This is the bio of the guy pushing this.
Jon Goldberg-Hiller
Backround: I completed my BA in political science at Reed College (1979) and my MA and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1991) with emphasis in public law, comparative politics, and Marxist theory. Prior to graduate school, I had the opportunity to live and teach in West Africa, and subsequently I taught at Reed College prior to joining the faculty at UH.
Research Interests: I have recently been studying the ways changing forms of identity, nationalism, political authority and political economy have modulated the mobilization of rights in various contexts. By starting with these dimensions of social life rather than with rights discourses themselves, I have tried to understand how rights are resisted and how they retain relevancy; in this vein I have researched such contemporary phenomena as the conservative reaction against same-sex marriage, opposition to the political recognition of indigenous peoples, and efforts by labor unions to boycott legal regulatory machinery. I am presently embarking on a study of the means by which indigenous peoples in the Pacific have mobilized rights that lack constitutional or jurisdictional authority and how these ideas about rights have traveled across space and time, altering indigenous identities and redirecting political demands.
Selected publications:
“Rights as Excess: Understanding the Politics of Special Rights,” Law and Social Inquiry, forthcoming (with Neal Milner). download pdf copy
“‘Subjectivity is a Citizen’: Representation, Recognition, and the Deconstruction of Civil Rights,” Studies in Law, Politics and Society, Forthcoming. download pdf copy
The Limits to Union: Same-Sex Marriage and the Politics of Civil Rights,. University of Michigan Press, 2002
"Reimagining Rights: Tunnels, Nations, Spaces." Law & Social Inquiry, forthcoming (with Neal Milner.) download pdf copy
"Rites, Rights and the Right: Conservative Christian Politics in the United States," Theory and Event 5.2, 2001 (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tae/).
"‘Making a Mockery of Marriage’: Domestic Partnership and Equal Rights in Hawai‘i," in Sexuality in the Legal Arena, Edited by Didi Herman and Carl Stychin, Athlone Press, 2000, pp. 113-131. American edition to be published by University of Minnesota Press.
"The Status of Status: Domestic Partnership and the Politics of Same-Sex Marriage" 19 Studies in Law, Politics and Society 3-38, 1999
Entitled to be Hostile: Narrating the Political Economy of Civil Rights," 7 Social & Legal Studies 517-538, 1998
"The Boycott of the Law and the Law of the Boycott: Law, Labour and Politics in British Columbia", 21 Law and Social Inquiry 313-351, 1996.
Not surprising. Reed's unofficial motto (at least in the 70's) was "Communism, Atheism, Free Love". Chock full o' upper-middle-class white kids with near-perfect NMSQTs and little to no real-world knowledge or experience.