Lecture by Leti Volpp, the Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law at Berkeley Law. In January 2018, then-President Donald Trump derided the idea of protecting immigrants from what he referred to as “shithole countries.” This talk will examine the immigration policy context in which this term was uttered, analyze how the term was invoked in litigation challenging the Trump administration, and then consider what the term tells us about relationships between waste, racism, and immigration.
About the Speaker
Professor Volpp's research and teaching focus on questions of immigration and citizenship. She is the Director of the campus-wide Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley. Her honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation Individual Research and Writing Grant, the Association of American Law Schools Minority Section Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Award and the Professor Keith Aoki Asian Pacific American Jurisprudence Award.
She is the co-editor of Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places (Fordham University Press, 2019, with Marianne Constable and Bryan Wagner), and Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, with Mary Dudziak). Her writing has been widely published in journals including Citizenship Studies; PMLA; Law, Culture and Humanities; differences; the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, Critical Analysis of Law; the Columbia Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, and the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.
