Brooklyn Book Festival Features Faculty Books and Panel with Professors Baer and Simonson
Brooklyn Book Festival Features Faculty Books and Panel with Professors Baer and Simonson
Brooklyn Law School once again played host to the Brooklyn Book Festival, opening its doors as one of the community venues for New York City’s largest free literary festival, a beloved event for book enthusiasts, which provides an opportunity to connect with local, national, and international authors and publishers.
Among the panelists appearing on the main festival day on Sunday were two Brooklyn Law faculty members: Vice Dean and Centennial Professor Miriam Baer and Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship Jocelyn Simonson, both of whom wrote new books. The two were part of a panel discussion held in the Moot Court Room that was titled “Reclaiming Power Through Collective Resistance and Law” and moderated by Erin Geiger Smith, the author of Thank You For Voting.
Baer is the author of Myths and Misunderstandings in White-Collar Crime (Cambridge University Press, July 2023), which explores the complex terrain of federal white-collar crime, unearthing how understanding the pathologies behind our legal practices can help hold those in power accountable for their misdeeds. In explaining why she wrote the book, Baer described two goals.
“I wanted people to understand how universally important white-collar crime is…it’s about how we as a society deal with deceptions or violations of trust,” Baer said. “And if we as a society cannot handle deception and violations of trust, it’s going to eat away at our institutions.”
Secondly, Baer said, she wanted to reassert the importance of law and of reforming federal criminal code, which places crimes such as fraud under “umbrella” statutes that she contends are too broad. The umbrella statutes used to prosecute federal crimes do not shed enough light on the laws that are being violated, and, because they are not separated by degree, fail to distinguish between variations of the same type of conduct, she said.
“I want people to understand that law is important. And it's worth the effort to spend time reading criminal codes, figuring out how they're made, what they do, and how we can fix them,” Baer said.
Simonson wrote Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People are Dismantling Mass Incarceration (The New Press, August 2023), which explores how groups of people are engaging in collective resistance within the criminal legal system. The types of resistance described in the book include: community bail funds, through which people team up to provide bail for others, typically strangers, in need; “court watching,” which is being present in criminal court matters to bear witness to what unfolds; “participatory defense,” which involves such things as community organizing and storytelling on behalf of loved ones facing criminal charges; and “people's budgets,” whereby citizens play a role in deciding how their own city or municipality allocates its budget.
“The audience I had in my mind for this book were not people who already knew about the kind of tactics that the book discusses,” Simonson said. “I actually wanted to tell the stories of groups engaging in this work to people who might not know about it.”
Simonson and Baer were joined by two other authors who discussed social change from more personal perspectives. Christopher Paul Harris, author of To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care, drew on his experience as an activist and organizer to explore how the new Black politics can forge a future centered on collective action, community, and care. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Héctor Tobar, who wrote Our Migrant Souls, discussed the meaning of “Latino” in the 21st century.
In addition to the books authored by Baer and Simonson, other faculty members’ books were featured and available for sale at Brooklyn Law School’s booth. They included: Animus, Enforcing the Equal Protection Clause, and Rebuilding Expertise, all by Stanley A. August Professor William D. Araiza; The Common Law Inside the Female Body by Anita and Stuart Subotnick Professor Anita Bernstein; The People’s Constitution, co-authored by Dean’s Research Scholar and Associate Professor Wilfred U. Codrington III and John F. Kowal; Seek and Hide by Jeffrey D. Forchelli Professor Amy Gajda; Family Life, Family Law, and Family Justice by 1901 Distinguished Research Professor Marsha Garrison; The Right of Redress by Professor Andrew Gold, and The American Law Institute: A Centennial History, co-edited by Gold; and Closing Death’s Door by Visiting Professor Stephan Landsman and Michael J. Saks.