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DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250122T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250122T130000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
CREATED:20241210T163217Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250117T211555Z
UID:11356-1737547200-1737550800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: John Eason
DESCRIPTION:During the prison boom—from 1970 to 2000 when facilities tripled across the US\, prisons were more likely to be constructed in rural towns in the South with higher rates of poverty\, and Black and Latino residents. By examining the period we call the prison “bust”—between 2000-2023–when prison closures eclipsed openings\, we reveal how prison closures impact schools and racial equity across rural communities. Using Community Engaged Methods (CEM) we demonstrate multiple adverse effects of prison closure on rural communities of color including school closures. We argue that these findings implore us to find responsible ways of curbing demand to close prisons and reduce harm to rural communities of color. We assert this move from prison abolition as advocacy to prison abolition as policy will bear more fruit in reducing our overreliance on mass incarceration.\n\nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. \n\n\nJohn M. Eason (he/him) is the Watson Family University Associate Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He also works as a Senior Fellow at the Justice Policy Center/Office of Race and Equity Research at the Urban Institute. \nHe holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. Eason\, a native of Evanston\, Illinois\, received a bachelor’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a M.P.P. from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. \nBefore entering graduate school\, Eason was a church-based community organizer focused on housing and criminal justice issues. He also served as a political organizer for then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama. \nEason’s research interests challenge existing models and develop new theories of community\, health\, race\, punishment and rural/urban processes in several ways. First\, by tracing the emergence of the rural ghetto\, he establishes a new conceptual model of rural neighborhoods. Next\, by demonstrating the function of the ghetto in rural communities\, he extends concentrated disadvantage from urban to rural community process. These relationships are explored through his book\, “Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation” (University of Chicago Press\, 2017).
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-john-eason/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20250115T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20250115T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
CREATED:20241028T144048Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250106T154904Z
UID:11029-1736942400-1736947800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Samuel Fury Childs Daly
DESCRIPTION:Beginning in the 1960s\, many African governments were taken over by their armies. “The Soldier’s Creed” describes how law and militarism intersected in postcolonial Africa. In Nigeria and other former British colonies\, military officers believed they could remake their countries in the image of an army. Soldiers tried to condition civilians to think like they did—and when that failed they tried to beat the bad habits out of them by force. Military-style discipline became a political philosophy\, and some soldiers came to believe that making Africa into a vast open-air barracks was what would make it truly “free.” In Nigeria and elsewhere\, soldiers saw judges as partners in their attempts to “discipline” their countries\, but law wasn’t the disciplinary tool they thought it was. Civilians could turn law back on them\, they discovered\, and only some judges shared their world-making aspirations. Using an original collection of legal records\, documents\, and memoirs\, Samuel Fury Childs Daly shows how law facilitated militarism and\, at times\, worked against it. \n\n\nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\n\n\nSamuel Fury Childs Daly is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago’s Department of History. Professor Daly writes about law\, warfare\, and the politics of military regimes. Most of his work describes the history of Africa since independence. He asks how soldiers and judges think: how do military dictatorships use law\, and how do judiciaries check their powers – or enable them? He also studies what warfare does to legal systems. Armed conflict degrades normative orders\, and sometimes it creates new ones. How do people make order and resolve disputes in wartime? His first book\, A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law\, Crime\, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press\, 2020)\, connects the Nigerian Civil War to the fraud and violent crime that wracked Nigeria in its wake. Using an original body of legal records from the secessionist Republic of Biafra\, it traces how technologies\, survival practices\, and moral codes that emerged during the fighting lasted long after the war was over. The line between martial violence and violent crime can blur on the battlefield\, and once that line is gone it is hard to redraw it. \nHe is currently conducting research for two projects – a global history of military desertion\, and a book about military imposters and role-players. His work has been published in venues including Past & Present\, Comparative Studies in Society and History\, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in History from Columbia University\, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge\, and an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies\, University of London. He previously taught at Duke University. \n 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-samuel-fury-childs-daly/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20241204T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20241204T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
CREATED:20240709T163120Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20241119T153054Z
UID:10338-1733313600-1733319000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen
