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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Legal Mobilization On The Terrain Of The State: Immigrant Rights Practice In Two National Legal Fields, Leila Kawar Apr 2011

Legal Mobilization On The Terrain Of The State: Immigrant Rights Practice In Two National Legal Fields, Leila Kawar

Political Science Faculty Publications

Scholarship on law and social movements has focused attention primarily on the United States, and secondarily on countries that share the Anglo-American legal tradition. The politics of law and social movements in other national legal contexts remains under-examined. The analysis in this article contrasts legal mobilizations for immigrant rights in France and the United States and explores the relations between national fields of power and legal practices. I trace the institutionalization of immigrant rights legal organizations in each country, and argue that the divergent organizational forms and litigation strategies adopted by “professionalized” movement organizations reflect the dynamics of the nationally-distinct …


Finding A Place For Marginal Migrants In The International Human Rights System, Leila Kawar Jan 2011

Finding A Place For Marginal Migrants In The International Human Rights System, Leila Kawar

Political Science Faculty Publications

This article examines how international human rights law is shaping the politics of immigration. It argues that migrant human rights are neither conceptually nor practically incompatible with an international order premised upon state territorial sovereignty, and that the specific aesthetics of the contemporary international human rights system, namely its formalistic and legalistic tendencies, has facilitated its integration with a realm of policymaking traditionally reserved to state discretion. An exploration of two areas in the emerging field of migrant human rights traces the multi-scalar transnational legal processes through which these norms are formulated and internalized.