Submissions for Our Next Issue
Unbound: the Harvard Journal of the Legal Left is now accepting submissions for our 2019-2020 volume, “Critical Perspectives on (Im)migration and Personhood.” We seek submissions that challenge mainstream narratives and understandings of immigration, migration, and legal personhood within or beyond the nation-state from a Left perspective, broadly construed.
As historian Mae Ngai has demonstrated, laws restricting or/and enabling immigration to the U.S. have functioned to produce “impossible subjects,” whose existence is a material and social fact while simultaneously remaining a “legal impossibility.” This situation, according to Amna Akbar and Sameer Ashar, maintains and exacerbates a hierarchical system conducive to capitalist white supremacy. Yet, the process of defining human movement as legal or illegal has always been contingent, offering the potential for alternative orientations to (im)migration. Given that the law constructs and manipulates the categories of “the immigrant” and “the migrant,” we hope to assemble a critical set of perspectives that analyze both the hierarchizing power attendant in such distinctions, as well as the potential for their disruption.
We welcome submissions from legal scholars, practitioners, activists, and others working in relation to law or legal institutions. Essays might consider immigration, migration, and legal personhood in relation to: U.S. militarism and imperialism; race-based oppression; gender and sexuality; uneven environmental devastation; labor, trade, and other aspects of political economy. This is by no means an exhaustive list of possible topics.
Submissions should be no longer than 15,000 words. We prefer footnotes be in standard Bluebook style. Our submission deadline is January 15, 2020. We look forward to reading your submissions!
Unbound seeks to undo the traditional hierarchies of the student-edited legal journal. To that end, writers are responsible for their own citations, and student editors will provide substantive feedback on the arguments made.
We welcome submissions in a wide variety of forms, from relatively traditional law review articles to shorter essays and even personal narratives of legal experience. The tone can be personal and reflective, cool and analytical, heated and polemical, or whatever else serves your purposes. While we may have issues built around a particular theme, we may also choose to publish on a rolling basis as we receive and edit submissions. If you have an idea for an article that is not yet complete, feel free to contact us to discuss upcoming issues, themes, and deadlines. We welcome submissions by email. Please send them in Microsoft Word format, with footnote citations, to unbound@mail.law.harvard.edu.