What Is a Social Group in the Eyes of the Law? Knowledge Work in Refugee-Status Determination
B. Robert Owens
Robert Owens: earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2017 and a Master of Legal Studies from the University of Chicago Law School in 2016. His research is at the intersection of the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of law. From 2016 to 2018 he was a Visiting Scholar at the American Bar Foundation, and since 2017 he has been a consultant at the Civic Consulting Alliance, working with public-sector agencies on public safety and criminal justice issues. He may be contacted at [email protected]. Thanks to Andrew Abbott, Anya Bernstein, Elisabeth Clemens, Adam Chilton, Tom Ginsburg, Terry Halliday, Emily Ryo, Hanisah Abdullah Sani, Chris Schmidt, and the members of the Politics, History, and Society Workshop at the University of Chicago for comments and suggestions through many iterations of this article.
Search for more papers by this authorB. Robert Owens
Robert Owens: earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2017 and a Master of Legal Studies from the University of Chicago Law School in 2016. His research is at the intersection of the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of law. From 2016 to 2018 he was a Visiting Scholar at the American Bar Foundation, and since 2017 he has been a consultant at the Civic Consulting Alliance, working with public-sector agencies on public safety and criminal justice issues. He may be contacted at [email protected]. Thanks to Andrew Abbott, Anya Bernstein, Elisabeth Clemens, Adam Chilton, Tom Ginsburg, Terry Halliday, Emily Ryo, Hanisah Abdullah Sani, Chris Schmidt, and the members of the Politics, History, and Society Workshop at the University of Chicago for comments and suggestions through many iterations of this article.
Search for more papers by this authorAbstract
This article explores the settling and unsettling of legal concepts in relation to refugee-status determination. To gain admission to the United States, asylum seekers are required to demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of one of five protected grounds: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Accordingly, many political asylum claims turn on the interpretation of “particular social group.” This article examines case law disputes in the federal courts of appeals over the meaning of that phrase and describes how statutory interpretation by judges has contributed to the persistence of such disputes over several decades since the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act. My analysis reveals the tensions between different forms of rationality at play in judicial statutory interpretation and applies the concept of legal settling to a new empirical domain.
References
- Anker, Deborah. Law of Asylum in the United States, 7th ed. New York: Thomson Reuters, 2014.
- Block-Lieb, Susan, and Terence Halliday. “ Settling and Concordance: Two Cases in Global Commercial Law.” In Transnational Legal Orders, edited by Terence Halliday and Gregory Shaffer, 75–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
10.1017/CBO9781107707092.004 Google Scholar
- Collins, Paul. “Friends of the Court: Examining the Influence of Amicus Curiae Participation in U.S. Supreme Court Litigation.” Law and Society Review 38, no. 4 (2004): 807–32.
- Epstein, Lee, William Landes, and Richard Posner. The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
- Executive Office for Immigration Review. Statistics Yearbooks. 2000–2013. May 26, 2015. http://www.justice.gov/eoir/statistics-and-publications.
- Erika Feller, Volker Türk, and Frances Nicholson, eds. Refugee Protection in International Law: UNHCR's Global Consultations on International Protection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
10.1017/CBO9780511493973 Google Scholar
- Gerd Gigerenzer, and Christopher Engel, eds. Heuristics and the Law. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
10.7551/mitpress/3488.001.0001 Google Scholar
- Gigerenzer, Gerd, Peter Todd, and the ABC Research Group. Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Grattet, Ryken, Valarie Jenness, and Theodore Curry. “The Homogenization and Differentiation of Hate Crime Law in the United States, 1978 to 1995: Innovation and Diffusion in the Criminalization of Bigotry.” American Sociological Review 63, no. 2 (1998): 286–307.
- Halliday, Terence. “Recursivity of Global Normmaking: A Sociolegal Agenda.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 5 (2009): 263–89.
- Halliday, Terence, and Bruce Carruthers. “The Recursivity of Law: Global Norm Making and National Lawmaking in the Globalization of Corporate Insolvency Regimes.” American Journal of Sociology 112, no. 4 (2007), 1135–1202.
- Terence Halliday, and Gregory Shaffer, eds. Transnational Legal Orders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
10.1017/CBO9781107707092 Google Scholar
- Hamlin, Rebecca. Let Me Be a Refugee: Administrative Justice and the Politics of Asylum in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199373307.001.0001 Google Scholar
- Hathaway, James, and Michelle Foster. The Law of Refugee Status, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
10.1017/CBO9780511998300 Google Scholar
- Jenness, Valarie, and Ryken Grattett. Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001.
- Kuersten, Ashlyn, and Susan Haire. Songer Database Update. 2007. June 6, 2014. http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/poli/juri/appct.htm.
