Faculty Colloquia and Events

Drawing Board Luncheon: Ariel Dulitzky

Drawing Board Luncheon: Matthew Murrell

Chalkboard: Fall Kickoff will be held as part of our “Chalkboard” series re: teaching at the law school on Monday, August 12, 2024, 11:45 AM-1:00 PM, on Zoom. The Chalkboard Canvas site includes information about past sessions and will soon include slides and recording for this one, too. To access the Chalkboard site: https://utexas.instructure.com/enroll/GFG6Y4.

Log in to website to see Zoom link.

Full faculty meeting

History and the School Prayer Cases

In a series of two decisions known as the School Prayer Cases, the Supreme Court famously held that the Establishment Clause forbids state-sponsored prayer in public schools—even where the government provides opt-outs for dissenters. Yet subsequent legal developments have rendered those decisions unstable. And with the Court’s recent turn to “historical practices and understandings,” many question whether the School Prayer Cases can possibly survive.

Substance and Process in Corporate Law: Theory and History

A conversation with Wim Voermans, Professor of Constitutional and Administrative law at Leiden University, on his book “The Story of Constitutions” (Cambridge University Press), with comments from Zachary Elkins, Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Constitutional Studies Program will award its 2023 Book of the Year Award to Professor Voermans at this luncheon.

Paper: INDIGENOUS MISDESCRIPTION

Guest: Andy Ye Yuan - Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. The workshop will start at 3:55pm.

A conversation with Allan Rock, Attorney General and Minister of Justice of Canada (retired), on the cases he litigated and laws he sponsored in connection with Quebec’s attempted secession from Canada in 1995.

TBA

Guest: Scott Baker - Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis. The workshop will start at 3:55 pm.

This speaker series considers the criminalization of reproduction—historical and contemporary, local and global—largely through the lens of reproductive justice.

RSVP

Abstract: People with disabilities face structural, legal, and institutional barriers to accessing reproductive health services and information, including contraception and abortion care. They also experience high rates of violence and reproductive coercion, as well as stigma and discrimination from health providers. They are more likely to experience maternal morbidity and mortality, rendering pregnancy particularly dangerous for some. Mounting abortion restrictions after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will result in some disabled people being forced to carry pregnancies to term, notwithstanding serious health risks. Should they choose to raise their children after childbirth, they will likely encounter ongoing threats to their parental rights because of laws, policies, and practices that assume incompetence among disabled parents. Thus, the ruling creates a paradox for disabled people where they may be forced to bear children but subsequently denied the opportunity to rear them, perpetuating a historical pattern of exploitation and subjugation. This paper identifies and responds to this paradox by providing and applying a disability reproductive justice framework.

Robyn Powell is Professor of Law at Stetson University. Her work examines the intersection of disability justice and reproductive justice, with a focus on disability law and policy, health law and policy, and family law. She is a leading authority on the rights of parents with disabilities and has served as an Attorney-Advisor at the National Council on Disability. Her forthcoming publications include “Disabling Abortion Bans” (UC Davis Law Review) and “Forced to Bear, Denied to Rear: The Cruelty of Dobbs for Disabled People” (Georgetown Law Journal). She received a Ph.D. and M.A. in Social Policy from Brandeis University, a J.D. from Suffolk University Law School, and a B.S. in Social Work from Bridgewater State University.

A conversation with Carlos Bernal, Justice (retired) of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, on his scholarship and judicial opinions on the doctrine of an unconstitutional constitutional amendment.

A conversation with David Pozen, Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia University, on his new book “The Constitution of the War on Drugs” (Oxford University Press), with comments from Jennifer Laurin, William B. Bates Chair for the Administration of Justice at the University of Texas at Austin.

Guest: Tom Zur - S.J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School. The workshop will start at 3:55 pm.

This speaker series considers the criminalization of reproduction—historical and contemporary, local and global—largely through the lens of reproductive justice.

