PLEASE NOTE TIME AND NEW LOCATION 

Constitutional Roundtable

presents

Judith Resnik

Arthur Liman Professor of Law, Yale Law School

Ratifying Kyoto at the Local Level:  Sovereigntism, Federalism

and Translocal Organizations of Government Actors

(Judith Resnik, Joshua Civin and Joseph Frueh, for the symposium on Environmentalism and Federalism, forthcoming, U. Arizona Law Review)

4:10 – 6:00 pm

Thursday, October 23, 2008

FLB (Classroom B) - Flavelle House

78 Queen's Park

This paper is part of a series on which I am working to think through how cross-jurisdictional social movements affect our understanding of constitutional and legal identities of nation-states.  Here, my focus is on translocal organizations of government actors  (TOGAs) -- such as the U.S. Conference of Mayors or the National Governors Association -- which have over the twentieth century emerged as important contributors in the United States to law and policy.  Legal scholars have analyzed the horizontal and vertical dimensions of federalism as if those were the only dimensions on a federalism grid.  Moreover, conversations about federalism in the United States tend toward essentialism -- as if a particular arena of law is "naturally" one for a particular level of government.  This article questions both of these constructions.  It first maps the growth and significance of these voluntary associations and their role in the importation and exportation of law across national boundaries and specifically their activism regarding climate change.   What becomes plain is that  TOGAs shape law and policy in ways not captured by only two aspects of a federalism grid and also undercut claims that certain issues are "national" rather than "local."    We also clarify (in part by naming them "TOGAs") that these particular forms of associations ought not be subsumed under appellations such as NGOs, GOs, SIGS (special interest groups) or PIGS (public interest groups).  In additio to demonstrating their function as importers and exporters of law in ways that can provide majoritarian legitimacy to trans-border legal migrations, we  interrogate the legitimacy of the particular form of aggregate political capital of TOGAs, as we conclude that they both contribute to some federalist political virtues while undermining others.  Thereafter,  we explore the ways in which both law has and can respond to TOGAs, and because we see them as politically generative,  we argue for special status to be accorded to these configurations.

Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches about federalism, procedure, feminism, and local and global interventions to diminish inequalities and subordination.  Her writings include Representing Justice: From Renaissance Iconography to Twenty-First Century Courthouses, (with Dennis E. Curtis) (published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 2007);  Law's Migration: American Exceptionalism, Silent Dialogues, and Federalism's Multiple Ports of Entry (published in the Yale Law Journal, 2006); Judicial Selection and Democratic Theory: Demand, Supply, and Life Tenure (published in a symposium in Cardozo Law Review, 2005); and Trial as Error, Jurisdiction as Injury: Transforming the Meaning of Article III (published in the Harvard Law Review, 2000).  Forthcoming books include Migrations and Mobilities: Gender, Borders, and Citizenship (co-edited with Seyla Benhabib and to be published in 2009 by New York University Press).   Professor Resnik has chaired the Sections on Procedure, on Federal Courts, and on Women in Legal Education of the American Association of Law Schools.  She is a Managerial Trustee of the International Association of Women Judges and the founding director of Yale's Arthur Liman Public Interest Program and Fund.  She also served as a co-chair of the Women's Faculty Forum of Yale University.  In 2001, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2002, a member of the American Philosophical Society.  In 2008, she received the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation Outstanding Scholar of the Year Award.  Professor Resnik is a graduate of Bryn Mawr and NYU Law School.

Refreshments will be served.

For more workshop information, please contact Professor Lorraine Weinrib at l.weinrib@utoronto.ca or Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.