Immigration Article of the Day: Producing Liminal Legality by Jennifer M. Chacón
Producing Liminal Legality by Jennifer M. Chacón, University of California, Irvine School of LawUniversity of Oxford – Border Criminologies November 30, 2015 Denver University Law Review, Vol. 92, No. 4, 2016
Abstract: Inside and outside of the sphere of immigration law, liminal legal statuses are proliferating. These legal categories function simultaneously as a means to effectuate administrative resource conservation through community-oriented risk management strategies and as a form of “preservation through transformation” that enable governmental actors to reassert and maintain control over populations identified as risky in ways that do not trigger the rights-protective schemes that evolved both internationally and domestically in the mid-Twentieth Century. This Article uses the existing literature on liminal legal subjects as a starting point for understanding and critiquing the legal mechanisms that produce liminal legality.
KJ