​Spring feels like conference season in my disciplines.  Many of my scholar friends just got back from the Western Political Science Associationmeetings in San Francisco, and many others are gearing up for the Midwest Political Science Associationmeetings in Chicago.  
 
And of course, right now, my attention has turned to the Law and Society Associationmeetings – June 7 – 10 in Toronto, Canada and to the Consortium Pre-Conference Workshop.   The Consortium will have several professional development panels at LSA – on undergraduate research, getting and loving a tenure track job in legal studies at an undergraduate focused institution, and a panel on the connections between LSA and CULJPS (they are long and deep connections!).
 
With all of the recent attention to “Manels,” as well as to the multiple ways that women are showing “we also know stuff,” I’ve been reflecting lately on how proud I am of how inclusive CULJPS is, and how inclusive my time at LSA has been (with caveats, and acknowledged limits – I find CULJPS to be really supportive of women’s leadership, and LSA to be terrific at being an inclusive and international organization; both still have room to grow).  
 
I’ve also been thinking about who I am when I attend a conference, why I go, and how I act while there.  For instance, I avoid APSAmeeting – going only once a decade or so – but I usually attend the WPSA.   I find myself at home with the public law people there, the popular culture people there, and the feminist political theory folks; and I always attend an environmental theory panel, even though they don’t usually relate to my areas of research or teaching.  I like the WPSA focus on pedagogy, the intimate and relaxed feel of it, and the ability to construct a “conference within a conference.” 
 
I presented at some graduate student conferences when I was earning my PhD at NYU in the late 1990s/early 2000s, and I attended disciplinary conferences related to my dissertation, as an observer, during the same time.  But it wasn’t until I attended the 2000 LSA meetings and the graduate student workshop in Miami Beach that I began to see myself as “an academic attending an academic conference.”  In the nearly twenty years since then, I’ve cycled through loving, and loathing, the conference process – and I’ve noticed that the wayI conference has changed over time.  When I was first out of grad school, and still working to develop the book that grew out of my dissertation, I attended in order to present.  Because I was a junior scholar, I almost always presented fully formed work, and therefore didn’t get as much benefit as I could have, from presenting work in progress. 
 
It wasn’t until my first book came out, and I switched gears, that I began to see conferences as a place to have meaningful conversations about my work and teaching – it wasn’t until tenure that I saw conferences as places to be vulnerable, intellectually.  Now, I love to be on panels where I can present work where the research is mostly done and the argument is in formation, but I am still trying out different approaches.  Even more, I love being on panels that are focused on something outside of the research, and use the research as a springboard – a roundtable on Data Access and Research Transparency, for example, or a panel on pedagogy and engaging undergraduates in research.
 
Early in my career, I understood that conferences were important places to network, even as I hated the term, and cringed at the thought.   I was lucky to have an advisor who did lots of heavy lifting on my behalf – she’d introduce me to her peers, saying things like, “Renee’s research is on ...” and when I listened closely I learned not only how she saw my research, but how to talk about it within the different subfields of my disciplines.
 
On my own, though, I didn’t start out strategically – in fact, I was such a dork! I’d actually follow senior scholars around the book room, or around the reception buffet (grabbing as much food as I could, to supplement my super small assistant professor at a state university per diem), and “accidentally-on-purpose” run into them, smile, and blunder through “I love your work” conversations.  I was lucky that so many senior folks were generous – they gave me their cards, they sat down with me to hear what I loved about their work, they invited future conversation, they helped me connect with their graduate students and colleagues.  Over time, I learned to be more strategic (and respectful) – to email in the month ahead of a conference to introduce myself and ask for a cup of coffee, to follow-up with everyone I met with an email in the weeks after the conference, thanking them for their time, suggesting an article, sending my work whenever they invited it.   I learned to ask my panel mates to meet up for breakfast before, or for drinks after, as a way of extending our scholarly connections and conversations.  
 
I learned, actually, to be much more extroverted than I am.  
 
Years later, I learned the value of three special treats: one hotel breakfast-in-bed, the ability to say no to an evening out, when I was wiped out, and the pleasures of an afternoon in a strange and fabulous city. As a new mom, I learned that conferences were also places I could sleep in, and take uninterrupted showers, and eat breakfast alone.  
 
