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Professor Margot Pollans delivered the James D. Hopkins Memorial Lecture on Monday, April 21, on "." Dean Horace Anderson appointed Professor Pollans as the James D. Hopkins Professor of Law for the 2023–2025 term. During the holder's term, the James D. Hopkins Professor delivers a lecture that is open to the entire law school community and members of the public.

Professor Pollans opened her lecture outlining the different contexts in which people experience physical inundation such as toxic exposure, gun violence, radiation, and noise. “How well legal regimes responds to this condition is, to me, a really important metric of good governance,” she explained. “Here in the United States, inundation management does not paint a picture of good governance, and it has not for a very long time. Instead, for decades, it has been priming us to become fascists subjects.”

Professor Pollans defined inundation and made the case that it is an essential unit of analysis. She offered a taxonomy of regulatory approaches to inundation, explaining that little current law prevents inundation. Instead, it facilitates individuals who want to protect themselves. And, finally, she explored the consequences of these approaches for both individuals and regulators. Throughout her lecture, Professor Pollans offered specific examples of inundation, many of which translate into our everyday life. She observed that, “[i]nundation includes a broad range of harms, but what they all have in common is that they all flow from the permeability of the human body.”

Professor Pollans concluded her remarks with the following words: “For as long as bodies remain permeable, physical inundation remains a critical unit of analysis for human experience. Permeability creates mutual dependence. Self-shielding serves primarily to drive us further apart. We have only to look at the long-term effects of covid lockdown to see a society-wide experiment with this phenomenon. Resisting fascism will require profound collective action. Shield and cleanup regimes did not cause fascism, but I do think that they have weakened our capacity for collective action. I invite you to prove me wrong.”

Professor Margot Pollans joined Haub Law’s faculty in 2015. She is the Faculty Director of the ̨��SWAGFood Law Center and, during her time at Haub Law, Professor Pollans has been a leader in building the national reputation of the ̨��SWAGFood Law Center. She is currently the Joseph P. D’Alessandro Faculty Scholar and previously, she served as the Shamik and Adrienne Trivedi Faculty Scholar from 2020–2022. She teaches several classes including Agriculture Law and the Environment, Food Systems & the Environment, and Administrative Law.

Professor Pollans is an accomplished scholar whose primary research interests lie in the areas of food and agriculture law, administrative law and social justice. Her academic work has appeared in a variety of journals including in the California Law Review, Michigan Law Review, the Ohio State Law Journal, the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, and the Harvard Environmental Law Review. She is also the co-author of a casebook, Food Law: Cases & Materials. In 2022, she was named the recipient of Haub Law’s distinguished Goettel Prize for Faculty Scholarship for her article, "" published by Michigan Law Review (120 Mich. L. Rev. 643 (2022)).

The title of James D. Hopkins Professor of Law is awarded to a member of the faculty for a two-year term in recognition of outstanding scholarship and teaching. The designation is among the Law School’s most significant faculty honors. The Hopkins Professor is selected by the Dean in consultation with the former holders of the Hopkins Chair. The prior James D. Hopkins Professor of Law for the 2021–2023 term was Professor Noa Ben-Asher.