Live from MSU: The Shape and Influence of Empirical Methods in Immigration Law

Manning, Ryo, Marouf, Eagly, Pham

I’ll be blogging today and tomorrow live from the Immigration Law Teachers Workshop 2016, which is being hosted by Michigan State University College of Law.

We’re kicking things off this morning with a panel on the shape and influence of empirical methods in immigration law. As moderator Huyen Pham (TAMU) said: “everyone needs to start the day by thinking about empirical methods in immigration law.” So true.

Ingrid Eagly (UCLA) talked about the growing use and importance of empirical methods in immigration law. Data, she notes, is allowing scholars to move beyond “theoretical frameworks” and “speculation” in ways that are changing advocacy and teaching as much as scholarship.

Fatma Marouf (TAMU) spoke about how to become an empiricist. She identified crash courses designed to train scholars on how to do empirical work. And the benefits and challenges of finding a collaborator/coauthor. She flagged the role of IRB entities at universities that may have a role in directing empirical work. She closed by observing how gender dynamics might affect empirical work (women face some challenges they should be aware of going in).

Emily Ryo (USC) started with a quote from sociologist William Bruce Cameron who said: “not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.” (Ha!) With that caveat, she identified how empirical study of immigration lawyers and immigration judges, in particular, could tell us a lot about the immigration system.

Stephen Manning (ILG) spoke about how data informs and drives immigration impact litigation. He spoke about his work in family detention litigation and how individual stories have been used to illustrate the points made by data rather than making individual stories themselves the focus of litigation. He also spoke about his work with the innovation law lab to collect data for transformative litigation. He gave the discrete example of immigration court in Atlanta and how data is being collected in an effort to cure the flawed “ecosystem” that currently exists in that city.

What an excellent panel to kick off the day. Thank you all for sharing your experiences!

-KitJ