"Workplace Injury, Social Murder, and Law" - Baldy Center Distinguished Speaker Nate Holdren

[Baldy Center]

Event schedule and format subject to change, please check The Baldy Center event website for updates and registration: http://www.buffalo.edu/baldycenter/events/calendar.html

Nate Holdren (Drake University)

"Workplace Injury, Social Murder, and Law"

April 15, 2022—DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
ONLINE ONLY; 12:30pm
Zoom registration here.

Nate Holdren (Drake University)

Abstract: The United States has long been gripped by an economy which injures and kills many people in varying ways and with grim regularity, as have all capitalist societies. In the 1840s Friedrich Engels called this tendency social murder. The COVID-19 pandemic is the latest and most widely noted expression of this tendency. Legal and policy responses to the awful reality of social murder are pulled between a substantive effort to save lives, and a realpolitik aimed primarily at minimizing the consequences such killing has for institutionally powerful actors. Even when the priority of saving lives does prevail, that priority is often forced into compatibility with the imperatives of profit, resulting in people being consigned to poverty and exclusion, which has especially affected disabled people. In this talk Holdren takes his historical scholarship on the origins and immediate aftermath of workers’ compensation laws in the early twentieth century United States as a point of entry to examine these tendencies in capitalism, then turns to current work-in-progress attempting to theorize these tendencies via the intellectual resources offered by the Marxist tradition. He argues that these aspects of capitalist society raise critical questions about how movements for justice should understand the legal system and what the actual relationship is between law and the conditions which make justice possible.

Bio: Nate Holdren received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Minnesota in 2014. Before coming to Drake, he was a Jerome Hall Fellow at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law. He has taught courses at Drake on topics including broad introductions to Law, Politics and Society, socio-legal perspectives on U.S. constitutionalism, law and employment, the role of law in the exclusion of social minorities, law and slavery, and markets in morally charged things. Professor Holdren’s teaching places a heavy emphasis on writing instruction, with a focus on writing as a developmental process that requires a lot of practice. He enjoys working with newer writers and has taught repeatedly in the First Year Seminar program. He especially enjoys working with first generation college students, having been first gen himself. Holdren also co-facilitates a writing group for Drake faculty.