Chinese women and children, or their advocates, brought many legal challenges to decrees denying them entry into the United States or seeking to deport them. Relying on more than 150 reported habeas corpus cases decided in West Coast federal courts between 1875 and 1924, we examine how courts helped to structure the rise of the administrative state through controversies involving the boundaries of citizenship, legal residency, and familial status. Cases involving those particularly vulnerable individuals whose statuses were conditioned upon their familial bonds helped to shape the meaning and scope of civic membership. Amid political conflict within institutions of the American state and increasing pressure to curtail immigration, the courts gradually ceded primary decision-making authority to administrative agents, legalizing the administrative state. However, courts continued to supervise what kinds of decisions administrators could make, what kinds of procedures administrators had to use, and what kinds of evidence had to be considered in order to render legitimate the exercise of administrative discretion. Chinese women and children seeking recognition of their citizenship or permanent residency posed what were perceived as moral and civic dangers to the family and the state. This rendered their direct rights claims less enforceable as administrators' authority to determine status expanded.In this article, we will argue that controversies about whether Chinese women and children were entitled to citizenship or residence in the United States during the We thank Zoeth Flegenheimer '15 and Allison Hrabar '16 (Swarthmore College), and Heather Bennett (doctoral candidate, University at Albany, SUNY) for research assistance. Amy Rappole, a student at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, helped collect and classify some of our case law material. Two anonymous reviewers provided excellent suggestions on a previous draft of this article. late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries highlighted struggles between courts and emerging institutions of the administrative state. These struggles concerned who had access to courts, which institutions would make status determinations, and who had the right to have rights that courts might acknowledge. Studying these struggles shows how contested meanings and disputes over family and civic membership contributed to state-building.Our story hews somewhat to the familiar Progressive Era narrative of the administrative state wresting power from the courts: Congress passed increasingly restrictive immigration legislation, and federal administrative agencies gained increasing authority and discretion to make decisions about which Chinese immigrants and denizens could enter or remain and who would be excluded or deported. However, we emphasize here the courts' agency in this process and illustrate the ways in which dilemmas over the determination of status encouraged the development and legitimation of administrative apparatuses. 1 Our review of cases from the...

By supporting new course development and by encouraging cross-disciplinary conversations and collaborations, liberal arts colleges can often help political scientists expand their capacities beyond narrow disciplinary "silos," with benefits for faculty and students alike. At the same time, it is important to teach political science students what our own discipline has to offer, to help students understand our discipline's strengths, and to borrow when confronted with moments when explanatory frameworks of the discipline fail. Liberal arts departments begin the training of many future Ph.D.s; however, our job is not only to equip students to do further work within the discipline but also to use its tools to become engaged and astute democratic citizens who can analyze, interpret, and evaluate policies and political developments around them. Polity (2014) 46, 98-106.

This article aims to illuminate how non-state actors participate in forging public institutions and in establishing public agendas. It also sets out to identify novel mechanisms of state building. It does so by examining the historical experience of the Immigrants' Protective League (IPL) from its founding in 1908 through 1924. The history of the IPL highlights the role of organized, networked women in generating new boundary stories and doing boundary work; in conducting research and enhancing legibility; in incubating new policy experiments; and in moving the national, state, and local governments to take up new tasks in the progressive era. Focusing on women's activism in this period, and efforts to link immigrants to categories of the vulnerable, reveals that porous boundaries, hybrid power-sharing arrangements, and public-private collaborations may be more typical in forging new American institutions and public agendas than is generally recognized—and insufficiently captured by a narrative of a weak state borrowing temporary capacity from private actors.

No abstract

No abstract