 Welcome, everyone. My name's Bill Falls. I'm the Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. And I want to welcome you to the first full professor lecture of the spring semester. The College of Arts and Sciences initiated the full professor lecture series in 2007 as a way of providing well-earned recognition for those who have achieved our highest rank, the rank of professor. Today I'm very honored to introduce Kathy Fox, professor in the Department of Sociology. Professor Fox has a very distinguished reputation in sociology, law, society, criminology. She's recognized as one of the most original and creative voices in her field. She's recognized for producing very high quality scholarship and for contributing selflessly in a variety of service areas here at UDM as well as out in the world. She is known also for having very high standards and commitment to excellence in teaching. One of her students observed that one of Professor Fox's best attributes is her energy. It's infectious. She comes to class each and every day with a thirst for teaching and learning. She has the ability to make students look forward to class because each session is unique and exciting. Clearly Professor Fox exemplifies all the best characteristics of a scholar, teacher, and mentor. We're extremely fortunate to have someone of Kathy's reputation, experience and achievement among our faculty. But before we hear Kathy's lecture, I would like to turn the floor over to Professor Dale Jaffe, Chair of the Department of Sociology, who will tell us a little bit about Kathy and her many accomplishments. Thank you, Bill. This is my second opportunity as a department chair to introduce one of my colleagues as a full professor to the University of the Unity. I can already say that probably my favorite responsibility as a department chair. I have loved the discipline of sociology since I was 18 as a first year college student, and I have cherished my vocation as a sociologist ever since. At Vermont, I have been fortunate to live this life for 10 years in the company of 15 others who share my passion for this discipline, its questions, its answers, and its morality. My colleagues are award-winning researchers, teachers, and citizens, and they are also incredibly wonderful and caring people. Consequently, it's difficult to single out one for special attention and accolades. I did not call for a ballot at yesterday's faculty meeting to vote on the most respective or popular colleague in the department. But if I had, and I say this with most if not all of my fellow department members in the audience here today, Dr. Fox would have been a likely winner. Kathie's sociology colleagues know her to be a gifted teacher, productive scholar, and unselfish contributor to the general good. I have plenty of evidence that this reputation extends beyond the department as well. Researchers seeking collaborators, programs with teaching opportunities, and committees recruiting engaged, knowledgeable, and responsible participants have all approached me about Kathie's availability this year. I have decided that under IVB, the university's budget system, I could make a fortune for the sociology department and subcontracting Kathie out to perform work with other units. Of course, we would lose her, and here's the evidence why that plan would never fly. While Kathie was in New Zealand on her full right, my predecessor as chair, Tom Streeter, announced a faculty meeting and said that he would disclose gossip about Kathie at the meeting. The department was a buzz. At the appointed day, time, and place, we all assembled, and my recollection was that attendance was excellent. Tom began a series of announcements and was immediately interrupted in court. What's the gossip about Kathie? Everyone asked. Tom paused and said quietly, Kathie got a tattoo in New Zealand. Yes, a tattoo. Honestly, it felt anticlimactic, but that's not the point. The interest in Kathie's life was so intense that the chair was able to generate attendance at a faculty meeting just with the suggestion of provocative gossip about Kathie. Subcontractors beware. No matter what you offer never let Kathie Fox out of our grip. And by the way, if you received her talk well today, she might answer a few questions about her tattoo. Kathie's career as a sociologist began at the University of Tulsa, where she received her BA in 1985 under the mentorship of Peter and Patricia Adler, well-known and frankly, rather colorful scholars in the sociology of deviant behavior. Surprised but inspired by the adverse suggestion that she go to graduate school in sociology, Kathie moved on to Cal Berkeley, where she earned her master's in 1989 in her doctorate in 1994. Her dissertation in ethnography of an AIDS prevention program for drug users connected her with David Maza, a giant in the field of DVs. She arrived at UVM in the year of her defense, 1994 and has been here ever since. Now it's always a little tricky to characterize the underlying trajectory of a scholarly career, especially one as rich and varied as Kathie's. But I think it's fair to say that Kathie began as an ethnographer of various forms of deviant behavior drawing on social constructionist perspective in sociology. And then moved on to consider the fates of formally labeled and processed rule breakers within the criminal justice system. Years of study of the correctional system and the assumptions of risk that shape the internal life of correctional institutions and the fate of innovative paradigms such as restorative justice are now leading her to ask questions about the culture of risk itself, the focus of her talk today. Kathie Fox's work proves that context is not only critical, it is often the key to revealing