While conferencing, I was always aware that I was making connections – I didn’t realize that I was also making friends.    I didn’t realize that slowly, over the course of a career, conferences would become the highlight of my academic year – a chance to see and talk with people I only get to see once every twelve months, as well as a chance to meet junior scholars who are just beginning to develop their research agendas and teaching personas. 
 
Time at conference is, for me, like a miniature sabbatical on an amazing fellowship – three to five days of focused conversation about my work, and your work – the chance for adequate sleep (or not) and the chance for a morning writing retreat in a new city with great coffee.  I try to do two conferences a year – more doesn’t seem sustainable (though I’ve done four, before), one doesn’t seem quite enough.  I try not to grade during conferences – except on the airplane (airplane grading is the best) – and I try to return from conferences refreshed and energize for future work.
 
I am certain that LSA will be all of that that this year – and I am incredibly excited about the pre-conference workshop that CULJP is planning.  
 
We will meet – and I hope you’ll join us – the day before, in the conference hotel in Toronto, to engage in sustained and invigorating dialogue about undergraduate legal studies. We’ll start the day with presidents – past and future – of CULJP and LSA, discussing the interplay and overlap between our two organizations, and the role of sociolegal studies in undergraduate legal studies.  We’ll network and chat at lunch – and maybe even take a walk – and then return in the afternoon for a hands-on and interactive set of sessions on program development and maintenance, curricular outcomes and assessment, and how best to serve our students. 
 
The CULJP pre-conference workshop will be an intimate gathering 20 – 30 people, and a perfect place to have a conference experience as a junior scholar new to LSA and CULJP, as well as a place for those of us who are more ‘seasoned’ to connect in different ways with our peers.  
 
I hope you will join us – register here, then email me and ask to meet up for a cup of coffee at LSA!

Eric Ashley Hairston is an ​Associate Professor of English and of Law and Humanities at Elon University.

I am collaborating with faculty at multiple institutions to conduct a survey to collect data about undergraduate research as a pedagogical tool, specifically as a high impact practice (HIP) among faculty members who teach in the humanities, social sciences, and education at four-year colleges and universities in the U.S. The survey instrument for this study aims to collect data about:
a) the knowledge of undergraduate research as a high impact pedagogical practice;
b) the resources available for faculty to support undergraduate research on their
    respective campuses;
c) obstacles to engaging in undergraduate research;
d) the professional impact of engaging in undergraduate research; and
e) the nature of undergraduate research projects that faculty have facilitated.
 
We would appreciate your participation in the study.  Please access the survey here:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/H9TSZWQ

Your participation in this survey is voluntary, and your responses will be completely confidential.
 
If you have any questions, problems, or concerns throughout the process, please contact Dr. Eric Ashley Hairston (ahairston@elon.edu), Dr. Anne S. Choi (achoi@csudh.edu), or Dr. Crystal S. Anderson (andersoncs2@longwood.edu).  This research has been reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board at Elon University (#17-099).
 
Thank you for advancing our understanding of undergraduate research and mentoring.

Elizabeth Petrick is an assistant professor in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers-Newark and the associate director of the Law, Technology and Culture BA program. Alison Lefkovitz is assistant professor in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers-Newark and the director of the Law, Technology and Culture BA program.
 
One thing that becomes strikingly clear when you do liberal arts research at a technical school is that there are significantly fewer opportunities for student research than in other fields. Certainly we encourage our students to do individual research in class. But to many students, this seems like a pedagogical activity without the real-world research consequences that their peers in other departments get to experience. Engineering, biology, chemistry, and other disciplines all demand student workers in labs, shared grants, co-authored papers, and other collaborations. In contrast, historians rarely write with others and don’t always have the research funds even to hire a research assistant. This left those in my department scratching our heads about how to give our students the same sort of research opportunities available to students in other fields. One answer was to embrace the digital humanities. And, looking to lean in to our strengths, we decided to start a website that presents the history of patents.
 
