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 US Migration Federalism Before Nationalization—that challenges settled historiography on migration by bringing together slavery and migration to illustrate the wide influence of slave policy and federal Indian law on voluntary migration law that ostensibly having nothing to do with slavery. One might expect that the influence of slavery on migration 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 groups’ abilities to do so. The book is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Under a National Science Foundation collaborative research grant with Karen Musalo of University of California Law, San Francisco, and Katherine Donato of Georgetown University, we are seeking to answer the question: How do U.S. immigration courts decide gender-based asylum cases? For this project, we are analyzing hundreds of immigration agency administrative decisions and creating two original data sets that we will analyze both quantitatively and qualitatively to assess which factors affect legal outcomes.

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 political contestation. But, because my training was interdisciplinary and included law, political science, and American studies, I reach 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 role of the federal appellate courts in U.S. immigration policy across federal court history.

Prior to Brooklyn College, I taught for 8 years at DePaul University in Chicago. I am an alumna of Brandeis University and earned a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. 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 despised 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.