how people understand the meaning of their behavior and why they do what they do. She is a skilled qualitative methodologist, a master of extended case study method. More specifically, she uses micro-level observations to reveal macro-level cultural constraints. This has been her signature approach to understanding the institutional conditions that constrain the behavior of the individuals within them. And it is in the tradition of one of her graduate school mentors at Berkeley, Michael Borgoi, a former president of the American Sociological Association. Through this method, she generates theories that are tested and refined as the result of further research in which key elements of her initial case are varied. In today's talk, Kathie takes her enduring interest in risk in the U.S. and asks what happens when one varies the institutional restrictions on risk imposed by the litigious and highly individualistic culture of blame that seems so natural and common sense to Americans and replaces it with a culture that sees different assumptions as equally natural. This work builds on her work in the area of restorative justice where she asks what happens when one assumes that offenders, even highly stigmatized offenders who have committed heinous crimes, are presumed to be deserving of public trust. That is, what are the consequences for the criminal justice system, society, the victims, and the perpetrator of assuming that given the right mix of supports, a serious offender might never recidimate after release. This approach also influences Kathie's teaching. It is infused with a pedagogical content that she wittingly and unwittingly creates. She enters her classroom with a presumption that students will work hard and succeed and that they will be partners with her on a journey to understand important social problems and post-solutions. I say that this context is partly created unwittingly because it is really the result of the generosity of spirit that students and colleagues have come to value. Finally, Kathie's career is a model for those who value linking systematic study with social change and social justice. The final paragraph of a book chapter based on the AIDS study sitting on my bookshelf for her dissertation reads as follows, Leaving the field has enabled me to look less at the horrors or at the various curious features of the scene I studied. As Goulner astutely reminded me that Goulver was a sociologist we were all reading at the time, I didn't want to be guilty of showing off my subjects as a zookeeper would, exploiting them for my own professional gain. Being out of the field and forced to write up what all this means in a sociological way has allowed me the necessary distance to reflect on how the experience has changed me. I still believe in the viability of ethnography as a method. I remain hopeful that academic ethnography can learn from the applied research of the AIDS project. Leaving the field has allowed me to envision my future not as a virtuous outreach worker but as an academic ethnographer who has learned and incorporated the value of extending research toward change. Twenty-five years after those words were published today we can marvel at how Kathy's vision of ethnography for social change has made a difference in the lives of so many. Colleagues, it's my pleasure to introduce my friend and colleague, old professor Kathy Fox. Wow. Thank you. Thanks so much for coming. First, let me say how delighted I am to be here and to be promoted to full professor and to be among my esteemed colleagues and friends. I want to thank my chair, Dale Jaffe, for those nice words and for all of his support, and to my former chair and my dear friend, Tom Streer, who has been my champion for many years. I've had the great fortune at UVM to have had a string of excellent chairs and I want to mention the support of my former ones, Beth Mints and Nick Denigales as well. And my colleagues in sociology are the best and I'm lucky to work among them. And nothing is ever possible in our department without Sally Griggs. My friend Sarah Solnick has provided me with tremendous assistance over the years along with fun diversions and our friends, the Donnellys, have made life more interesting and better for over a dozen years. They even let me win at Parchisi once. Thanks to Inez Berzbieta, who helped me with my slideshow. And my friend Lisa Emerson, who is a Kiwi, talked through many of these ideas with me. And most of all, I want to thank my greatest advocate, my saint of a spouse, Todd Rawlings, who has made many sacrifices over the years for my career goals. And my son, Cal Rawlings, is here too, which means a great deal to me. As Dale said, my career has been devoted to the sociological analysis of social problems, specifically interventions, and even more specifically about social control and the discourses of risk. In other words, how social agents utilize prevailing logics to characterize the nature of risk among problematic populations. The preliminary research I am going to present today is a bit of a departure from this, except that it is still concerned with the topic of risk and with discourse, and those are burgeoning fields in sociology, subfields. I went to New Zealand in 2013 on a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award to study their restorative justice practices with regard to offender reentry, which is the substantive topic that I've been studying for over a decade. While I was there, though, I became riveted by another aspect of Kiwi culture, which prompted an entirely new area of research for me into law and society. A UVM Graduate College REACH grant enabled another research trip to New Zealand in 2014 for a pilot study and the results of