Live From MSU: Activist, Scholar, or Both?
Motomura, Wishnie, Anker, Benson, Landau
Panel two of #immprof2016 is “Activist, Scholar, or Both?”
Lenni Benson (NYLS) shared her journey towards creating Safe Passage. It had an unpredictable start. She came upon a juvenile docket by happenstance during a government data collection project. Observing from the back of the room, Lenni saw an unrepresented 8 year old boy, “Miguel” (not his real name), called to the stand. Lenni, being Lenni, jumped up and asked to serve as a “friend of the court” to help speak for the child. The rest you know.
Deborah Anker (HLS) spoke about her incredible work with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic to push the boundaries of gender asylum law. Interestingly, a lot of change benefited from cases and laws from overseas (Canada, New Zealand, UK).
Michael Wishnie (Yale) considered the issue of “what kind of scholarship, if any, might be useful to activism.” I love the “,if any,” which he colored by explaining that he came to scholarship only after being told that he had to do it for his job. He called this “disclosing his priors.” Wishnie acknowledged that some articles do, in fact, change the world. (Charlie Reich’s The New Property). But, more often, it’s to say something novel that can start to legitimize an idea or perspective. Treatises, too, he noted, are enormously helpful. Social science scholarship can illuminate patterns through empirical work, while legal history revealing past practices can contribute to activism as well. At the end of the day, though, Wishnie is skeptical of how we can judge whether and how legal scholarship itself has or does impact the world.
Hiroshi Motomura (UCLA) has “agonized” over the idea of the activism-scholarship divide for some time. He spoke about the “lifecycle” of a project. His started with the example of his 1990 article on statutory interpretation. He talked about taking the ideas in that article to litigators (by presenting at AILA) and marketing them as something to try that might help with cases. Those panels led to him being included on litigation teams. This was a true lifecyle from his 1990 article on phantom norms to Zadvydas v. Davis (2001). Hiroshi then spoke about a similar cycle on his work with discretion in immigration enforcement. And it was about taking the effort to reframe his ideas to bring them to different audiences, and being patient.
Joseph Landau (Fordham) did a fabulous job moderating the panel. I have to hand it to him for having the ability to keep these heavyweights on task!
-KitJ