Filtering by
- All Subjects: race
- Creators: School of Social and Behavioral Sciences
- Creators: Fox, Cora
- Creators: Thompson, Ayanna
Even though criminal justice outcomes frequently receive more media, public, and research attention than civil legal outcomes, civil legal outcomes are equally important in ensuring fairness, accountability, and justice for both individuals and society as a whole. This provides individuals an avenue to pursue justice and restitution for civil wrongs, protects civil rights, and compensates those who have been harmed financially. This study examined the relationship between regional implicit racial bias and racial disparities in outcomes of real-world civil trials. In particular, I explored whether the racial composition of the attorneys on the defense teams or race of the plaintiff predicted plaintiff verdicts and greater damage awards. I hypothesized that all-White defense attorney teams and plaintiffs would win their cases at higher rates and would subsequently be awarded more in damages than their non-White counterparts, especially in regions reporting high levels of implicit racial bias. Using real-world civil trials and Project Implicit Race IAT data, I conducted logistic and linear regression analyses to test the effects of race and regional bias on trial outcomes. The results showed that the likelihood of a pro-plaintiff verdict increased when the defense team included at least one non-White attorney. That is, more racially diverse defense teams won their cases less then all-White defense teams. Additionally, I found that the likelihood of a pro-plaintiff verdict decreased in regions reporting relatively higher levels of regional implicit racial bias. Future research aimed at understanding and reducing disparities and bias in the legal system should be extended to include civil trials and both attorney and client demographics.
Much of this rhetorical use of typology generated accessible associations of Catholics with both biblical villains and with officials who persecuted and executed Protestants during the reign of Mary I. These associations created a typological network that reinforced the notion of English Protestants as an elect people, while at the same time exploring Protestant religio-political anxiety in the wake of various Catholic plots. Each chapter explores texts published in moments of Catholic “crisis” wherein typology and trauma form a recursive loop by which the parameters of the threat can be understood. The first chapter examines John Stubbs’s Discovery of a Gaping Gulf (1579) and his views of Protestant female monarchy and a sexualized Catholic threat in response to Elizabeth I’s proposed marriage to the French Catholic Duke of Anjou. The second chapter surveys popular and state responses to the first Jesuit mission to England in 1580. The final chapters consider the place of typology and trauma in works by mercantilist Thomas Milles in response to recusant equivocation following the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 and in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624) as a response to the failure of marriage negotiations between the Protestant Prince Charles and the Catholic Spanish Infanta.
What remains underexplored, however, is the reality that "life" and "the human" are deeply relational categories that should not be reduced to such material instances alone. Historically, and especially in the early modern period, "life" and "the human" are understood as interconnected and widely networked. Although such materialism indeed becomes solidified in the seventeenth-century, I seek to recuperate an ethical challenge to contemporary biopolitical materialism through an extended dialogue with early modern thinkers. By turning to works "in the Age of Shakespeare" I return attention to the originary epoch of what has been described as our "modern event horizon." I argue that within the very historical period that gives rise to the practice of biopolitical materialism exists a rich textual archive of resistance to this troubling phenomenon in the form of neighborly concern and the acknowledgement of shared creaturely estate.
Chapter One inaugurates my argument by turning to Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, reading as its central theme the tragic effect inherent to dissociating the individual from the community. The remaining three chapters attend to neighborly forms given expression in three of Shakespeare's late plays: Chapter Two considers the potential political orientation of grace in Measure for Measure; Chapter Three positions neighborliness as a series of posthuman encounters in The Winter's Tale; and Chapter Four explores an early modern understanding of hospitality as stewardship at work in Timon of Athens. I conclude by turning to philosophy and political theology in order to suggest a way to think "life" as an ethical relation with, in, and through "the Age of Shakespeare."