In late March, the Baldy Center hosted a conference, “Gender and the Drug War,” which examined how gender plays a role in the drug war as viewed by the varied disciplines that inform sociolegal studies. Organized by David L. Herzberg, Associate Professor of History at UB, the conference brought together historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and public analysts to consider the role of gender in structuring the American drug war(s).
     The “drug war,” a moniker for an immensely complex set of social relations encompassing drug markets, drug use, drug governance, and drug treatment, has far-reaching influence on the intimately personal and broadly political. While scholarship has examined the relationship between the drug war and racially disparate mass incarceration, the two-day interdisciplinary symposium brought together leading scholars to examine the relationship between gender and drug policy. The conference addressed a number of interrelated themes: how gender structures the basic categories through which drugs are understood; how gendering affects the structure and implementation of drug policy; what social, cultural, and economic, and political dynamics have helped to obscure the operations of gender in drugs wars; among many others. The first day of the conference identified “calls for gender,” areas of scholarship and policy which lack sufficient awareness of gender, while the second day developed and articulated how the papers presented could meet these “calls.” Commenting on the benefits of the conference, Herzberg noted how it will culminate in "two consensus statements, one that provides a road map for humanities scholars to incorporate gender into their research on drugs and drug policy, and another that provides a guide for policymakers to consider the role of gender in America’s drug problems and the gendered consequences of existing or proposed drug policies."

More information can be found on the conference website. 

Baldy Center 2012-2013 Senior Fellow Kathleen Biddick, Professor Emeritus of History at Temple University, had her collection of essays Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties published by Punctum Books. The collection analyzes how the analysis and critique of biopower, as conventionally defined by philosopher Michel Foucault and widely assumed in much contemporary theory of sovereignty, remains trapped in the very historical context it ostensibly seeks to expose and dismantle.  Baldy Senior Fellows are accomplished academics and professionals, usually faculty members at other universities, who pursue intensive scholarly projects closely related to the mission of the Baldy Center. They utilize UB’s extensive research resources, participate regularly in Baldy Center events, and share their expertise with the larger Baldy community.
Read more on Professor Biddick’s Temple University faculty page.  

UB Assistant Professor of History and Baldy Center Research Fellow Jennifer L. Gaynor recently had her manuscript, Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia: Submerged Genealogy and the Legacy of Coastal Capture, published by Cornell University Press. A scholar of Southeast Asia's maritime and coastal worlds from the seventeenth century to the present, in recent years her work has taken a legal turn. Her research examines the changing material, cultural, and legal geography of Asian seas and coasts, in particular, how humans reshape coastal and maritime spaces, alter their significance, and transform the social relations they support. Her manuscript shows the vital part maritime Southeast Asians played in struggles against domination of the seventeenth-century spice trade by local and European rivals.

A book chapter titled “Missing in Action: The Human Eye” written by Or Bassok, 2013-14 Baldy Center Postdoctoral Fellow, has just been published in the book Constitutionalism Across Borders in the Struggle Against Terrorism (edited by Federico Fabbrini, Vicki C. Jackson, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016). Bassok, currently a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, examines in his chapter how allowing lawyers to legally "clear" military operations has affected the "manifestly unlawful order" doctrine. “I demonstrate in the article that a routine has been created in which military lawyers give clearance to military operations. This routine de-facto negates the ability, created after the Nuremberg trials, of combatants to disobey an order since it is manifestly unlawful,” says Bassok. During his Baldy fellowship, Bassok traveled to Harvard Law School to present the paper in a conference that resulted in this edited volume. Bassok notes that one of his goals during the Baldy fellowship was to return to write on criminal law after many years in which he focused on writing his dissertation which focused on constitutional law. “My interaction with Professor Guyora Binder helped me return to write on criminal law issues and this chapter that focuses on a defense in criminal law is the first product of my work. I also very much benefited from discussing my paper with Dr. Jesse Norris, currently criminal justice faculty at SUNY-Fredonia,  who was a co-Baldy Fellow and also writes on terrorism and criminal law.”

