Working Groups
Baldy Center Working Groups are smaller and more narrowly focused than research programs and are funded in their early developmental stages. Currently there are two Working Groups: Environmental Stewardship and Law and Religion.
Environmental Stewardship
Environmental stewardship is an emergent topic that will benefit from sustained research building on the socio-legal tradition. While the focus of this working group lies in the area of socio-legal studies, faculty in the biological and physical sciences are key participants, since scientific information, science organizations, and scientific methods are essential elements in understanding environmental stewardship. The working group draws on UB's broad cadre of faculty and academic programs concerned with environmental affairs, including the 200 faculty affiliates of the Environment and Society Institute.
This working group brings together the range of disciplinary perspectives necessary to conduct effective research on environmental stewardship. By "environmental stewardship" we mean the complex of social institutions and practices that sustain the capacity of the natural environment to support life over the long term. Key dimensions of environmental stewardship include policies, laws, organizations, common patterns of behavior, and ways of measuring progress toward sustainability.
Coordinator
- Margaret Shannon
- University at Buffalo Law School
529 O'Brian Hall • Buffalo, NY 14260
Tel: 716.645.5992
Faculty Participants
Joseph Atkinson Engineering Robert L. Berger Law Barry B. Boyer Law John Fountain Geology Errol Meidinger Law G. William Page Planning Paul Reitain Geology Lynda Schneekloth Architecture Robert G. Shibley Architecture A.T. Steegman, Jr. Anthropology
Law and Religion
The Law & Religion working group focuses on the interrelations of law, religion, and society in this and other cultures. Various legal systems – local, national, and global – have been shaped historically by the religious systems on which they were constructed, which they encountered later and which were transported into their society through the adoption of foreign legal systems. While the standard presumptions are that a religious foundation is a necessity for a legal system, or that law and religion are naturally dissociated in a society, this group would like to interrogate that relationship by asking: What shapes the differential reception of religious or legal systems as they move into new cultures and societies? What religious responses have there been to modern legal developments? What legal responses have there been to historic and modern religious changes and why? How are moral and ethical ideas manifested in sociolegal contexts?
Other areas of interest include the theatricality, authority, ritual, and language of religion as it has been employed in a legal system; how a religion informs specific local legal practice; what the social and political formations of particular legal/religious systems are; what role "texts" play in each: what theories relate law, religion, and society in new and useful ways; and, finally, how current movements in the U.S. and elsewhere link law and religion in society.
Coordinators
- Jeannette Ludwig
- Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
935 Clemens Hall • College of Arts & Sciences
University at Buffalo • Buffalo, NY 14260
Tel: 716.645.2191 x1175
jmludwig@acsu.buffalo.edu - Elizabeth Mensch
- University
at Buffalo Law School
720 O'Brian Hall • Buffalo, NY 14260
Tel: 716.645.3035 - mensch@buffalo.edu