Juridicial Occasions for Racial Formation: The Freedmen's Bureau, Labor, and Private Law
Abstract The Reconstruction Era has garnered renewed attention from legal historians and scholars of the critical race tradition. Yet Reconstruction’s central institutional actor, the Freedmen’s Bureau—a federal agency created to aid emancipated...
Landback as Federal Policy
Abstract Demands for the return of land to tribal nations have become much louder and more compelling in recent years. While “landback” has been part of federal policy for nearly a century, lawmakers and presidents from both parties have embraced...
How Does an Immigrant Become an “American”? Exclusion and Assimilation in U.S. Naturalization Law
Ugly fears of unassimilated immigrants have persisted throughout American history, influencing immigration law for centuries. From Chinese exclusion in the late 1800s, to President Trump’s Muslim ban in 2017, to his continued emphasis on securing...
Major Questions in the Plenary Power Domain
Immigration law has been described as a field of constitutional oddity. Under the plenary power doctrine, courts have deferred to government decisions on immigration policy that would plainly violate constitutional rights outside of the immigration...
Privacy and the Impossibility of Borders
This Article argues that a meaningful conception of privacy renders borders illegitimate. For those present in a nation state without legal authorization, pursuit of their basic rights carries the real risk that identifying information collected...