Details:
Please join us for our March installment of the 2014-2015 Brown Bag Speaker Series, featuring a presentation by Professor Mario Barnes, titled “Taking a Stand?: Assessing the Social and Racial Effects of State-Sanctioned Violence.”
This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. No RSVP necessary.
Date:
Tuesday, March 10th, 2015
Time:
12-:00 – 1:00pm
Location:
University of California, Irvine campus
Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway, room 1517
Abstract:
In 2004, borrowing from characteristics of its defense of home (“Castle Doctrine”) statute, the state of Florida substantially revamped its self-defense statute to remove the Common Law duty to retreat and effectively sanction the use of force, including deadly force, “anywhere [one] ha[s] a lawful right to be.” This first version of a so-called ”Stand Your Ground” (SYG) law resulted in significant changes to the charging and prosecution of those alleged to have committed violence against others. Since 2004, over two dozen U.S. states have revamped their self-defense statutes to incorporate some portion of Florida’s substantive and procedural SYG reforms. Adopting states, however, have enacted these law changes without significantly studying the real world impact of such reforms, especially in terms of their potentially racialized effects. In the wake of Florida’s very public trial of George Zimmerman for killing unarmed teen, Trayvon Martin, empirical studies seeking to explicate the workings of these statutes have begun to emerge. My project seeks to cull the available data and recent research to provide a quantitative and qualitative feedback loop to policy makers regarding the operation of these laws. In particular, my work seeks to explore whether SYG laws actually deter violent crime. Additionally, I interrogate the under-examined racialized consequences of laws authorizing increased uses of violence in a society where individual decisions and judicial determinations about the appropriate use of force are often affected by negative identity stereotypes and unconscious bias.
Speaker Biography:
Mario L. Barnes is the Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development and Professor of Law at UC Irvine, with a joint appointment (by courtesy) in Criminology, Law & Society. He is also a Faculty Affiliate in the UCI Center in Law, Society & Culture, the Co-Director of the UCI Center on Law, Equality and Race (CLEaR), and previously served as Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for the law school from 2011 to 2014. Professor Barnes’ scholarly interests are in the areas of criminal law, constitutional law, national security law, and race and the law. As a member of a burgeoning movement within legal scholarship which seeks to leverage synergies between empirical research and antisubordination-focused legal theories, his work often relies upon sociolegal studies. His recent works include: “Judging Opportunity Lost: Race-Based Affirmative Action and Equality Jurisprudence After Fisher v. University of Texas,” forthcoming in 62 UCLA Law Review 272 (2015) (with Erwin Chemerinsky and Angela Onwuachi-Willig); “The Obama Effect: Specialized Meaning in Anti-Discrimination Law,” in 87 Indiana Law Journal 325 (2012) (with Angela Onwuachi-Willig); and “Analyzing Stops, Citations, and Searches in Washington and Beyond,” in the 35 Seattle University Law Review 673 (2012) (with Robert S. Chang). From 2004 to 2009, he was a faculty member at the University of Miami School of Law, and from 2002 to 2004, he served as a William H. Hastie Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He is the recipient of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) 2008 Derrick Bell Award and co-recipient of the AALS 2015 Clyde Ferguson Award, which are awarded to the junior and senior scholar, respectively, who make a contribution to legal education through mentoring, teaching, and scholarship.
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