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DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20240410T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240410T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20231214T223726Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240319T203451Z
UID:9028-1712750400-1712755800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Susan Bibler Coutin
DESCRIPTION:In this talk\, Susan Bibler Coutin provides an overview of her draft book manuscript\, On the Record: Papers\, Immigration\, and Legal Advocacy.  Based on 2011-2015 ethnographic fieldwork in the legal department of an immigrant-serving nonprofit in Southern California\, On the Record analyzes how immigrant residents and the attorneys and paralegals who represent them attempt to surmount documentary challenges\, deploying papers as a form of advocacy.  Undocumented residents who seek legal status in the United States face a potentially insurmountable challenge: to obtain status\, they have to document lives that they were forbidden to live. The records that applicants must present to US immigration officials may be the very things that their lives as undocumented individuals fail to produce: bank records\, check stubs from their employers\, contracts in their own names. Sometimes\, records can result in unexpected opportunities\, while other times they eliminate all hope of legalizing. The documentation requirements associated with immigration cases also have risen in recent years\, as US officials have increasingly come to see immigration as a security issue and immigrants as a potential threat. On the Record examines how broader trends in enforcement and securitization are embedded in the forms that immigrants have to complete\, the documentary expertise that service providers and immigrants have developed\, the materiality and legal significance of papers\, and the sorts of state-noncitizen relationships that emerge in the interstices of form completion. By analyzing the mundane workings of an extraordinary area of law\, On the Record argues that gathering and submitting records as part of immigration claims is a way of “documenting back” to a state that views immigrant residents as suspect. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nSusan Bibler Coutin is a Professor of Criminology\, Law and Society\, and Anthropology at the University of California\, Irvine. She holds a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology and is a professor in the Department of Criminology\, Law\, and Society and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California\, Irvine.  Her research has examined social\, political\, and legal activism surrounding immigration issues\, particularly immigration from El Salvador to the United States. \nHer most recent book Documenting the Impossible Realities: Ethnography\, Memory\, and the As If\, coauthored with Barbara Yngvesson\, was published by Cornell University Press in 2023.  She recently completed NSF-funded research regarding how the production\, retrieval\, and circulation of records and files figures in immigrants’ efforts to secure legal status in the United States.  In collaboration with Sameer Ashar\, Jennifer Chacón\, and Stephen Lee\, she is completing a book project based on research entitled\, “Navigating Liminal Legalities along Pathways to Citizenship: Immigrant Vulnerability and the Role of Mediating Institutions.” Their co-authored book Legal Phantoms: Executive Relief and the Haunting Failures of U.S. Immigration Policy is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.  With Walter Nicholls\, she is currently carrying out an NSF-funded project entitled\, “Immigration Dimensions of Local Governance: Municipalities\, Neighborhoods\, and Citizenship.”
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-susan-bibler-coutin/
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:20240403T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240403T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20231214T220337Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240327T154447Z
UID:9025-1712145600-1712151000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Sara Sternberg Greene
DESCRIPTION:One of the most basic assumptions of our legal system is that when two parties face off in court\, the case will be adjudicated before a judge who is trained in the law. Sara Sternberg Greene’s research shows that\, empirically\, the assumption that most judges have legal training does not hold true for many low-level state courts. Using data compiled from all fifty states and the District of Columbia\, Greene finds that thirty-two states allow at least some low-level state court judges to adjudicate without a law degree\, and seventeen states do not require judges who adjudicate eviction cases to have law degrees. Since most poor litigants are unrepresented in civil legal cases\, this sets up an almost Kafkaesque scene in courtrooms across the country: Legal cases that have a profound effect on poor families\, such as whether they will lose their home to eviction\, are argued in courtrooms where either no one knows the law or only one party—the attorney for the more powerful party—does. \nConsidering data collected from a case study of North Carolina\, where over 80% of magistrates do not have J.D.s\, Greene argues that allowing a system of nonlawyer judges perpetuates long-standing inequalities in our courts. She further argues that the phenomenon of lay judges is a symptom of a much larger problem in our justice system: the devaluation of the legal problems of the poor\, who are disproportionately Black and Latinx. This devaluation stems in part from an enduring cultural history in the United States of blaming the poor for their poverty and its associated problems. A change is in order\, one that intentionally considers the expertise of judges and adopts creative solutions to incentivize specially qualified adjudicators to serve as low-level state court judges. \nTo register\, or for access to the related paper\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nSara Sternberg Green is a Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law. She is a sociologist and legal scholar whose teaching and research interests include poverty law\, housing law\, consumer law\, bankruptcy\, family law\, contracts\, qualitative research methods\, and law and sociology. Greene uses primarily qualitative empirical methods to study the relationship between law\, poverty\, and inequality. \nHer work focuses on how low-income families understand\, experience\, and interact with the law\, how legal institutions may inadvertently perpetuate poverty and inequality\, and how structural conditions create barriers to accessing law and justice for low-income families. Greene’s work has been published or is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review\, the New York University Law Review\, the Duke Law Journal\, and the Minnesota Law Review\, among others. She has also published work in popular outlets such as The New York Times\, Politico\, and The Hill. \nGreene received her B.A. in 2002 from Yale University\, magna cum laude and with distinction. She received her J.D. in 2005 from Yale Law School\, where she received the Stephen J. Massey Prize for excellence in advocacy and served as notes editor for the Yale Law Journal and articles editor for the Yale Law and Policy Review. She also served as chair of the student board of directors for the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization and as student director in the Housing and Community Development Clinic. After clerking for Judge Richard Cudahy on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit\, Greene focused on housing law and tax credit matters at the law firm Klein Hornig in Boston before beginning a Ph.D. program. She received her Ph.D. in social policy and sociology from Harvard University in 2014.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-sara-sternberg-greene/
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:20240327T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240327T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20231214T215420Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240319T203944Z
UID:9022-1711540800-1711546200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Leisy J. Abrego
DESCRIPTION:Having accompanied the immigrant youth movement in the United States\, we witnessed the leadership\, relationality\, and transformative capacities of undocumented youth who fought for access to legalization. Leisy J. Abrego will highlight undocumented youth-led practices of healing as inspiring examples of kinship\, community care\, and transformation in the face of legal violence. Reframing notions of undocumented youth in the U.S. as ‘good neoliberal subjects’ as was required for public-facing activism (Pallares\, 2014)\, the talk instead centers their communal embeddedness. Undocumented youth were able to collectively organize and heal some of the harm caused by the legal violence (Menjívar and Abrego\, 2012) of the citizenship regime by going through an affective and cognitive (personal and political) transformation process in which their subjectivities were reconstituted. Shame turned into pride\, and a sense of isolation was met with a sense of kinship and belonging. Relying on humbled scholarship and participatory (co-creative) research\, Abrego takes seriously the messiness of life and the complex personhood (Gordon\, 2008) of immigrants without romanticizing their agency\, nor underestimating the embodied effects of legal violence. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nLeisy J. Abrego is a Professor in Chicana/o Studies at the University of California\, Los Angeles. She is a member of the first large wave of Salvadoran immigrants who arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. \nHer research and teaching interests – inspired in great part by her family’s experiences – are in Central American immigration\, Latina/o families\, the inequalities created by gender\, and the production of “illegality” through U.S. immigration laws. Her award-winning first book\, Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws\, Labor\, and Love Across Borders (Stanford University Press\, 2014)\, examines the well-being of Salvadorian immigrants and their families – both in the United States and in El Salvador – as these are shaped by immigration policies and gendered expectations. Her early research examines how immigration and educational policies shape the educational trajectories of undocumented students. Her second book\, Immigrant Families (Polity Press\, 2016)\, is co-authored with Cecilia Menjívar and Leah Schmalzbauer and delves deeply into the structural conditions contextualizing the diverse experiences of contemporary immigrant families in the United States. \nMore recently\, Abrego has been writing about how different subsectors of Latino immigrants internalize immigration policies differently and how this shapes their willingness to make claims in the United States. Her current project examines the day-to-day lives of mixed status families after DACA. Her scholarship analyzing legal consciousness\, illegality\, and legal violence has garnered numerous national awards. She also dedicates much of her time to supporting and advocating for refugees and immigrants by writing editorials and pro-bono expert declarations in asylum cases.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-leisy-j-abrego/
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:20240306T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240306T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20231214T215516Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240223T163047Z
UID:9019-1709726400-1709731800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: John Doering-White
