This article analyzes how Central American immigrants in tenuous legal statuses experience current immigration laws. Based on ethnographic observations and over 200 interviews conducted between 1998 and 2009 with immigrants in Los Angeles and Phoenix and individuals in sending communities, this study reveals how the convergence and implementation of immigration and criminal law constitute forms of violence. Drawing on theories of structural and symbolic violence, the authors use the analytic category “legal violence” to capture the normalized but cumulatively injurious effects of the law. The analysis focuses on three central and interrelated areas of immigrants’ lives—work, family, and schooling—to expose how the criminalization of immigrants at the federal, state, and local levels is not only exclusionary but also generates violent effects for individual immigrants and their families, affecting everyday lives and long-term incorporation processes.

/pdf/legal-violence-immigration-law-and-the-lives-of-central-2tpcdaivdt.pdf

Legal violence: immigration law and the lives of Central American immigrants

Physical violence, whether realized or implied, is important to the legitimation, foundation, and operation of a Western property regime. Certain spatializations—notably those of the frontier, the survey, and the grid—play a practical and ideological role at all these moments. Both property and space, I argue, are reproduced through various enactments. While those enactments can be symbolic, they must also be acknowledged as practical, material, and corporeal.

https://people.uwec.edu/ivogeler/w270/property-violence.pdf

Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid

Liberalism has difficulty with the fact of state borders. Liberals are, on the one hand, committed to moral equality, so that the simple fact of humanity is sufficient to motivate a demand for equal concern and respect. Liberal principles, on the other hand, are traditionally applied only within the context of the territorial state, which seems to place an arbitrary limit on the range within which liberal guarantees will apply. This difficulty is particularly stark in the context of distributive justice; state boundaries, after all, often divide not simply one jurisdiction from another, but the rich from the poor as well. Allowing these boundaries to determine distributive shares seems to place an almost feudal notion of birthright privilege back into the heart of liberal theory. This difficulty has led many philosophers to argue that some revision of liberal theory is necessary. These proposals frequently involve either the demand that liberalism focus on previously neglected particularistic commitments, or the demand that it abandon such local concerns and endorse a cosmopolitan vision of distributive justice. What I want to do in this article is identify a different way in which liberalism might deal with the worries created by the fact of state borders. My argument is that a globally impartial liberal theory is not in-

Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy

1. Introduction Tom Ginsburg and Tamir Moustafa 2. Of judges and generals: security courts under authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile Anthony Pereira 3. Administrative law and judicial control of agents in authoritarian regimes Tom Ginsburg 4. Singapore: the exception that proves rules matter Gordon Silverstein 5. Judicial independence in authoritarian regimes: insights from Chile Lisa Hilbink 6. Law and resistance in authoritarian states: the Egyptian case Tamir Moustafa and Simon Fraser 7. Courts out of context: the authoritarian sources of judicial failure in Chile (1973-90) and Argentina (1976-83) Robert Barros 8. An authoritarian enclave? The supreme court in Mexico's emerging democracy Beatriz Magaloni 9. The institutional diffusion of courts in China: evidence from survey data Pierre Landry 10. Building judicial independence in semi-democracies: Uganda and Tanzania Jennifer Widner 11. Judicial power in authoritarian states: the Russian experience Peter Solomon 12. Courts in a semi-democratic/authoritarian regime: the judicialization of Turkish and Iranian politics Hootan Shambayati 13. Judicial systems and economic development Hilton Root and Karen May 14. Courts in authoritarian regimes Martin Shapiro.