RSVP

Abstract: Over the past four years, three of the largest Latin American countries have made significant strides toward the decriminalization of abortion: Argentina in December 2020, Colombia in February 2022, and Mexico in September 2023. The changes are the result of strategic rights-based litigation, cultural work, and national and regional coalition building, largely on the part of feminists who came of age in the 1990s and 2000s. These feminists had long worked for incremental change, using the Courts as allies for reform. Contrasting their strategies with those deployed today by younger feminists in the region, who not only are more inclined to use social networks and direct action but are also more focused on issues of violence and individual harm, I argue for the need to bridge gaps between old and new feminisms to continue to work toward reproductive justice.

Isabel Cristina Jaramillo Sierra is Professor of Law and Director of the Jurisprudence Department at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She also acts as general coordinator of the Latin American Network of Feminist Legal Scholars- RED ALAS (www.redalas.net). She has written extensively on feminist legal reform and its impact on women, with particular attention to reforms related to quotas, abortion, and violence. Relevant works in English include “The New Colombian Law on Abortion" in International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics (2022) and "Abortion Reform in Colombia: From Total Prohibition to Decriminalization up to Week Twenty-Four" in The South Atlantic Quarterly (2023). She has worked as a consultant for the National Government and the Judicial Branch on gender and human rights issues; served as an expert before the Congress of the Republic; and worked as an Ad Hoc Judge for the Constitutional Court and the State Council. In 2017, she was nominated (but not elected) by President Juan Manuel Santos to the Constitutional Court. She earned her S.J.D. from Harvard Law School and an LL.B. with Honors from Universidad de los Andes.

Co-sponsored by Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and the Latin America Initiative at Texas Law

Drawing Board Luncheon: Charles Silver

Guest: Tamar Kricheli-Katz - Associate Professor of Law, Tel-Aviv University. The workshop will start at 3:55 pm.

A conversation with Andrea Scoseria Katz, Associate Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, on how the U.S. Constitution changes without an alteration to its text—and the costs to this form of constitutional change.

This speaker series considers the criminalization of reproduction—historical and contemporary, local and global—largely through the lens of reproductive justice.

RSVP

Abstract: President Trump’s harsh, exclusionary anti-immigrant policies were bolstered by rhetoric that demonized migrant pregnancy and motherhood. including tropes like “birth tourism,” “anchor baby,” “chain migration,” and “public charge.” The Obama and Biden administrations, in contrast, enacted and publicized policies excepting pregnant women from otherwise intensive immigration enforcement regimes, projecting an image of humanitarian concern. This paper uses critical feminist ethnography to study the impact of pregnancy-related immigration policies on the lived experiences of pregnant migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border from 2017-2022. It documents the impacts of a shifting landscape of exclusion, expulsion, deportation, detention, and release during an era of rapid migration policy change. The findings are clear: under every policy regime, pregnant women are negatively impacted. During periods characterized by increased detention, detention conditions are poor. During periods characterized by exclusion and expulsion, pregnant women are forced to wait in dangerous, precarious conditions in Northern Mexico, increasing the likelihood that they will attempt a perilous desert crossing into the United States. And during periods characterized by a greater chance of receiving humanitarian parole due to pregnancy, parole is seldom granted to partners and family members, making family separation inseparable from a supposedly humanitarian exception.

Amanda Heffernan is a nurse midwife and Assistant Professor at Seattle University College of Nursing, where she is also Clinical Placement Coordinator for the Midwifery Program. In addition, she is a Seattle University PACE (Partnership for Advancing Community Engagement) Fellow and a faculty fellow at the Seattle University Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture. Her research interests sit at the intersection of migration and reproductive justice, including the impact of detention on families and the experiences of pregnant migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. She is author of “Pregnancy in United States Immigration Detention: The Gendered Necropolitics of Reproductive Oppression” in International Feminist Journal of Politics. She received a Ph.D. in Nursing from the University of New Mexico, an MSN in Nurse-Midwifery from Frontier Nursing University, a B.S. in Nursing from the University of Washington, and a B.A. in History from Whitman College.