DESCRIPTION:In recent years\, record-breaking numbers of young people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border have entered U.S. government custody as unaccompanied children (UC). Whereas prior research has focused on UC’s experiences while in custody and following release to a sponsor—usually a family member—limited scholarship has examined the experiences of human service professionals working within programs that are contracted by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to care for UC. In these programs\, social workers\, mental health clinicians\, medical providers\, educators\, and transitional foster parents collaborate to provide care for UC while assessing the safety and suitability of the sponsoring context. \nThis presentation draws on 65 in-depth interviews with human service workers in ORR-contracted programs across four states to examine how they conceptualize care for UC during this transitional period. John Doering-White focuses on how two legal and policy frameworks—the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008—refract through highly politicized and mediatized bureaucracies of care and control to structure how human service providers care for UC. He suggests institutional pressures to accelerate time to release are often at odds with professional care ethics\, and that this tension risks compromising care for UC as well as the sustainability of the human service workforce in mission-driven organizations contracted by ORR. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n_____________________________________________________________________________________ \nJohn Doering-White is an Assistant Professor of Social Work and Anthropology at the University of South Carolina. His research focuses on undocumented immigration and humanitarianism. His ethnographic work has focused on grassroots shelters that assist Central Americans migrating through Mexico. He is interested in how organizations can best assist undocumented communities considering shifting immigration enforcement trends between the United States\, Mexico\, and Central America. As part of this work\, Doering-White served as co-producer on Border South\, a feature documentary film that premiered to national and international audiences in June 2019. \nDoering-White is also actively conducting research in his hometown of Detroit in partnership with organizations that support immigrant and minority entrepreneurs navigating a gentrifying city. Data collection for this project has taken place in partnership with undergraduate students participating in a summer field school that trains students in qualitative and community-engaged methods. \nDoering-White’s research has been funded by the Fulbright Garcia-Robles program\, the Wenner Gren Foundation\, and the Institute for Field Research. His scholarship appears in Social Service Review\, Children and Youth Services Review\, the Journal of Social Work Education\, the Journal of Community Practice\, and the Journal of International Migration and Integration. He has also presented nationally and internationally on various topics\, including undocumented migration\, unaccompanied minors\, language interpretation\, and ethnographic approaches. \nDoering-White is a graduate of the Joint Doctoral Program in Social Work and Anthropology at the University of Michigan\, where he also earned his MSW. He received a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and Human Development Social Relations from Earlham College in Richmond\, Indiana.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-john-doering-white/
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:20240228T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240228T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20231214T194101Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240206T150606Z
UID:9016-1709121600-1709127000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Jaeeun Kim
DESCRIPTION:How does immigration law shape migrant subjectivities? This article examines whether and how migrants’ engagement with the asylum institution brings about changes in their religious practices and self-understandings\, drawing on ethnographic research among ethnic Korean migrants from mainland China applying for asylum in the U.S. as Christians fearing persecution. Through a critical engagement with the interdisciplinary scholarship on migration and waiting and sociology of future\, Jaeeun Kim develops a theory of migrants’ future-making and aspiration formation to unpack the black box through which immigration law shapes migrant subjectivities in variable and dynamic ways. Kim pays attention to the interplay between immigration law\, non-state intermediaries\, and transnational social fields\, especially how the interplay shapes migrants’ approach toward the legally sanctioned status passage as well as their future imagination and aspirational horizon. She argues that the production and coordination of competing futures and aspirations in the context of involuntary waiting should be central to our analysis of immigration law and migrant subjectivities. This article further contributes to the literatures on therapeutic governance and legal consciousness by complementing a Foucauldian conceptualization of governance with a robust theory of future-oriented action and offering fruitful ways to study temporality in relation to law’s hegemony and inequality. \nTo register for the event\, or to access the related paper draft\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nJaeeun Kim is the Korea Foundation Endowed Associate Professor of Sociology and Professor of Law\, by courtesy\, at the University of Michigan. She is a political sociologist and law and society scholar interested in questions of human mobility\, inequality\, power\, and agency. She seeks to develop a relational\, processual\, and agentic account of categorization and identification\, particularly in contexts in which such practices have significant implications for inequality at local\, national\, and global levels. Her research takes a transnational and global perspective\, and systematically considers sending and transit contexts in studying international migration by adopting a multi-sited approach to research. \nKim’s work\, generously supported by the Social Science Research Council\, the Wenner-Gren Foundation\, the American Council of Learned Societies\, and the Academy of Korean Studies\, has been published in journals in sociological theory\, law and society\, race/ethnicity/migration\, and historical sociology. Her first monograph\, based on her award-winning dissertation (2013 Theda Skocpol Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association)\, was published at Stanford University Press in 2016 and won three book prizes and one honorable mention from the American Sociological Association\, the Social Science History Association\, and the Association for Asian Studies. Kim’s recent article published in Sociological Theory\, titled “Migration-Facilitating Capital: A Bourdieusian Theory of International Migration\,” also received the 2019 Theory Prize from the ASA Theory Section. \nKim is currently working on her second book project about the asylum-seeking of unauthorized migrants on religious grounds\, based on her ongoing multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork. Before joining the University of Michigan\, she received her Ph.D. degree from UCLA\, was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Stanford\, and taught at George Mason University for a year. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (School of Social Science) in Princeton during 2016–2017\, and a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berllin (Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin) during 2020–2021.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-jaeeun-kim/
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:20240221T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240221T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20231214T193308Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240220T180412Z
UID:9009-1708516800-1708522200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Demar F. Lewis IV
DESCRIPTION:The senseless murders of Breonna Taylor\, George Floyd\, and countless other Black Americans in 2020 brought unprecedented and polarized attention to the mandate to “defund the police.” Despite the centrality of this debate to discussions of community safety in recent years\, few studies document the nuanced perspectives that undergird Black Americans’ evaluations of this mandate. Drawing on interviews and surveys with an age-diverse sample of 83 Black people living in Cincinnati\, Ohio\, this article shows that there are generational differences in participants’ evaluations of “defunding the police” as an outcome or process of change that do not neatly transfer to universal support or opposition for the mandate. While respondents of all ages generally agree that policing is needed to co-produce safety in Black communities\, Demar F. Lewis finds that they also believe that policing’s operational structure and daily practices must evolve to better meet unmet local needs\, supporting calls for institutional divestment. \nTo register for the event\, or to access the related paper draft\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nDemar F. Lewis IV is an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of African American and Africana Studies. Lewis is also an affiliate faculty member in the Department of African American Studies. He is a sociologist and critical criminologist trained in Black Studies and public policy whose research examines how historical and contemporary notions of safety influence the ways that Black people organize their lives. This has led Lewis to develop multiple research studies to advance understandings of how racial violence\, police violence\, and resource deprivation influence perceptions of safety in the United States. \nHis current projects examine (1) the influence of gentrification and resource deprivation on policing practices and Black Americans’ perceptions of community safety in Cincinnati\, (2) the evolution of the “defund” mandate in U.S. politics\, (3) the health consequences of carceral violence and racism in the U.S.\, and (4) the causes and consequences of U.S. lynchings. To pursue his research agenda\, Lewis uses historical methods\, qualitative interviews\, statistical analyses\, and computational methods.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-demar-f-lewis-iv/
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:20240214T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240214T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20231214T191353Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240215T172618Z
UID:9006-1707912000-1707917400@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Susila Gurusami
DESCRIPTION:For the last few decades\, “gender responsiveness”— policies meant to help address the supposedly “unique needs and circumstances” of women under carceral supervision and control—has dominated reforms aimed at improving the experiences and outcomes of incarcerated women and is often hailed as an important feminist intervention. However\, abolitionists have long identified such policies as problematic in how they essentialize gender and women’s needs while contributing to the expansion of carceral power. Yet\, rather than understanding the failures to create “kinder\, gentler\, gender-responsive [women’s] cages” as an indicator that carceral institutions have not meaningfully implemented gender responsive policies\, Susila Gurusami argues that carceral institutions have always been gender responsive institutions. \nGurusami contends that the recent turn towards what is labeled as gender responsive carceral policy obscures how carceral institutions actually respond to gender. Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with formerly incarcerated Black women\, Gurusami shows how carceral institutions respond to\, construct\, and govern gender through a process that she calls “reproductive warfare”: carceral institutions’ mobilization of racial-sexual power meant to deny Black women reproductive and sexual self-determination. \nShe documents how carceral institutions wage “reproductive warfare” in two ways: by (1) explicitly invoking gender responsive carceral policies as legitimate\, therapeutic\, and protective for criminalized women; and (2) blatantly violating the legal reproductive and sexual rights of incarcerated people\, but referencing stated or implied commitments to gender responsive policies to dismiss such violations as accidental and/or further evidence of the need for gender responsive carceral policies. Ultimately\, Gurusami argues that these findings should push us towards abolition feminism as a strategy that meaningfully responds to the gendered needs of all criminalized people. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n_____________________________________________________________________________________ \nSusila Gurusami is an Assistant Professor of Criminology\, Law\, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a sociologist of race\, gender\, labor\, and politics\, with particular interests in carceral governance and abolition. \nGurusami is also a former UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow and received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California\, Los Angeles in 2017. Her work has been published in Gender & Society\, Societal Problems and Punishment and Society. Recognitions for this scholarship include funding and awards from the American Sociological Association\, Sociologist for Women in Society\, Society for the Study of Social Problems\, and the Racial Democracy\, Crime\, and Justice Network. \nGurusami is currently working on a book manuscript investigating how Black women navigate state surveillance\, regulation\, and punishment in their everyday lives after returning home from prison and jail.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-susila-gurusami/
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:20231206T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20231206T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20230621T163651Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231128T222217Z
UID:7686-1701864000-1701869400@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Eva Rosen