which I will share today. So let me begin with a story. Everyone loves a story, and this one captures the essence of my project. So imagine these two situations. In the first instance, a child is at an amusement park and she cuts her leg on a piece of metal. We go searching for a bandage and are greeted by two official-looking park employees who have a proper first aid kit, paperwork, advice, clipboards, documentation that they advised medical attention, along with some free passes to try to placate us. In the other case, the child cuts himself on a piece of metal on a kayaking adventure, and when asked for a bandage, the jovial employees scrounge around and finally find one, and they joke and laugh, saying, you're going to have a good story to go along with that scar. Both of these things happened. One of them occurred in the US and the other in New Zealand. So at first glance, these are pretty striking differences, but they are typical in each country or somewhat typical in each country. But what is the significance? They are representative of the way that things work in each place and reflect the legal and regulatory structures of the two countries, which are reflected in the discourses around safety that I'll talk about. But I want to point out two notable things. First of all, what struck me was the way that each situation made me feel or react. Which was the amusement park with the officious employees. I became more irate and incensed over the incident. It felt like a bigger deal. And in the New Zealand example, the fact that the employees acted as though this was not a big deal, that things like this just happened sometimes, that cooled me out completely. And I felt no impulse to try to lay blame. And I will return to this later. My second point is that these are two very similar countries in many respects. Some people don't know where New Zealand is. It's a little tiny place about the size of Colorado, four million people west of or east of Australia. They are both anglophone countries, former British colonies, democracies, and they both use British common law as their basic legal framework. Yet they developed distinct approaches towards risk, the notion of liability, their approach to litigation and harm. There are many more examples I could give and I'll give you a few. My cover slide, this slide, is a photo of a diving platform built by a municipality to allow people to jump into the bay. It is about eight and a half meters high, which is about 28 feet. And... Posted signs, there are other signs that say like one at a time and things like that. This one jokingly advises that there is no liability or risk in sight. So here is the punchline which if you find as amazing as I did as a US citizen then perhaps this shows our cultural conceit. In the 1970s, New Zealand eliminated tort laws that allow lawsuits in cases of accidents and injuries. No matter who is at fault. There is a truly no-fault system. And what that means is that in New Zealand there is no legal mechanism to sue another person or a school or a doctor for an accident or an injury. And this frankly blew my mind. So this applies to adventure tourism, schools, playgrounds, workplace accidents, automobile accidents, medical malpractice, all those things. And instead they created a government sponsored accident compensation corporation which is called ACC that takes care of injuries regardless of fault. And imagine what effect this has on the everyday discourse around responsibility for harm and the effects on general relationality among people. There are other countries in Europe and Canada that have aspects of a no-fault system and that tolerate risk better than we do in the US. But New Zealand is the most comprehensive and yes they do have trampolines at hotels and holiday parks which is invented there. And moreover, one need not sign a waiver of liability when renting a car or bungee jumping or sending a child off to camp. You don't sign a way you're right to sue because you don't have that right. I was so fascinated by this that I went looking for a book to read up on the subject and discovered that there are none so I have decided to write one myself. Which is one of the great things about this job. If you're interested in something the central questions that animate this project for me are for one thing, why and how did New Zealand develop this approach? In other words, what is it in their culture that would enable this approach? And for another, how do people in New Zealand think about the law and available remedies as a resource and what discourses do they construct to understand notions like risk, rights and responsibility. And finally, what is the relationship between the legal structure, the system, legal culture and the role of the state more generally? But today I'll report on some basic findings I developed after living there for six months and resulting from my research trip last year, during which time I conducted archival research into parliamentary debates from the 60s and 70s and conducted 17 interviews as just a pilot study with personnel from ACC, lawyers, doctors, school principals and ordinary citizens. Through those interviews I discovered certain sensibilities and cultural concepts that are distinct from American ideas that helped shape and sustain and also explain their no-fault approach. And because of the brevity of this talk I will paint with a broad brush, but please assume lots of qualifiers and caveats and that sort of thing throughout. Okay, so the original visionaries who made recommendations to change the tort law around accidents and injuries promoted a few basic concepts as underpinning the push for change. The most important of these is the idea of community