Christina Wells speaks freely about political and legal issues, for as Professor of Law at MU, her research falls under the auspices of constitutional law, especially freedom of information and access to government information, both of which relate to the First Amendment. Wells “cut her teeth” as a law professor, so to speak, on matters related to protest law, looking specifically at how the government uses national security rationales to limit freedom of speech, for example by keeping protestors “penned in one area…more than one would think the law would allow.” While her early work focused on protests at medical and abortion clinics, she has recently begun to examine funeral protest laws, not only because both the protests and the laws governing them are bound up in First Amendment issues but also, coincidentally, because the protests that spawned this legislative action took place in Westboro, Kansas, the state in which Wells grew up.

In a recent paper, “Questioning Deference,” Wells brings principles from both psychology and law to examine how people make decisions in times of crisis. She shows, for instance, how fear and prejudice can skew the government’s decision-making, citing the prosecution of anti-war protestors during World War I, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the legal battles against Communists during the Cold War as painful reminders.

The real challenge for Welch is how “to help people see that they too can be the agent of evil.” Given that most of our stories involve “good guys versus bad guys,” those are the cultural scripts we are given. Taking some ideas from Theophus Smith’s Conjuring Culture (1995), Welch argues that “it’s not just a simple divide of oppressor/oppressed.” While clearly there is blatant oppression, sometimes excessive shaming occurs—“the people who have been oppressive need to be shamed, need to be called to account,” yet, “there’s no way all that suffering is going to be redeemed.” When a single event or person becomes a scapegoat for all the suffering groups of people have experienced historically, “it becomes a way of driving a deeper and deeper wedge.” The goal is to find a way of balancing accountability without demonizing the oppressor.