DESCRIPTION:An extensive literature documents racial discrimination in housing\, focusing on its prevalence and effect on non-White populations. This article studies how such discrimination operates\, and the intermediaries who engage in it: landlords. A fundamental assumption of racial discrimination research is that gatekeepers such as landlords are confronted with a racially heterogeneous applicant pool. The reality of urban housing markets\, however\, is that historical patterns of residential segregation intersect with other structural barriers to drive selection into the applicant pool\, such that landlords are more often selecting between same-race applicants. \nUsing interviews and observations with 157 landlords in four cities\, we ask: how do landlords construct their tenants’ race within racially segmented housing markets\, and how does this factor into their screening processes? We find that landlords distinguish between tenants based on the degree to which their behavior conforms to insidious cultural narratives at the intersection of race\, gender\, and class. Landlords with large portfolios rely on screening algorithms\, whereas mom-and-pop landlords make decisions based on informal mechanisms such as “gut feelings\,” home visits\, and the presentation of children. Landlords may put aside certain racial prejudices when they have the right financial incentives\, but only when the tenant also defies stereotypes. In this way\, landlords’ intersectional construction of race—even within a predominantly Black or Latino tenant pool—limits residential options for low-income\, subsidized tenants of color\, burdening their search process. These findings have implications for how we understand racial discrimination within racially homogenous social spheres. Examining landlords’ screening practices offers insight into the role housing plays in how racism continues to shape life outcomes—both explicitly through overt racial bias\, and increasingly more covertly\, through algorithmic automation and digital technologies. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n_____________________________________________________________________________________ \nEva Rosen is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy\, and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Sociology. Her research is focused on social inequality in the urban context. In particular\, she studies the intersection between poverty and American housing policy. Rosen was on research leave during the academic year 2022-2023 as a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation. \nRosen received her doctorate in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University. In 2018\, she was named one of APPAM’s outstanding early career scholars and received their 40 for 40 Fellowship. Rosen is a member of the Scholar Strategy Network. She has published papers in academic journals including the American Sociological Review\, City & Community\, The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography\, and The Annual Review of Law and Social Science. Rosen’s work has been funded by: The National Science Foundation\, The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)\, The Joint Center for Housing Studies\, The Furman Center\, The Meyer Foundation\, and The Harvard Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy\, among others. \nRosen’s recent book\, The Voucher Promise: “Section 8” Housing and the Fate of an American Neighborhood (Princeton University Press\, 2020)\, is the winner of the Inequality\, Poverty\, and Mobility Outstanding Book Award from the ASA and the Paul Davidoff Award from the ACSP. The book examines the Housing Choice Voucher Program\, colloquially known as “Section 8\,” and how it shapes the lives of families living in a Baltimore neighborhood called Park Heights. Eva Rosen tells stories about the daily lives of homeowners\, voucher holders\, renters who receive no housing assistance\, and the landlords who provide housing.  \nHer new edited volume\, with Brian McCabe\, called The Sociology of Housing: How Homes Shape Our Social Lives\, will be released in fall 2023 with Chicago University Press. With this volume\, the editors and contributors solidify the importance of housing studies within the discipline of sociology by tackling topics like racial segregation\, housing instability\, the supply of affordable housing\, and the process of eviction. \nCurrent work examines low-income housing and the role that landlords play in four urban housing markets. Another ongoing project maps eviction trends in the District of Columbia with sociology professor Brian McCabe.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-eva-rosen/
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:20231129T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20231129T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20230706T165950Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231017T181738Z
UID:7831-1701259200-1701264600@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Chiara Galli
DESCRIPTION:More children than ever are crossing international borders alone to seek asylum worldwide. In the past decade\, over a half million children have fled from Central America to the United States\, seeking safety and a chance to continue lives halted by violence. Yet upon their arrival\, they fail to find the protection that our laws promise\, based on the broadly shared belief that children should be safeguarded. A meticulously researched ethnography\, Precarious Protections chronicles the experiences and perspectives of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they pursue applications for refugee status in the U.S. asylum process. Chiara Galli debunks assumptions about asylum\, including the idea that people are being denied protection because they file bogus claims. In practice\, the United States interprets asylum law far more narrowly than what is necessary to recognize real-world experiences of escape from life-threatening violence. This is especially true for children from Central America. Galli reveals the formidable challenges of lawyering with children and exposes the human toll of the U.S. immigration bureaucracy. \nTo register for this event\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nChiara Galli is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago and an ABF/JPB Access to Justice Scholar for 2022-23. She studies the profession of public interest immigration lawyering and the effects of the law on the lives of vulnerable groups of undocumented immigrants\, including children and asylum-seekers. \nHer book\, Precarious Protections: Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum in the U.S. (University of California Press\, 2023)\, is based on ethnographic research that she conducted in legal clinics in Los Angeles during the Obama and Trump administrations and chronicles the experiences and perspectives of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they pursue applications for refugee status in the U.S. asylum process.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-chiara-galli/
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:20231115T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20231115T130000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20230706T165549Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231109T164031Z
UID:7828-1700049600-1700053200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Jamelia Morgan
DESCRIPTION:Quality-of-life offenses\, or municipal and state criminal laws that purport to regulate social and physical disorder\, regularly target people who violate those laws because they engage in routine activities of daily living in public spaces.  Most notably\, these laws target unsheltered individuals and include a litany of offenses prohibiting activities like public camping\, sleeping in public spaces\, and disorderly conduct. Plaintiffs challenging these offenses and critics of these laws have labeled these laws “status crimes\,” or status offenses\, because these laws criminalize behaviors inextricably linked with status or derivative of status. Proponents of these laws argue that they serve to promote the general welfare of the community and that they reduce incidents of physical and social disorders.  They argue that the enforcement of quality-of-life offenses furthers what has long been recognized as a legitimate exercise of state police powers. \nThis framing by proponents paints an incomplete picture of the nature and function of quality-of-life offenses that target individuals engaged in routine activities of daily living in public spaces. Quality-of-life offenses are by their nature exclusionary devices; the enforcement of these laws leads to the removal of offending individuals whose conduct (allegedly) produces or contributes to social and physical disorder. Viewed in this vein\, it becomes clear to see that the function of these quality-of-life offenses is not solely to reduce or eliminate disorders or even promote the general welfare of the community; these laws also function to exclude certain individuals from the community. \nThis exclusionary function of these quality-of-life laws poses serious constitutional concerns. Through community exclusion\, and the stigma and costs that attach to those who are targeted under enforcement regimes\, these laws are also status-enforcing. Through the stigmatizing effects of criminalization\, and the economic losses that criminal legal system involvement produces\, the enforcement of quality-of-life offenses in particular serves to reinforce the social position of marginalized groups.  After all\, these laws target for removal\, citation\, and arrests individuals whose life-sustaining conduct must take place in public spaces because they have nowhere else to go. If laws regulating disorder target for enforcement—including removal\, citation\, arrest\, and detention— individuals whose conduct is inextricably linked with their status or identity\, then what’s at stake is more than solely the criminalization of status per se but rather criminalization that contributes to the continued subordination of that group\, or groups\, within society. \nThe status-enforcing effects of criminalization stem not only from the meaning of status vis-à-vis criminal sanction itself\, but also from the interaction between the status and the broader political economy. Where these laws criminalize conduct based on necessary activities of daily living\, these laws locate the harms of enforcement within a largely sociopolitical setting\, one that may render conduct practically compulsory (though factually voluntary) only insofar as the state and local jurisdiction have failed to adequately fund social services and programs\, whether affordable and accessible housing\, medical and mental health care\, and other supports.  Framed in this way\, the status offenses at issue in contemporary cases are of a different nature from the status crimes at issue in Robinson and Powell.  Yet\, the “new” status crimes still fall under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. As a constitutional matter\, the punishing of status today is much more about the lack of social investments than it is about the culpability\, precise conduct\, or volitional capabilities posed by the specific “offender.” \nDespite extensive scholarly discussions on the constitutional regime governing the criminalization of status\, the exclusionary and subordinating features of these laws punishing violations of quality-of-life offenses and other disorders have been largely ignored. Indeed\, most scholarly discussions debate how to define constitutionally prohibited status crimes. Primarily\, scholars focus on such questions as whether certain conditions\, like homelessness\, count as statuses\, and how to delineate the boundaries that govern which kind involuntary acts fall within the scope of prohibited status crimes when the individual (arguably) lacks the choice to restrain from violating the law. \nJamelia Morgan’s article proposes a more expansive\, yet still practical\, reading of Robinson and Powell that better aligns with a textualist and historical understanding of the Eighth Amendment. It also deploys an intertextual approach to propose a reading more aligned with an antisubordination reading of the Fourteenth Amendment. This reading also better aligns with the precise constitutional injuries that status offenses pose to individuals targeted by jurisdictions for quality-of-life policing specifically. Through providing a structural analysis of quality-of-life policing\, the article both defines status-based crimes and explains why many of these laws should be viewed as constitutionally prohibited status-based offenses. Ultimately\, relying on Robinson and Powell\, this article calls for these opinions to be applied to the current social context where political and economic factors drive mass criminalization\, and identifies new frameworks for understanding status crimes. \nTo register for this event\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nJamelia Morgan is a Professor of Law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. She is an award-winning and acclaimed scholar and teacher focusing on issues at the intersections of race\, gender\, disability\, and criminal law and punishment. Her scholarship and teaching examine the development of disability as a legal category in American law; disability and policing; overcriminalization and the regulation of physical and social disorder; and the constitutional dimensions of the criminalization of status. \nMorgan received a B.A. in Political Science and a M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University\, and her J.D. from Yale Law School. \nPrior to law school\, she served as Associate Director of the African American Policy Forum\, a social justice think tank that works to bridge the gap between scholarly research and public discourse related to affirmative action\, structural racism\, and gender inequality.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-jamelia-morgan/
