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:

At any given moment there are hundreds of international negotiations being undertaken in numerous institutions and forums, touching upon every legal and social aspect, including cyber, trade, terrorism, telecommunications, environment and human rights, just to name a few. International investigation and monitoring groups, and international committees and specialized bodies, are routinely created, subjecting states to investigations and reviews. States are subject to strict reporting requirements, having to submit hundreds of detailed reports a year to different institutions. International courts and over 160 international dispute settlement mechanisms are at work in their respective areas– creating new bodies of law, and thousands of professional committees whether in economic blocs, international institutions, or other forums, are revising and creating new international norms. Black lists are being formed, alliances changing, and new actors, including multinational corporations, are now an integral player of the international arena.

The challenges states are facing in building capacity and training personnel to deal with this vast and evolving international scene are formidable, requiring substantial funds, human capital, leadership, strategic planning, specialized education, and extensive inter ministerial cooperation, just to name a few. Ramifications for a state for lack of capacity may be huge.

This talk will seek to take a birds eye view of the evolving international arena, and focus on some of the challenges states, particularly developing countries, have in building their capacity to enable effective navigation in this sphere. The talk will showcase the International Rule Making Project, which seeks to assist in the development of global tools and policies. The talk will also address the increasing participation of China, who openly seeks to reshape global governance, as a strong player in the international space, and the possible interconnections between all of these issues.

Speaker Bio:

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Dr. Matias regularly advised Prime Ministers and the Government on policy and law regarding international matters. She was a member of Israeli National Security Council teams on a range of national security challenges, national strategy building, international law, Middle East policy, counter-terrorism, and international conflicts. She headed inter ministerial committees, and worked with colleagues from around the world to develop international mechanisms, international tools, and law.

Matias represented the State of Israel in United Nations committees, international investigations of Israel, international and foreign courts, and co-headed Israel’s inter ministerial task force on matters relating to universal jurisdiction and issues relating to the laws of war. She represented the state in numerous bilateral and multilateral negotiations, including complex trade matters with the EU, joining the OECD, permanent-status issues with the Palestinians, and as a member of Israeli-Palestinian joint committees. She was also a member of Israeli government teams working with the international donor community on matters of Palestinian institution and capacity building, and a member of numerous policy teams.

Since 2014 she heads the Global Affairs and Conflict Resolution program at the Lauder School of Government IDC, and teaches courses on globalization, diplomacy, law, and conflict resolution. She is also on the Professional Advisory Board of the International Institute for Counter Terrorism. She is a recipient of the 2008 Award from Georgetown University Law Center for Outstanding Achievements in the Profession, and in 2017-2018 served on the President of Israel’s Committee for Doctoral Grants for Academic Excellence and Scientific Innovation.

Between 2013-2018 she was a fellow at the Hoover Institution and since 2018 is a visiting scholar at CDDRL heading the International Rule Making Project geared at developing global international tools enhancing good governance, rule of law, capacity building, and economic growth particularly in developing countries and areas of conflict.

Matias is a member of the Israeli bar and the New York bar. She clerked at the Supreme Court of Israel, received her LLB from Tel-Aviv University, her LLM from Georgetown University, and her Doctorate in International Law (S.J.D.) from George Washington University under the supervision of Judge Thomas Buergenthal.

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.