Prof. Matthew Dimick named new director of The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy

Dimick joined the UB Law faculty in 2011. He has a PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as a JD from Cornell Law School. Before coming to Buffalo, he was a Law Research Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center.

“Matt is well regarded by local and national media as a faculty expert in the area of law and economics and is often asked to provide commentary on issues including economic inequality, tax and welfare policy, and employment and labor law,” Dean S. Todd Brown said in making the appointment. “I am very pleased he has agreed to serve in this important position.”

UB Law Links asked the new director about his work and his vision for this law school mainstay.

Congratulations on your appointment as director of The Baldy Center. Tell us how you hope to move the center’s mission forward?

The Baldy Center is an endowed academic center for interdisciplinary research on law and legal institutions. Its mission is to advance interdisciplinary research on law, legal institutions and social policy. We bring in scholars and speakers from around the country, and the world, to present their research and get feedback from our smart and talented faculty and students. The Baldy Center provides funding for research grants and for hosting conferences, and we provide financial support for early, midcareer and senior scholars so they can develop both their research and careers. Among many other things!

It’s an impressive range of programming.  To me, The Baldy Center is one of the best things about being a faculty member at UB School of Law. I want to build on what we do to make sure the center and UB get recognition for this amazing work. We’ve supported outstanding scholarship and have hosted some phenomenal guests, and I’m afraid too often those things fly under the radar.

One strength of The Baldy Center is its attractiveness to visiting scholars from all over the world. How do you see their work intersecting with that of UB Law’s faculty?

It’s a commonplace that the world is more interconnected than ever. And yet those interconnections are under incredible strain. Issues like world trade, immigration and nationalism are front and center. The Baldy Center recently held a conference, hosted by faculty member Jorge Fabra-Zamora, on transnational legal and political theory, which addressed topics like indigenous and customary law, international law, international and regional human rights law. So these are topics of direct concern to the center.

At the same time, the local can often illuminate the global, and vice versa. For example, one of our long-serving faculty members, Jack Schlegel, recently completed a book about the history of the Buffalo economy. It’s a topic near and dear to us as Buffalonians, but the book also impressively illuminates universal concerns about law, economic development and urban space. We have many other faculty members who are intensively involved with local issues that nevertheless speak to worldwide needs. The Baldy Center helps support that work, and it provides a model for what the center can strive to build on: locally rooted but globally conscious.

 You have a doctorate in sociology in addition to a law degree. How does having the tools and perspective of social science help you address issues in the law?

Certainly, one of the most important roles of the law school and legal education is training the next generation of lawyers. But we’d be failing in our mission—especially here at the state’s only public law school—if we didn’t recognize our obligation to the larger public. We want to teach our students how to be zealous advocates for their clients, but legal scholars also want to know if the law is actually working for everyone in society. Is the law helping society be more equitable and prosperous? Is it helping everyone reach their individual potential?

 The social sciences—sociology, political science, economics and anthropology, but also philosophy and the humanities—provide the tools to help legal scholars study those questions, sometimes in a critical but also constructive way. And The Baldy Center helps bring people together from across these diverse scholarly backgrounds to engage, debate and discuss solutions to social problems and whether the law can—or can’t—help address them.

 In addition to legal journals, you’ve published in popular outlets like Vox and The Atlantic. Why is it important to you to reach those wider audiences?

Popular outlets are concerned with the most topical questions of the day, and it is incumbent upon legal scholars to explain how their research answers those questions. There’s unfortunately a wide divide—larger, perhaps, than I’ve seen it before—between academia and the public at large. Sometimes, I admit, I wish the public would work a little harder to peek behind the sound bites and shock-value headlines to understand the value scholars see in their own work. But, to be sure, scholars don’t always make it simple for the public to do that. Sometimes it’s easier for scholars to get absorbed only in what other members of their discipline are doing or saying, especially when the world doesn’t seem to be listening. My hope is that explaining and providing context for your research in popular outlets helps to close that divide.

 Your research interests center around the intersection of economics and law. Is that an area you’d like to see more Baldy Center scholars work in?

Absolutely! Both in the more traditional sense, with The Baldy Center and associated scholars engaging with economists from economics departments, but also in other ways as well. New scholarly avenues have opened up just in the past decade that seek to look at the economy from alternative perspectives. One of these goes under the name of Law and Political Economy. Economists often take the economy as simply given, starting with individuals, their preferences and technology, and then ask which legal rules would serve predefined economic goals, like efficiency. Scholars in Law and Political Economy want to flip the script, so to speak. They point out, “Hey, we wouldn’t even have an economy without the law!”

Property, contract, corporate law, intellectual property and so forth, all provide the essential legal infrastructure needed for the economy to function. These scholars ask how the law shapes and constitutes the economy, rather than the other way around. Some of our current and former faculty members here at UB—Athena Mutua and Martha McCluskey, among others—were crucial in founding these efforts, and in keeping the flame alive before these perspectives became more popular.

I want to stress, too, that while some of these competing perspectives are debates about advancing knowledge and truth—who has the “right” answers about how the economy works?—economics and Law and Political Economy can work together, too. Different problems require different tools. Too often, when you have a hammer, everything becomes a nail. But that’s not how the world works.