Abstract:

Why did colonial powers establish courts to address Indigenous grievances? Under which conditions did these rulers decide to rule in favor of Indigenous claimants, even at the expense of their own state agents? This paper addresses these questions by studying the legal battles between Indigenous communities, Spanish settlers, and local bureaucrats in the General Indian Court of colonial Mexico (GIC). I apply an existing framework developed in the judicial politics literature to understand how the Spanish Crown allowed, and even encouraged, the Indigenous population to raise claims against local bureaucrats. Moreover, I offer a theoretical contribution to this literature by defining the scope conditions under which autocratic regimes might also use the judicial system to constrain local elites. To further explore the decision-making process of this colonial court, I develop a model that predicts that the GIC offered favorable rulings to Indigenous claimants in a strategic way. I predict that a favorable ruling was more likely in cases that involved colonial agents, were related to land invasions or physical abuses, and originated from areas where local elite power was high and Indigenous population more vulnerable. I provide empirical evidence of the strategic use of the colonial court using a mixed-methods approach including paleographic transcriptions, human coding, and text analysis of a novel dataset of more than 30,000 judicial claims. These results have implications for our understanding of both the development of Indigenous legal autonomy in colonial history and for the more general strategic development of judicial power in autocracies. One plausible, yet controversial, implication is that Indigenous communities had more tools to resist oppression during the colonial period than following the rise of the nation-state.

Speaker Bio:

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Edgar Franco Vivanco is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. He studied a PhD in political science at Stanford University. During 2018-19, he was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Edgar is a collaborator with the Poverty, Governance, and Violence Lab at Stanford University, and with the Digging Early Colonial Mexico project at the University of Lancaster. Edgar’s research agenda explores how colonial-era institutions and contemporary criminal violence shape economic under-performance, particularly within Latin America. In his book project, Strategies of Indigenous Resistance and Assimilation to Colonial Rule, he examines the role Indigenous groups have played in the state-building process of the region since colonial times. 

Abstract:

Community-driven development programs that decentralized administrative, fiscal, and political functions have become a popular policy tool to deliver public services.  We study a large reform in the city of Delhi that decentralized the management of discretionary school budgets to elected bodies of parents.  Using household surveys, non-participant observation in schools, semi-structured interviews, and administrative data we ask if decentralization has brought expenditures closer in line to the preferences of parents?  We find that expenditures are heavily skewed to the preferences of more traditionally powerful actors, namely men and members of the government bureaucracy.

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Abstract:

As the 2020 presidential campaign begins to take shape, there is widespread distrust of the fairness and accuracy of American elections. Four factors increasing the mistrust. Voter suppression has escalated as a Republican tool aimed to depress turnout of likely Democratic voters, fueling suspicion. Pockets of incompetence in election administration, often in large cities controlled by Democrats, have created an opening to claims of unfairness. Old-fashioned and new-fangled dirty tricks, including foreign and domestic misinformation campaigns via social media, threaten electoral integrity. Inflammatory rhetoric about “stolen” elections supercharges distrust among hardcore partisans.
 
Taking into account how each of these threats has manifested in recent years—most notably in the 2016 and 2018 elections—this presentation concludes with concrete steps that need to be taken to restore trust in American elections before the democratic process is completely undermined.

Speaker Bio:

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From 2001-2010, he served (with Dan Lowenstein) as founding co-editor of the quarterly peer-reviewed publication, Election Law Journal. He is the author of over 100 articles on election law issues, published in numerous journals including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review and Supreme Court Review. He was elected to The American Law Institute in 2009 and serves as Reporter (with Professor Douglas Laycock) on the ALI’s law reform project: Restatement (Third) of Torts: Remedies. He also is an adviser on the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Concluding Provisions.

Professor Hasen was named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by The National Law Journal in 2013, and one of the Top 100 Lawyers in California in 2005 and 2016 by the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journal.

His op-eds and commentaries have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and Slate. Hasen also writes the often-quoted Election Law Blog, which the ABA Journal named to its “Blawg 100 Hall of Fame” in 2015. The Green Bag recognized his 2018 book, The Justice of Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption, for exemplary legal writing, and his 2016 book, Plutocrats United, received a Scribes Book Award Honorable Mention. His newest book, Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy will be published by Yale University Press in 2020.

Abstract:

Legal compliance has gotten a bad rap in international relations research. Compliance – the state of being on the “legal” side of a legal/illegal binary – has been largely set aside as a variable of interest in empirical studies of international law in favor of more substantive measures of behavioral change. Nevertheless, efforts to frame political science inquiry in terms of law’s effects have not succeeded in sidestepping compliance. To the contrary, none of the core functions of law (guiding behavior, assessing it, attributing responsibility, or assigning remedies) is possible without an applied concept of legal compliance as an orienting point on the horizon. This paper reclaims compliance as an essential concept for the empirical study of international law—albeit in a transformed state that emphasizes its potential for contextual variability and its essentially legal-political character.

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