Jacqueline Stevens is a professor in the law and society program at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of Reproducing the State. She analyzes the politics of hereditary groups, including the laws and pseudoscientific narratives that make ethnicity, nation, race, and other intergenerational groups seem natural. She also maintains a blog, States without Nations.
Jacqueline Stevens writes about how laws create hereditary membership groups that seem to be natural. Her most recent book States without Nations: Citizens for Mortals (Columbia University Press) will be available in November, 2009. It considers eliminating four laws responsible for most of the world’s violence and inequality and explores the psychological grounds for their persistence in light of copious evidence that they are irrational and unjust. The four laws are: birthright citizenship, inheritance, marriage, and private ownership of land.
Stevens’ current research is on law-breaking by law enforcement agencies attempting to deport U.S. residents, including U.S. citizens. A unifying theme running throughout her writing is law’s role in constituting the nation, ethnicity, race, family, kinship, and sexuality. These groups inspire passionate attachments causing systemic violence and inequality, seen especially in crises of war, restrictions of movement among states, inheritance, marriage, and private ownership of land. Stevens also writes about the role of government research in constituting taxonomies of race and ethnicity through the research done on the Human Genome Project. She is also working on a book manuscript “The Human Being Project.” Professor Stevens was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Yale University, 1997-1999. Another major research commitment is coordinating the development of an online global politics game through the website www.agoraxchange.net.