RESEARCH
Overview
My research rests at the intersection of law and political theory. I focus on three particular areas of specialization: 1) capital and carceral punishment; 2) religious and ideological pluralism in late liberal states; and 3) race-conscious practices in citizenship and immigration. I also maintain ongoing research interests in higher education pedagogy, especially as it pertains to teaching law in the liberal arts. In conducting my research, I employ a methodologically diverse toolkit, often combining textual analysis and close readings, qualitative interviews, archival investigations, and field observations.
My work can be found as articles in peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journals like Law, Culture, and the Humanities and Punishment & Society and as book chapters in edited volumes published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. Taken together, these works - which assess canonical and contemporary theorists alongside watershed legal cases, transcripts of depositions and testimonies, and archival ephemera - argue that the ordinary procedures of law can often foreclose the realization of justice, fairness, and equal treatment in the lives of ordinary plaintiffs and in the American legal system writ broadly. More information on these articles and book chapters can be found below, where I also detail the articles I have in preparation.
In addition to articles and book chapters described above and below, I am also at work on a book manuscript. Titled The Matter of Dred Scott: Towards a Theory of Reparative Citizenship, I contend that the early legal archives of Chief Justice Roger Taney - author of Dred Scott v. Sandford, a case that denied Black individuals the rights of personhood just prior to the Civil War - possess the potential to not only remake contemporary American life along more egalitarian lines, but also reimagine what the bonds of modern political membership require. I argue that while Dred Scott often assumes the status of "anti-canon" in American law, this status occludes how it can also serve as the discursive site where personhood can be restored and belonging can be fostered; it can be a site, in other words, that generates a political theory of race-conscious reparative citizenship. To make this argument, I assemble the disparate matter of Taney's life and harness a rich body of interdisciplinary literature - that assesses the generative potential of archives, recovers the lived experiences subordination endured by enslaved persons, builds a framework of tort that recognizes the body as a locus of harm and redress, and considers the egalitarian possibilities of an expansive vision of citizenship - to illuminate the transformative potential of this very same matter for our contemporary legal and political life. ​​​​​​
These projects have benefitted meaningfully from student-faculty collaborative research funded by Dana Research Assistantships at Dickinson College and the Perry Foundation at Whitman College; because of these grants, students and I have worked alongside one another to do archival investigations, craft literature reviews, conduct and collect oral histories, and assess theoretical tracts and qualitative data. My work has also been supported by the Mellon Foundation for the Study of Religion, the Mellon Foundation Coblentz Civil Rights Endowment, the Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies Fellowship, and the Selznick Fellowship.
Articles
"The Religious Life of Legal Death"
Revised and resubmitted to Punishment & Society. Nominated for best paper at the Western Political Science Association. Manuscript available upon request.
This article argues that the incorporation of religion into the procedural mechanisms of the death penalty not only functions as a strategic effort made by the Supreme Court to preserve the continued legitimacy of an institution it previously characterized as "unusual in its pain, in its finality, and in its enormity," but also serves to entrench and intensify the felt quality of embodied violence at the moment of execution. Through an engagement with Ramirez v. Collier, I contend that the Supreme Court - in its treatment of the religious condemned - harnesses the figure of a warden-sanctioned spiritual advisor as an entity through whom messages of forceful retribution and merciful redemption can be both conveyed and realized. Given this mechanism of punition, I argue that Ramirez emerges as a tipping point in both capital punishment and free exercise jurisprudence: in an age marked by the increased willingness of the Supreme Court to recognize religious accommodation claims and to tolerate untested methods of execution (like nitrogen gas asphyxiation), it appears that the protections afforded to the condemned by the First Amendment will be deployed to permit (and occlude) violations of the Eighth Amendment. Ramirez v. Collier, in other words, portends a fraught legal future, for both the religious and the condemned. ​
"Toleration, not Coercion? Reading Locke after Masterpiece Cakeshop and 303 Creative"
Revised and resubmitted. Manuscript available upon request.
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In this article, I analyze the ways in which "toleration" and "tolerance" operate in the decisions authored by Justices Anthony Kennedy and Neil Gorsuch in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and 303 Creative v. Elenis, respectively. Tolerance, the Justices argue, ought to compel the socio-legal acceptance of closely-owned businesses that deny service to same-sex or queer couples on the basis of sincere religious belief. However, I argue that a reliance on the language of toleration recalls and reconstitutes the processes of Foucauldian subject formation present in John Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration - a document that was instrumental in the construction of American ideals of secularism, Protestantly understood.
"Theorizing Employment Division v. Smith"
Published in Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Read the article here.
This article interrogates, first, Justice Antonin Scalia’s assertion in Employment Division v. Smith that the law must uphold the belief-action distinction in order to preserve democratic norms and, second, the affect that this distinction had on Alfred Smith’s relationship with his faith. I argue that as Smith responded to the law’s repeated requests for justification as to why his religious convictions ought to exempt him from the criminal regulation of peyote, he experienced a profound sense of legal, political, and spiritual disempowerment – a disempowerment compounded by the erasure of the complexities of his faith in both the decision and aftermath of Smith. By way of making this argument, I bring Scalia, Smith, and Smith into sustained conversation with an unlikely interlocutor: Jürgen Habermas.