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:20231108T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20231108T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20230706T164555Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231102T185123Z
UID:7810-1699444800-1699450200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Felipe Ford Cole and Brittany Farr
DESCRIPTION:This paper revises histories of nineteenth century capitalism by attending to the continuities between public and private debt in antebellum Mississippi. The conceptual distinction between public and private debt has long reigned over the financial and legal history of the midcentury Antebellum south. To historians\, public debt appears in this period as the brief and contentious subject of politics\, enlivening the rise of the Democratic party and transformation of state constitutions. Private debt takes shape as the antecedent condition to the planter foreclosures that sharpened the reasoning for secession. \nBy contrast\, the paper traverses the conceptual boundaries of public and private debt in this era. Cole and Farr begin with a series of public debts—issued in the form of state bonds to agricultural banks—that were used to support and expand the private credit of planters. When the Mississippi state government refused to repay these bonds during the economic depression of 1837-42\, it forced many planters into insolvency\, transforming them into delinquent debtors to the state. In the ensuing foreclosures\, creditor banks auctioned off many enslaved women\, men\, and children\, causing enslaved families to be torn apart and scattered to satisfy debts. \nThe history that they trace points toward a direct connection between debt and racial harm. Mississippi’s mismanaged public debt exacted the greatest cost from enslaved Black families\, who were separated to satisfy private debts to state creditors. The violence of this family separation benefitted enslavers by reducing morale and discouraging resistance\, which in turn benefitted a state whose economy relied upon slave labor. By drawing out the connection between Mississippi’s public and private debt\, and between this debt and family separation\, Cole and Farr show one of the ways in which debt and racial violence are intimately intertwined\, a relationship that they contend is central to racial capitalism. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n_____________________________________________________________________________________ \nFelipe Ford Cole joined Boston College Law School as an Assistant Professor of Law in 2022. He studies how the law shapes the balance between sovereign power and the power conferred to private capital in local\, national\, and international contexts. As a comparative legal historian\, Professor Cole’s research focuses on the historical evolution of this balance in the U.S. and Latin America. \nCole’s current research explores the evolution of public debt markets and the theory of sovereignty in the U.S. and Latin America and reexamines the origins of the core doctrines of international investment law. Professor Cole’s work has been published or is forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review and in edited volumes published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. \nBefore coming to Boston College Law\, Cole was a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Professor Cole earned a J.D. from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and is completing a Ph.D. in History at Northwestern University. He also earned an M.Phil. in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. in History from New York University. \nBrittany Farr is an Assistant Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. She joined NYU from the University of Pennsylvania Law School\, where she was a Sharswood Fellow. \nFarr is a scholar of private law and race. With more than a decade of interdisciplinary training\, her research draws on history\, legal theory\, and cultural studies to theorize how marginalized populations have availed themselves of otherwise inhospitable legal regimes. In particular\, her research focuses on enslaved and free African Americans’ use of contract law during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and interrogates the ways in which contract law mediated African Americans’ relationship to bodily autonomy\, economic freedom\, and legal agency both during and after slavery. Her writing has appeared in UCLA Law Review\, University of Chicago Law Review Online\, and many other academic publications. Farr has also co-authored policy reports on mental health and banking\, as well as on gender and mass incarceration. \nFarr earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 2019 and was a recipient of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund’s Earl Warren Scholarship\, which is awarded to law students with a demonstrated commitment to racial justice. Prior to law school\, Farr earned a Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation\, “Reproducing Fear Amid Fears of Reproduction: The Black Maternal Body in U.S. Law\, Media\, and Policy\,” examined how persistent fears about Black motherhood and reproduction have shaped certain laws\, public health campaigns\, and popular culture. Her first chapter\, which theorizes slavery as a reproductive technology\, received the Louise Kerckhoff Prize for Best Graduate Paper from USC’s Center for Feminist Research. \nFarr’s interest in the interplay between law and culture was sparked as a Folklore & Mythology major while an undergraduate at Harvard College.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-felipe-ford-cole-and-brittany-farr/
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:20231025T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20231025T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20230706T163724Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230905T180700Z
UID:7805-1698235200-1698240600@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Asad L. Asad
DESCRIPTION:Some eleven million undocumented immigrants reside in the United States\, carving out lives amid a growing web of surveillance that threatens their and their families’ societal presence. Engage and Evade examines how undocumented immigrants navigate complex dynamics of surveillance and punishment\, providing an extraordinary portrait of fear and hope on the margins. \nAsad L. Asad brings together a wealth of research\, from intimate interviews and detailed surveys with Latino immigrants and their families to up-close observations of immigration officials\, to offer a rare perspective on the surveillance that undocumented immigrants encounter daily. He describes how and why these immigrants engage with various institutions—for example\, by registering with the IRS or enrolling their kids in public health insurance programs—that the government can use to monitor them. This institutional surveillance feels both necessary and coercive\, with undocumented immigrants worrying that evasion will give the government cause to deport them. Even so\, they hope their record of engagement will one day help them prove to immigration officials that they deserve societal membership. Asad uncovers how these efforts do not always meet immigration officials’ high expectations\, and how surveillance is as much about the threat of exclusion as the promise of inclusion. \nCalling attention to the fraught lives of undocumented immigrants and their families\, this superbly written and compassionately argued book proposes wide-ranging\, actionable reforms to achieve societal inclusion for all. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nAsad L. Asad is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. His scholarly interests encompass social stratification; race\, ethnicity\, and immigration; surveillance and social control; and health. Asad’s current research agenda considers how institutional categories—in particular\, legal status—matter for multiple forms of inequality. His forthcoming book\, Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton University Press)\, examines how and why undocumented immigrants worried about deportation nonetheless engage with institutions whose records the government can use to monitor them. Additional research projects focus on the effects of immigration enforcement on health\, the role of the federal judiciary in immigration enforcement\, and the capacity of immigrant-serving organizations to counter the inequalities of the U.S. immigration system. \nAsad’s research has been published in several outlets\, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences\, Law & Society Review\, International Migration Review\, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies\, and Social Science & Medicine. His work has received awards from the American Sociological Association\, including the Louis Wirth Award for Best Article given by the Section on International Migration\, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. Asad earned his B.A. in Political Science and Spanish Language and Culture from the University of Wisconsin\, and his A.M. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-asad-l-asad/
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:20231018T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20231018T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20230829T150744Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231012T162705Z
UID:8269-1697630400-1697635800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Stefan Vogler
DESCRIPTION:Limited scholarship examines LGBTQ+ people’s willingness to report crime victimization to law enforcement\, even though LGBTQ+ people face disproportionate rates of violent victimization. Relatedly\, LGBTQ+ people also report higher levels of contact with the police and are incarcerated at three times the rate of the general population\, suggesting that\, like other minoritized groups\, LGBTQ+ people face the paradox of being “over-policed and under-protected.” \nIn this context\, Stefan Vogler asks what affects LGBTQ+ people’s willingness to report future crime victimization. He draws on a first-of-its-kind national probability sample of both LGBTQ+ (N=803) and non-LGBTQ+ (N=682) people to address these questions. Vogler finds that many drivers of willingness to report are common across the two groups\, including legal cynicism\, race\, and age. At the aggregate level\, LGBTQ+ people report significantly lower level of willingness to report than non-LGBTQ+ people. However\, when disaggregated\, he finds that transgender and nonbinary people drive this finding. Vogler considers what this means for existing understandings of crime reporting behaviors\, as well as why findings may differ across the LGBTQ+ spectrum. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nStefan Vogler is a sociologist who studies sexuality-and gender-related issues in law\, science\, and health. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an Affiliated Scholar with the American Bar Foundation. Vogler previously was a Research Scientist with NORC at the University of Chicago and held postdoctoral positions at Northwestern University and the University of California\, Irvine.  \nHis research is centrally concerned with processes of legal and social classification and their relationship to social inequalities and social change. Vogler has been particularly interested in how practices of measurement and categorization vary across institutional settings and overlap and interlock with gender\, sexuality\, race\, and nationality.  \nIn his first book\, Sorting Sexualities\, Vogler unpacks the politics of the techno-legal classification of sexuality in the United States. His study focuses specifically on state classification practices around LGBTQ people seeking asylum in the United States and sexual offenders being evaluated for carceral placement – two situations where state actors must determine individuals’ sexualities. Though these legal settings are diametrically opposed—one a punitive assessment\, the other a protective one—they present the same question: how do we know someone’s sexuality? Vogler reveals how different legal arenas take dramatically different approaches to classifying sexuality and use those classifications to legitimate different forms of social control. By delving into the histories behind these diverging classification practices and analyzing their contemporary reverberations\, Sorting Sexualities shows how the science of sexuality is far more central to state power than we realize.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-stefan-vogler/
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:20231011T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20231011T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20230706T162715Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230926T141413Z
UID:7799-1697025600-1697031000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Kristina Shull
