Name:

Dr. Marc-Tizoc González

Title:

Professor of Law

Department:

Describe your research in about 200 words.

Affiliated with Latina & Latino Critical Legal (LatCrit) Theory, Professor González studies how constitutional jurisprudence, civil rights statutes, and property law affect people who are hungry, impoverished, or otherwise socially marginalized, as well as how lawyers, especially those with racialized ethnic identities, work to promote social justice. For example, he argues to view “food justice as interracial justice” with a focus on the jurisprudential and social implications of the “food-sharing cases,” challenges to municipal laws that criminalize people who publicly share food with homeless and other hungry people at city-owned properties like parks or sidewalks. He also writes “critical ethnic legal histories,” narrating forgotten pasts wherein racialized workers cultivated interracial solidarity to advance an emancipatory vision of social justice. Finally, he has begun to write about the post-dictatorship Latin American jurisprudence of habeas data, a third-generation international human right to information, which can provide a legal check against “big data” and ubiquitous electronic surveillance.

What’s the most interesting thing you have learned from a student?

Students have honored me repeatedly by sharing about their personal struggles, including, inter alia, fears about coming out of the closet to their family of origin; worries over their, or a family member’s, undocumented status; understanding the results of testing that established their learning differences; and similarly significant and identity-shaping experiences. Hence, my students have taught me many “interesting things” over the dozen-or-so years during which I’ve taught in higher education.