Legal Mobilization and Juridification: Migration as a Central Case

Enacting immigration politics in a juridical register

“…Indeed, what our interpretive analysis reveals is that judicialization may in some contexts be associated with the multiplication of expertise, but even in these circumstances the dynamics of legal contestation are not only cerebral but also affective. This insight is consonant with a tradition of judicialization scholarship that conceptualizes judicial procedures as assemblages of cultural referents available for social and political mobilization (see Sterett 2016;Kawar 2014;Sieder 2013). In carefully tracing these dynamics, our aim is to render observable the full range of actors in each particular field of law-in action as well as the registers of interaction among them (see Scheffer 2010).…”

Introduction to the Research Handbook on Law and Courts

“…Asylum seeking throughout the world in the twenty-first century has placed administrative courts and their caseloads at the heart of public debate. Policing inclusion in the interest of a theoretically described sovereignty that does not accord well with international commitments and joint histories of dominance and subordination has been central to the work of courts (Sterett, 2016). Therefore, this section includes chapters that compare regulating inclusion.…”

“…Authoritarianism has brought with it claims to emergency, a corollary to war in the claim to need to act outside constitutional guarantees (in Turkey: Kingsley, 2017), or dismiss judges (in Poland: Santora, 2017), or claim judges are wrong for deciding asylum seeking cases in the United States (Brennan Center, 2017). In Europe and the United States, regulating belonging has proven to be a central case for controversies over courts' work (Sterett, 2016). Budget cuts or shutting down operations also threaten domestic courts.…”