About Anna O. Law
Photo Credit: David Rozenblyum
I am an Associate Professor of Political Science and Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights at CUNY Brooklyn College. I specialize in US constitutional law, federal courts, federalism, and legal history especially U.S. immigration and citizenship policy history.
I just finished a 16 year book-length project Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship—that challenges the conventional historiography on US immigration policy history by bringing together African American and Native American history with voluntary migration. I didn’t take this approach to be novel. Supreme Court decisions in the nineteenth century on voluntary migration laws spoke explicitly about implications for slavery if voluntary migration laws were changed. Also, in the late nineteenth century, federal Indian law was cited as precedent for Chinese Exclusion.
One might expect that the rights of mobility and ability to remain (to stay where you want to set roots) would be found in equal protection or alienage jurisprudence. Instead I find that the influence of slavery on international and domestic migration laws is found in federalism laws, the area of law which tracks how power and authority are divided between the national government and the states. In a federalism system where different levels of government share power, which level of government had jurisdiction over one’s ability to move about and to remain in a place of their choosing?
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In an non-overlapping line of research, I study the immigration courts today. With a National Science Foundation collaborative research grant with Karen Musalo of University of California Law, San Francisco, we seek to answer the question: How do U.S. immigration courts decide gender-based asylum cases? For this project, we are quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed hundreds of immigration agency administrative decisions and creating two original data sets, one on Immigration Judge decisions, the other on Board of Immigration Appeals ones. Our first article (with Annie Daher, Katharine Donato, and Chelsea Meiners will be out at Boston College Law Review in November 2024)
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A word about my theoretical and methodological approaches. As a political scientist, I study legal institutions like the federal courts as one institution sharing power with Congress and the Presidency. I treat legal outcomes not just as products of legal precedent, but also of political contestation. Because my training was interdisciplinary and included law, political science, and American studies, I write and research across disciplinary lines drawing from the methodology of all these areas.
I favor historical institutionalism as an analytical approach, meaning that my research is sensitive to the historical and political contexts in which laws appear and legal decisions are rendered. Often, why something happened is explained best by when it happened—and what else was happening at the same time in the rest of U.S. history. My first book, The Immigration Battle in American Courts, was both empirical and historical. I traced the evolving roles of the two highest federal in U.S. immigration policy from 1891 to 2001.
Prior to Brooklyn College, I taught for 8 years at DePaul University in Chicago. I am an alumna of Brandeis University and earned a PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA in American Civilization at Brown University. I grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights
In 2012, I joined the Brooklyn College faculty as the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights—a chair that calls for educating students and the public on the limits and possibilities of the U.S. Constitution’s ability to protect politically disfavored minorities.
Herbert Kurz, a Brooklyn College alumnus, had a vision for a fairer world that was inspired by his uncle’s firing as a target of injustice during the red scare. Kurz translated that vision into practices at his own insurance firm Presidential Life Insurance Co. and beyond by championing social justice and implementing progressive policies like affirmative action well ahead of his time.
I’ve translated those sentiments into three programs that I conceptualized and administer each year.
The Kurz Speaker Series brings outside visitors (academics and journalists) to Brooklyn College and also taps the College’s own talented faculty to create events to educate the community on the Constitution. The inaugural event was a panel on NYPD’s Stop and Frisk policy and subsequent series have focused on other critical issues, such as school desegregation, LGBTQ equality, and most recently, inviting Jamelle Bouie to provide a post-inaugural reassessment of the rule of law and US democracy in 2025.
Each year, the Kurz Undergraduate Research Assistant Fellowship offers ten students the opportunity to aid a faculty member withy his or her current research agenda. The fellowship provides the student with a stipend for the hands-on research, thereby providing an opportunity the student would not have otherwise been able to afford. In addition, the student receives research skills, workplace training, mentorship and graduate school preparation—all of which frequently miss students with fewer financial advantages. To date, the Kurz research assistant program is run across four departments—Classics, History, Political Science and Sociology—and has funded more than 50 faculty/student research teams in an array of research projects.
In 2020, I launched the first Kurz Professional Development event. The spring event was a panel aimed at helping faculty struggling to complete their second book—a necessary requirement in many fields for promotion to Full Professor. While most departments rightfully focus on careful and attentive mentoring to junior scholars to get through the tenure process, many faculty members receive little or no guidance on their second book and promotion process—a factor that disproportionately affects women and people of color who take longer to advance. For this first event, the Princeton University Press acquisitions editor along with a senior social scientist and a senior humanities scholar visited Brooklyn College to illuminate why the second book is difficult and offer strategies to get it done.