The site will provide historical context for patented innovations, in the form of written entries detailing each patent’s development, technical significance, and outcomes. In a later stage, we also hope to present the context behind which patents are filed, as well as the geographical, temporal, and personal connections between different inventions and innovations that are awarded patents through a mapping feature. This project will allow for the exploration of such connections and ultimately lead to a better understanding of who files patents and where, why some result in successful inventions and others vanish into obscurity, and, in general, the history of innovation in this country.
 
To begin, we applied for and received a Faculty Seed Grant from our university, the New Jersey Institute of Technology. This grant first allows us to build a pilot version of the website so that we can begin entering and displaying entries. The grant has also enabled us to hire an undergraduate research assistant who will generate a few entries for the website. More entries will come from a course called “Invention and Regulation” that Dr. Elizabeth Petrick crafted specifically to generate another round of entries. In the course this past fall, students could select from a range of patents that were granted to NJIT faculty, staff, and students. From there, they were put into research groups with other students who had picked the same or similar patents. Over the course of the semester, the students learned the history of innovation from assigned readings on legal history and the history of science. But they also learned about this history by conducting oral history interviews, looking at patent applications, and other primary source material on their particular patent. By the end of the course, we had several entries for the new website, which are currently being edited by a graduate student in collaboration with the undergraduate students who originally composed them. The seed grant also allowed us to hire this graduate assistant. What’s even more exciting is that we have now begun collaborations with Dr. Gerardo Con Diaz at UC Davis who will teach a course on computer and law similar to “Invention and Regulation.” His students’ entries will also be entered onto the website after being edited in the same fashion. 
 
Certainly we hope that our digital history of patents provides a service to the broader public. What inventions mattered? Why? What made their inventors successful? How did the public react to these innovations? The blog will not only introduce readers to the process of filing a successful patent; it will also allow readers to understand why certain technologies were needed, what obstacles innovators faced in creating those, and how even successful patents did not always yield significant changes in the public use of technology. But even before we have launched the site and gained an audience, we have met a main goal of the project: helping students engage in substantive original research. 

Jamie Longazel is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center at the University of Dayton. 

I teach a unit on legal education in my Law & Society course. Among other lessons, I use it as an opportunity to introduce students to feminist legal theory.

We read a chapter from Becoming Gentlemen by Lani Guinier, Michelle Fine, and Jane Balin, a chapter from What Works for Women at Work by Joan Williams and Rachel Dempsey, and a provocative essay about sexism and public bathrooms.

Students always told me the unit reminds them of the 2001 film Legally Blonde starring Reese Witherspoon, and insisted that I show it in class.

Over and again, I dismissed their pleas, even without having seen the film. How could it not be problematic?
In time, I gave in. I promised I would at least watch the movie. And if it turned out to be appropriate, I would consider showing it the following year.

The first thirty minutes or so confirmed my suspicions: It was pure garbage, nothing but stereotypes.
Just when I was about to give up on it, however, there was a shift. I stood corrected. It may suffer from inaccuracies, but we could definitely use it to start a conversation about feminist legal theory.

To my students’ delight, I have shown the film in class each of the last two years. I use it to set up an in-class debate around the question, “Is Legally Blonde a feminist film?”

I’m not about to launch into a full analysis here; after all, I wouldn’t want my future students to stumble upon this post and use it to give their side an advantage in the debate. Instead, let me simply note a few highlights from this year’s debate.

Those who argued ‘yes, Legally Blonde is a feminist film’ said…

• The film challenges the idea that feminism is ‘anti-feminine.’ All women are included – even Reese Witherspoon’s character, Elle Woods, who studies fashion and wears exuberant amounts of pink. Feminism is about being yourself.
  
• The film depicts women, as our student judge so wonderfully summarized, “unlearning the patriarchy.” For example, while Elle’s ex-boyfriend Warner pitted Elle and his new girlfriend, Vivian, against one another, in time the two became friends after realizing their shared interests as women.   
• Rather than being saved by a man, Elle’s female law professor picks Elle up when she is down after bumping into her at the salon.

Those who argued ‘no, Legally Blonde is not a feminist film’ said…

• This is upper class, white feminism. Women from backgrounds different from Elle’s would not be able to pull off what she did.
  