responsibility. By most accounts the accident compensation scheme was promoted and adopted because of two fundamental principles outlined in what is called the Woodhouse Report. Number one, that accidents are inevitable and could happen to anyone and we just have to assume this and act on that basis and therefore we all have a responsibility to share the risk and burden for making victims whole. They saw litigation as having unfair outcomes that led to uneven recoveries and that also created unnecessary delays by the fixation on finding fault. What this reflects is a social welfare approach to compensation as entitlement as opposed to an insurance scheme which would be subject to the vagaries of the free market and be rated based on usage and actuarial risk assessment. This sign is an example of the way government treats risk. It says prevent amoebic meningitis which can kill you by the way. So it says don't put your head under the water meaning that there's these geothermal pools that have these amoeba in it and if you put your head under you will die or you can die and this is the kind of thing they put a little smiley face just don't do it right but they don't try to prevent you from engaging in these kinds of activities. And just as a side point this slide is of a sand dune and those are boogie boards and it's called sand boarding and I did this actually in the North Island and it's 460 feet high and you don't have to sign anything kids can do it anybody can do it you can just slide down and people have broken their backs and you know so okay so anyway that's another thing that I found surprising. So in a great book called fairness and freedom by David Hackett Fisher which compares the US and New Zealand he argues that the primary guiding value in the US is freedom and whereas in New Zealand it is fairness. And he attributes this difference to the timing and conditions under which each country broke free from English rule. Those who emigrated to have freedom from tyranny and it was an abrupt and violent split as we know whereas the future Kiwis left because they disliked the status hierarchy and unequal opportunities in England and they had hoped to create a more egalitarian society. The break from English rule was also less antagonistic and this will become important later. The concept of fairness has many interpretations of course. What Americans might consider fair and clearly be considered so by Kiwis. The prospect of litigation over an accident for example might leave one injured party with nothing while another might get a generous settlement. This is what they call a forensic lottery and it would likely be unacceptable to most New Zealanders. And in public opinion polls they very much like their accident compensation scheme. It is a simple process to get compensated for an injury. It applies to everyone even visitors and the payout is fair and formulaic. Let me share with you the results of my interviews about how Kiwis think about risk and harm by introducing a few fundamental ideas in Kiwi lexicon and explain how they fit into their legal consciousness. These are a fair go similar to that as Jack is as good as his master. I'll talk to you about that in a minute. Cotton wooling and she'll be right mate. And I have to thank Kristen and Andrew Sheamus for this picture. This is their son bungee jumping in New Zealand. He was 11 at the time and I don't know if they'd let you do that sort of thing here at 11 but you didn't have to sign a waiver right? No? So the concept of a fair go is an important one and it applies to their approach to risk in the sense that it can mean everyone deserves a fair shot or a go. If you want to develop a bungee jumping business or you want to have a try at a sport they would encourage you to do so and the state should not regulate your desire out of that. For example any over-regulation would make some activities less accessible to ordinary citizens if you had to be certified or trained to do so or have special fancy equipment. Therefore many Kiwis would be against this kind of regulation because it would exclude ordinary citizens. It's an interesting interpretation of rights compared to ours. Theirs is more focused on inclusion and leveling the playing field for everyone but within it is couched to belief that no one is better than anyone else and thus the phrase Jack is as good as his master. So as one of my interviewees explained a norm for Kiwis is quote not sticking your neck out and trying to make yourself more important than anyone else or you're making a fuss. They also have a concept called tall poppy which is if you try to make yourself taller they will cut you down. Another respondent mentioned that if someone is making more of a fuss more of an issue that we generally think it needs to be made of they get told. This applies to litigation as well because people reported to me that to sue someone is to assert that your problems are somehow more important than anyone else's. Another central concept is the idea of cotton wooling. So the expression is you can't wrap children in cotton wool and you'll hear this a lot. It means you can't over protect them that that's undesirable. And as one respondent said to me I think New Zealanders probably have a fairly high risk threshold where they're comfortable. One question that emerges is whether such a system creates a moral hazard in which people take unnecessary risks because of the knowledge of the shared burden. Research shows though that accidents did not increase upon the introduction of their accident compensation scheme. Some respondents attributed the high risk threshold to the fact that New Zealanders value sports, outdoor activities that they live in a landscape that is wild and