DESCRIPTION:Using 60 ethnographic interviews with a range of minority law students and early career legal professionals\, this Article illuminates the cruciality of eCRT tools to understand the experience of individual deviance and the usefulness of a queer theory lens in aiding such an effort. Analysis from these narrative data show that students with different kinds of peripheral identities experience professional spaces in many uniquely different ways but that narratives across minority categories (primarily differentiated by race\, gender identity\, religion\, and disability) also overlapped in important ways. Particularly\, the data show a clear pattern among these differently peripheral actors of what I call “blasé” dismissal and denial of discrimination. Unlike microaggressions which might have resonance in common cultural parlance as an operationalization of structural violence\, what distinguishes blasé discrimination\, I argue\, is the ordinariness of the act in common interactional parlance alongside its relative unlikeliness to be seen as problematic when confronted. It is this possibility of defense and even justification in the face of being questioned about the violence that makes blasé discrimination and its ambiguous parameters worthy of our attention in identity jurisprudence. This exploration of the blasé response to discrimination sheds light – borrowing from queer theory – on the opportunities available for theory building when difference is analyzed across narrative to focus on the commonalities of deviance across sub-categories of assumed identity. In turn\, it offers a framework for considering what I am framing as the “QuEer-CRT” approach for law and society scholarship. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nSwethaa S. Ballakrishnen (they/them) is a socio-legal scholar whose research examines the intersections between law\, globalization and stratification from a critical feminist and global south perspective. Particularly\, across a range of sites and different levels of analysis\, their work interrogates how law and legal institutions create\, continue\, and counter different kinds of socio-economic inequalities.  \nScholarship from Professor Ballakrishnen’s research projects has appeared in\, among other journals\, Law and Society Review\, Law and Social Inquiry\, Fordham Law Review\, International Journal of the Legal Profession\, and the Journal of Professions and Organization. Their first book\, Accidental Feminism (Princeton University Press: 2021)\, unpacks the case of unintentional gender parity among India’s elite legal professionals; a second book Invisible Institutions (Hart Publishing: 2021\, ed. with Sara Dezalay) brings together cross-subjective perspectives on legal globalization; and a third book\, Gender Regimes and the Politics of Privacy (Zubaan Books\, with Kalpana Kannabiran) investigates the gendered legacies of India’s privacy jurisprudence. These strains of research have received a range of honors and awards\, including from the National Science Foundation\, the American Sociological Association\, and the Law and Society Association; and in 2022\, Ballakrishnen was awarded the campus-wide UCI Distinguished Early-Career Award for Research. You can read more about their research praxis and commitments here.  \nAlongside this scholarly output\, Professor Ballakrishnen’s research has been featured in a range of professional and popular media including Harvard Business Review\, Stanford News Report\, Above the Law\, Bloomberg Law\, Quartz\, Law School Transparency Radio\, The Practice\, New Books Network\, and WPR. They have presented research at over 100 conferences worldwide\, delivered over 50 invited talks in a range of academic and professional settings\, and their legal opinions on family and financial laws have been cited by the Probate and Family Court of Massachusetts and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit respectively.  \nProfessor Ballakrishnen is committed to building and serving socio-legal communities\, especially ones that focus on critical questions concerning legal education and the profession. At UCI\, they co-run the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession\, the Socio-Legal Studies Workshop\, and the Law\, Society\, and Culture Emphasis. In addition\, beyond UCI\, they are affiliated faculty at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession\, on the board of trustees of the Law and Society Association (LSA) and the ISA Research Committee on Sociology of Law\, a co-founder of the LSA Collaborative Research Network on Legal Education\, and on the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Empirical Study of Legal Education and the Legal Profession. In 2017-18\, they were the AccessLex Visiting Scholar on Legal Education at the American Bar Foundation. In 2020\, Professor Ballakrishnen was named a AALS Teacher of the Year.  \nFor over a decade before entering academia full-time\, Professor Ballakrishnen was a legal intern to Hon’ble Justice Arijit Pasayat of the Supreme Court of India\, an international banking associate in Mumbai\, and an external consultant for cross-border litigation financing in New York City.  \n 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-swethaa-s-ballakrishnen/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20241023T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20241023T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
CREATED:20240709T162252Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20241017T181450Z
UID:10332-1729684800-1729690200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Ke Li
DESCRIPTION:Drawing on archival and ethnographic research\, this talk presents a case study of legal workers in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Empirically\, it marks the key moments in the PRC’s development of a legal services industry during the reform era. It does so by tracing how a particular group of law practitioners\, known as basic-level legal workers\, rose to prominence in the socialist era and then fell from favor in the new millennium. The fact that the PRC’s top decision-makers have struggled to transform the group of practitioners and that they have mishandled attempts to harness a burgeoning services industry testifies to the limits of authoritarian regimes—and especially the challenges in instrumentalizing law\, legal professions\, and judicial institutions. Theoretically speaking\, this case study foregrounds an understudied theme in the literature. True\, legality has become an integral part of autocrats’ ruling methodologies in many parts of the world. Their endeavors to deploy legal techniques and personnel to resolve emerging problems in ruling\, however\, do not always deliver. Thus\, it is crucial for researchers to heed—and explicate—when and why autocrats do not always get what they want.\n  \nTo read the related paper for Dr. Li’s presentation\, reach out to Sophie Kofman or Dianna Garzón. \n\n\nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n\nKe Li (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the John Jay College of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on law and society\, knowledge practices\, and gender politics in contemporary China. In a decade or so\, she has had articles published in the Law & Society Review\, Law & Policy\, and Sociological Forum. Her book\, Marriage Unbound: State Law\, Power\, and Inequality in Contemporary China\, was published by Stanford University Press in 2022.   \nDrawing on extensive archival and ethnographic data\, Marriage Unbound shows how women’s legal mobilization and rights contention can forge new ground for our understanding of law and politics\, as well as power and inequality\, in an authoritarian context. In 2023\, this book received several awards\, including Herbert Jacob Book Prize for the best book on law and society and Victoria Schuck Award for the best book on women and politics.  \nIn recent years\, she has branched out into new research areas. In one project\, she examines LGBTQ activism and impact litigation in Chinese society; and\, in a related project\, studies how state- and society-sponsored knowledge moves come to shape judicial decision-making\, respectively. Together\, these two inquiries\, she hopes\, will allow her to connect several adjacent research areas: law and society\, the sociology of knowledge\, and science and technology studies. 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-ke-li/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20241016T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20241016T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
CREATED:20240923T174431Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20241011T232526Z
UID:10861-1729080000-1729085400@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: 2024-26 Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellows
DESCRIPTION:To register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n  \nSino Esthappan: “The Institutionalization of Algorithmic Risk Assessments in US Pretrial Hearings”\nAcross fields\, organizations now increasingly adopt predictive algorithmic scoring systems to improve decision-making processes. Some studies find that these systems discipline workers by evaluating and directing their behaviors. Others show how\, rather than unwittingly abiding by algorithmic directives\, workers may appropriate these tools to accomplish specific goals and tasks. Yet the relational conditions under which actors follow or reject scores are not well understood\, and we know little about how organizational networks shape algorithmic decision-making practices in multiprofessional expert fields. In this presentation\, I will describe my dissertation project\, which examines how actors in the US criminal court policy field negotiate different kinds of expertise to institutionalize risk assessment tools in pretrial hearings. I will explain my plans to use archival records\, interviews\, observations\, and court transcripts to analyze how a wide multiprofessional field of national policy stakeholders and local criminal court officials makes sense of and justifies the use of varied risk assessment practices in pretrial hearings. I will conclude by discussing the implications of this research for criminal court policies and practices and scholarship on law\, organizations\, punishment\, and technology. \nSino Esthappan is an ABF/Northwestern University Doctoral Fellow in Law & Social Science. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. \n____________________________________________________________ \nRobert Gelles: “Originalism in the Making: Language\, Knowledge Practice\, and Constitutionalism in the Conservative Judicial Audience”\nDespite significant successes in pursuing its agenda\, there remains dissent among the ranks of the Conservative Legal Movement (CLM). Intellectuals in the Movement have criticized the Supreme Court judgments that seem to achieve Conservatives’ political and legal priorities. One of their central criticisms is that the Court did not use the appropriate method of legal interpretation—it failed to abide by an Originalist Constitutional Theory. Recent social science scholarship has shown that intellectuals like these play a key role in CLM. As institution builders\, conveners\, teachers\, and authors\, Conservative legal scholars help to create and disseminate intellectual resources for litigation and judicial decisions\, train a group of attorneys to take up the cause\, and act as an audience for the judiciary and profession. At the heart of their activities is a discussion about the appropriate means of interpreting law\, often centered on an argument about the nature of language. Drawing from participant observation\, interviews with members of the Movement\, and publicly posted footage of major events\, I analyze the linguistic beliefs and behaviors by which these scholars perform their roles. By taking a semiotic approach\, I aim to show how their linguistic beliefs and knowledge practices play a key role in shaping their particular and influential legal consciousness\, as well as shaping their responses to ongoing legal action. Doing so\, I suggest\, offers an opportunity to re-conceptualize a defining feature of constitutionalism: the relationship between law and politics. \nRobert Gelles is an ABF/University of Chicago Doctoral Fellow in Law & Social Science. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Chicago.  \n_________________________________________________________________ \nKyneshawau Hurd: “3D of Racial Justice: Diversity\, Dominance & Discrimination. Implicit Social Dominance & The Diversity Principle-Policy Gap”\nThis work delves into the discord between the widely professed commitment to diversity\, equity\, and inclusion (DEI) in the United States and the persistent maintenance of racial hierarchies\, a phenomenon described as the principle-policy gap. Challenging traditional notions of discrimination that link it solely to overt racism or covert prejudice\, this study posits that the drive for hierarchy (or preservation of caste) is a subtler and perhaps more foundational force perpetuating racial inequalities. Further\, this works argues that this hierarchy-preservation motivation may be especially important for understanding persistent inequality in outwardly egalitarian\, pro-diversity\, and racially positive contexts.\nThus\, through a socio-psychological perspective\, the research spotlights “implicit social dominance orientation” (ISDO)—an unconscious preference for hierarchical structuring of social groups—as a significant factor contributing to this gap. Across several studies\, this work investigates the nuanced relationship between explicit and implicit social dominance orientations (SDO and ISDO\, respectively) and their impact on support for racial diversity and justice policies. Drawing from Social Dominance Theory and recent advancements in implicit cognition\, I develop a measure of ISDO and create four “Dominance Profiles”—a typology of group-based dominance motivations with implicit and explicit dimensions—to examine decision-making of those who explicitly disavow social dominance but implicitly endorse it.