As one of the leading legal and political theorists of religion in the late modern moment, Habermas articulates a vision of democratic life that at once venerates public religious expression and insulates law- and policy-making institutions from faith-based influence. Habermas’s vision is often characterized by contemporary political theorists and legal academics as the ideal to which all religiously plural democracies should aspire, but when his argument is considered alongside the experiences of Smith before the Court as well as Smith’s position as an Indigenous person, a powerful disjuncture between theory and practice emerges. For although Habermas encourages religious individuals to adopt an epistemic stance of public reason and to engage in cooperative acts of translation in order to settle collaboratively the appropriate limits of religion as well as the law, I argue that, when applied to Smith, these methods of discursive engagement work to not only underscore the absolute primacy of the law over religion, but also to undercut Smith’s own understanding of his faith. I ultimately suggest that this mode of inquiry – that is to say, infusing theory with nuances gleamed from the everyday legal lives of ordinary individuals – generates new pathways through which to ameliorate latent social, legal, and political harms. ​
"Sacred Testimony, Settler Law"
In preparation. Draft manuscript available upon request.
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In this article, I advance a reinterpretation of the power of first person narratives in Indigenous claims to religious freedom. Building from my article on Employment Division v. Smith, I argue that as free exercise jurisprudence developed in Smith's wake, it failed to account for the power of legal discourse in processes of interpersonal claim-making - a failure that permits the law to reconstruct the settler colonial practices of the late 19th and early 20th century Bureau of Indian Affairs in contemporary courtrooms. Resistance to this reconstruction, I argue, can be done through the testimony - a process through which a petitioner can situate, contextualize, and challenge dominant modes of knowing and law-making.
"The Case for Dialogic Care"
In preparation. Draft manuscript available upon request.
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This article represents a contribution to the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education. I draw from my experiences co-leading the Dialogues Across Differences project at Dickinson College to suggest that dialogic techniques, when used in law-focused collegiate classrooms, fosters a learning environment that allows students to feel themselves empowered to, first, assess critically the language that shapes our collective legal lives and, second, expand the concept of who can be understood as capable of juridically-informed and democratically-valuable speech. Additionally, I argue that dialogue can be a vector for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in justice-oriented conversations on college campuses, but it must be done in a way that accounts for historical and contemporary lived experiences of harm, trauma, or exclusion. I conclude that dialogically-driven pedagogy can dismantle hierarchical power within and among participants in the classroom, which could influence students' future and formal study of the law - and their eventual participation within democratic life.
Book Chapters
"Constitutionalism"
Forthcoming in Political Theory Speaks for Oxford University Press (edited by Susan Liebell and Lilly Goren).
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This video chapter distills the nuances of constitutionalism for undergraduate audiences. I draw from canonical works of legal theory, and from contemporary political life, to suggest that ideals of constitutionalism imbues the demos with the power to not only craft a rule of law that serves all persons, but to also wield such rule to check those who hold a governing office.​
"Unframing the Death Penalty"
Published in Is the Death Penalty Dying? American and European Perspectives for Cambridge University Press (edited by Austin Sarat). Read the chapter here.
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This chapter explores the rhetoric of and possibilities for capital punishment abolition in the wake of Saddam Hussein's execution. I argue ​that the technological framing of the execution - as mediated through grainy videos and as located in underground bunkers - compels transatlantic political figures to reach for the language of "democracy" and "civilization" in considering whether the death penalty ought to be a legitimate mechanism for punishment in the United States, Europe, and Iraq. I determine that this rhetoric, as deployed in this context, acts as a discursive conduit that entrenches the death penalty's constitutional status in American law and embeds it in American incursions abroad - a move that ultimately frustrates the realization of abolition.​
Books
The Matter of Dred Scott
In preparation. Read the overview of the project here.
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In this book, I endeavor to unsettle the discursive power of Dred Scott v. Sandford in narratives of an unbroken march towards justice. In its denial of Black citizenship in the years just prior to the American civil war, Dred Scott often operates – in classrooms, academic scholarship, legal decisions, activist materials, and political myth-making – as “anti-canon,” that is, an entity against which just laws and policies ought to be made. Although not incorrect, this framing does not fully capture the lingering ways in which Dred Scott continues to exert latent force on contemporary American practices, particularly those related to belonging, membership, and community inclusion. By way of both revealing and redressing these forms of exclusion, this project reconstructs the archival ephemera of Chief Justice Roger Taney’s legal life. In doing so, this project argues that Taney’s matter – like hurried scribbles in the margins of a divorce decree, notes on cross-examinations for the escaped enslaved, or directives for the policing of farms – centers an ideal individual whose property in themselves not only runs counter to his decision in Dred Scott, but also compels contemporary race-conscious remedies. This project, in other words, argues that an historically-situated reassessment of Dred Scott’s stakes can both reveal much about the liberatory potential of our modern state and cultivate a new vision of community, citizenly bonds.
Book Reviews
Rachel Ellis, In This Place Called Prison
Published in Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Read the review here.
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This book review engages with Rachel Ellis's rich and compelling manuscript. Through an framework that is both theoretically and qualitatively rich, Ellis explores how religiously-funded rehabilitation programs in prisons, which have arisen as state and federal funding has retreated, operate as a site of "secondhand carcerality." Secondhand carcerality, she argues, at once deepens the felt nature of retribution by expanding the psychic sites of punishment even as it occludes - "it's just God's will!" - the harmful vagaries of the prison system itself.​
Elizabeth Shakmun Hurd, Heaven Has a Wall
In preparation. Draft review available upon request.
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​This book review engages with Elizabeth Shakmun Hurd's innovative and timely manuscript. Through a framework that interjects lived experience with broader historical and contemporary considerations of how and why borders work in the manner that they do, Hurd crafts a vision of national boundaries as religious objects - objects that are slippery in their construction, but palpable in their constitutive power. Her work argues for a novel reinterpretation of contemporary border politics and urges us - as border crossers - to rethink the promises and perils of borders.​
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