Legal Humanities Research Group
Examining Notions of Justice
Led by Mellon Faculty Fellows A. Naomi Paik (2020–2021) and Colleen Murphy (2021–2022), HRI’s Legal Humanities Research Group recognized law as both reflecting and actively influencing societal values, aspirations, anxieties, biases, and notions of justice, examining how law constitutes and shapes the social world in which it is embedded.
Legal humanities examines how the law, society, culture, politics, and economy are mutually constituted. It thus draws from a range of methodologies, including those dealing with representation (e.g., literary, cultural, and performance studies), history, philosophy, and sociological perspectives.
Public Programming Highlights
2020–2021
Though all activities were undertaken virtually in 2020-2021, the inter-generational group nonetheless launched a vibrant slate of public programs, which took legal humanities and social justice as their guiding framework and followed two primary strands of interest: forced migrations and abolition.
Speakers were beamed in from Europe to Australia, staging transnational conversations between guests as well as presenters and audiences in Champaign-Urbana and across the country.
- Screen and discussion with the filmmakers of The Infiltrators
- Zoom conversation with Behrouz Boochani and his collaborator/translator Omid Tofighian
- Boochani had recently received asylum in New Zealand in late 2019 after enduring nearly seven years in the Manus Prison, detained by the Australian state as part of the “Pacific Solution” of offshore detention for migrants and asylum seekers.
- He spoke to the corpus of his work in journalism, filmmaking, literature, and other cultural creation, focusing particularly on the need not only to provide information and awareness (via journalism, for example), but to impact people’s understandings of border regimes and their effects on people who must endure them.
- Lecture by Leti Volpp (Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley)
- Campus visit from Dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal and Cooperating Counsel with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR)
2021–2022
- Virtual lecture with Samuel Moyn (Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of History, Yale University) and a discussion of Moyn's new book Humane followed by commentary from respondents Nicholas Grossman (Political Science) and Patrick Keenan (Law).
- Virtual lecture with Franita Tolson (Vice Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs and Professor of Law in the Gould School of Law, University of Southern California) who presented on her forthcoming book In Congress We Trust?: Enforcing Voting Rights from the Founding to the Jim Crow Era, followed by responses from Marsha Barrett (History) and Michael Morley (Law, Florida State University).
- Panel Discussion: The Futures of Legal Humanities, conducted on Zoom and featuring Carmen Gonzalez (Law, Loyola University Chicago), A. Naomi Paik (Criminology, Law, & Justice and Global Asian Studies, University of Illinois Chicago), Heidi Hurd (Law), and Richard Ross (Law and History).
- Anthony Ray Hinton, author of New York Times bestselling book The Sun Does Shine, activist, and Equal Justice Initiative community educator, came to campus to share his story, a decades long journey to exoneration and freedom after surviving 30 years on Alabama’s death row.
Legal Humanities Reading Group
In addition to pursuing their own individual research projects, the group engaged in collective study on foundational texts of legal humanities and examined texts engaging with Critical Race Theory, theories of sovereignty, political theology, notions of the human in legal discourses, and different approaches to legal history.
Constituted by scholars in anthropology, philosophy, history, political science, literary studies and cultural studies, the group engaged readings that ranged across methodological approaches to core questions of liberal legal regimes, sovereign and biopolitical power under the law, genealogies of different legal regimes (particularly in colonial contexts), and relationships between legal regimes and social and cultural conditions.
Undergraduate Student Research Symposia
2021
legalhumanities.web.illinois.edu
Legal humanities interns Buthaina Hattab, Maria Martinez, and Adem Osmani held information sessions and recruited four fellow undergraduates to participate in their research symposium, which this year took the form of a web showcase of their work.
With their collaborators, majors in English, Political Science, Geography and Psychology, they held a launch event in April as part of Undergraduate Research Week, to showcase their research and related web publication.
2022
Legal humanities interns Tom Ballard, Alice Lee, and Alex Wellman organized a collection of research presentations that showcased exploration of law through applications of historical, philosophical, literary, and visual thinking.
Six undergraduate students and four faculty members participated in the symposium, held during Undergraduate Research Week on-site in the College of Law.
Undergraduate Courses
- “Philosophy of Law and Government” was offered by the Philosophy Department in fall 2021.
- “Personhood: Comparative Perspectives” was offered by the Department of Anthropology in spring 2022.
Professional Development Opportunities
- Dr. Nadine Naber offered a three-hour workshop on “Liberate Your Research,” focused on naming and claiming methodological interventions.
- Jennifer Lynn Kelly offered a second workshop focused on publishing articles and first books for early career engaged scholars who can face more obstacles to publishing.
- An assistant professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, Kelly worked through years-long processes to get her work on justice tourism in Palestine published. Mark Simpson-Vos, head of acquisitions at UNC Press, spoke from the editor/press perspective on getting a first book manuscript published.