sometimes dangerous and that historically their main industries were hazardous ones like whaling farming, mining and forestry and they have learned to live with risk. Interestingly a few respondents spoke negatively about the creep of what they call the nanny state which means a paternalistic state. We believe that a paternalistic state would interfere with people's chance at a fair go. At the same time a respondent said we look to the government to provide we're not so frightened of the government providing things as you would be in the states. This reveals I think a sort of tension in what the state's role is or should be according to citizens and I'm still in the process of working out what that tension is about. But the move to increase safety standards which is currently very controversial is unwelcome for the most part because it is viewed as unfair. A fascinating paradox to me is that in the US we purport to dislike government intervention yet we insist on intense safety regulation often through litigation and our regulatory system is according to scholars like Kagan it's highly punitive and adversarial by comparison. Respondents also described their discourse about risk and anxiety quite distinctly what they would think in the US and even in the Woodhouse report which was the basis for the reform they spoke about the benefits of taking risks and that concept came up repeatedly in my interviews. Their hero Edmund Hillary was the first person to climb Everest he is iconic and appears on their currency and he represents the daring that Kiwi's embrace. One Kiwi respondent said to me it's part of growing up is to have broken something and my husband and I actually noticed an unusual number of kids walking around with plaster casts they don't think anything of it as much as we would and compare this to the risk anxiety in the US which is extreme at the other end but Kiwis tend to be somewhat fatalistic and sanguine about dangers and say sometimes things happen even if no one is negligent and I would venture to say that this is because they are not exposed to a system in a system that forces the finding of fault which is often an issue with regard to which insurance company pays. The absence of third party insurance companies likely influences their way of thinking as does access to universal health care. Again this context shapes their legal consciousness and the range of things that they would think about what is legally reasonable. Okay cotton woolen case in point this is on a playground and it's about 25 feet high. There are no signs saying keep off don't climb on this and it's made of rocks and you can climb on it. This is a playground in New Zealand granted these are some of the more extreme ones they also have boring ones that nobody plays on like we do but this is a school playground where first of all you don't have to wear shoes in New Zealand and they're playing with blocks and hammers and a bunch of broken debris and you can do that. You can make bow and arrow you can climb trees and this is from an unusual school that has no rules on the playground and no adults intervening and kids make the rules of play they also have found that bullying went way down because it became so much more interesting and involves much more cooperation. They play with hammers and nails too and broken things and notice how high this climbing structure is I don't know if you can tell the scale but it's pretty high I don't know 20 feet so I want to contrast this to US playgrounds which are designed to reduce risk and possibly fun as well my kids elementary school outlawed running on the playground and the game of tag had to be played and I'm not talking that's in the US and in New Zealand there's a classic game called Bull Rush which is like tag but it involves tackling talk of banning Bull Rush was met with fierce resistance as adults had nostalgic memories of Bull Rush in their childhoods and as one respondent said to me about playgrounds it's just sort of you play on them don't get hurt use your judgment plus anger there's this sort of expectation that you're going to play hard and you might get hurt that doesn't mean that something is somebody's fault and a principal from a school explained to me how he cajole the parent into letting her son go on a school trip to an adventure camp and he said there's flying foxes and mudslides and waterholes and shooting and God knows what fires and in the end his mother decided that he shouldn't go so she didn't want him to go and she was worried about him and he's totally cotton-wold and so she rang up the school and I said fine bring him to school he's going to be in a younger group's class and he'll be doing their work for the week and so she's like oh maybe he should go and so we went and I saw him there and he had a great time so it's just to show you how much more you can probably push the envelope here I mean that was a principal who was trying to persuade the boy to do the dangerous things really hegemonic notion in New Zealand is the idea that she'll be right that everything will be fine and to make a fuss over something like an injury is not appropriate studies show that Kiwis trust their government by and large certainly more than we do here and feel that most people are trustworthy so the adversarial process of litigation is just not standard operating procedure even in cases when it is allowed people repeatedly said to me we don't have a culture of suing litigation is not used as a way to assert rights or for protections where in the United States it is considered one of the most important ways to get industries to behave for example and to ensure safe products as one respondent said about adventure tourism New Zealanders are very