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VAP Position Available

Posted: 03 Apr 2013 12:40 PM PDT

A job announcement

Visiting Assistant Professor of American Politics- One Year Replacement
Department of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
The Department of Political Science invites applications for a one-year, full-time visiting position in American Politics in the field of Law and Politics at the rank of Visiting Assistant Professor beginning in the Fall of 2013; Ph.D. is preferred, advanced ABD will be considered. Applications from those with a specialization in some aspect of Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, or Labor, are particularly encouraged. The ideal candidate will be able to teach a mixture of the following subjects: Public Law, Law and Society, Introduction to American Politics, and/or Political Theory. The successful candidate's work will be informed by theoretical and historical perspectives on questions important to the understanding of politics in the United States.
The Department values intellectual diversity and supports a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches that help bring people together across subfields as they address questions of power. The Department also supports interdisciplinarity in teaching and research in keeping with the Colleges' longstanding emphasis on liberal arts education. We encourage the creative development of new questions, lines of inquiry, and vectors of critique.
APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS:
Evaluation of applications begins April 8, 2013 and will continue until the position is filled. Please send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, writing sample, graduate transcripts, a statement of teaching philosophy, and arrange to have three letters of reference sent to:
Professor Paul A. Passavant, c/o Jean Salone
American Politics Search
Department of Political Science
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
300 Pulteney Street
Geneva, NY 14456
EOE
Hobart and William Smith Colleges are committed to attracting and supporting faculty and staff that fully represent the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the nation and actively seek applications from under-represented groups. The Colleges do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, marital status, national origin, age, disability, veteran's status, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression or any other protected status.
Hobart and William Smith Colleges are a highly selective residential liberal arts institution located in a small, diverse city in the Finger Lakes region of New York State.  With an enrollment of approximately 2,200, the Colleges offer 62 majors and minors from which students choose two areas of concentration, one of which must be an interdisciplinary program.  Creative and extensive programs of international study and public service are also at the core of the Colleges' mission.

Paul A.
Passavant
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
300 Pulteney St.
Geneva, NY 14456
USA

The Supreme Court and the Native American

Posted: 03 Apr 2013 12:38 PM PDT

Kathryn Fort, Michigan State University College of Law, has published The Vanishing Indian Returns: Tribes, Popular Originalism, and the Supreme Court at 57 St. Louis University Law Journal (2013). Here is the abstract.
Writing history is perilously tricky, weighing narratives, presenting facts, and making stories. This is particularly true when the history directly affects the legal rights of a present-day community. When the Supreme Court of the United States writes history, it imbibes the narrative with both cultural and legal authority, and the story the Court creates needs to be both persuasive and perceived as factual. The Court is not a body of historians, obligated to write nuanced history. However, the Court's opinions and factual reiterations legitimize those facts and history. Once the Court releases an opinion, the history in it achieves a high level of popular authority.
As the nation faces cultural divides over the meaning of the "Founding," the Constitution, and who owns these meanings, the Court's embrace of originalism is one strand that feeds the divide. The Court's valuing of the original interpretation of the Constitution has reinforced the Founder fetishism also found in popular culture, specifically within the politics of those identified as the Tea Party. As addressed elsewhere, their strict worship of the Founders has historical implications for both women and African Americans, groups both marginalized and viewed as property in the Constitution. No one, however, has written about how the Court's cobbled historical narrative and their veneration for the Founders has affected American Indian tribes. Tribes barely exist in the Constitution, and the Founders "original" understanding of tribes was that they would inevitably disappear.
The "vanishing Indian" stereotype, promulgated in the early Republic, reaching an apex in the 1820's, continues to influence fundamentally how the Court views tribes. Compressing history from the Founding through the Jacksonian era undermines tribal authority and sovereignty within the Court. In its federal Indian law cases, the Court relies on racial stereotypes, and popular conceptions of American history. As a result of these shortcuts, the Court folds all tribes into one large group, empties the American landscape of tribal peoples, and forces tribes into a past where they only exist to disappear.
Download the article from SSRN at the link. 
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