Guest: Andrew Hayashi - Law Professor, University of Virginia School of Law. The workshop will start at 3:55 pm.

Faculty Meeting to discuss Curriculum Committee recommendations. Zoom is available.

This speaker series considers the criminalization of reproduction—historical and contemporary, local and global—largely through the lens of reproductive justice.

RSVP

Abstract: This talk will present the preliminary findings of a national research study tracking prosecutions for pregnancy-related conduct in the first year after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It will contextualize them within larger conversations about pregnancy criminalization and the relationships among victimhood, care, and punishment in U.S. criminal systems.

Wendy Bach is a Professor of Law and co-Director of the Appalachian Justice Research Center at the University of Tennessee College of Law. Her research focuses on the intersection of poverty law, criminal law, social welfare provision, law and society, and community lawyering. Professor Bach is the author of a number of law review articles and Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She is currently leading a national study of the criminalization of pregnancy in a post-Dobbs world. She received a J.D. from the New York University School of Law, as well as an M.A. and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Drawing Board Luncheon: Thomas McGarity

Guest: Sadia Farzana - Postdoctoral Scholar, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. The workshop will start at 3:55 pm.

Guest: Adi Leibovitch - Senior Lecturer, Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Law and Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality. The workshop will start at 3:55 pm.

Faculty meeting for research faculty to discuss faculty appointments after job talks.

This speaker series considers the criminalization of reproduction—historical and contemporary, local and global—largely through the lens of reproductive justice.

RSVP

Abstract: Equality as well as liberty arguments can structure the debate about abortion that continues after Dobbs, in litigation and in legislation, in state and federal arenas. This book chapter draws on case law and history to show that principles of equal citizenship require government to protect potential life in different ways today than it has in the past, when criminal bans on abortion enforced caste-based understandings of women’s roles. While states enforcing gender status roles have long assumed that government can coerce the labor of pregnancy and lifegiving, equal protection commitments give rise to an anti-carceral presumption in regulating abortion. As state laws inside and outside the abortion context attest: States that respect women as equal citizens do not turn, as a matter of first resort, to coercive measures when there are numerous less discriminatory and less restrictive ways to protect potential life. Reaching for carceral solutions perpetuates the forms of inequality that are the central concern of sex-based equal protection law. To opt for the maximally coercive approach—forced pregnancy and childbirth—when there are alternative means for enabling families to flourish is neither constitutional nor plausibly characterized as promoting life. New efforts by anti-abortion forces to interpret the Comstock Act as a national abortion ban are a case in point: these efforts seek to criminalize reproductive healthcare in ways that disregard half a century of sex equality law.

Cary Franklin is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. She is also the McDonald/Wright Chair of Law, Faculty Director of the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy, and Faculty Director of the Williams Institute. Her research focuses on the historical development of conceptions of equality in American law and how this history influences the shape of contemporary legal protections in the contexts of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and race. She has published extensively in major law reviews. Her article “The Anti-Stereotyping Principle in Constitutional Sex Discrimination Law” (New York University Law Review, 2010), was awarded the Kathryn T. Preyer Prize by the American Society for Legal History. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, she was the W.H. Francis, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Texas. She received a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.D. in English from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. in English and History from Yale University.

Guest: Joshua Teitelbaum - David Belding Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Georgetown University. The workshop will start at 3:55 pm.

A conversation with Jaime Olaiz González, Professor of Constitutional Theory at Universidad Panamericana (Mexico), on the causes and consequences of the extraordinary ease of amendment in Mexico.

Drawing Board Luncheon: Susan Morse

Constitutional Studies roundtable discussion. Zoom option available.

Guest: Talia Gilis - Associate Professor of Law, Columbia Law School. The workshop with start 3:55pm.