James Fleming & Linda McClain Awarded Residential Fellowships at Princeton University
The two professors will work on book projects during their sabbatical fellowships next year.
Boston University School of Law’s Honorable Paul J. Liacos Professor of Law James Fleming and Paul M. Siskind Research Scholar and Professor of Law Linda McClain have been selected for research fellowships in Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs and its Center for Human Values, respectively. The professors will be on sabbatical at Princeton University beginning in fall 2016 and continuing through spring 2017.
Professor Fleming, who will be a visiting fellow and visiting professor in the Program in Law and Public Affairs, is one of six scholars awarded the fellowship for the year. Fleming will work on a book project analyzing “classical controversies over the legal enforcement of morals as they have arisen in contemporary struggles for the rights of gay men and lesbians.” Along with the book project, he will teach an undergraduate course at Princeton University. The book project and course will be a continuation of the BU Law seminar Fleming taught this spring entitled Jurisprudence: Contemporary Controversies Over Law and Morality.
“Teaching my BU Law seminar with many great students was a wonderful opportunity to jump start the research project I’m going to be doing next year,” says Fleming. “It gave me an incredibly rich setting in which to think about the issues.” Fleming addressed these issues in his inaugural Liacos lecture at BU Law, “Was Justice Scalia Right About the Slippery Slope to ‘the End of All Morals Legislation’? After Same-Sex Marriage, Is Polygamy Next?”
Fleming, who received a PhD in politics from Princeton University, has authored or co-authored five books regarding constitutional law and theory and edited or co-edited six more. His most recent book is Fidelity to Our Imperfect Constitution: For Moral Readings and Against Originalisms (Oxford University Press, 2015). His book project on the legal enforcement of morals will be a sequel to his recent book with Professor McClain, Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues (Harvard University Press, 2013).
Professor McClain will be one of eight Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellows in the Princeton University Center for Human Values, where she will be working full time on her book project, Marriage, Conscience, and Bigotry. McClain’s project will examine the rhetoric of bigotry and conscience in controversies over same-sex, interracial, and interfaith marriage. Her project seeks to provide readers with a helpful and clear guide to understanding present-day controversies over prejudice and bigotry in battles over marriage, antidiscrimination law, and religious exemptions.
“I am very excited about working on my project at Princeton in an interdisciplinary community of scholars,” says McClain. “Because values and the role of government in promoting them is a strong concern of my scholarship, I also believe that it will be wonderful to work on that project at the University Center for Human Values, whose mission includes fostering inquiry into ethics and values in private and public life.”
McClain has extensive background in the fields of family law, gender and law, and feminist legal theory. Her work has addressed the respective roles of families, other institutions of civil society, and of government in fostering citizens’ capacities for democratic and personal self-government. She has authored or edited five books as well as numerous articles and book chapters in the areas of civil rights, religion and law, and family law.
Fleming and McClain’s fellowships will begin as their daughter starts her sophomore year as an undergraduate at Princeton University.
“We are extremely fortunate that both of us were able to get sabbatical fellowships at the same place,” says Fleming. “We are really looking forward to a terrific opportunity to make substantial progress on our next book projects.”
Reported by Greg Yang (CAS’17).