DESCRIPTION:The early 1980s marked a critical turning point for the rise of modern mass incarceration in the United States. The Mariel Cuban migration of 1980\, alongside increasing arrivals of Haitian and Central American asylum-seekers\, galvanized new modes of covert warfare in the Reagan administration’s globalized War on Drugs. Using newly available government documents\, Shull demonstrates how migrant detention operates as a form of counterinsurgency at the intersections of U.S. war-making and domestic carceral trends. As the Reagan administration developed retaliatory enforcement measures to target a racialized specter of mass migration\, it laid the foundations of new forms of carceral and imperial expansion. \nReagan’s war on immigrants also sowed seeds of mass resistance. Drawing on critical refugee studies\, community archives\, protest artifacts\, and oral histories\, Detention Empire also shows how migrants resisted state repression at every turn. People in detention and allies on the outside—including legal advocates\, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition\, and the Central American peace and Sanctuary movements—organized hunger strikes\, caravans\, and prison uprisings to counter the silencing effects of incarceration and speak truth to U.S. empire. As the United States remains committed to shoring up its borders in an era of unprecedented migration and climate crisis\, reckoning with these histories takes on new urgency. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nKristina Shull is an Assistant Professor and Director of Public History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research interests include immigration history\, mass incarceration\, U.S. foreign relations\, social movements\, climate migration\, the Cold War\, and public history. \nShull’s first monograph\, Invisible Bodies: Immigration Crisis and Private Prisons Since the Reagan Era\, is currently under contract with UNC Press’s Justice\, Power\, and Politics series. It explores the rise of immigration detention in the United States in the early 1980s as a form of counter-insurgent warfare in Reagan’s Cold War on immigrants. \nShe also directs a digital humanities project titled “Climate Refugee Stories\,” about migration\, borders\, and the fight for climate justice. This multimedia archive and public education project employs Participatory Action Research methods and is built in collaboration with a global team of migrants and refugees\, students\, interdisciplinary scholars\, artists\, and non-profit organizations. \nShe has a forthcoming article in a special issue of Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics on Abolitionist Feminisms titled\, “QTGNC Stories from Detention and Abolitionist Imaginaries\, 1980-Present\,” and she is also currently conducting research for a second book project titled\, Immigration Detention and Histories of Resistance.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-kristina-shull/
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:20231004T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20231004T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20230706T161802Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230911T192826Z
UID:7792-1696420800-1696426200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Arzoo Osanloo
DESCRIPTION:In this talk\, Arzoo Osanloo will explore the persistence of the logic of mercy as a global zeitgeist. She will do so through two seemingly divergent\, yet overlapping and co-constituting prisms\, criminal sanctioning and humanitarianism. In doing so\, she aims to show how pardons and humanitarian care\, respectively\, construe mercy and\, she argues\, have overtaken the post-WWII initiative to expand human rights as a means to address inequity in social relations\, thus constituting one of the most enduring ideologies of our time. \n\nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \nArzoo Osanloo is a Professor in the Department of Law\, Societies\, and Justice and the Director of the University of Washington’s Middle East Center. She also holds adjunct appointments in the School of Law and the Departments of Anthropology\, Near Eastern Languages and Civilization\, Gender\, Women’s and Sexuality Studies\, and Comparative Religion. She earned her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University in 2002. Prior to that\, she practiced law\, having received a J.D. from The American University in 1993. \nAs a former immigration and asylum/refugee attorney\, Professor Osanloo became concerned with the fraught but often neglected relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘rights.’ As a legal anthropologist\, her research and teaching focus on the intersection of law\, culture\, and politics\, including human rights and humanitarianism. Her research explores the formations of women’s rights and human rights in cultural contexts and draws on continuing ethnographic fieldwork in Iran. Her first project explored the politicization of ‘rights talk’ and women’s subjectivities in post-revolutionary Iran\, and resulted in the book\, The Politics of Women’s Rights in Iran (Princeton University Press\, 2009). Her courses focus on human rights\, refugee rights and identity\, humanitarianism\, post-conflict reconciliation\, and women’s rights in Muslim societies. \nProfessor Osanloo is currently working on a new research project that examines the Islamic mandate of forgiveness\, compassion\, and mercy in Iran’s criminal sanctioning system\, jurisprudential scholarship\, and everyday acts among pious Muslims. This new research project considers the Muslim mandate of forgiveness or forbearance as a central ordering component of an Islamic way of life. Her interest is not simply in the texts of the sources\, Qur’an and Hadiths\, but also in how pious Muslims practice forgiveness\, forbearance\, mercy\, and compassion in everyday life. That is\, how does this compulsion to Muslims manifest through social interaction\, law\, and states politics? Iran’s criminal sanctioning laws are one specific focus of this work\, laws which permit individual forgiveness (not to be confused with the state pardon). One of the aims of this study will be to appraise the relationship between the legal and social manifestation of forgiveness to a certain understanding of human rights. In addition\, the work will assess how the Muslim compulsion to forgive and forbear may potentially play a role in reconciliation and transitional justice\, and how gender (symbolically and literally) figures into forgiveness. \nBesides working on book projects\, Professor Osanloo has published in numerous edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals\, including American Ethnologist\, Cultural Anthropology\, Political and Legal Anthropology Review\, and Iranian Studies.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-arzoo-osanloo/
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:20230927T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230927T013000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20230920T195826Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240917T131857Z
UID:8422-1695772800-1695778200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: 2023-25 Doctoral Fellows
DESCRIPTION:To register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \nReyna Hernandez: Bureaucracies of Innocence: Reentry and Remedy After Wrongful Conviction\nThe extant literature on life after wrongful conviction is foundational to examining how exonerees experience reentry. This scholarship primarily focuses on the social and psychological challenges exonerees face after wrongful incarceration\, including prolonged trauma and stigma\, and how they affect exonerees’ reentry processes. While offering essential insights into the effects of wrongful conviction and incarceration on exonerees’ personal lives\, this work only scratches the surface of exploring how criminal legal contact shapes exonerees’ everyday lives. As in life after incarceration for “rightfully” convicted people\, wrongfully convicted and exonerated individuals must interact with and incorporate themselves into institutions and organizations that become crucial to accessing the tangible and intangible resources and services they need through their transitions into the outside world. Moreover\, while law and policy are continually embedded into exonerees’ daily lives within and outside of these institutional and organizational contexts\, research on these relational dynamics is lacking. Reyna Hernandez’s research utilizes participant observation and in-depth interviews with exonerees\, innocence lawyers\, and innocence organization staff; content analysis; and visual methods (photo-elicitation) to triangulate exonerees’ experiences and organizational perspectives on facilitating and accessing exonerees’ post-incarceration needs. These include the legal and extralegal processes and mechanisms these actors might activate to advance remedies to wrongful conviction. Ultimately\, this work seeks to offer ways to improve and reimagine how best to compensate the wrongfully convicted by examining the bureaucracies that directly affect how exonerees access and receive reparations after wrongful incarceration\, further illustrating how entanglement with U.S. carceral institutions perpetually affect innocent people. \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nBrandon Honoré: Land Use Regulations and the Racial Inequality of Institutionalized Trustworthiness  \nBrandon Honoré examines the socio-legal construction of racial wealth inequality by investigating the relationship between land use regulations and institutionalized indicators of trustworthiness. He hypothesizes that exclusionary zoning not only contributes to segregation\, but also racial wealth inequality\, by asymmetrically distributing risks across racial groups. The asymmetric distribution of risks—both environmental hazards and the hazards of social exclusion—consequently contribute to institutionalized wealth inequality. Honoré combines data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act\, Toxics Release Inventory\, American Community Survey\, and Chicago Metropolitan Area for Planning Land Use Survey to build models of the Chicago region. By examining a single metropolis\, he will track interdependencies among communities both within the urban core and across the suburban periphery as risk and institutional credibility are (re)allocated across spaces over time. \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nPortia Xiong: Admitted but not Advanced: Diversity\, Minor Feelings and Asian and Asian American Law Students in the United States\nThis ethnographic project looks at why anti-Asian biases\, prejudices\, discriminations\, and violence still persist in legal education while Asian and Asian American presence is rapidly increasing by investigating three interconnected questions. First\, how does race impact Asian and Asian American law students’ everyday lives in white institutional spaces? It will compare and contrast the intergroup and intragroup dynamics of the Asian group and the Asian American group to explore how citizenship status stratifies their racialized law school experiences. Special attention will be paid to their experiences of racial biases\, prejudices\, and discriminations. Second\, how does racial identity intersect with other identities such as gender\, class\, sexual orientation\, religion\, and country of origin in each group? It will pay attention to how the Asian group and the Asian American group socialize with people from different racial backgrounds as an effort to refute the stereotype that Asians and Asian Americans are monolithic groups. For instance\, who do they make friends with at law schools? Who do they include in their study groups and recreational activities? Thirdly\, how do they respond\, resist\, or relate to marginalization and exclusion emotionally and cognitively in white institutional spaces like law schools? It will focus on their emotional labor and cognitive labor in dealing with racial oppression by documenting what Cathy Park Hong calls “minor feelings”: the emotions felt by marginalized minority groups in a predominantly white space\, feelings that are both ignored and considered excessive.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-2023-24-doctoral-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:20230920T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230920T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20230706T155113Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230828T211721Z
UID:7787-1695211200-1695216600@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Emily Rong Zhang