• The ‘be who you are’ message aside, stereotypes remained rampant – especially, for example, among Elle’s sorority sisters, who received almost no character development. 
• Over and again, the objectification of Elle is what placed her in the prominent positions that led to her success, sending a subtle message that she is not competent otherwise.

As you can see, students on both sides come up with some solid arguments. What I like most about the exercise is that the ambiguity makes for a good debate. I also appreciate how my law school-bound students relish the opportunity to make a case in front of a crowd, particularly the women, who, not surprisingly, tend to be much more engaged in this activity.

This year, the “yes team” won the debate. Although next year, it just may go the other way.  

Jamie Longazel is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center at the University of Dayton. 
 
“Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.” - Mother Jones

After only a week in office, Donald Trump has made it quite clear that we will facing some frightening realities over the next four years. Many of us are scrambling for ways to respond.

I love this Mother Jones quote as a reminder that the lessons can precede the conflict, rather than the other way around.

The particular lesson I always come back to as a scholar-educator-activist is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. For Freire, true liberation – for the oppressed and their oppressors – comes when the oppressed “[learn] to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of that reality.”

I do not think U.S. academics appreciate Freire as much as we should. Most of us are on board with his
critique of the “banking method” of education, but his core political message about education for liberation remains on the margins of academia.  

It could be that the tendency in the Global North is to see education as apolitical. The conventional wisdom equates “political teaching” with imposing your views upon your students. Surging right-wing populism has stretched this narrative even further, in effect politicizing higher education to suit its own agenda. The “Professor Watchlist,” for instance, aims to expose “professors that advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.”
In the face of these criticisms and the parallel assault on facts that in all likelihood will continue to characterize the Trump Administration, it is going to be important that we make clear what makes teaching political and that we make a strong case for why political teaching is so important.

Teaching is a political act when it encourages students to grapple with realities that others choose to ignore, when it draws attention to oppression and gives voice to those who experience it.  

Political teaching also involves thinking about education beyond the confines of the traditional classroom. Not just in service learning or community engagement projects, but also in studying with members of our communities, particularly those who have been unable to access higher education institutions. We ought to be learning together about the forces that keep so many of us down.

As I write, I am beginning my second semester teaching a course that is part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. Inside-Out brings “traditional” college students together with people who are incarcerated to learn side-by-side in a prison setting.

Each week I will travel with students from my predominately white, relatively affluent university to a local men’s correctional facility. The course will unfold under the assumption that we are all equally capable and our voices equally valuable. Experiential knowledge and academic knowledge will have equal weight. Everyone will read the same readings, write the same papers, and participate in the same discussions. Although I will distinguish myself to a degree as the facilitator, I will sit in the circle along with the students, listening, learning, and resisting the urge to lecture.

The title of this particular course is Crime & Inequality. The name may imply an endless string of charts and stats about disparities in punishment, offending, and victimization. However, the crux of what I do is use crime as a jumping off point for an in-depth discussion about identity and oppression.
The focus, therefore, is out of step with traditional criminological approaches focusing on “them” as offenders or the subjects of social control. Rather, guided by a combination of critical writings and our cumulative experiences, we will be looking at issues like criminalization across history, the politics of crime, rape culture, and the criminalization of resistance.

What will gradually get unveiled is how complex, interwoven systems of oppression affect each of us differently. We will all struggle through the difficult reality that we, too, are complicit in such systems. Through deep reflection and honest discussion, we will also come to understand better the roots of our own day-to-day hardships.

The process, more so than the result, is what makes Inside-Out worthy of the label, “transformative education.” The program provides participants with a real-life example of what solidarity across difference looks like. Our experiences with oppressive systems mostly differ, yet I approach this course appreciating the possibility of finding unity in the shared experience of struggle.

Engaging with identity therefore gets us to this point, yet transcending identity is the larger goal.
Education, we might say, imitates life in this way.
​
As we enter a moment of profound uncertainty, it is my hope that life might also imitate this style of education. With truth seeking, reflection, and dialogue all under assault, our task will be to get at the root of our struggles, to become empowered enough to push back, and to stand in solidarity with, learn from, and inspire those who are engaged in struggles of their own. Following the advice of Mother Jones, what we need to do as we prepare is sit down and read – or, better yet, learn – together. 

