The Erasure of American Empire: The Cold War and the “Boomerang” of Empire

Описание: This is the last of three lectures in the 2025 Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture in Representative Government series "Colonial Administration: Empire, Civilization, and the Making of Political Science" presented by award-winning NYU School of Law professor Maggie Blackhawk.

Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe) traces the formation of the modern discipline of political science with empire at its foundation - particularly, the field of "colonial administration” - and examine how this aspect of the discipline was obscured during the mid-twentieth century. She will argue that this erasure, echoing a similar omission in constitutional law and theory, has critically weakened political science's capacity to recognize, theorize, and address the enduring "boomerang effects" of empire within the contemporary United States.

Blackwawk teaches federal Indian law, constitutional law, and legislation at NYU School of Law. Much of her scholarship explores the relationship between law and power, with an emphasis on ways subordinated peoples leverage law to shift power to their communities – especially outside of rights and courts-based framework. Her recent projects focus on the laws and legal histories of American colonialism and the central role of the American colonial project, including the resistance and advocacy of Native and other colonized peoples, in shaping the constitutional law and history of the United States.

Blackhawk was awarded the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize and her research has been published or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Supreme Court Review, American Historical Review, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, and Journal of Politics.

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