\nThis work further suggests that that diversity ideology\, particularly when framed instrumentally\, appeals to implicit dominance motivations and helps explain the principle-policy gap observed among egalitarians. We find evidence for the existence of ISDO and its influence on the decision-making of self-professed egalitarians. Those with higher levels of implicit social dominance (but not necessarily higher levels of racial antipathy) endorse policies that undermine racial justice efforts compared to True Egalitarians. Specifically\, policy support of Implicit Dominants\, those who explicitly endorse diversity and egalitarianism but implicit support hierarchy\, is driven by perceptions of dominant-group benefit.\nOur research highlights the importance of considering both implicit motivations and dominance motivations in understanding decision-making and behavior\, particularly among self-identified egalitarians. These findings contribute to the broader discourse on diversity to advance a 3D framework for understanding racial inequality. This framework seeks to better account for Discrimination and the ways Diversity and Dominance contribute to contemporary manifestations of it that current legal frameworks may not appreciate.\n\n\nKyneshawau Hurd is the ABF Postdoctoral Fellow in Law & Inequality. She is a social psychologist and psychology and law scholar studying the intersections of diversity\, dominance and discrimination. \n\n\nTo read the related paper for Dr. Hurd’s presentation\, reach out to Sophie Kofman or Dianna Garzón. 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-2024-26-doctoral-and-postdoctoral-fellows/
LOCATION:ABF Offices\, 750 N Lake Shore Drive\, 4th Floor Chicago\, IL
CATEGORIES:ABF Speaker Series,News
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20241002T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20241002T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
CREATED:20240708T203001Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240904T165419Z
UID:10315-1727870400-1727875800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Yuan Yuan
DESCRIPTION:When soldiers fight justly in a just war waged by their state\, they may nonetheless kill or maim innocent civilians unexpectedly or in terms of expected collateral damage in overall justified assaults. Such incidents often inflict severe moral injuries on those soldiers in the form of immense guilt\, shame\, and remorse\, which Yuan Yuan calls “the moral injuries of soldiering.” \nThese injuries appear to have a fatalistic flavor\, representing a wound at the heart of soldiering itself as they haunt soldiers even though they have done the right thing in light of the morality of soldiering. In this paper\, Yuan contends that soldiers do not kill in their personal capacity when they fight justly in a just war initiated by their state. Instead\, they kill on behalf of and in the name of the people. While their state—representing the citizenry—wronged the innocent war victims\, the soldiers carrying out the killings did not wrong them\, thanks to the exclusionary power of the rules of engagement. While the soldiers share the responsibility for the killings as citizens of the warring state\, their responsibility is no more and no less than that of any other citizen. Only if the citizenry takes up the moral responsibilities for the unavoidable killings of innocents in a just war\, through public apology\, collective mourning\, and fair compensation\, can soldiers be liberated from the crushing emotional burdens of harming the victims. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nYuan Yuan (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California\, San Diego. Prior to this appointment\, she was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at NYU Shanghai. She received her PhD in Philosophy from Yale University in 2020. Her primary areas of research are ethics\, political philosophy\, and philosophy of law\, with an emphasis on the interface between them.   \nShe is currently working on a series of papers on just war theory\, which defends the core principles of the international laws of war by illustrating how political relations transform interpersonal morality in politically oriented or mediated warfare. She also has a secondary research interest in experimental philosophy\, employing empirical methods to explore patterns in ordinary people’s philosophical intuitions.  \n 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-yuan-yuan/
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:20240925T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240925T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
CREATED:20240917T132849Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250623T145547Z
UID:10829-1727265600-1727271000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: 2024-26 Doctoral Fellows
DESCRIPTION:To register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \nJoshua Aiken: “The Public’s Safety: Gun Control\, Career Criminals\, and the Statutory Revolution in Arms (1961-1995)”\nThis talk examines the relationship between notions of public safety\, new firearms regulations\, and mass criminalization in the United States from 1961-1995. Synthesizing four case studies\, I argue that the racialization of space\, pathologizing of crime\, and development of a new “gun rights” agenda shaped how Americans experienced an increasingly armed society. Based on archival research\, I attend to how legal frameworks\, political approaches\, and influential actions of everyday people can index historical changes over time. First\, I consider the drafting of the Gun Control Act of 1968\, the first major federal firearms regulation since the 1930s. Second\, I examine a network of armed black resistance\, namely through the actions of the original Black Panther Party\, that revealed the racial state’s role in structuring public space\, defining who constitutes the public\, and determining what it means to be safe. Third\, I explore how a failed constitutional challenge of Washington D.C.’s 1975 firearm regulation law\, led key figures in the “gun rights” movement to a statutes-first approach. Fourth\, I foreground a suite of federal laws passed from 1984-1986—including the Armed Career Criminal Act—that criminalized people and pathologized blackness. By the 1990s\, gun rights ideologues successfully used these laws to advance their distinct agenda through conventional legal arguments\, favorable federal courts and bipartisan responses to “violent crime.” In conclusion\, I consider how these events might challenge prevailing narratives regarding the relationship between race\, gun laws\, and American social life. \nJoshua Aiken is the ABF Doctoral Fellow in Law & Inequality. He is currently a J.D./Ph.D. Candidate at Yale University (History and African American Studies).  \n_______________________________________________________________________ \nEwurama Okai: “In Search of Equal Protection Futures: How Imagined Futures Shape Racial Justice Litigation in the Progressive Legal Movement”\nUnderstanding what makes legal movements successful has long been a focus of social-scientific study. Existing literature identifies factors such as the available legal ‘stock\,’ framing of social wrongs\, resource access\, and movement coherence. Recently\, scholarship on constitutional change and conservative legal movements has highlighted an important yet underexplored factor: imagined futures. While scholars acknowledge that these futures shape legal landscapes\, they often limit their analysis to predefined scenarios or trace current conditions back to pre-determined visions. This approach leaves a gap in understanding how legal movements actively construct\, interpret\, and legitimize these imagined futures\, particularly in adverse litigation contexts. Ewurama Okai’s research addresses this gap by investigating how imagined futures influence lawyering. Through in-depth interviews with Illinois-based legal professionals and qualitative content analysis of legal scholarship\, Okai examines the doctrinal and interpretive possibilities for law. Her work aims to illuminate how imagined futures serve as a mechanism in shaping legal movements\, influenced by legal education and scholarship\, and what the mean for how the field makes changes in broader society. \nEwurama Okai is the ABF/AccessLex Institute Doctoral Fellow in Legal & Higher Education. She is a J.D./Ph.D. Candidate at Northwestern University (Sociology). 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-2024-26-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:20240918T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240918T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
CREATED:20240708T202100Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240805T173338Z
UID:10310-1726660800-1726666200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Kasey Henricks
DESCRIPTION:“Chicago on the Take” is a case study that focuses on parking tickets that are written under false pretenses. It leverages multiple data sets against one another to demonstrate that more than one in eight tickets over a six-year span were written under conditions when restrictions did not apply. These findings within a multilevel framework to answer three questions: (1) Are errored tickets more likely to be issued in neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black or Latinx residents? (2) Are errored tickets more likely to be issued by patrol officers as opposed to parking enforcement officers? and (3) Does ethnoracial composition moderate the relationship between ticketing authorities and errored tickets? The implications of our findings (1) quantitatively trouble the ontological assumptions of data that are defined from a policing standpoint and (2) underscore an adjudicative process that routinely sanctions drivers without cause.\nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n_______________________________________________________________________ \nKasey Henricks (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology\, Law\, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He likes to pursue big questions through small things. Looking at often overlooked objects of the everyday\, from parking citations to lottery tickets\, Kasey’s research agenda uncovers how race and class inequalities are reproduced over time through reconfigurations of public finance under late capitalism. More specifically\, he has a publication record that follows a two-fold examination of 1) how seemingly face-neutral modes of raising revenue yield disparate consequences in who pays for social services and 2) the ways in which raced and classed antagonisms ideologically shape\, and become shaped by\, conflicts over state finance. His work documents various predatory developments in private-public “partnerships\,” alongside the erosion of a social safety net\, through the emergence of piecemeal revenue systems during the past half-century\, showing how raced and classed dynamics are implicated in a transformation of state finance that has become increasingly regressive and upwardly redistributive to capital interests across the globe.  \nAlthough Kasey never earned a high school diploma\, he completed a PhD with distinction in the discipline of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. He also holds a bachelor’s degree from Austin Peay State University and an associate’s from Chattanooga State Technical Community College. Prior to arriving at UIC\, he was a faculty member of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and an affiliate scholar at the Appalachian Justice Research Center. He has held fellowships at the American Bar Foundation\, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime\, Security\, and Law\, KWI Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities\, and UIC’s Institute for Research on Race & Public Policy\, and his research has been supported by funders like the National Science Foundation\, Russell Sage Foundation\, and Chicago Community Trust. Some of his work has been recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association\, Society for the Study of Social Problems\, Association of Black Sociologists\, Association for Humanist Sociology\, Southern Sociological Society\, Eastern Sociological Society\, and Southwestern Sociological Association. He is also a former doctoral fellow of the American Bar Foundation. 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-kasey-henricks/
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:20240911T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240911T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
CREATED:20240708T200454Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240822T163345Z
UID:10303-1726056000-1726061400@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: David Troutt