/pdf/rule-by-law-the-politics-of-courts-in-authoritarian-regimes-1e57lh5yqj.pdf

Rule by law : the politics of courts in authoritarian regimes

THE AMERICAN PRESENT IS AT ODDS with representations of the American past. The American present witnesses the steady aggrandizement of executive, administrative, emergency, penal, military, and war powers as contemporary commentators such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Giorgio Agamben contemplate the contours of American hegemony and superpower in a new era of empire.1 The global impact of present American politics, political economy, and foreign policy is obvious to any casual observer of current affairs. The story of the American past, on the other hand, continues to be told in narratives that seem to be heading off somewhere else. In place of the growth of power, the history that America most frequently tells itself highlights a story of relative powerlessness-a usually benign tale of legal-political self-abnegation, emphasizing constitutional restraints such as federalism, checks and balances, the separation of powers, limited government, the rule of law, and laissezfaire. When presented more positively, American history is usually framed as a quest for freedom-the struggle for political liberty, emancipation from bondage, the rise of civil, economic, and social rights. Property, contract, and freedom of speech, press, and association form the constitutional backbone of a free market, a vigorous civil society, and a democratic polity-hallmarks of a free people. Oddly, key elements of this tale are kept alive in both older political histories of the liberal tradition in America and newer histories highlighting the rights and agency of particular cultural communities. Coming to terms with the historical rise of the mechanisms of legal, political, economic, corporate, and technological power that currently shape so much of the globe is thus a more difficult task than it should be. A true philosophical and political history of the American present continues to elude historians.2

/pdf/the-myth-of-the-weak-american-state-25lhwsy4gp.pdf

The Myth of the “Weak” American State

Legal interpretation' takes place in a field of pain and death. This is true in several senses. Legal interpretive acts signal and occasion the imposition of violence upon others: A judge articulates her understanding of a text, and as a result, somebody loses his freedom, his property, his children, even his life. Interpretations in law also constitute justifications for violence which has already occurred or which is about to occur. When interpreters have finished their work, they frequently leave behind victims whose lives have been torn apart by these organized, social practices of violence. Neither legal interpretation nor the violence it occasions may be properly understood apart from one another. This much is obvious, though the growing literature that argues for the centrality of interpretive practices in law blithely ignores it.2

/pdf/violence-and-the-word-563nhxfl4c.pdf

Violence and the Word

The Supreme Court, 1982 Term

/pdf/the-supreme-court-1982-term-foreword-nomos-and-narrative-1j5zihelp0.pdf

The Supreme Court, 1982 Term -- Foreword: Nomos and Narrative

"Bob Cover was and remains the dominant voice of his generation among legal scholars. These essays, each one magnificent in itself, are, when taken together, even more important. The wisdom they impart is forever." --Guido Calabresi, Dean and Sterling Professor of Law, Yale University"Robert Cover drew his sources for the authority of law--for its violence, but also for its paideic potential--from the structuring stories that spark our communal imaginations. Literally until the day of his untimely death, his irreplaceably restless spirit was binding itself with the pages of the Midrash, of "The Brothers Karamazov, " of "Billy Budd, Sailor." It is for us now to work also with these--Bob Cover's stories."--Richard Weisberg, Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University"The writings of Robert Cover were usually provocative, sometimes exasperating, but always relevant. In his last years, he concentrated on Jewish sources as well as mystical and Messianic thought. This collection of his articles is a thesaurus of some of his finest writings."--Robert F. Drinan, S.J., Georgetown University Law CenterThe late Robert Cover was Professor of Law, Yale Law School. Martha Minow is Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. Michael Ryan is Professor of English, Northeastern University. Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science and Chair of the Program in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College.

Narrative, violence, and the law : the essays of Robert Cover

What should a judge do when he must hand down a ruling based on a law that he considers unjust or oppressive? This question is examined through a series of problems concerning unjust law that arose with respect to slavery in nineteenth-century America. "Cover's book is splendid in many ways. His legal history and legal philosophy are both first class...This is, for a change, an interdisciplinary work that is a credit to both disciplines."-Ronald Dworkin, Times Literary Supplement "Scholars should be grateful to Cover for his often brilliant illumination of tensions created in judges by changing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century jurisprudential attitudes and legal standards...An exciting adventure in interdisciplinary history."-Harold M. Hyman, American Historical Review "A most articulate, sophisticated, and learned defense of legal formalism...Deserves and needs to be widely read."-Don Roper, Journal of American History "An excellent illustration of the way in which a burning moral issue relates to the American judicial process. The book thus has both historical value and a very immediate importance."-Edwards A. Stettner, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science "A really fine book, an important contribution to law and to history."-Louis H. Pollak

Robert M. Cover

Papers

Violence and the Word

The Supreme Court, 1982 Term

The Supreme Court, 1982 Term -- Foreword: Nomos and Narrative

Narrative, violence, and the law : the essays of Robert Cover

Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process