Dr. Ellen Berrey, previously a faculty member in UB’s Department of Sociology and currently Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at University of Denver, recently had her manuscript The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and Limits of Racial Justice published by University of Chicago Press. The manuscript benefited from feedback from a Baldy Center Book Manuscript Workshop in 2013. The Baldy Center supports book manuscript workshops as part of its mission to advance interdisciplinary research on law, legal institutions, and social policy, and seeks to help UB faculty members make their book manuscripts as strong as possible prior to publication. The Center invites two or three distinguished external scholars to review the manuscript and to engage in an intensive discussion with the author and interested UB faculty.
     Reflected Berrey, “With the expertise of top scholars across the country in the fields of sociology, law, anthropology, and history, as well as feedback from UB faculty and graduate students, I made key revisions so that the final review process at the University of Chicago Press went very smoothly. Based on that feedback, I revised the title, core concept, and central argument. I rewrote the introduction, reordered chapters, and corrected key empirical mistakes." 
     Drawing on six years of fieldwork and historical sources dating back to the 1950s and making extensive use of three case studies from widely varying arenas, Berrey explores the complicated meanings and uses of diversity as it is invoked by different groups for different, often symbolic ends. “In fact, the very existence of the Baldy Book Manuscript Workshop informed my decision to take a position at UB. It signaled to me that there was institutional support within the Law School for book writing, with an initiative created and run by people who understand what book authors need: intensive feedback on their written work.” Positively reviewed in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, American Journal of Sociology, and other academic and mainstream outlets, Berrey's book was also recently awarded the 2015 Herbert Jacob Book Award for best book in Law & Society scholarship by the Law & Society Association. In summer 2016, Berrey will join the sociology faculty at University of Toronto. 
 

 Laura Ford, 2014-16 Baldy Center Postdoctoral Fellow, joined the faculty at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology in January 2016. Ford taught "Sociological Theory" and "Law and Social Order" during the spring semester at Bard and taught "Intellectual Property: An Introduction for Engineers & Scientists" in UB’s School of Engineering & Applied Sciences during her time as a Baldy fellow. Ford’s other scholarly achievements during her time at the Baldy Center include a book chapter, “Legacies of the Sacred in Private Law: Roman Civic Religion, Property, and Contract” (forthcoming in a volume edited by Werner Gephart, University of Bonn, Germany); law review article, “Patenting the Social: Alice, Abstraction, and Functionalism in Software Patent Claims” (forthcoming in Cardozo Public Law, Policy and Ethics Journal); a book review of Private Property and Public Power: Eminent Domain in Philadelphia  by Debbie Becher (forthcoming in Contemporary Sociology); and an encyclopedia entry, “Property,” forthcoming in The Encyclopedia of Social Theory published by Wiley-Blackwell (edited by Bryan S. Turner). Ford also presented numerous papers during her time at UB.

Rebecca Schmidt, 2015-16 joint TBGI Post-Doctoral Fellow between the Baldy Center and York University, will begin a post-doctoral fellowship at University College Dublin's College of Social Sciences and Law and Sutherland Law School in fall 2016. Schmidt will support the ongoing and new research of College Principal, Dean of Law, and Professor of European Union Regulation & Governance Colin Scott, and will develop projects in cognate areas to enhance understanding of diverse modes and actors involved in the field of regulatory governance. During her fellowship at UCD, Rebecca will explore multi-level networks of governance interactions and their implications for existing public policy requirements. Examining both bottom-up approaches and top-down regulation, her project concentrates particularly on the dynamics between the local and the transnational level. Working at the Baldy Center provided Schmidt a valuable platform for securing this position as it gave her the opportunity to deepen her interdisciplinary approach through participating and presenting in seminars with scholars from disciplines ranging from behavioral economics to anthropology.

From May 12th-14th, The Baldy Center hosted a conference, "Redistribution: Politics, Law, and Policy," organized by Associate Professor of Law Matthew Dimick. The theme of the gathering was the redistribution of income, with particular focus on questions that concern preferences, taxation, and state capacity. The conference addressed a number of interrelated questions on these three themes: What determines individual support or opposition for political parties or politicians that favor more (or less) redistribution?; How important is tax (or benefit) progressivity in explaining levels of redistribution across countries?; What are the history, factors, and politics of the development of an administrative state capable of taxing and redistributing? Speakers included Monica Prasad, Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University; Isabela Mares, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University; and Susan Stokes, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Yale Program on Democracy, Yale University. 
More information can be found on the conference website.