IJPM names research fellows for 2008-09

IJPM names research fellows for 2008-09January 25, 2008Jaime Winne Alvarezjlwinne@syr.edu

The Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics and the Media at Syracuse University (IJPM) has announced its second class of research fellows, for the 2008-09 academic year. Composed of both University faculty members and graduate students, this group of scholars will focus on interdisciplinary, law-oriented research supported by IJPM, which each year distributes these individual and collaborative research fellowships.

Launched in September 2006, IJPM is an academic institute devoted to the interdisciplinary study of issues at the intersection of law, politics and the media. A collaborative effort of SU’s College of Law, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, the institute sponsors lectures, conferences and symposia designed to foster discussion and debate among legal scholars, sitting judges and working journalists.

Applicants for the research fellow positions each submitted research proposals that examine issues at the intersection of law, politics and the media. Only full-time faculty and full-time graduate students at SU are eligible to apply for the research awards. Fellowship recipients are also required to present their work in an IJPM-sponsored colloquia series organized specifically for the research fellows.

“The latest class of research fellows demonstrates that the interdisciplinary study of law, politics and the media is thriving at SU. We are pleased to play a role in fostering and promoting this work,” says Keith Bybee, director of IJPM, associate professor of law and political science, and Michael O. Sawyer Chair of Constitutional Law and Politics at the Maxwell School.

The 2008-09 IJPM research fellows are:

Collaborative

Lynne Flocke and Roy Gutterman — Flocke and Gutterman, professors in the Newhouse School, will explore how the media covered the murder of Grace Brown and the arrest, pretrial issues and trial of Chester Gillette in the case. In July 1906, the body of Brown, a pregnant factory worker, was discovered floating in Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks. The arrest, incarceration, trial and execution of Gillette were a public spectacle that became one of the 20th century’s earliest “trials of the century.” Flocke and Gutterman will also determine what early issues of journalism and the law began to present themselves at this juncture.

Individual

Evan Criddle — Criddle, assistant professor in the College of Law, will explore the idea of executive counter-majoritarianism in the context of the growth of the administrative state and the liberalization of executive lawmaking in U.S. administrative law. He will show that executive counter-majoritarianism takes a variety of forms and will assess the risks associated with this type of presidential administration.

Thomas M. Keck — Keck, assistant professor of political science in the Maxwell School, will assess the frequency with which press coverage of federal judicial decisions implies partisan motivations on the part of the judges. Focusing initially on federal judicial decisions involving abortion, gay rights and affirmative action, he will examine a random sample of newspaper coverage, from both national and regional papers, during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush eras.

Individual (Graduate Student)

Erik John Chaput — Chaput, a graduate student in history in the Maxwell School, will examine the debate over aid to non-public education in Rhode Island from 1945-1971 by highlighting the various constitutional discourses that were active in Rhode Island from World War II to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman in 1971. His project will illuminate an under-examined part of Rhode Island’s history, while concurrently addressing recent historiographical trends relating to the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

K. Matthew Dames — Dames, a graduate student in the School of Information Studies, will analyze the transformation of the word “piracy.” He will argue that the word’s transformation to a proxy for infringement is the result of an ongoing, decades-long, politically oriented frame. He will also examine the historical and contemporary meanings of “piracy” in the United States and the term’s effect on U.S. copyright policy.

Matthew P. Guardino — Guardino, a graduate student in political science in the Maxwell School, will examine the role of mass media and elite political communications in manipulating citizen opinion on contemporary American public policy issues. He will integrate concepts from cognitive psychology and critical social theory in order to offer an empirical account of these processes in three key economic and social welfare policy cases: the Reagan tax plan of 1981, welfare reform in 1996 and the proposed Social Security reform of 2005.

Richard Price — Price, a graduate student in political science in the Maxwell School, will examine the question of when and how often lawyers offer state constitutional arguments. While the federal retrenchment on constitutional rights suggests that lawyers should be more likely to offer state constitutional arguments to state courts, they are trained to think in only federal terms. Price will review cases to the New York Court of Appeals for evidence of state constitutional arguments.

Rachel Ross — Ross, a graduate student in documentary film and history in the Newhouse and Maxwell schools, will research and produce a film that addresses the issue and public awareness of genocide. Using the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Rwanda and the current problems in the Sudan as examples, Ross plans to identify different patterns in U.S. policy toward these genocides and the ways in which the actions of the United States were dictated not by the level of atrocity, but by international reaction and what the nation stood to gain economically.

For more information on the research fellows and IJPM, visit http://jpm.syr.edu.