Legal Mobilization on the Terrain of the State: Creating a Field of Immigrant Rights Lawyering in France and the United States

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 underexamined. 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 fields of power relations within which law reform has been conducted. My analysis links the material and symbolic resources available to law reformers to the relative authority of private and public juridical actors in each state.     

Legality and (dis)membership: removal of citizenship and the creation of ‘virtual immigrants’ in the 1967 Israeli occupied territories

This article seeks to show that liberal law continues to justify and legitimize displacements of minority populations, even in an age of universal human rights. As demonstrated by the Israeli court's 1988 decision legitimating the deportation of Mubarak Awad, citizenship and immigration laws provide juridical justifications for contemporary ethno-national settler projects. In the aftermath of a territorial conflict that defines or redefines the bounds of the state, native minority populations are vulnerable to being legally recast as ‘aliens’ or ‘virtual immigrants’. National conflict may thus be transformed by legal formalism into a question of immigration law, allowing the power relations that produce state sovereignty to slip into the background.