Click here for part 1.

Teaching Law & Society Through a Transnational Lens

In her recent book, Law and Societies in Global Contexts, Eve Darian-Smith (2013) argues that mainstream law and society instruction has too often limited the scope of “society” to that within the domestic nation-state. This has not been because of narrow foresight, however.  Rather, it was because the field of socio-legal studies was largely shaped by a set of political horizons within which the nation-state predominated as the central scale of social justice claims. Socio-legal scholars have therefore often taught their students about the heroic struggles for rights and equality by labor activists, women, people of color, and queers in seeking recognition or redistribution from the nation state. Yet in the face of an administration that has both amassed its power by rebuking these victories and also seems to foreclose future possibilities of protection, how might we use this as an opportunity to reconsider how we teach about law and society?

Teaching Law & Society in a transnational perspective means situating American law within a history of settler colonialism, a legacy that has persisted most visibly in the recent struggle at Standing Rock. Scholars of settler colonialism have revealed the enduring material logics of sovereignty and offer powerful critiques of the symbolic legitimacy of law. The historical continuity of this analytical perspective offers a frame through which to understand the shifting articulations of law, race, control over territory and resources, and larger transnational struggles for political-economic power. 

A transnational perspective also offers our students a new political horizon from which to understand twenty first century challenges of climate change, refugee migration, and global economic inequality. These issues are the result of shifting geographies of power and new technologies of global governance that are not limited to formal legality. Indicators, standards and other forms of “soft law” have all become important sites of contestation.  Hence, a transnational perspective means teaching students about the wide-ranging forms of legality that now exert control.

As we approach the Age of Trump, socio-legal studies is not only poised to help our students better understand the cotemporary political moment, but also equip them for what will surely be a difficult period for people of color, women, queer, and working class people who have long struggled for basic rights and to improve their working conditions. Understanding these struggles through a transnational context will not only reveal the underlying architectures of power through which domination is exercised, but also enlist new allies that will be important in the struggles to come. 

Matthew Canfield is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at New York University, writing his dissertation on food sovereignty and global governance.

If mainstream pundits and scholars weren’t already frightened of Donald Trump, that surely changed during the second presidential debate when he threatened to jail Hillary Clinton. Trump’s off-hand threat to Clinton—“because you’d be in jail”—drew criticism from commentators and scholars across the political spectrum for his clear disregard for the principles of rule of law.  
 
Of course, this was neither the first, nor the only time that he revealed his attitude towards legal principles and conventions. From his unconstitutional calls to round up and deport millions of Muslims, to his rejection of the exoneration of the Central Park 5, to his refusal to abide by the rulings of the National Labor Relations Board, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he holds the same instrumental view of law that he holds for basic facts.
 
Trump’s legal ideology reflects a worldview that reduces everything down to deal-making. Indeed, with over 3,500 legal actions, Trump is America’s most litigious president. Like a socio-legal scholar, Trump understands that law is an arena where “the haves come out ahead,” using lawsuits to bully his critics and workers. His crude legal ideology could easily be described by the Soviet legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis’ critique that the Western “concept of justice is drawn from the exchange relationship, and expresses nothing outside of it.”
 
Yet Trump not only exploits law for his own gain, he has also claimed to speak on behalf of it. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Trump howled “I am the law and order candidate!” against a brooding dark backdrop festooned with American flags. By painting an apocalyptic portrait in which, “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life,” he drew on the specter of violence and racial anxiety to claim his own authority.
 
Trump’s mimicry of Nixon’s law-and-order rhetoric along with his less-than-subtle racism reflects a world in which some populations—people of color, women, and queers—are more subject to punitive legal measures than others.
 
As we confront the looming horizon of his presidency, how must we address this contradiction? What does this election teach us about law? And, how can we prepare ourselves and our students for the Age of Trump?
 