DESCRIPTION:Each redistricting cycle presents an opportunity for minority groups to translate demographic growth and changes in residential patterns into political power. That it occurs typically only once every ten years following each decennial census makes this opportunity all the more momentous. And for Native persons\, this opportunity has been hard-won: in some cases\, it has taken decades of litigation to challenge districts that diluted the Native vote\, either through cracking (fracturing the population across several districts) or packing (concentrating Native persons into a few districts with lopsided majorities). \nYet identifying redistricting opportunities\, seized or missed\, is not analytically straightforward. This project\, the first of its kind\, evaluates how Native persons fared in the last redistricting cycle (following the 2010 census) and in the latest redistricting cycle (following the 2020 census). I measure the spatial dispersion of Native populations in every state in which Native persons constitute a numerically significant minority (Alaska\, Arizona\, Montana\, New Mexico\, North Dakota\, South Dakota\, and Wyoming)\, analyzing the districting schemes of both lower and upper chambers of each state legislature. \nCombining census data with districting shapefile data\, and adapting a measure called “partisan dislocation” developed to assess partisan gerrymandering\, I measure Native dislocation: it is the difference between the racial composition of each district and that of each Native person’s geographic neighborhood. When that difference is large\, there are either proportionally more Native persons in the district than in their immediate neighborhood (an indication of concentration) or proportionally fewer (an indication of dispersion). \nThe analysis reveals both the enduring contribution and growing limitations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act\, which is responsible for the creation of many majority-Native districts\n(districts in which Native voters constitute more than a majority of the district’s population). While the Act is still responsible for the maintenance of historically majority-Native districts\, it is unable to translate increasing Native voting strength into electoral power beyond those districts. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nEmily Rong Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of California\, Berkeley\, School of Law. She studies how the law can promote political participation and representation\, especially of individuals from historically disadvantaged communities. Before joining Berkeley\, she was a Skadden Fellow at the ACLU Voting Rights Project.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-emily-rong-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:20230913T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230913T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20230706T153542Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230830T201457Z
UID:7777-1694606400-1694611800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: K-Sue Park
DESCRIPTION:Dr. K-Sue Park will be presenting on her forthcoming law review article. This paper offers a history of the American title registry and its role in expanding the jurisdictional power of the English colonies in America\, and then the United States. It argues that the examination\, historical or theoretical\, of U.S. sovereignty and property institutions\, such as the registry\, must depart from and center the question of the prior and ongoing sovereignty of Native nations across this land. \nTo register for this event\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. \n_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nK-Sue Park is an Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. Her scholarship examines the development of American property law and the creation of the American real estate market through the histories of colonization and enslavement. She teaches first-year Property and a seminar entitled Land\, Dispossession\, and Displacement. Previously\, she was the Critical Race Studies Fellow at UCLA School of Law and an Equal Justice Works Fellow and staff attorney in El Paso\, where she investigated predatory mortgage lending schemes as part of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid’s foreclosure defense team. \nPark earned her B.A. summa cum laude\, Phi Beta Kappa honors from Cornell University\, where she was a College Scholar\, her M.Phil. with Distinction in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge\, her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School\, where she was a Presidential Scholar\, and her Ph.D. in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley\, where she was a Javits Fellow. She was also a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea in 2003. \nIn 2015\, her article\, “Money\, Mortgages\, and the Conquest of America\,” won the American Bar Foundation’s Law & Social Inquiry Graduate Student Paper Competition and the Association for Law\, Culture and the Humanities’ Austin Sarat Award\, and was selected for the Law and Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop. Her publications have appeared in the Harvard Law Review\, the Yale Law Journal\, The University of Chicago Law Review\, The History of the Present\, Law & Social Inquiry\, and the New York Times.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/7777/
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:20230906T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230906T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20230623T181817Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230823T213440Z
UID:7707-1694001600-1694007000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Gregory Elinson
DESCRIPTION:“Over the past decade\, prominent progressive voices in the legal academy have reached a new consensus. Robust\, American-style\, judicial review is no balm to progressive causes — rather\, it is inherently anti-progressive. The judiciary\, they say\, has regularly interfered with legislative and executive efforts to protect minority rights and remedy economic inequality. Thus\, they conclude\, progressives ought to stop defending judicial review and instead devote their energies to eliminating (or limiting) it. Embedded in their critique are two related empirical claims: first\, that the judiciary in general and the Supreme Court in particular have been consistently less progressive than the other branches; and\, second\, that landmark progressive rulings in cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade were not\, in and of themselves\, meaningful contributions to the progressive cause. \nThis Article considers the evidence in support of these claims and argues that judicial review’s progressive critics are wrong on both counts. For one\, we contend that critics underestimate just how anti-progressive American politics\, independent of judicial intervention\, have usually been. Revisiting the key cases on which the progressive critique is based\, we find little evidence for the proposition that the judiciary has consistently been more anti-progressive than the elected branches. Rather\, we suggest that few durable progressive coalitions have ever been latent such that we can say with any confidence that\, but for judicial intervention\, they would have surfaced in Congress or the executive. For another\, the Article finds little evidence that progressive judicial interventions have been mostly sizzle\, with little substance. To the contrary\, we find empirical support for the proposition that landmark progressive rulings in cases like Brown and Roe mattered quite a bit. Brown\, recent historiography makes clear\, eased passage of federal civil rights legislation\, while Roe established a far more permissive abortion regime than would have been feasible to achieve through the political process. \nStepping back from this empirical inquiry\, the Article takes an analytic turn. What is it about the judiciary’s role in American politics that judicial review’s progressive critics have missed? We have two answers. First\, we think that progressive critics offer a too-rosy account of the elected branches’ progressivism. Throughout American history\, both major political parties have effectively colluded to keep the rights of disfavored minorities off the political agenda. And drawing on an array of scholarship in law\, political science\, and history\, we find little evidence that electoral incentives consistently favor progressivism. Second\, we think there is better evidence to suggest that legal elites\, when freed of the pressures of coalition assembly and maintenance that constrain the elected branches\, have in fact been more progressive than Congress and the president. In earlier eras of American history\, we attribute this phenomenon to legal elites’ commitment to a stripped-down\, common-law constitutionalism. In more recent decades\, we attribute this phenomenon in large part to the role of educational polarization\, which has tended to make the elite bar—and thus the pool of actual and potential judges and justices—relatively more open to progressive arguments.” \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nGregory Elinson is an Assistant Professor of Law at Northern Illinois University College of Law. He is a public law scholar with wide-ranging interests in constitutional and administrative law and legislative and judicial procedure. Much of his research concerns how partisan politics and political polarization have shaped the separation of powers. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Vanderbilt Law Review\, Emory Law Journal\, and the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law\, as well as several leading peer-reviewed social science journals\, including Law & Social Inquiry and Studies in American Political Development. \nBefore coming to NIU in 2022\, Professor Elinson was a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School and an associate in Kirkland & Ellis’s Chicago office\, where his practice focused on commercial and appellate litigation. Greg clerked for Judge David Barron on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Judge Gary Feinerman on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. He holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School\, a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California\, Berkeley\, and a B.A. from Harvard College.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-gregory-elinson/
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:20230524T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230524T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20221123T180457Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230614T185314Z
UID:2018-1684929600-1684935000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Kalyani Ramnath
DESCRIPTION:This talk will draw from Dr. Ramnath’s forthcoming book Boats in a Storm: Law\, Migration\, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia 1942 – 1962 (Stanford University Press\, 2023). Migrant struggle with the law – in transnational disputes over taxation\, immigration\, and detention between 1940s and 1960s – form a lesser-known archive for decolonization. A critical reading of this archive offers insights into the contours of citizenship today and offers opportunities to reflect on continuities in conversations around belonging\, loyalty\, displacement\, and dispossession. \nThis speaker will present virtually\, with the option to view in-person at the ABF. To register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nKalyani Ramnath is an Assistant Professor in the department of History at the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia. She is a historian of modern South Asia\, with research and teaching interests in legal history\, histories of migration and displacement\, transnational history\, and questions of archival method. Her first book\, Boats in a Storm: Law\, Migration\, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia 1942 – 1962 is forthcoming with Stanford University Press in August 2023.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/kalyani-ramnath-history-university-of-georgia/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
ORGANIZER;CN="Sophie Kofman":MAILTO:skofman@abfn.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20230517T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230517T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20221123T180204Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230614T201159Z
UID:2015-1684324800-1684330200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Kevin Kenny
DESCRIPTION:Today the United States considers immigration and border control a federal matter. Before the Civil War\, however\, the federal government played virtually no role in regulating immigration. \nIn this presentation\, based on his recently published book The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States\, (Oxford University Press\, 2023)\, Kevin Kenny will demonstrate how the existence\, abolition\, and legacies of slavery shaped the emergence of a national immigration policy in the nineteenth century. For a century after the American Revolution\, states controlled mobility within and across their borders and set their own rules for community membership. Throughout the antebellum era\, defenders of slavery feared that\, if Congress gained control over immigration\, it could also regulate the movement of free black people and even the interstate slave trade. The Civil War and the abolition of slavery removed the political and constitutional obstacles to a national immigration policy\, yet they did not make that policy inevitable. The first national immigration controls were directed not at immigrants generally\, but at Chinese immigrants in particular. Admission remained the norm for Europeans; Chinese laborers were excluded through techniques of registration\, punishment\, and deportation first used against free black people in the antebellum South. The federal government continues to control admissions and exclusions today but tensions within federalism\, rooted in nineteenth-century history\, remain important to the lives of immigrants after arrival. Some states monitor and punish immigrants\, while others offer sanctuary and refuse to act as agents of federal law enforcement\, echoing the personal liberty laws passed in response to fugitive slave acts in the antebellum era. Revealing the tangled origins of border control\, incarceration\, and deportation\, this presentation sheds light on the history of race and belonging in America\, as well as ongoing conflicts between state and federal authority over immigration today. \nThis speaker will present virtually\, with the option to view in-person at the ABF. To register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nKevin Kenny is Glucksman Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (OUP\, 2013)\, Peaceable Kingdom Lost (OUP\, 2009)\, The American Irish: A History (Longman\, 2002)\, and Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (OUP\, 1998). Currently President of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians\, Professor Kenny came to the United States as an immigrant in the 1980s.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/kevin-kenny-history-new-york-university/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
