Law Commons^™

Defining American: The Dream Act, Immigration Reform And Citizenship, Elizabeth Keyes

All Faculty Scholarship

The grassroots movement propelling the DREAM Act and immigration reform forward reveals how the definition of citizenship is undergoing a dramatic transformation, in ways both inspiring and troubling. The DREAM movement depends upon the compelling but exceptional stories of passionate, high-achieving, law-abiding youth who already define themselves as being American, and worthy of legal status. Situating this narrative in the rich literature of citizenship, the article shows how the DREAM movement effectively exposes the disjuncture between the DREAMers' identity as Americans and their lack of legal immigration status. The article celebrates how this narrative succeeds as a contrast to the …

From Citizenship To Custody: Unwed Fathers Abroad And At Home, Albertina Antognini

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The sex-based distinctions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) have been remarkably resilient in the face of numerous equal protection challenges. In Miller v. Albright, Nguyen v. INS, and most recently United States v. Flores-Villar — collectively the "citizenship transmission cases" — the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the INA’s provisions that require unwed fathers, but not unwed mothers, to take a series of affirmative steps in order to transmit citizenship to their children born abroad.

The conventional account of these citizenship transmission cases is that the Court upholds sex-based distinctions that would otherwise fail …

Understanding Immigration: Satisfying Padilla's New Definition Of Competence In Legal Representation, Yolanda Vazquez

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Panel Discussion on Padilla v. Kentucky.

Your View: The Stateless State Of Caribbean Residents, Irene Scharf

Faculty Publications

On the Caribbean island of Hispanola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, grave human rights concerns affecting those of Haitian descent living in the Dominican Republic have recently erupted. Over the years, thousands of Haitians have come to the Dominican Republic to work the farms there and provide cheap construction and other manual labor. Recently, with the economic and natural disasters that have befallen Haiti, more Haitians have been arriving in the Dominican Republic. Many have put down roots and are raising families. Today, an estimated 200,000 people born in the Dominican Republic have parents who were born in …

Citizen Spouse, Kerry Abrams

Faculty Scholarship

Marriage and citizenship have a complicated relationship to one another. Marriage is often the primary way in which a person can exercise and demonstrate his or her identity under law, by claiming legal benefits and by performing legal obligations. This Essay examines the history of one particularly salient example of marriage-as-citizenship — the derivative domicile rule — and uses this history to consider how the relationship between marriage and citizenship has changed and developed over time. The derivative domicile rule linked a woman’s domicile, and her state citizenship along with all the rights and obligations it carried, with her husband’s …

Overcoming Coloniality: The Potential Of South-South Dialogue About Citizenship, Participatory Democracy, And Development Between Brazil And India, Bernd Reiter

Government and International Affairs Faculty Publications

This chapter argues that North-South dialogue is heavily influenced by the colonial past and burdened by extreme power inequalities. Former colonizing nations control many of the agendas of such dialogue, exposing it to the risks of paternalism, post-colonialism, and tutelage. As a result, coloniality is a condition difficult to escape in north-south dialogue. South-south dialogue, on the other hand, is less implicated by this burden, thus offering a platform for a potentially free - and freeing – critical interchange of ideas and empirical examples that reflect subaltern experiences and provide opportunities for mutual learning. One area where this dialogue is …