About Anna O. Law

I am an Associate Professor of Political Science and Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights at CUNY Brooklyn College. I specialize in public law (including U.S. constitutional law, federal courts, legal institutions such as the American jury system) and U.S. immigration policy history.

Currently, I am at work on a book-length project—tentatively titled The Politics of Mobility—Voluntary and Involuntary Migrations, 1619-1882—that challenges the conventional historiography on US immigration policy history by bringing together slavery, Native American history and voluntary migration to illustrate the wide influence of slave policy and federal Indian law on migration policy and law. The structure of US government, namely its federal system, dictates the right to mobility and its corollary, the ability to remain in the place of one’s choosing. The book is under contract with Oxford University Press and will be out in 2025-2026.

One might expect that the rights to mobility and to remain would be most likely found in equal protection or alienage jurisprudence. Instead I find that the influence of slavery on international and domestic migration is found in federalism jurisprudence, the area of law which tracks how power and authority are divided between the national government and the states. Which level of government had jurisdiction over one’s ability to move about and to remain in a place of their choosing affected politically powerless groups’ abilities to do so.

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In an non-overlapping line of research, I study immigration courts. 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, and I treat legal outcomes not just as products of doctrinal development, 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.

I favor historical institutionalism as an analytical approach, meaning that my research is temporally sensitive. I believe that 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 powerless minority groups.

Herbert Kurz, a Brooklyn College alumnus, had a vision for a fairer world that was inspired by his own family’s challenges as targets of injustice. Kurz translated that vision into practices at his own insurance firm and beyond by championing social justice and implementing progressive policies like affirmative action well ahead of his time.

I’ve interpreted 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, U.S. immigration policy, and most recently, an assessment of the phenomenon of “fake news.”

• 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 40 faculty/student research teams in an array of research projects.

• In 2020, I will launch the first Kurz Professional Development event. The spring event will be a panel aimed at helping faculty struggling to complete their second book—a necessary requirement in many fields for promotion to full professor. Because of most departments’ focus on careful and attentive mentoring to junior scholars to get through the tenure process, most faculty members receive little or no guidance on their second book and the promotion process—a factor that disproportionately affects women and people of color. For this first event, the Princeton University Press acquisitions editor along with a senior social scientist and a senior humanities scholar (who are on their third books) will visit our campus to illuminate why the second book is difficult and offer strategies to get it done.