ANNOUNCEMENT: The Center in Law, Society and Culture is pleased to announce the 2012-13 Microsemi/Peterson Fellows, who are graduate and law students with scholarly interests in socio-legal studies.
The Microsemi/Peterson fellowships are made possible because of a gift from Jim Peterson, CEO of Microsemi Corporation, who has been a generous supporter of Center activities over the past 3 years. The selected fellows participate in a year-long set of activities designed to further their interdisciplinary research training, through intellectual collaboration and exchange, and through the production of an original project. For more information click here.
The Microsemi/Peterson Fellows selected for the 2012-2013 academic year are:
 | Alyse Bertenthal is a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Criminology, Law & Society. She has a law degree from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in Literature from Yale University. Prior to graduate school, she served as a judicial law clerk on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the United States District Court for the Central District of California, and worked as an attorney for the ACLU. Alyse’s current research interests include dispute transformation, legal consciousness, and the relationship of law, language, and society.
Every year more than 7,000 non-criminal appeals are filed in California state courts. The number of appeals is a significant court statistic, yet there exists virtually no research on individuals who appeal or why they decide to reassert a claim after previously unsuccessful legal experiences. In this project, I will conduct a detailed exploration of the claims that emerge as appellate issues, and will ask how litigants and legal professionals jointly construct the meaning of these claims. Using data from a California state court self-help clinic in which litigants and attorneys discuss potential appeals, I plan to investigate the discursive practices used by clinic participants to construct legal meaning and understanding of the law’s role in resolving disputes. This study will contribute to an expanded model of the dispute transformation process, and has implications for rethinking the production of legal knowledge in terms of communicative interaction and social activity.
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 | Nathan Coben is a second-year Ph.D. student in the department of anthropology at UC Irvine. Nathan received his BA in History from UC Berkeley in 2007 and his MA in Folklore from UC Berkeley in 2011. His folklore research looked at narratives about crime, economic crises, and urbanism in the context of a California “new town”. His current and future research examines property in the Republic of Ireland.
This project explores the socio-legal construction of the estate in the Republic of Ireland. As a category, the estate confounds easy distinctions between public law about sovereignty and private law about property. Understanding the historical development of the estate is crucial in articulating contemporary relationships between property and politics in Ireland. I will study archival material on the granting of estates during the imposition of colonial English Common Law in Ireland. My goal is to produce a study with these archival accounts that emphasizes the legal practices constituting the estate as a problematic site of sovereignty and property. As the state currently attempts to register and tax all the property in its territory as part of austerity measures, it is apparent that the genealogical relationship between property and the state must be rigorously examined. I intend to produce a manuscript for publication in a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary law and society journal.
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| Jennifer Henry spent her childhood in Fort Collins, Colorado. After attending Macalester College, she began her career at the Sonoma County Economic Development Board in Santa Rosa, California, and continued at the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce in Saint Paul, Minnesota before returning to California for law school at UCI. She is in her third and final year of law school and has spent her summers interning in Washington, D.C. at the Federal Communications Commission and Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law with its Community Development Project. She is fascinated by master-planned communities like Irvine and hopes to become a professor someday.
This project will analyze the history and development of Irvine, a master-planned community in California. Irvine’s uniform character owes much to the Irvine Company, a private real estate developer with massive land holdings and a commitment to community design. Because the Irvine Company owns so much land, and tends to lease land to businesses and residents of Irvine rather than selling, the company retains a great deal of control over what activity takes place on the land. This project will focus on the ways in which the Irvine Company contributes to the organization of space in and around the city, much like a local government. The project’s analysis will contribute to a larger discussion surrounding the distinction between public and private, which some scholars assert is meaningless while others insist it has essential meaning that differentiates between public and private space, public and private bodies of law, and public and private entities.
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| Sheiba Kian Kaufman is a third year doctoral student in English literature. Her research focuses on cosmopolitanism and literary representations of and understandings between the Christian West and its Eastern neighbors—particularly Persia—in the early modern period of 1558-1714. Her interdisciplinary approach to interreligious embraces in literature strives to discover alternative modes of edifying dialogue that is conducive to an age of global consciousness and citizenship. She has a B.A. in English from UCLA and an M.St. in English Literature 1550-1780 from Oxford. Her service and humanitarian efforts include translating for Asylum Welcome, Oxford, and coordinating with Amnesty International representatives to bring Education Under Fire, an national campaign dedicated to promoting international human rights and access to higher education, to UCI.
This project investigates the socio-legal configurations of interreligious and intercultural diplomatic interactions in the early modern period of 1558-1714. To this end, this paper explores depictions of hospitality and diplomacy between Europeans and Persians in the English Renaissance play, The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607). In the play, Anthony Sherley—fictionalized ambassador par excellence—meets Shah Abbas I of Persia and implores, “Our sins are all alike; why not our God?” Curiously, the Englishman’s interfaith inquiry, his leap of faith, is left unanswered. This paper aims to elucidate the intent and context of such a provocative socio-religious question and uncover its ramifications for our society today. By reading literature through the lens of global citizenship, this project aims to contribute to early modern and religious studies and in turn support our evolving understanding of present day interfaith initiatives.
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