This past week I participated in the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities annual meeting.  Warren gave a great wrap up here, and Mai-Linh described the panel that we both participated on here. Below, I am posting the abstracts from my fellow panelists.  I will post a separate piece outlying my presentation.

The panel was chaired by Frank Snyder of Texas Wesleyan, who did a yeoman’s job of coordinating the panel.  It included myself presenting Re-Entering the Loneliness: Robert Penn Warren and the Exile;  Beth Caldwell of Thomas Jefferson Law School, presenting Clinging to Precedent in a Changing World: The Fiction that Deportation is not a Punishment;  and Quyen Vo, a very impressive student at UC Berkeley, presenting National Interest and International Legal Obligations in British Refugee Asylum.  Here are the abstracts in the order presented.

Beth Caldwell, Clinging to Precedent in a Changing World: The Fiction that Deportation is Not a Punishment

The Supreme Court decided that deportation is not a punishment in 1893. The decision was influenced by overt racism that characterized American society at the time. Since then, our societal norms have changed. However, the decision that deportation is not a punishment has remained the same. Although this core holding has not evolved over time, the Supreme Court reasoned in Trop v. Dulles that this characterization may be “highly fictional.” In 2010, the Court acknowledged that deportation may in fact be the most severe penalty resulting from a criminal conviction. The language the Court employs to discuss deportation seems to characterize deportation as a punishment. However, the Court has not explicitly reversed its 1893 decision that deportation is non-punitive. This paper explores the evolution of the case law and attempts to reconcile the Court’s evolving reasoning with its decision not to reverse or reconsider the ultimate question of whether deportation is a punishment. This inquiry is particularly important because deportation would be subject to review under the Eighth Amendment if it were defined as a punishment.

Quyen Vo, National interest and International Legal obligations in British Refugee Asylum, 1933-1951

 This paper considers how the British state’s refusal to acknowledge formally an asylum seeker’s refugee status affected the scope of British refugee asylum between 1933 and 1951; in the former year the first international refugee treaty emerged under the League of Nations, and in the latter a more comprehensive refugee convention was established under the United Nations. This paper argues that the British state sought to determine the entry of asylum seekers and rights of ‘refugees’ territorially present using primarily the national immigration law, which sought above all to protect and promote the national interests. By examining shifting boundaries between national immigration law and international refugee law, this paper highlights distinctions between citizen and alien, legal and illegal, and inclusion and exclusion that lie at the heart of British refugee asylum. More broadly, the analysis offers a richer historical understanding of the British state’s attitudes toward international refugee law.

Marc L. Roark, Re-entering the Loneliness: Robert Penn Warren and the Exile

How do exiles return to community? As Randy Hendricks has demonstrated, Robert Penn Warren uses as a principal literary figure the wanderer to describe his theories of racial relations, his concept of language, and his own place in the southern narrative. This paper explores Robert Penn Warren’s conceptions of the exile as tragic hero in the context of the law. Importantly, Warren’s wanderer’s always return home, a process that requires legal acceptance of the wanderer’s place in society