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"She Was Surprised And Furious": Expatriation, Suffrage, Immigration, And The Fragility Of Women's Citizenship, 1907-1940, Felice Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

This article stands at the intersection of women’s history and the history of citizenship, immigration, and naturalization laws. The first part of this article proceeds by examining the general legal status of women under the laws of coverture, in which married women’s legal existence was “covered” by that of their husbands. It then discusses the 1907 Expatriation Act, which resulted in women who were U.S. citizens married to non-U.S. citizens losing their citizenship. The following sections discuss how suffragists challenged the 1907 law in the courts and how passage of the Nineteenth Amendment—and with it a new concept of women’s …

Mezei's Day In Court: Debtors' Prisons, Substance Abuse, And The Permissiveness Of Civil Detention In American Immigration Law, Conor Mcdonough

Northwestern University Law Review

American immigration law mandates the civil detention of certain classes of migrants while their legal cases proceed through the courts. Due to the peculiar nature of immigration law, many migrants find themselves detained for years on end without receiving the level of due process that normally attends imprisonment. This Note draws on historical and comparative analysis to argue that the mandatory detention provisions of American immigration law are not civil, but functionally criminal, and that detained migrants are therefore owed a modicum of due process that they do not currently receive.

This Note traces the history of immigration law in …

Racial Purges, Robert L. Tsai

Michigan Law Review

Review of Beth Lew-Williams' The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.