- Llewellyn, Karl. The Common Law Tradition: Deciding Appeals. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1960.
- Macey, Jonathan, and Geoffrey Miller. “ The Canons of Statutory Construction and Judicial Preferences.” Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship Series, Paper 1643. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
- Mallard, Grégoire. Fallout: Nuclear Diplomacy in an Age of Global Fracture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
10.7208/chicago/9780226157924.001.0001 Google Scholar
- National Law Journal. “Branch Offices: A Comprehensive List of the Offices at NLJ 350 Firms.” National Law Journal 37 (2015): 21.
- Owens, B. Robert. “Judicial Interpretive Disputes and the Adjudication of Asylum Claims in U.S. Federal Courts.” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2017.
- Phillips, Scott, and Ryken Grattet. “Judicial Rhetoric, Meaning-Making, and the Institutionalization of Hate Crime Law.” Law and Society Review 34, no. 3 (2000): 567–606.
- Posner, Richard. How Judges Think. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
- Ramji-Nogales, Jaya, Andrew Schoenholtz, and Philip Schrag. “Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication.” Stanford Law Review 60, no. 2 (2007): 295–411.
- Ramji-Nogales, Jaya, Andrew Schoenholtz, and Philip Schrag. Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
- Ryo, Emily. “Detained: A Study of Immigration Bond Hearings.” Law and Society Review 50, no. 1 (2016): 117–53.
- Schauer, Frederick. “Formalism.” Yale Law Journal 97, no. 4 (1988): 509–48.
- Schauer, Frederick. Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
10.4159/9780674054561 Google Scholar
- Songer, Donald. The Multi-User Database on the United States Courts of Appeals, 1925–1996. 1998. June 6, 2014. http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/poli/juri/appct.htm.
- Tamanaha, Brian. Beyond the Formalism-Realism Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
- Tazreiter, Claudia. “Local to Global Activism: The Movement to Protect the Rights of Refugees and Asylum Seekers.” Social Movement Studies 9, no. 2 (2010): 201–14.
10.1080/14742831003603349 Google Scholar
- Weber, Max. Economy and Society. Vol. 2. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, [1922] 1968.
Cases Cited
- Ananeh-Firempong v. INS, 766 F.2d 621 (1st Cir., 1985).
- Castellano-Chacon v. INS, 341 F.3d 533 (6th Cir., 2003).
- Cece v. Holder, 733 F.3d 662 (7th Cir., 2013).
- Chen v. Ashcroft, 289 F.3d 1113 (9th Cir., 2002).
- Chevron USA, Inc. v. National Resources Defense Council, 467 U.S. 837 (S. Ct., 1984).
- Estrada-Posadas v. U.S. INS, 924 F.2d 916 (9th Cir., 1991).
- Gatimi v. Holder, 578 F.3d 611 (7th Cir., 2009).
- Gebremichael v. INS, 10 F.3d 28 (1st Cir. 1993).
- Gomez v. INS, 947 F.2d 660 (2d Cir., 1991).
- Henriquez-Rivas v. Holder, 707 F.3d 1081 (9th Cir., 2013).
- Hernandez-Montiel v. INS, 225 F.3d 1084 (9th Cir., 2000).
- Iliev v. INS, 127 F.3d 638 (7th Cir., 1997).
- INS v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478 (S. Ct. 1992).
- Koudriachova v. Gonzales, 490 F.3d 255 (2d Cir., 2007).
- Li Zhang v. Atty. Gen. of the United States, 543 Fed. Appx. 277 (3d Cir., 2013).
- Mgoian v. INS, 184 F.3d 1029 (9th Cir., 1999).
- Molina-Estrada v. INS, 293 F.3d 1089 (9th Cir., 2002).
- Pedro-Mateo v. INS, 224 F.3d 1147 (9th Cir., 2000).
- Sanchez-Trujillo v. INS, 801 F.2d 1571 (9th Cir., 1986).
- Shu Han Lin v. Holder, 718 F.3d 706 (7th Cir., 2013).
- Thomas v. Gonzales, 409 F.3d 1177 (9th Cir., 2005).
Administrative Decisions
- Board of Immigration Appeals. In re C-A-. 23 I. & N. Dec. 951, WL 1977492. 2006.
- Board of Immigration Appeals. Matter of Acosta. 19 I. & N. Dec. 211, WL 56042. 1985.
- Board of Immigration Appeals. Matter of M-E-V-G-. 26 I. & N. Dec. 227, WL 524499. 2014a.
- Board of Immigration Appeals. Matter of W-G-R-. 26 I. & N. Dec. 208, WL 524498. 2014b.
Statute Cited
- Refugee Act of 1980. Pub. L. No. 96–212 (1980).
