Immigration Law Teachers Workshop

November 16, 2005

Here is the invitation from the organizers of the 2006 Immigration Law Teachers Workshop. Be there or be square!!

We are writing to tell you about plans for the seventh biennial Immigration Law Teachers Workshop, which (as previously announced on the Immprof listserv) will take place on May 4-6 at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, William S. Boyd School of Law.

Professor David Thronson of the UNLV law faculty is serving as logistics coordinator for the workshop. The other members of the planning committee are Linda Bosniak as chair, Leti Volpp and Hiroshi Motomura on the scholarship panels, and Margaret Taylor on the teaching panels.

Preliminary Logistics

The conference begins with a dinner on Thursday evening, May 4, at 7:00 p.m., and concludes after lunch on Saturday May 6. Program events will be held at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, William S. Boyd School of Law.

We have blocked a group of rooms for our group at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, a hotel on “the Strip” that UNLV routinely uses for conferences. Available rates are $149 for Thursday night, and $189 for Friday and Saturday. You may, of course, look around for better rates, but the Law School tells us that these are quite low in this market. You might also consider sharing a room with a fellow conference attendee to limit costs.

To book a room at the Luxor, call 1-800-288-1000, identify yourself as a participant in the Immigration Law Teachers Workshop and provide group code TIMM6. The Luxor will hold this block of rooms until April 4, 2006. Transportation will be provided daily from the Luxor to the law school and back.

The conference registration fee will be $150. This covers administrative expenses, continental breakfasts and box lunches for both Friday and Saturday, and dinner on Friday evening. For Thursday night’s dinner, you will need to pay your own way.

Basic format

The workshop will consist of the following sessions: four plenary scholarship panels, one plenary teaching panel, and several smaller break-out sessions devoted to scholarly works in progress and topical teaching issues.

Four plenary scholarship sessions. Each of these sessions will focus on an important issue or recent development that prompts fundamental rethinking of scholarship in our field. The subject areas are Citizenship, Culture and Immigration Law, Administrative Law, Federalism and Delegation, and International/Domestic Refugee Law. We are using these panels as an opportunity to include scholars from disciplines other than law whose work has some bearing on immigration and citizenship, legal academics whose scholarly centers of gravity are not necessarily in immigration and citizenship, scholars who have not attended any/many of the six prior Immigration Law Workshops, and a diversity of voices from within our community.

These panels will be constructed not around traditional papers, but rather short pieces (about five pages) that panelists will submit by way of commentary on an issue or recent development. The moderator will assume that all workshop attendees will have read the pieces (to be distributed before the meeting), so we can devote the full session time to discussion.

One plenary teaching panel: The plenary teaching session will address the tough choices that professors now face when deciding what to cover in a basic immigration course. New legislation and new Supreme Court cases have added to the raw material that we teach, and the universe of what might be considered an essential part of “immigration law” is expanding. How does one make these choices and build a syllabus for an immigration law course? Are there certain topics that must be covered, certain skills that must be imparted, or does coverage even matter? What underlying (and perhaps unarticulated) assumptions and goals shape our choices? The syllabus bank for immigration law professors will be reactivated in anticipation of this program, so that participants will have the opportunity to review the syllabi of panelists and other colleagues before the session. Once the final program has been set, we’ll inform you how to access this material.

Breakout work-in-progress sessions. These will be small breakout sessions designed to engage in intensive discussion, and provide constructive criticism, of each work-in-progress. Obviously, the size of each session will depend on the total workshop size and the number of works-in-progress submitted. Each paper will have a commentator, who will assume that all attendees will have read the paper in advance and will proceed immediately to discussion.

For these sessions, we are asking scholars to volunteer to share their works-in-progress. In order to set up these groups, we ask that you provide Hiroshi (motomura@email.unc.edu) with a title and brief abstract of your work-in-progress by January 15. Please do this by filling out the works-in-progress questionnaire that accompanies this letter.

The papers themselves must be submitted by March 15. The March 15 date will allow the planning committee to review each paper, arrange for a commentator, and assemble a discussion group. We will distribute the papers to attendees around April 15, i.e., three weeks before the workshop.

In order to keep the advance reading for workshop participants reasonable, please limit your submission to a maximum of 50 pages. If your paper will be longer, please plan on providing an edited version that focuses the discussion in a way that you would find most helpful as an author.

Breakout teaching sessions. Smaller workshops on teaching will be offered as break-out sessions; some teaching workshops may be scheduled simultaneously with the works-in-progress sessions. The precise schedule will depend on the level of interest for various discussion topics. Workshops will be led by facilitators who have proposed ideas or have agreed to lead discussion on certain topics. Possible topics include workshops for new law teachers or for adjunct teachers, workshops on integrating exercises or simulations into the classroom, or workshops on teaching upper-level specialized seminars.
The questionnaire accompanying this letter (to be returned to Margaret, at mtaylor@law.wfu.edu by January 15) provides the opportunity for you to propose a workshop and/or indicate your interest in various topics.

Next steps

Please mark your calendars, if you haven’t done so already! You can book air travel and hotel now.

If you are interested in presenting a work-in-progress, please fill out the Works-In-Progress Questionnaire that accompanies this letter (in Word format) and send to Hiroshi (motomura@email.unc.edu) by January 15, 2006. The questionnaire asks you for the title and an abstract of your paper. Also, if you would be interested in serving as a commentator on a work-in-progress, please so indicate on the form, and indicate as well if you have any subject-matter preferences.

If you plan to attend the conference, please fill out the Teaching Sessions Questionnaire that accompanies this letter (in Word format) to indicate your relative interest in various teaching topics, and return it to Margaret (mtaylor@law.wfu.edu) by January 15, 2006.

We are very excited about this workshop. We look forward to hearing from you, and to seeing you in Las Vegas.