Baldy Center News

The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy is turning 40! As part of the celebration, the Center will hold a 40th Anniversary Reception at the Annual Conference of the Law and Society Association and the Canadian Law and Society Association Conference. The Reception will be held Thursday, June 7th from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. at the Sheraton Centre Toronto, 123 Queen Street West, Toronto, ON. The Center will also be celebrating the awarding of this year’s Law and Society Association Dissertation Prize to Baldy Postdoctoral Fellow Amanda Hughett.

To participate, please contact the Baldy Center at 716-645-2102 or baldyctr@buffalo.edu.

Nancy S. Marder is professor of law at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, where she also serves as the director of the Justice John Paul Stevens Jury Center and co-director of the Institute for Law and the Humanities.  She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, and is an Academic Fellow of the Pound Civil Justice Institute. Her areas of expertise include juries, judges, and courts.  At the Baldy Center, her research will focus on a book, The Power of the Jury:  Transforming Citizens into Jurors, which examines how every stage of the jury process—from voir dire to post-verdict interviews—helps to transform ordinary citizens into responsible jurors. The approach Marder posits will give judges, lawyers, academics, legislators, and concerned citizens a new way to evaluate jury reforms.

Werner Reutter is a research fellow of political science at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, the University of Potsdam, the University of Bonn, the University of Jena, Humboldt-University of Berlin, and the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. At the Baldy Center, he will explore whether, and to what extent, decisions of a German subnational constitutional court and an American state supreme court infringe on the competencies of state legislatures.

Daniel Platt earned his Ph.D. in American Studies at Brown University. His research reconsiders the growth of household credit in the American economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by focusing on legal contests over the rights of debtors and creditors. At the Baldy Center, Platt will complete a second article and revise his book manuscript, tentatively titled Governing Credit from the Age of Emancipation to the Keynesian Turn.