These questions have been at the top of my mind as I have reflected on the way I teach my undergraduate “Law & Society” course. Trump’s victory came amid a module on law and social change, in which we were examining what historian Carol Anderson has recently termed “White Rage” in response to the Brown decision. While this election appeared to be an echo of the past—a re-entrenchment of white heteropatriarchy in the face of popular uprisings by people of color and legal victories by the LGBT movement—the reduction of this counter-mobilization to racial or sexual antipathy fails to account for the larger political shifts that we are not only seeing domestically, but also globally. 

Anxieties of Power and Racial Populism
 
Seen from a global perspective, Donald Trump’s election, like the Brexit referendum, reflects a rising tide of right-wing political movements that are exploiting popular concerns over declining economic power and long-standing racial anxiety to launch their parties to power. The similarities and shared symbols between these two major votes is instructive.
 
In Britain, Nigel Farage, the former head of the UK Independence Party, stoked the fears of distressed working class Brits about immigrants that, he claimed, were taking over their jobs. Like Trump’s election, the Brexit vote was won by a coalition of white working class voters. Moreover, like Trump’s mantra to “Make America Great Again,” Farage called on Brits make Brexit their “Independence Day” and “take back control.” A giddy photo of Farage and Trump set amidst the gleaming gilded elevator of Trump Tower days after the US election, confirmed Trump’s hope that the US election would be “Brexit times 10.”
 
Both Brexit and Trump—as well as the growing political strength of right-wing nationalist parties in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Brazil—serve as a reminder of the enduring ties between race, national sovereignty, and economic power. Indeed, as post-colonial scholars have demonstrated, sovereignty is often articulated within a grammar of racial difference that serves to secure access to economic resources. In settler colonial states, such as the United States, continued articulations of racial difference are asserted within a global political economic context of declining economic strength.
 
Today, as the economic center of global capitalism pivots away from its former transatlantic axis and domestic economic inequality grows, those workers who once embraced a more egalitarian redistributive economic vision during times of prosperity are now left clinging to the symbolic wages that W.E.B. DuBois referred to as the “psychological wage of whiteness.” (It is no wonder that White Nationalists are now enjoying mainstream popular attention as they celebrate the rise of Trump.) For as economic inequality widens, Trump offered a voice for his white working class supporters’ affective and symbolic sentiments of superiority.
 
As socio-legal scholars, we know that these forms of power—racial, economic, and political—are facilitated by law. Indeed, as critical race theorists such as Ian Lopez have demonstrated, race is a socio-legal construction that has been constituted physically, symbolically, and materially through the violence of law.  Global trade agreements, campaign finance laws, voter suppression, and mass incarceration are critical sites of law that were crucial in constructing neoliberalism. In an Age of Trump, Brexit, and other movements of right-wing populism, these sites will remain essential in constructing new racialized regimes of power.
 
In short, Trump’s election reminds us that we cannot teach Law & Society solely within a domestic context. To do so reproduces a narrative of American exceptionalism that conceals the relationship between race, power, and global political-economic formations. Perhaps more importantly, however, it prevents our students from understanding the global coalitions of solidarity that are increasingly important within a context of global interdependence and governance.

In New Orleans last June, as part of the Law and Society Association's annual meeting, the Consortium sponsored three professional development panels meant to serve people at teaching-centered institutions, within undergraduate studies programs everywhere, and who are graduate students and faculty interested in pedagogy and student research.   As part of the program, we sponsored a Teaching Café, featuring ideas from faculty at a range of institutions who use moot courts, mock trials, legislative lobbying, citizen-police training, and so much more to engage students in an immersive undergraduate legal studies education.
 
A second panel focused on the relationship between legal studies and the law school environment, from the perspective of undergraduate faculty.  In conversation with audience members, the panelists noted the diversity of student expectations for undergraduate legal studies: many want to go to law school, some into the field of criminal justice, and some go directly into the workforce.  Still others hope to pursue doctoral education in a field related to “law and society.”  Given this varied set of expectations from our undergraduates, as well as our institutional relationships (to law schools and offices of admissions, for example), and our own intellectual commitments, how can we best serve our students in learning about the connections between law, society, and culture?
 