DESCRIPTION:Urban renewal\, a mid-century federal-local redevelopment program that transformed American cities and displaced millions of Black migrants from the South\, was a race-conscious government policy responsible for the enduring suppression of Black wealth. Its racial history and character are untold in legal scholarship. This article argues that the 25-year regime enacted in the Housing Act of 1949 was a response to the Great Migration of Black workers and families to northern\, midwestern\, and western cities. It was codified to interact with other segregation policies\, such as highway construction\, restrictive covenants\, redlining\, and public housing\, through the colorblind veneer of rational planning principles. Race planning created durable conditions of “racial bargaining\,” the discounted value of wealth-producing transactions in segregated Black communities. Since its mid-century enactment\, urban renewal federalized a race-conscious segregation policy that eluded civil rights remedies and framed contemporary urban development programs. The article shows how this framework sustained the racial wealth gap at the core of this country’s continuing struggle with structural inequality. \nReframing requires reckoning. The article presents\, for the first time\, the case for restorative remedies to Black descendants of the U.S. urban renewal program. Offering an architecture of accountability for race-conscious wrongs\, the article conceptualizes three buckets of contemporaneous\, future\, and cumulative harms\, an analysis of government wrongfulness\, and illustrative restorative programs. \n\nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. \n_____________________________________________________________________ \nDavid Dante Troutt (he/him) is professor of law (Justice John J. Francis Scholar) and the founding director of the Rutgers Center on Law\, Inequality\, and Metropolitan Equity (CLiME). He teaches and writes in four areas of primary interest: the metropolitan dimensions of race\, class and legal structure; intellectual property; Torts; and critical legal theory. His major publications (noted below) include books of fiction and non-fiction\, scholarly articles and a variety of legal and political commentary on race\, law and equality. A member of the faculty since 1995 after practicing corporate and public interest law in New York and California\, Troutt founded CLiME in 2013 in order to provide a research resource for students and the public interested in the growing challenges of municipalities and families trying to sustain middle-class outcomes amid growing fiscal constraints and rapid demographic change.  \nSeveral themes characterize Troutt’s work. A key feature of his writing and teaching about the intersections of race\, class and place concerns identifying blind spots in conventional analyses of spatially determined opportunity through structuralist and interdisciplinary analysis. This work involves inquiries about meanings of colorblindness\, the role of inequity in persistent marginalization\, and the utility of civil rights theories in addressing concentrated poverty. Troutt is conducting ongoing research on developing the principle of mutuality in public law. Key themes in Troutt’s writing about intellectual property include personhood and authorship in copyright and trademark. Key aspects of his work in critical theory include the uses of narrative methodology\, cultural constructions of marginalization and the dynamic life of stereotypes.  \nProfessor Troutt is a frequent public speaker and contributor to a variety of national periodicals\, including Politico\, Huffington Post\, Reuters and The Crisis. He received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University and his juris doctor from Harvard Law School. \n 
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-david-troutt/
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:20240515T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240515T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
CREATED:20231214T235759Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240404T145017Z
UID:9043-1715774400-1715779800@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Dan Berger
DESCRIPTION:The facts of mass incarceration in the United States are well known. Yet many of the distinguishing features of mass incarceration\, including its racism and severity\, have been foundational elements of the US prison system. At the same time\, incarcerated people have consistently shown prison to be a microcosm of the social and political divisions of society overall. In this talk\, Dan Berger previews his current book project\, Prison: A History of the United States. A sweeping history of how the United States has been made and remade through prison\, the book endeavors to tell an incarcerated people’s history of the country from settlement to the present. Following the experiences of incarcerated people across a diverse and evolving set of prisons\, Berger addresses how a country that takes “freedom” as its beacon has been defined by its absence. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nDan Berger is a Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Scholarship He is an interdisciplinary historian of activism\, Black Power\, and the carceral state in twentieth-century U.S. history. His research pursues a human accounting of how freedom and violence have shaped the United States. Much of Berger’s work is located in critical prison studies\, including the diverse ways in which imprisonment has shaped social movements\, racism\, and American politics since World War II. \nHis latest book is Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey\, which is a biography of the modern Black freedom struggle through the lives of Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons. Published in 2023\, the book has already been hailed as “a triumph in storytelling” (Hanif Abdurraqib) and a “rare\, intimate portrait … that will join classics on this period” (Imani Perry). Berger’s other books include Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era\, which won the 2015 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians; Rethinking the American Prison Movement\, coauthored with Toussaint Losier; and Remaking Radicalism\, coedited with Emily Hobson. \nBerger co-curates the Washington Prison History Project\, a digital archive of prisoner activism and prison policy in our state. He writes often for public audiences in Black Perspectives\, Boston Review\, Truthout\, and the Washington Post\, among elsewhere. At the UW\, he is an affiliate member of the Center for Human Rights\, the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies\, and the UW Seattle Department of History\, and he co-directs the UW Bothell Labor Colloquium. Beyond the university\, he is on the advisory or editorial boards of the American Prison Newspaper Project\, The Global Sixties\, the Journal of Civil and Human Rights\, and the Justice\, Power\, and Politics book series at UNC Press.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-dan-berger/
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:20240508T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240508T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