they're quite trusting you just trust that there's some safety standards and they also mentioned that they trust business owners or doctors to ensure their safety not because of a fear of litigation or penalties but because they would care about people's safety and about their own reputation and littered throughout New Zealand policy documents is an emphasis on what is called natural justice which means ensuring a kind of fairness that is intent on removing bias and ensuring a level playing field and the debates about tort reform focused on creating equity and outcomes not just processes or procedural justice that is me on a trampoline in New Zealand where I broke my collar bone to wrap up as I always ask my students at the end of an empirical report so what so what New Zealand is its own country with its own unique history that is similar but not identical to other anglophone countries it developed in an idiosyncratic way in a particular time it's not altogether surprising that New Zealand developed its own ideologies but the interesting questions pertain to the ways in which those ideas infuse and reflect the legal structure and the culture moreover the lack of litigation shapes the way that people interact with each other with government and with the law orienting defensively toward another in anticipation of a lawsuit changes the nature of interactions in particular ways for example medical doctors from the US who practice medicine in New Zealand say that they practice much less defensively as they do not have to anticipate any potential lawsuit the significance of this ongoing research I believe is this with regard to rights Kiwis tend to think of them as communal and not individual they would often say with rights comes responsibility a few cultural concepts are bound up in their version of rights an interesting to note is that New Zealand didn't even have a bill of rights until 1990 a few mentioned to me being mystified that in the US everyone would think their individual right to carry a gun should override the public good or for that matter that we would regulate playgrounds heavily but not guns in other words individual rights there are not paramount the legal scholarship about the US suggest that citizens and corporations use the court system to press for their rights in situations when they feel aggrieved and although we are deeply ambivalent about the role of government in the US in fact indeed we demand government regulation with regard to safety so this presents an interesting tension about the relationship between litigation and government regulation in the US as well the literature posits that we litigate in the US because we have weak regulation relatively or rather that the courts are the means by which we secure regulation by that logic then a country that is not litigious should have a more robust regulatory system but that appears to be the case and this is an empirical question though which I plan to pursue more secondly the significance is that in New Zealand they are happy to have the government provide for them because they view citizens and government in a partnership they resent a nanny state which oversteps but not on their individual rights because they don't use that language they expect citizens to have a duty of self regulation in the interest of the greater good community responsibility is part of the discourse so everyone has to be responsible for everybody else sometimes respondents would attribute this to the small size of the country and their sense of relative interdependence compared to the more diversified US and I would argue that is because they have not created an antagonistic culture that emphasizes individual rights against others a sort of winner takes all kind of attitude only in the last 30 years has New Zealand's economy opened up and have they ushered in some neoliberal policies but they still have vestiges of their famous welfare or interventionist state one example is that there are tighter rules on lawyers behavior for example about stirring up cases looking for cases trying to generate money and lobbying is illegal there so there are checks on the influence of money which I think is probably important and our culture of suing which many scholars have argued have been overstated creates a context in which we expect incredible safety standards because we have litigated our way to a risk free society one reason is because New Zealand does not have a constitution such as ours and they don't specifically have a constitution that's designed to decentralize government power what this means is that in the US many issues get resolved through the court system whereas in New Zealand most everything is resolved through legislation the courts are not strong avenues for policy formation Thomas Burke argues that the US constitution is to blame for our litigious culture and other scholars argue that our adversarialism comes from our desire to keep government out of industry to allow the free market to flourish and also from our general mistrust of government intrusion which we see as contradictory to our individual rights New Zealand's founding document the Treaty of Waitangi which has a highly contested history as well provides for sovereignty of the people along with the benefits of citizenship which suggests an understanding of reciprocity between and among government and the governed in a context that is more trusting of government except centralized power embraces a more communal understanding of rights and an ideology of fairness where the power of the courts is diminished citizens are less invested in finding fault or laying blame and can just assume that she'll be right and get on with the business of bungee jumping thank you