Seminars

Throughout the twentieth century in Mexico, police and judicial agents used confessions to validate their accusations when other forms of evidence were not available. Judges did not mind. Most of these confessions were based on torture or the threat of extrajudicial violence. When armed revolutionary groups and drug trafficking organizations became central concerns for the Mexican state, in the 1960s and 1970s, the use of torture acquired additional value for the judiciary and for the military. Over time, practices and justifications of violence by state and non-state actors have shaped a particularly complicated landscape for criminal law today.

Universities in the United States have never been in a more perilous situation, one that threatens their independence and continued viability. The Trump administration has demanded oversight of the Middle Eastern Studies Department at Columbia, has sought control over the hiring of faculty at Harvard, has called for the punishment of students at Brown, and most recently, has succeeded in removing the president of the University of Virginia. The federal government has initiated investigations of dozens of universities, with the expectation that it will withdraw funding from any college that does not comply with its demands. Academic freedom, now under threat, has its origin in Sweezy v New Hampshire, a decision by the Supreme Court in 1957 that reversed the conviction of Paul Sweezy for contempt of court when Sweezy, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, refused to answer questions regarding a lecture on communism. Subsequent court decisions have recognized that academic freedom is not solely a consequence of the First Amendment; it is the right of a university to determine who may teach, what may be taught, and how it should be taught. It is a distinctive right, according to legal precedent, that protects the expert academic speech of professors and the educations decisions of universities. This understanding of academic freedom is the defensive shield that will protect universities from further federal and state interference.

Priyanath Mukhopadhyay, an officer of the police Detective Department in Calcutta, found spectacular fame as the author-proprietor of Darogar Daptar (1875-1910), a bi-monthly magazine where he published 'ditektibh golpo' or stories of detection. My talk maps the institutional, epistemological and cultural contours of criminal detection in turn-of-the-century colonial Bengal by disentangling the two careers that Priyanath Mukhopadhyay straddled. I parse the immense popularity of Darogar Daptar among turn-of-the century Bengali readers by situating the Darogar Daptar stories -- which Priyanath insisted were 'fictional' accounts of 'real' criminal cases he investigated as a detective officer -- within the larger bureaucratic culture that framed colonial policing practice. The talk shows how these stories provide a portal to the complex traffic of ideas about evidence, proof, and reasoning that circulated between the classified domains of state practices and everyday life in a colonized society.

Throughout its history, the United States has grappled with the question of who qualifies as an "American." Citizenship remained contested throughout the antebellum era, culminating in the Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott denying citizenship to all Black people, whether enslaved or free, as well as to anyone from an "inferior and subordinate class." The Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause reversed that decision by granting near-universal citizenship based on birth within the United States, shifting debates over the meaning of "American" to immigration and naturalization policy. President Trump's executive order purporting to end universal birthright citizenship has raised these questions anew. This talk, based on my forthcoming book, will examine the legal and historical significance of birthright citizenship to the nation, as well as to its prospects for the future.

The ubiquity of rape and other forms of sexual exploitation in the American South before the Civil War was at the center of the system of power and culture that helped perpetuate slavery. Sexual violence entangled both the slave and the slave owner in the daily battle over the power to protect oneself and one's community; the power to avenge hurt and humiliation; and the power to punish. Rape permeated the lives of all the individuals who existed within the system: Black and white; male and female;; adult and child; enslaved and free. The culture of rape not only determined the interactions between slaves and enslavers but also affected relationships within the slave community and within the white community.

The perception that the official publications of the USSR, most notably Pravda, imposed a blanket uniformity of opinion among Soviet citizens during the 1960s and 1970s has been largely discredited by historians. Local newspapers, with a circulation limited to a city or an oblast, frequently provided advice on maneuvering within the legal system and campaigned for the rights of citizens who faced bureaucratic obduracy. Local television channels also took up the fight against bureaucracy, airing sitcoms that featured fictional police detectives acting ethically in the pursuit of justice, even when their actions conflicted with the wishes of local Soviet officials.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt has always been regarded as one of the most progressive presidents in American history, responsible both for moving the country towards economic recovery after the Great Depression and for committing the United States to achieving victory over Nazi Germany. Yet Roosevelt, largely on account of his racist antipathy toward Asian peoples, was the primary initiator of the internment of Japanese Americans in camps during the Second World War. Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as justification for his action, legislation that is still in effect and has recently been cited by the current President-elect as the legal basis for his plan to institute the mass deportation of immigrants.

The trials of the Japanese military after World War II, unlike the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership, was fraught with controversy and dissent as Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union each vied to use the proceedings to advance an agenda shaped by Cold War imperatives. The eleven judges included, inter alios, representatives from China, the Philippines, India, the Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand, all of whom clashed with each other in determining guilt and punishment. The Tokyo trials provoked and promoted bitter discord among China, Korea, and Japan, an antagonism that persists to the present.

In 1913 Maury Diggs, 26, and Farley Drew Caminetti, 27, both married men with children, traveled with two unmarried women, Marsha Warrington and Lola Norris, from California to Nevada. Both men were quickly indicted for violating the Mann Act of 1910, a federal law aimed at preventing the sexual trafficking of women. Although Warrington and Norris consented to extramarital sex and no money changed hands, the defendants were found guilty in each case, decisions ultimately confirmed by the Supreme Court, and the two men served time in federal prison. The cases highlight the use of federal authority to legislate morality, reflecting widespread anxiety that traditional American values in the newly urbanized United States faced many threats, including a huge influx of immigrants, and increasing opportunities for women.

Paul Ogorzow joined the Nazi SA, the Stormtroopers, in 1931, two years before Adolf Hitler came to power, eventually becoming a squad leader. In 1934 the national railroad, Deutsche Reichsbahn, hired Ogorzow as an assistant switchman and six years later, a series of attacks on women traveling alone on the S-bahn commuter rail system began. The assaults occurred in darkness – a blackout had existed in Berlin after enemy aircraft had started bombing the city – and by July 1941 eight women had been murdered and dozens more viciously assaulted. Arthur Nebe, head of the Reich Criminal Police, launched a massive investigation into the S-bahn murders and in 1941 the Berlin police captured Ogorzow. But Nebe is best remembered as one of the architects of the Holocaust, an accomplice of Reinhard Heydrich in planning the extermination of millions. Nazi concepts of criminal policing, based on the forensic science of the day, were intimately linked to the racialization and genocide of the Nazi project.

Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn 'Amer.

A global protest movement and international lawyers are raising the question of genocide and war crimes in relation to Israel’s campaign in Gaza. This paper will analyze these discussions and explores the attraction of the genocide concept for the protest movement.