CREATED:20231214T234653Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240430T174500Z
UID:9040-1715169600-1715175000@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Veena Dubal
DESCRIPTION:How much does an Uber driver make per hour? Workers’ groups\, economists\, and corporate-sponsored researchers have all calculated dramatically different numbers. Why has answering this question been so fraught\, and what can we learn about the value of quantitative and qualitative research from reflecting on this question? \nIn this article\, Veena Dubal argues that rather than reflecting a “natural labor price\,” calculated via a digital assessment of supply and demand\, variable wages allocated algorithmically to individual workers are better understood as part of a new digitalized labor management practice\, what she has called algorithmic wage discrimination. By design\, algorithmic wage discrimination formulates hourly wages that are highly variable\, using data and insights about worker behavior to set labor prices differentially. Quantitative studies of wage-earning at the aggregate level thus obscure what qualitative research makes evident: wages for platform-controlled workers not only often fall below subsistence levels\, but the very methods and practices of wage-setting generate novel forms of economic suffering. Regulatory interventions\, then\, should be attendant not just to the average wage price\, which tends to disguise new harms and buttress corporate myths about the nature of digital labor management\, but also to the many problems engendered by digitalized wage allocation\, thereby heeding the demands of worker groups to intervene in the relational process of wage-determination. These qualitative findings are especially important to understanding and regulating the “future of work\,” as algorithmic wage discrimination is quickly moving from the ride-hail and food-delivery industry to the labor economy writ large. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nVeena Dubal is a Professor of Law at the University of California\, Irvine School of Law. Her research focuses broadly on law\, technology\, and precarious workers\, combining legal and empirical analysis to explore issues of labor and inequality. Her work encompasses a range of topics\, including the impact of digital technologies and emerging legal frameworks on workers’ lives\, the interplay between law\, work\, and identity\, and the role of law and lawyers in solidarity movements. \nDubal has written numerous articles in top law and social science journals and published essays in the popular press. Her research has been cited internationally in legal decisions\, including by the California Supreme Court\, and her research and commentary are regularly featured in media outlets\, including The New York Times\, The Washington Post\, The Wall Street Journal\, The Los Angeles Times\, NPR\, CNN\, etc. TechCrunch has called Dubal an “unlikely star in the tech world\,” and her expertise is frequently sought by regulatory bodies\, legislators\, judges\, workers\, and unions in the U.S. and Europe. Dubal is completing a book manuscript that presents a theoretical reappraisal of how low-income immigrant and racial minority workers experience and respond to shifting technologies and regulatory regimes. The manuscript draws upon a decade of interdisciplinary ethnographic research on taxi and ride-hail regulations and worker organizing and advocacy in San Francisco. \nDubal received a B.A. from Stanford University and holds J.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California\, Berkeley\, where she conducted an ethnography of the San Francisco taxi industry. The subject of her doctoral research arose from her work as a public interest attorney and Berkeley Law Foundation Fellow at the Asian Law Caucus where she founded a taxi worker project and represented Muslim Americans in civil rights cases. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at her alma mater\, Stanford University. She returned to Stanford again in 2022 as a Residential Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Dubal is the recipient of numerous awards and grants\, including the Fulbright\, for her scholarship and previous work as a public interest lawyer.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-veena-dubal/
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:20240501T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240501T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
CREATED:20231214T231042Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240415T141147Z
UID:9037-1714564800-1714570200@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Hiroshi Motomura
DESCRIPTION:Hiroshi Motomura will share key lessons from his forthcoming book\, Borders and Belonging. The book shows how new immigration policy insights emerge from combining approaches that are seldom adopted together. This broader inquiry reveals conceptual obstacles to finding sound responses to migration. First is a tendency to apply a simplistic single framework for evaluating migrants’ claims. In fact\, some claims invoke shared humanity\, while other claims draw on belonging to a national community. Second is a false assumption that immigration laws govern the boundary between insiders and outsiders. In fact\, immigration laws empower some insiders while silencing others. Third is a deceptive distinction between “refugees” and “migrants.” In fact\, refugees work\, and many migrants flee dire conditions. Fourth is a misleading choice between “temporary” and “permanent” migration. In fact\, the line between them is blurred. Moving beyond these (and other) conceptual obstacles is essential for developing sound responses to human migration. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nHiroshi Motomura is the Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law and the Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the University of California\, Los Angeles School of Law. Motomura is a teacher and scholar of immigration and citizenship\, with influence across a range of academic disciplines and in federal\, state\, and local policymaking. \nHis book\, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (Oxford 2006) won the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PROSE) Award from the Association of American Publishers as the year’s best book in Law and Legal Studies\, and was chosen by the U.S. Department of State for its Suggested Reading List for Foreign Service Officers. He is a co-author of two immigration-related casebooks: Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy (9th ed. West 2021) and Forced Migration: Law and Policy (2d ed. West 2013)\, and he has published many widely cited articles on immigration and citizenship. His most recent