CULJP 2022 Award Recipients
2022 Winner of Teaching Innovation Award in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Teaching
After careful deliberation, the Consortium’s Awards Sub-Committee has decided to award this year’s Teaching Innovation Award in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Teaching to our colleague Rosa Squillacote (Hunter College, City University of New York), for her course “Political Science 219: Women and the Law”.
This is a class that we consider a model of interdisciplinary teaching at a time of socio-political change, when it is particularly difficult to help students make sense of these changes in their complexity, whilst encouraging their development as responsible citizens and political actors. Professor Squillacote’s class tackles this challenge in exemplary fashion, in all its complexity. Her course is “based in the importance of understanding the material impact of the law and political power needed to change the law,” and emerged in connection to her own understandings of how different pressing issues of our time are all ““women’s political issues,” although they might not traditionally be called that”. She developed and taught this class over the course of ten years, successfully engaging with the fields of Gender Studies, Legal Studies and Political Science. Her deliberate intention was to help students make sense of how the law operates in the real world, in everyday life, to make sense of the complex intersection between gender and legal institutions.
"I want my students to understand that the law is already present in much of their lives, that the law is often punitive and coercive, but that the law can be shaped by political movements and by anyone who understands their world as a political world. I aim to provide a space for
students to begin to act in these personal and political spheres and examine themselves as political subjects."
The Committee observed that this is a particularly difficult goal in current times, when multiple needs and aspirations for social justice have come to the fore, but in which, as Professor Squillacote noted, there is a risk to focus on the law or legal expertise without incorporating the sociolegal context. Professor Squillacote successfully addresses this task. Thus, the class embeds law in a liberal arts context, attending to gender and power, and engaging with political subjectivity formation. Based on this premise, the class covers a variety of topics that, often, are taught with a black-letter approach but that covered a variety of topics, including “criminal legal systems, minimum wage, labor history, domestic labor, immigration, sex work, and more, and the impact of these systems on women and other marginalized groups.” The Committee also took note of Professor Squillacote’s creative assessment tasks, which seek to create opportunities for students to ‘perform’ public engagement and democratic citizenship in multiple ways, whilst offering the opportunity to hear about actual experience engaging with the law from multiple sources, including guest speakers. We consider her pedagogic model and assessment inspiring for all colleagues engaged in sociolegal teaching and learning in current times.
Additionally, the Committee would like to award a much-deserved Special Mention to Karen Miner-Romanoff (Law and Society Fellow, the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University), for her experiential problem-based learning approach to teaching criminology and juvenile justice courses. Her application showcased an innovative interdisciplinary pedagogy and method, which can serve as a point of reflection for these and other courses in sociolegal studies, highlighting the importance of carefully-designed experiential learning in our field.
This is a class that we consider a model of interdisciplinary teaching at a time of socio-political change, when it is particularly difficult to help students make sense of these changes in their complexity, whilst encouraging their development as responsible citizens and political actors. Professor Squillacote’s class tackles this challenge in exemplary fashion, in all its complexity. Her course is “based in the importance of understanding the material impact of the law and political power needed to change the law,” and emerged in connection to her own understandings of how different pressing issues of our time are all ““women’s political issues,” although they might not traditionally be called that”. She developed and taught this class over the course of ten years, successfully engaging with the fields of Gender Studies, Legal Studies and Political Science. Her deliberate intention was to help students make sense of how the law operates in the real world, in everyday life, to make sense of the complex intersection between gender and legal institutions.
"I want my students to understand that the law is already present in much of their lives, that the law is often punitive and coercive, but that the law can be shaped by political movements and by anyone who understands their world as a political world. I aim to provide a space for
students to begin to act in these personal and political spheres and examine themselves as political subjects."