CULJP also sponsored a panel on landing a law and society job at a teaching-centered institution.  This panel was exceptionally well-attended, with nearly fifty attendees interested in thinking about the job search process.  Our panelists, from both teaching-centered and research-oriented institutions, represented a range of professional identities – from newly hired faculty to department chairs and deans. Those who attended the panel asked a variety of questions that ranged from how to prepare a teaching statement for a job in an interdisciplinary department, to how to present oneself in a cover letter, to the benefits and drawbacks of applying for jobs not specifically listed as law and society but that have the potential to allow scholars to continue to do law and society work within specific disciplines.
 
Were you an attendee or panelist at one of these professional development events at Law and Society 2016?  If so, what did you find most useful?  What did you learn?  Answer in comments to keep the dialogue alive – and look for more opportunities like this to connect, in Mexico City 2017!

​The Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs is very pleased to announce the inaugural winners of the Teaching Innovation Award, Shannon Portillo (University of Kansas) and Danielle Rudes (George Mason University). This award recognizes Professors Portillo and Rudes for their excellence and innovation in interdisciplinary legal studies teaching.
 
The Awards Committee was particularly impressed by their development of the BURST model (Building Undergraduate Research Skills and Techniques), which provides students with the opportunity to consume and produce legal studies scholarship in a capstone course setting. In this model, students conduct original research, with paper writing occurring in an iterative process in which students gather feedback from faculty and peers throughout the semester. This has been an incredible success, as it has increased student learning and resulted in numerous conference paper presentations and publications. Moreover, Professors Portillo and Rudes have been exceptionally generous with regard to sharing their research kit with other legal studies faculty, a model of collegiality to be emulated.

Joanna Grisinger is an Associate Professor of Instruction at the Center for Legal Studies at Northwestern University and a CULJP board member.

I know I’m not the only one thinking about how to use (the now-Tony-award-winning) “Hamilton” in my classroom next year, so I wanted to share some resources I’ve been gathering about the musical. 

First, how to listen? The show is sung-through, so the cast album allows one to listen to (if not see) the complete show. The cast album is streaming on Spotify and Amazon Prime, and is available for purchase on iTunes and Amazon. The 2016 book Hamilton: The Revolution (the “Hamiltome”) contains lyrics and essays about the development of the musical; Lin-Manuel Miranda has provided additional lyrical annotations at genius.com. A lengthy 2015 New Yorker profile of Miranda  provides some background about the creation of the musical, and Miranda’s 2009 performance of the first song at the White House offers a hint of the success to come.  

Source materials for the musical include Joanne Freeman's Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press, 2002), Joanne Freeman, ed., Alexander Hamilton: Writings (Library of America, 2001), and Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton (Penguin, 2004).

The Gilder Lehrman Institute has put together a wealth of essays, primary sources, and teaching materials on Alexander Hamilton. In addition, a huge number of primary sources on the American Revolution and the Constitution are available through Yale's Project Avalon, including the full text of the Federalist Papers. Another great source is the Founders' Constitution ("the Oxford English Dictionary of American constitutional history"), which is fully available online.

Historian Lyra D. Monteiro (Rutgers-Newark) has a critical essay for The Public Historian on “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton" (Feb. 2016). Prof. Monteiro's essay elicited thoughtful responses from Jason Allen (New Jersey Council for the Humanities), David Dean (Carleton University), Ellen Noonan (American Social History Project, CUNY), and 
Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard Law School). Monteiro's own response is here.

Discussion of the politics and historical accuracy can also be found in the Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History, the New York Times and Slate, while an article in Vox argues that “Hamilton is fanfic, and its historical critics are totally missing the point.”

For coverage in podcast form: Backstory with the American History Guys has posted a podcast entitled "Hamilton: A History." The National Constitution Center has posted a podcast entitled "Hamilton, the Man and the Musical," with guests Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard Law School) and Michael Klarman (Harvard Law School).  

Finally, Richard Primus (University of Michigan Law School) asks, “Will Lin-Manuel Miranda Transform the Supreme Court?” As he suggests, “Within the foreseeable future, a jurisprudence of original meanings may fuel the most progressive constitutional decision making since the days of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Just you wait.”

Updated: 

• R.E. Fulton at Nursing Clio has written on "Hamilton as a Model for Women’s History."
• The New York Times on "The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton" at institutions across New York City; the article contains lots of useful links.