This workshop will interrogate the experience of traversing borders between legal forms through the lens of vulnerability theory. Contemporary legal scholarship most often devotes attention to status categories conceived as static positions of relative privilege or disadvantage. Vulnerability theory, which challenges the dominant conception of the universal politico-legal subject as an autonomous, independent, and static adult, shifts us toward a dynamic lens of analysis. Vulnerability theory focuses on the evolution of human needs across a life course, asking how law does and should respond to dependence and foster resilience over time. The theory recognizes that human beings are constantly susceptible to change, positive and negative, in our bodily, social, and environmental circumstances. This workshop will explore how we might understand the processes of ‘legal migration’ as dynamic responses to human and institutional vulnerability.
We are concerned, in particular, with legal migration processes as opportunities to foster resilience. Vulnerability is both universal and constant. Resilience, by contrast, may be created and fostered by the distribution of assets: social, political, environmental, economic, and cultural. The workshop asks how law might foster resilience as individuals and groups migrate between legal forms. In what ways does this migration foster resilience, reorder dependencies, or expose different forms of vulnerability? How do “legal migrants” change the institutions and categories they inhabit? The advent of same-sex marriage, for example, provides the occasion to study the migration of tens of thousands of couples from civil unions or a status of legal non-recognition to the privileged status of marriage. We invite scholars to consider multiple experiences of legal migration: from non-married to married; child to adult; not guilty to guilty; migrant to asylum seeker and possibly citizen; contractual agents to partners; union member to sovereign nation.
We encourage participation from scholars in multiple disciplines including law, the social sciences, and humanities, and welcome papers which address the response to human and institutional vulnerability occasioned by processes of migration. Papers are invited to examine social experience as well as legal formalities, while topics may vary widely from transitions in corporate entity or financial institution status (particularly in contexts of economic development or flux); shifts in intellectual property treatment; the migration process of immigrants, asylum seekers, or business entities across sovereign borders; to the criminal justice process. Papers which engage vulnerability theory as a central tool of analysis are most warmly welcomed.