Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

We are very happy to announce that Leti Volpp will return to this year’s OSI as the second convenor of Workshop 2 “Claiming the Past, Belonging for the Future.” She is the Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law at Berkeley Law, where her research focuses on questions of immigration and citizenship. She has served as a Visiting Professor affiliated with the Amerika-Institut of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and as past Faculty for the Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of Law. Her honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation Individual Research and Writing Grant, and the Association of American Law Schools Minority Section Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Award. She is a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

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The first convener of Workshop 2, “Claiming the Past, Belonging for the Future,” that we would like to introduce is Marianne Constable. She is Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and has published broadly on a range of topics in legal rhetoric and philosophy. Her most recent book, entitled Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts, (Stanford University Press, 2014) shows how legal utterances, in speech and writing, are forms of law-in-action. She is currently working on the “new unwritten law” that ostensibly exonerated women who killed their husbands in Chicago a century ago, as a way of exploring the rhetoric of law and the rhetoric of history. Her earlier books include Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (2005) and The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changes in Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (1994), which won the Law and Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History.

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