Seminars

A belief in conspiracies – before the age of Trump – relied on evidence and theory to expose the machinations of shadowy plotters and secret cabals. But the propagation of conspiracies no longer relies on evidence, abandons any pretense at explanation, and imposes a new reality through ceaseless repetition, the use of catchphrases ("a lot of people believe..."), and bare assertion ("the election was rigged!"). The new conspiracism has moved from the crackpot fringe to the heart of government; it disdains compromise, persuasion, and negotiation; and targets democratic institutions – universities, the media, the courts, elections – all while relentlessly and inexorably destroying democracy.

The Holocaust will forever stand as one of the greatest crimes against humanity. It also constitutes one of the largest acts of theft in history. Art confiscation by the Nazis began in Austria in 1938, in Poland in 1939, and in 1940 Adolf Hitler ordered the confiscation of all private Jewish art collections. Hundreds of thousands of cultural items – paintings, books, and antiques – were stolen or destroyed during the plunder of occupied Europe. Restitution in the eighty years since 1945 has been tortuously slow and complex; and the laws on restitution have become correspondingly more nuanced and sophisticated in response to the competing claims of governments, museums, the art market, and the heirs of the original owners. Within the United States, Congress has repeatedly enacted legislation on restitution, most recently the proposed Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2025 that passed the Senate and awaits House consideration.

Charles Guiteau, disappointed that the president, James Garfield, had not appointed him to the diplomatic mission in Paris, shot and killed Garfield in July 1881. The assassination hastened the abolition of the spoils system — whereby a president rewards his supporters with lucrative government positions — and the creation of a civil service. Congress passed the Civil Service Reform Act in 1883, ensuring that positions in the federal government be awarded on the basis only of merit. Officeholders would act to serve the public interest in ways that were objective, fair, and neutral. The current president, Donald Trump, has repeatedly acted to violate the law in appointing officeholders to further his personal interest, thereby discarding merit and expertise in the federal government.

Xi Jinping, in a speech on January 1, 2026, announced that “the reunification of our motherland is unstoppable.” The People’s Liberation Army conducted its largest military drill ever in December 2025, when Chinese fighter jets, warships, drones and amphibious assault ships displayed China’s ability to isolate and attack Taiwan, firing rockets into waters north and southwest of the island. Economic measures would be effective also: a naval blockade, stopping petroleum products and natural gas from reaching Taiwan, would destroy the island’s economy. An invasion of Taiwan would threaten Japan’s access to vital sea lanes and would greatly increase China’s influence in the Pacific, inevitably dragging the United States into war.

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.