book\, Immigration Outside the Law (Oxford 2014)\, won the Association of American Publishers’ Law and Legal Studies 2015 PROSE Award and was chosen by the Association of College and Research Libraries as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. \nIn 1997\, Professor Motomura was named President’s Teaching Scholar\, which is the highest teaching distinction at the University of Colorado\, and he has won several other teaching awards\, including the 2008 Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction at the University of North Carolina\, Chapel Hill\, and the 2013 Chris Kando Iijima Teacher and Mentor Award from the Conference of Asian Pacific American Law Faculty (CAPALF). He was one of just 26 law professors nationwide profiled in What the Best Law Teachers Do (Harvard 2013)\, and he received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award in 2014 and the law school’s Rutter Award for Teaching Excellence in 2021. He teaches Immigration Law\, Immigrants’ Rights\, and the Immigrants’ Rights Policy Clinic\, and he is the Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law. \nProfessor Motomura was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018 to work on a book\, Borders and Belonging: Can Immigration Policy Be Ethical?\, now under contract with Oxford University Press (forthcoming 2024). A preliminary partial version of the project was published as “The New Migration Law” in the 2020 Cornell Law Review.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-hiroshi-motomura/
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:20240424T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240424T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
CREATED:20231214T230258Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240417T154213Z
UID:9034-1713960000-1713965400@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Shayak Sarkar
DESCRIPTION:Shayak Sarkar’s talk discusses the experience of taxation for domestic workers\, particularly childcare workers in private households. Drawing upon an original survey\, expert interviews\, and online forums\, he documents new observations of the employee-employer relationship and tax decision-making. Surveyed “nannies” express a strong preference for formal employment and tax reporting. Nannies also report tax ignorance and evasion by some educated household employers; others forge unique tax arrangements\, including by strategically placing some income on the books and some off-the-books. Finally\, payroll companies play a surprising role in educating and supporting workers in navigating tax- and formality-hesitant employers. In addition to presenting these preliminary results\, Sarkar discusses further work to unpack domestic worker-employer negotiations. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nShayak Sarkar is a Professor of Law at the University of California\, Davis School of Law. Sarkar’s scholarship addresses the structure and legal regulation of inequality. His substantive interests lie in financial regulation\, employment law\, immigration\, and taxation. He obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. \nSarkar clerked for the Hon. Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Prior to his clerkship\, he practiced as an employment attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services\, where he focused on domestic workers’ rights. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School\, where he was active in the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project and the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic. He also served as a Coker Fellow in Contracts and received the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Before law school\, he studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford\, where he earned Masters’ Degrees\, with distinction\, in Social Work and Development Economics. \nHis research has appeared or is forthcoming in academic journals including the California Law Review\, Georgetown Law Journal\, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review\, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender\, the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism\, and the Review of Economics and Statistics.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-shayak-sarkar/
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:20240417T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240417T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
CREATED:20231214T224231Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240325T165022Z
UID:9031-1713355200-1713360600@www.americanbarfoundation.org
SUMMARY:Speaker Series: Lucius Couloute
DESCRIPTION:Roughly 600\,000 people are released from prison each year. Contemporary reentry systems\, or webs of post-incarceration services\, are typically organized around transforming this population into law-abiding\, productive\, and responsible citizens. Lucius Couloute’s talk examines how formerly incarcerated people conceptualize reentry services amid severe structural barriers to (re)integration. In particular\, Couloute will link narratives of individualism to the various forms of exclusion and “support” described by a sample of formally criminalized people. The cleavages between post-imprisonment needs and available resources begs a critical evaluation of both existing interventions and potential alternatives. As such\, Couloute will also explore a somewhat novel (re)integrative support – direct cash transfers – for their capacity to promote post-incarceration success. \nTo register\, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.  \n__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ \nLucius Couloute is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Suffolk University. He came to Suffolk University in the summer of 2019. Previously\, Couloute worked as a policy analyst with the Prison Policy Initiative where he produced policy reports using Bureau of Justice Statistics data and advocated for criminal justice reform. \nCouloute’s primary research interests involve the practices\, processes\, and impacts of criminalization. His current research investigates the structural barriers and cultural ideas that permeate a northeastern prisoner reentry system. His work also examines how organizations produce\, mediate\, or experience systems of inequality.
URL:https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/event/speaker-series-lucius-couloute/
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:20240410T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20240410T133000
DTSTAMP:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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:20260417T065508
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
END:VCALENDAR