ORGANIZER;CN="Sophie Kofman":MAILTO:skofman@abfn.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20230510T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230510T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20221123T180002Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230728T175003Z
UID:2011-1683720000-1683725400@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Bryan Sykes
DESCRIPTION:Criminal justice contact is a key stratifying institution in American life. By the close of 2020\, almost 3.9 million non-incarcerated people were under community supervision (probation or parole)\, representing nearly 68% of the adult correctional population. Although the number of people incarcerated has declined since the Great Recession\, alternatives to incarceration may introduce new pathways to inequality because compliance with court-ordered diversionary and rehabilitation programs rely heavily on access to resources\, such as money\, information\, and time. While there has been a considerable expansion of literature on the consequences of monetary sanctions imposed at sentencing\, less is known about how alternatives to incarceration can produce other financial punishments that intersect and amplify inequality within the criminal legal system. In this paper\, we show how shadow costs – financial outlays and expenditures not immediately quantifiable by the state but nevertheless ordered as a part of a reentry or rehabilitation treatment program — financially burden defendants\, probationers\, and parolees beyond the monetary sanctions imposed by courts. Our findings reveal that these shadow costs structure a bifurcated system of justice that facilitates the creation of markets for freedom that are dependent on poverty and inequality. \nThis speaker will present in-person at the ABF\, with the option to view the presentation virtually. To register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nBryan Sykes is an Inclusive Excellence Term Chair Associate Professor and Chancellor’s Fellow in the Department of Criminology\, Law and Society (and\, by courtesy\, Sociology and Public Health); a Faculty Affiliate in The Center for Demographic and Social Analysis (CDASA) and The Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy at the University of California-Irvine. \nHis research focuses on demography and criminology\, broadly defined\, with particular interests in population processes (e.g.\, fertility\, mortality\, enumeration)\, mass incarceration\, global population health\, social inequality\, law & society\, and research methodology. He applies and develops demographic\, statistical\, and mixed methodologies to understand changing patterns of inequality — nationally and abroad. His research has appeared in general and multidisciplinary science\, social science\, and medical journals.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/bryan-sykes-criminology-law-and-society-university-of-california-irvine/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
ORGANIZER;CN="Sophie Kofman":MAILTO:skofman@abfn.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20230503T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230503T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20221123T175730Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230707T193357Z
UID:2008-1683115200-1683120600@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Ifeoma Ajunwa
DESCRIPTION:The information revolution has ushered in a data-driven reorganization of the workplace. Big data and AI are used to surveil workers and shift risk. Workplace wellness programs appraise our health. Personality job tests calibrate our mental state. The monitoring of social media and surveillance of the workplace measure our social behavior. With rich historical sources and contemporary examples\, The Quantified Worker explores how the workforce science of today goes far beyond increasing efficiency and threatens to erase individual personhood. With exhaustive detail\, Ifeoma Ajunwa shows how different forms of worker quantification are enabled\, facilitated\, and driven by technological advances. Timely and eye-opening\, The Quantified Worker advocates for changes in the law that will mitigate the ill effects of the modern workplace. \nThis speaker will present virtually\, with the option to view in-person at the ABF. To register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\n  \nIfeoma Ajunwa (@iajunwa) J.D.\, Ph.D.\, is an award-winning tenured law professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. She is also the Founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program at UNC Law and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University since 2017. She was a 2019 recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and a 2018 recipient of the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). Dr. Ajunwa’s research interests are at the intersection of law and technology with a particular focus on the ethical governance of workplace technologies.  Dr. Ajunwa is a Founding Board Member of the Labor Tech Research Network which is an international group of scholars committed to the research of the ethics of AI used in the workplace and for labor. Dr. Ajunwa’s writing has also been published in the NY Times\, the Washington Post\, the Atlantic\, and the Harvard Business Review\, among others. 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/ifeoma-ajunwa-law-and-artificial-intelligence-university-of-north-carolina-at-chapel-hill-school-of-law/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
ORGANIZER;CN="Sophie Kofman":MAILTO:skofman@abfn.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20230426T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230426T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20221123T175553Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230511T143925Z
UID:2005-1682510400-1682515800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Desiree Fields
DESCRIPTION:“Robot landlords are buying up houses.” Headlines like this one are not unusual these days. What are we to make of digital experiments with landed property? These experiments are wide-ranging\, encompassing the sale of tokenized fractional interests in LLCs attached to rental properties\, the brokering of land sales via Facebook livestream\, and metaverse environments that can defy the laws of physics yet remain wedded to market rule. In this talk\, Fields works toward an analysis of digital experiments with landed property in terms of the global\, the historical\, and the geographical. The yoking of property to modernity and civilization makes technological progress a fundamental part of how relationships to land are constituted and reconstituted\, and in whose interests\, throughout global capitalism. \nThis speaker will present virtually\, with the option to view in-person at the ABF. To register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nDesiree Fields is an Associate Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California\, Berkeley. Her research revolves around the role of housing in capitalist urbanization. She studies how efforts to render immoveable property into liquid capital unevenly restructure urban space and social relations\, and the urban struggles for justice that arise to contest this process of financialization. She aims to challenge the storied complexity of finance and its tendency to obfuscate public understanding through demystifying and concretizing the operations of financial capitalism in urban housing markets. She has opened up what financialization means for rental housing\, showing how it has deepened\, diversified\, and expanded globally with the aid of a wave of advances in digital technology in the post-2008 era. At its core\, her work is about how these processes of economic and technological change unevenly restructure urban space and the social relations of housing. Her scholarship speaks to developments that are central to the future of cities: the growing importance of finance to capitalism\, the turn to increasingly market-driven approaches to housing and urbanization\, and the digital revolution. \nShe has published widely on the relationships among housing financialization\, movements for justice\, and digital platforms in journals like Progress in Human Geography; Economic Geography; Housing\, Theory\, and Society; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research\, and; Urban Studies.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/desiree-fields-political-economies-university-of-california-berkeley/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
ORGANIZER;CN="Sophie Kofman":MAILTO:skofman@abfn.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20230419T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230419T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20221123T175440Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230707T194504Z
UID:2002-1681905600-1681911000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Katrina Jagodinsky
DESCRIPTION:Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky will offer an overview of the database her NSF-funded team is building in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at UNL to discern trends and patterns in marginalized people’s use of habeas in the American West over the long nineteenth century. ABF scholars will be invited to offer input regarding the encoding structure of the database\, and will be asked to contribute to a peer review and discussion of an in-progress article focused on early findings of women’s use of habeas. \nFor access to the related article draft\, please reach out to Sophie Kofman (skofman@abfn.org). \n\nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \nKatrina Jagodinsky is the Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of History. She is a legal historian examining marginalized peoples’ engagement with nineteenth-century legal regimes and competing jurisdictions throughout the North American West. Jagodinsky’s first book Legal Codes & Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands\, 1854-1946 explains the strategies of six women seeking to protect their bodies\, lands\, and progeny from the whims of settler-colonists in the tumultuous process of westward expansion and conquest. \nJagodinsky has also published a number of articles and essays that examine the efforts of Indigenous and mixed-race women and children to leverage the American legal system in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. “A Testament to Power: Mary Woolsey and Dolores Rodriguez as Trial Witnesses in Arizona’s Early Statehood\,” won the 2012-2013 Jerome I. Braun Prize for Best Article in Western Legal History\, and “A Tale of Two Sisters: Family Histories from the Strait Salish Borderlands\,” won the 2017 Jensen-Miller Prize for Best Article in Western Women’s & Gender History from the Western History Association. \nHer current focus is on her role as Graduate Chair for the History department and her research project Petitioning For Freedom: Habeas Corpus in the American West\, which is a collaboration with the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities that is funded by the National Science Foundation.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/katrina-jagodinsky-history-university-of-nebraska-lincoln/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
ORGANIZER;CN="Sophie Kofman":MAILTO:skofman@abfn.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20230412T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230412T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20221123T175243Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230407T192305Z
UID:1999-1681300800-1681306200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Michael Ralph
