them.   \nShe is currently working on a series of papers on just war theory\, which defends the core principles of the international laws of war by illustrating how political relations transform interpersonal morality in politically oriented or mediated warfare. She also has a secondary research interest in experimental philosophy\, employing empirical methods to explore patterns in ordinary people’s philosophical intuitions.  \n 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-yuan-yuan/
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CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
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