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Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance

Emily Ryo

Selected Works

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Law

Legal Attitudes Of Immigrant Detainees, Emily Ryo Feb 2017

Legal Attitudes Of Immigrant Detainees, Emily Ryo

Emily Ryo

A substantial body of research shows that people’s legal attitudes can have wide-ranging behavioral consequences.  In this paper, I use original survey data to examine long-term immigrant detainees’ legal attitudes.  I find that the majority of detainees express a felt obligation to obey the law, and do so at a significantly higher rate than other U.S. sample populations.  I also find that the detainees’ perceived obligation to obey U.S. immigration authorities is significantly related to their evaluations of procedural justice, as measured by their assessments of fair treatment while in detention.  This finding remains robust controlling for a variety of …

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On Normative Effects Of Immigration Law.Pdf, Emily Ryo Dec 2016

On Normative Effects Of Immigration Law.Pdf, Emily Ryo

Emily Ryo

Can laws shape and mold our attitudes, values, and social norms, and if so, how do immigration laws affect our attitudes or views toward minority groups?  I explore these questions through a randomized laboratory experiment that examines whether and to what extent short-term exposures to anti-immigration and pro-immigration laws affect people’s implicit and explicit attitudes toward Latinos.  My analysis shows that exposure to an anti-immigration law is associated with increased perceptions among study participants that Latinos are unintelligent and law-breaking.  In contrast, I find no evidence that exposure to pro-immigration laws promoted positive attitudes toward Latinos.  Taken together, these results …

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Moral Judgments, Expressive Functions, And Bias In Immigration Law, Emily Ryo Dec 2015

Moral Judgments, Expressive Functions, And Bias In Immigration Law, Emily Ryo

Emily Ryo

In a lucid and trenchant style characteristic of Professor Hiroshi Motomura’s writing, Immigration Outside the Law offers rich descriptive and prescriptive analyses of three major themes underlying debates about unauthorized migration: the meaning of unlawful presence, state and local involvement in the regulation of unauthorized migration, and the integration of unauthorized migrants into American society. This review advances several ideas that I argue are important to understanding these key themes. In brief, I suggest that a more comprehensive understanding of public debates about unauthorized migration requires examining lay moral judgments about unlawful presence, the expressive functions of immigration law, and …

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Detained: A Study Of Immigration Bond Hearings, Emily Ryo Dec 2015

Detained: A Study Of Immigration Bond Hearings, Emily Ryo

Emily Ryo

Immigration judges make consequential decisions that fundamentally affect the basic life chances of thousands of noncitizens and their family members every year. Yet, we know very little about how immigration judges make their decisions, including decisions about whether to release or detain noncitizens pending the completion of their immigration cases. Using original data on long-term immigrant detainees, I examine for the first time judicial decision-making in immigration bond hearings. I find that there are extremely wide variations in the average bond grant rates and bond amount decisions among judges in the study sample. What are the determinants of these bond …

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Less Enforcement, More Compliance, Emily Ryo Feb 2015

Less Enforcement, More Compliance, Emily Ryo

Emily Ryo

A common assumption underlying the current public discourse and legal treatment of unauthorized immigrants is that unauthorized immigrants are lawless individuals who will break the law—any law—in search of economic gain. This notion persists despite substantial empirical evidence to the contrary. Drawing on original empirical data, this Article examines unauthorized immigrants and their relationship to the law from a novel perspective to make two major contributions. First, I demonstrate that unauthorized immigrants view themselves and their noncompliance with U.S. immigration law in a manner that is strikingly different from the prevalent view of criminality and lawlessness found in popular and …

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