Adam B. Cox and Cristina M. Rodríguez will discuss The President and Immigration Law. They will be joined in conversation by Alison LaCroix, Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law.

Presented in partnership with the Seminary Co-Op.

About the book: When President Barack Obama announced his plans to shield millions of immigrants from deportation, Congress and the commentariat pilloried him for acting unilaterally. When President Donald Trump attempted to ban immigration from six predominantly Muslim counties, a different collection of critics attacked the action as tyrannical. Beneath this polarized political resistance lies a widely shared belief: that Congress, not the President, makes our immigration policies, dictating who can come to the United States, and who can stay, in a detailed and comprehensive legislative code. In The President and Immigration Law (Oxford University Press), Adam Cox and Cristina Rodriguez shatter the myth that Congress controls immigration policy. Drawing on a wide range of sources-rich historical materials, unique data on immigration enforcement, and insider accounts of our nation's massive immigration bureaucracy-they tell the story of how the President became our immigration policy maker-in-chief over the course of two centuries. From founding-era debates over the Alien and Sedition Acts to Jimmy Carter's intervention during the Mariel boatlift from Cuba, presidential crisis management has played an important role in this story. Far more foundational, however, has been the ordinary executive obligation to enforce the law. Over time, the power born of that duty has become the central vehicle for making immigration policy in the United States. A path-breaking account of the President's relationship to Congress, Cox and Rodriguez's analysis helps us better understand how the United States ended up running an enormous shadow immigration system-one in which nearly half of all non-citizens living in America are here in violation of the law. It also provides a blueprint for reform, one that accepts rather than laments the role the President plays in shaping the national community, while outlining strategies to curb the abuse of law enforcement authority in immigration and beyond. You can learn more about the book on the authors' website here. 

About Adam B. Cox: Adam Cox, Robert A. Kindler Professor of Law at NYU, is a leading expert on immigration law, voting rights, and constitutional law. His writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Journal, Journal of Law and Economics, and elsewhere and has been covered by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, and other media outlets. His new book with Cristina Rodriguez, The President and Immigration Law, was just released.

About Cristina M. Rodríguez: Cristina M. Rodríguez is Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a nationally recognized scholar of administrative, constitutional, and immigration law. Her work has been published in numerous academic journals, including the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, and Daedelus. She also has appeared regularly in media outlets, including National Public Radio, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Democracy Journal, and Forbes. Beyond academia, she served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice during the Obama Administration and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

About the interlocutor: Alison LaCroix is the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. She is also an Associate Member of the University of Chicago Department of History. Professor LaCroix is a scholar of US legal history specializing in constitutional law, federalism, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legal thought. Professor LaCroix is currently writing a book on US constitutional discourse between 1815 and 1861, for which she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. The book, titled The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery From the Long Founding Moment to the Civil War, is under contract with Yale University Press. Professor LaCroix is also the author of The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Harvard University Press, 2010). She has published articles in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and Law and History Review, among others.

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