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Anna Law
Associate Professor Political Science, Herb Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights, CUNY Brooklyn College
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Anna Law
Associate Professor Political Science, Herb Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights, CUNY Brooklyn College
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AREAS OF TEACHING
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
BIO
Anna Law is a specialist in public law and legal institutions (including U.S. constitutional law and immigration law, federal courts, immigration courts) and U.S. immigration policy history. I favor historical institutionalism as an analytical approach, meaning that my research is temporally sensitive. I believe that often why something happened is explained best by when it happened—and what else was happening at the same time in the rest of U.S. history. My first book, The Immigration Battle in American Courts, was both empirical and historical. I traced the role of the federal appellate courts in U.S. immigration policy across federal court history. My second book is on the effect of slavery on US migration policy from the colonial period to 1882.
EXTENDED PROFILE
Anna Law holds the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights. Her publications appear in both social science and law journals and investigate the interaction between law, legal institutions and politics. Her first book, The Immigration Battle in American Courts (Cambridge University Press 2010), examined the role of the federal judiciary in U.S. immigration policy, and the institutional evolution of the Supreme Court and U.S. Courts of Appeals. Law is a former program analyst at the bipartisan, blue-ribbon United States Commission on Immigration Reform. She has shared her expertise with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Department of Homeland Security and National Science Foundation. In 2007, she appeared as a recurring narrator with other academic experts and two Supreme Court justices in the PBS award winning documentary. Her current projects include a second book on immigration federalism and slavery, and an National Science Foundation funded research with Karen Musalo (UC Hastings Law) on contemporary gender-based asylum decisions in the immigration courts.
RESEARCH
Book
The Immigration Battle in American Courts, Cambridge University Press (Hardcover 2010, Paperback 2014)
The book examines the role of the Supreme Court and U.S. Courts of Appeals in immigration policy making in the United States, while also advancing scholarly understanding about the differing functions of the two-highest federal appellate courts over time. The major premise of the study is that because the Supreme Court and the U.S. Courts of Appeals operate in decidedly different institutional settings, these two courts decide immigration cases in dissimilar ways and that the varying approaches have implications for the immigrant litigants.
Articles and Chapters
With Daniel J. Tichenor. “Race and Ethnicity and American Immigration Policy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Racial and Ethnic Politics in the United States (eds. David Leal, Taeku Lee, and Mark Sawyer). Oxford University Press. (January 2019).
“The Historical Amnesia of American Immigration Federalism.” Polity, 47 (2): 302–19 (July 2015).
“Lunatics, Idiots, Paupers, and Negro Seamen: Immigration Federalism and the Early American State.” Studies in American Political Development 28(2): 107–128 (October 2014).
With Margaret Williams. “Understanding Judicial Decision Making in Immigration at the U.S. Courts of Appeals.” The Justice System Journal Vol. 33 (1): 97–119 (2012).
“How the Internal Adjudicative Procedures of the Ninth Circuit Can Disadvantage Pro Se and Political Asylum Claimants.” 25 Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 647–679 (Spring 2011).
“The Diversity Immigration Lottery—A Cycle of Unintended Consequences.” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol 21(4): 3–29, Summer 2002.
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