Fifteen early career legal scholars from law schools around the country and BC Law came together on March 15 for a dynamic day of scholarly collaboration. The roundtable, convened by Paulo Barrozo, associate dean of faculty and global programs, provided a platform for the professors to discuss their current scholarship and expose their work to the incisive and constructive commentary of each other and members of BC Law’s senior faculty.
Brittany Far of NYU discussed Warranting Violence, examining how violence against enslaved persons was normalized and magnified by the use of contract law. Northeastern University’s Elettra Bietti presented a theory of antitrust from the viewpoint of a theory of justice. BC Law Drinan visiting assistant professors Rebecca Horwitz-Willis and Lucien Ferguson also presented, the former on the historical dilemmas of civil rights advocacy in the context of Black education, the latter on his paper that diagnoses the problem of state legislative capture and points to state constitutional judicial review as a possible response to the problem.
Brenda Dvoskin of Washington University shared her work on the interface of privacy concerns and views about sexuality titled The Erotic Interest in Privacy. The courtroom impact of falsehoods and measures based on empirical research to reduce the epistemic roots of the problem were the focus of American University’s Gustavo Ribeiro’s Misinformation and the Jury. Lisa Owens of UMass Law made the case for housing reparations in the context of the narrow path left open for political justice by the current Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence, and Bill Watson of the University of Illinois wrote Plain-Meaning Fallacy, testing the jurisprudential limits of originalist arguments in constitutional interpretation.
Yale’s Ketan Ramakrishnan shared his perspectives on Tort Law at the Frontier of Artificial Intelligence, which made the case for a type of liability model suitable to address wrongs caused by general-purposes AI systems. Suffolk University’s Erin Braatz presented research regarding the transformations of the Supreme Court’s articulation of due process’s tradition inquiries in the context of Eighth Amendment cases.
BC Law’s Mitchell Johnston’s Partial Damages work proposed a change in the usual binary approach to remedies in extant tort law doctrine and adjudication; Shelly Simana proposed a theoretical communitarian framework for the regulation of genetic material; and Yan Fang used qualitative research to advanced knowledge on public and private actors’ approach to safety on online platforms. Felipe Ford Cole’s paper on Race, Empire, and the Transformation of the Denial of Justice in International Investment Law used original archival findings to tell a fuller history of modern transborder investment law, and Andrea Olson’s work on Remedial Jurisdiction showed a novel theoretical way to think about civil jurisdiction.
The day left participants inspired with new ideas and connections to fuel their scholarship.
Photograph by Vicki Sanders