The Committee observed that this is a particularly difficult goal in current times, when multiple needs and aspirations for social justice have come to the fore, but in which, as Professor Squillacote noted, there is a risk to focus on the law or legal expertise without incorporating the sociolegal context. Professor Squillacote successfully addresses this task. Thus, the class embeds law in a liberal arts context, attending to gender and power, and engaging with political subjectivity formation. Based on this premise, the class covers a variety of topics that, often, are taught with a black-letter approach but that covered a variety of topics, including “criminal legal systems, minimum wage, labor history, domestic labor, immigration, sex work, and more, and the impact of these systems on women and other marginalized groups.” The Committee also took note of Professor Squillacote’s creative assessment tasks, which seek to create opportunities for students to ‘perform’ public engagement and democratic citizenship in multiple ways, whilst offering the opportunity to hear about actual experience engaging with the law from multiple sources, including guest speakers. We consider her pedagogic model and assessment inspiring for all colleagues engaged in sociolegal teaching and learning in current times.
Additionally, the Committee would like to award a much-deserved Special Mention to Karen Miner-Romanoff (Law and Society Fellow, the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University), for her experiential problem-based learning approach to teaching criminology and juvenile justice courses. Her application showcased an innovative interdisciplinary pedagogy and method, which can serve as a point of reflection for these and other courses in sociolegal studies, highlighting the importance of carefully-designed experiential learning in our field.
2022 Winner of Best Undergraduate Student Paper Award in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies
The Consortium for Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs is delighted to announce Xuan Lee of University of California Berkeley as the winner of the 2022 Best Undergraduate Student Paper in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies. Lee's paper, "Churchmen in Court: The Refugee Act of 1980, The Sanctuary Movement, and the Letter and Practice of Asylum Law in the United States" was advised by Professor Bonnie Cherry. The project examines the persistence of religious sanctuary movements for refugees and asylees in the US amid strict immigration regimes and challenges to religious authority, and also analyzes the legal contexts that shape and are shaped by the sanctuary movement.
The Awards Committee was impressed with Lee's attention to the institutional, legal, and social contexts of the sanctuary movement and of US asylum law. Moreover, we were excited by the way that Lee interrogated not only how the sanctuary movement has been constrained and shaped by the US legal regimes, but crucially went beyond this already-significant work in order to articulate the ways that the practices of the Sanctuary movement in the 1980s provoked changes in the structures and agencies of US asylum regimes. As Lee writes on page 9:
The Sanctuary Movement, by altering the sociopolitical space that asylum law occupies, caused asylum law to change the authority it drew from in keeping sanctuary-seekers out; the dialectic between the Movement and asylum law as it existed in the 1980s produced a new kind of asylum law: internal and executive policy like Operation Gatekeeper. Instead of drawing on the power of the people, asylum law turned to using executive action, avoiding public debate, as the American masses grew to support the rights of refugees.
This sort of project, demonstrating an intention and a sophistication in the mutual constitution of law and social movements exemplifies the best kind of law and society scholarship, and thus we are happy to award Lee for this work.
The Awards Committee was impressed with Lee's attention to the institutional, legal, and social contexts of the sanctuary movement and of US asylum law. Moreover, we were excited by the way that Lee interrogated not only how the sanctuary movement has been constrained and shaped by the US legal regimes, but crucially went beyond this already-significant work in order to articulate the ways that the practices of the Sanctuary movement in the 1980s provoked changes in the structures and agencies of US asylum regimes. As Lee writes on page 9:
The Sanctuary Movement, by altering the sociopolitical space that asylum law occupies, caused asylum law to change the authority it drew from in keeping sanctuary-seekers out; the dialectic between the Movement and asylum law as it existed in the 1980s produced a new kind of asylum law: internal and executive policy like Operation Gatekeeper. Instead of drawing on the power of the people, asylum law turned to using executive action, avoiding public debate, as the American masses grew to support the rights of refugees.
This sort of project, demonstrating an intention and a sophistication in the mutual constitution of law and social movements exemplifies the best kind of law and society scholarship, and thus we are happy to award Lee for this work.