DESCRIPTION:The resurgence of interest in the role chattel slavery has played in US capital growth has been marked by an abiding emphasis on the Cotton Kingdom. Highlighting the 19th century sector that arguably generated more wealth than any other—with enduring implications for governance and the management of difference—scholars have trained their emphasis on the Mississippi River Valley. One implication of this approach is that scholars have focused on the role between coercion and productivity\, generally arguing for a direct correlation. It is worth noting that the same period that witnessed tremendous brutality in the service of greater productivity in the US Cotton Kingdom witnessed unprecedented mobility and enhanced working conditions for enslaved workers in other industries\, namely those operating in hazardous enterprises\, artisanal professions\, and those working as bureaucrats. Violence constituted these dynamics\, especially the structural violence and intimate partner violence that social scientists tend to associate with freedom in capitalist societies and not merely the naked force they tend to associate with chattel slavery. In what follows\, I examine the distinct forms of intimacy and partnership that emerged during this period alongside economic transformations that changed how enslaved people experienced affinity and gained expertise\, besides shaping how they were used as capital. I use the term “commercial affinity” to explain how violence and social mobility became intertwined in unprecedented ways during the last few decades of legalized slavery. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \nMichael Ralph is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard Univeristy. Dr. Ralph’s research integrates political science\, economics\, history\, and medical anthropology through an explicit focus on debt\, slavery\, insurance\, forensics\, and incarceration. He is currently at work on two books that center on slavery\, insurance\, and incarceration.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/michael-ralph-afro-american-studies-howard-university/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
ORGANIZER;CN="Sophie Kofman":MAILTO:skofman@abfn.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20230329T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230329T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20221123T175010Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230707T200936Z
UID:1996-1680091200-1680096600@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Philip Thai
DESCRIPTION:Shortly after intervening in the Korean War (1950–53)\, the People’s Republic of China faced an array of economic sanctions by the United States and the United Nations. The nascent regime vowed to “oppose the American imperialist policy of economic blockade against our country\,” and it sought to break what it denounced as an illegal and illegitimate embargo by any means necessary. One front in this campaign was the British colony of Hong Kong\, where the People’s Republic hired a lawyer by the name of Percy Chen to work with its many front companies and file lawsuit after lawsuit challenging the U.S. embargo. At first glance\, Chen seemed an unlikely figure to serve as legal counsel for Communist China. An Afro-Asian anglophile and a thoroughly bourgeois barrister who lived on the margins of the British empire\, Chen found himself at the center of China’s legal offensive during a critical moment in the Cold War. This talk looks at Chen’s life and legal work during the early 1950s\, retracing how he wielded colonial law as a weapon to chip away at the U.S. embargo and thereby circumscribe its reach. More broadly\, it situates Chen’s role within the vast shadow economies of Greater China during the Cold War and explores the creative ways assorted actors leveraged the legacies of empire for survival and profit. The presentation is based on a draft chapter of Professor Thai’s forthcoming book\, In the Shadows of the Bamboo Curtain. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n______________________________________________________________________________________________ \nPhilip Thai is an Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies\, as well as the Director of Asian Studies\, in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University. Thai is a historian of Modern China and East Asia with research and teaching interests that include legal history\, economic history\, and diplomatic history. He is the author of China’s War on Smuggling: Law\, Economic Life\, and the Making of the Modern State\, 1842-1965 (Columbia University Press and a Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute\, 2018). During the 2022-23 academic year\, he will be in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study as an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Frederick Burkhardt Fellow working on his new project\, “In the Shadows of the Bamboo Curtain: Underground Economies across Greater China during the Cold War.” At the core of Professor Thai’s inquiries is understanding the complex interplay between law\, society\, and economy. His interdisciplinary work has been supported by a number of organizations\, including the ACLS\, American Philosophical Society (APS)\, Fulbright-Hays Program\, Social Science Research Council (SSRC)\, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation\, among others.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/philip-thai-history-and-asian-studies-northeastern-university/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
ORGANIZER;CN="Sophie Kofman":MAILTO:skofman@abfn.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20230315T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230315T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20221123T174628Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230314T140554Z
UID:1993-1678881600-1678887000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Tabitha Bonilla
DESCRIPTION:Despite theory that contrasts substantive and descriptive representation\, the measurement of descriptive representation almost always invokes substantive representation to determine if policy focuses are more likely to shift the status quo of a district to policies that favor particular groups. While it is clear that descriptive representation has a complicated relationship with producing policy shifts\, it is nevertheless important for redirecting policy under certain circumstances and for mobilizing Black and Latine communities. We believe that colloquially\, unlike in academic treatments of representation\, voters describe a more complex web of representation. Here\, we examine descriptive representation as a component of substantive representation. To test this hypothesis\, we use interviews\, descriptive survey data\, and a survey experiment to demonstrate how descriptive and substantive representation work in tandem. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nTabitha Bonilla studies political behavior and communication and broadly examines how elite communication influences voter opinions of candidates and political policies. In particular\, her work focuses on how messaging polarizes attitudes or can bridge attitudinal divides with substantive focuses on important topics in American politics ranging from gun control to human trafficking and immigration. Her work incorporates a range of quantitative methods including experiments and text analysis. \nBonilla earned her Ph.D. in political science in 2015 from Stanford University. She then worked as a postdoctoral scholar and teaching fellow in the political science department at the University of Southern California through 2016.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/tabitha-bonilla-policy-research-institute-for-policy-research-at-northwestern-university/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
ORGANIZER;CN="Sophie Kofman":MAILTO:skofman@abfn.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20230308T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230308T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20221123T174446Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230314T140740Z
UID:1990-1678276800-1678282200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Linda Zhao
DESCRIPTION:Although it is frequently argued that recruiting minority officers can improve policing by fostering positive contact and collaborations between minority and white officers\, officer diversity could in theory also produce more racially polarized networks and thus have the opposite of the intended effect. Few studies so far consider how officer networks differ across policing contexts\, and little is known about the link between the diversity of police workforces\, the structure of officer networks\, and policing outcomes. In this study\, I use data from the second-largest police agency in the United States to analyze joint implications of officer diversity and racial homophily\, defined as barriers to racial mixing in officer co-arrest networks\, for police misconduct. Results show that levels of racial homophily are higher in districts with more diverse officer workforces\, and that the combination of homophily and diversity is linked to an elevated risk of police misconduct\, even after controlling for other explanations of misconduct at both the officer and district level. These patterns contradict the idea that diversifying police forces necessarily improves the internal dynamics of police forces and is consistent with the broader sociological insight that the benefits of diversity are challenged by racial homophily within social networks. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nLinda Zhao’s research focuses on how social contexts (such as levels of diversity or inequality in a population) can shape intergroup dynamics in social networks\, how social networks and social contexts are linked to our behaviors and decisions\, and how such networks can generate inequality. Her projects investigate intergroup dynamics\, inequality\, and social influence in networks within the areas of immigrant integration\, policing\, and public health. Zhao’s current work leverages data from a range of contexts such as adolescent friendships in classrooms\, officer networks in police departments\, as well as quasi-experimental settings using computational models. Prior to joining the University of Chicago\, Zhao was a Frank H.T. Rhodes Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Population Center.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/linda-zhao-sociology-university-of-chicago/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
ORGANIZER;CN="Sophie Kofman":MAILTO:skofman@abfn.org
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20230301T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20230301T133000
DTSTAMP:20250424T082155
CREATED:20221123T174251Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230314T140756Z
UID:1987-1677672000-1677677400@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Amalia Kessler
DESCRIPTION:Although arbitration has deep roots in the United States\, the first half of the twentieth century witnessed a remarkable surge of enthusiasm for this extrajudicial dispute-resolution procedure\, giving rise to legislative and institutional experiments at multiple levels of government. A broad range of actors and interests embraced arbitration as key to the revitalization of American democracy in a modern age beset by pressing new challenges of industrialization\, urbanization\, and immigration. Arbitration\, they argued\, facilitated new forms of private/public partnership that would enable expanded\, lawyer-free access to justice and give voice to disempowered groups—ranging from small-scale business organizations and labor unions to Jewish communal minorities. The end result\, they hoped\, would be to generate a more socially expansive and culturally pluralist society\, refashioning American democracy for the modern industrial era. \nRecovering this forgotten history of arbitration reveals the surprising role that this seemingly technical and abstruse procedure played in two key developments that profoundly transformed the United States roughly a century ago and whose legacies remain with us to this day—namely\, the rise of the modern administrative state and the emergence of cultural pluralism as a defining\, though contested feature of American society. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n______________________________________________________________________________________ \nAmalia Kessler is the Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies\, the Associate Dean for Advanced Degree Programs\, a Professor\, by courtesy\, of History\, and the Director of Stanford Center for Law and History at Stanford Law School. \nA scholar whose research focuses on the evolution of commercial law and civil procedure\,  Kessler seeks to explore the intersections between law\, markets and dispute resolution—with a particular focus on the forces that have shaped the nature and origins of modern capitalism.  She is currently working on a new book\, tentatively entitled “The Public Roots of Private Ordering: Arbitration and the Remaking of the Modern American State\,” the research for which is supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies\, as well as a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.  In 2018\, her book\, Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture\, 1800-1877 (Yale University Press\, 2017) received the American Society for Legal History’s John Phillip Reid Book Award for the best English-language monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar on Anglo-American legal history.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/amalia-kessler-international-legal-studies-and-history-stanford-law-school/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
ORGANIZER;CN="Sophie Kofman":MAILTO:skofman@abfn.org
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