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This chapter uses the historian’s method of micro-history to rethink the significance of the Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon (1908). Muller is typically considered a labor law decision permitting the regulation of women’s work hours. However, this chapter argues that through particular attention to the specific context in which the labor dispute took place – the laundry industry in Portland, Oregon – the Muller decision and underlying conflict should be understood as not only about sex-based labor rights but also about how the labor of laundry specifically involved race-based discrimination. This chapter investigates the most important conflicts behind the Muller decision, namely the entangled histories of white laundresses’ labor and labor activism in Portland, as well as the labor of their competitors – Chinese laundrymen. In so doing, this chapter offers an intersectional reading of Muller that incorporates regulations on Chinese laundries and places the decision in conversation with a long line of anti-Chinese laundry legislation on the West Coast, including that at issue in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886).

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) states in 2018 that safeguarding “civil liberties is critical” to their official duties. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS, as its website explains,

reviews and assesses complaints from the public in areas such as: physical or other abuse; discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability; inappropriate conditions of confinement; infringements of free speech; violation of right to due process … and any other civil rights or civil liberties violation related to a Department program or activity.

My chapter tracks the centrality of deportability in shaping the civil liberties and rights that DHS is tasked with enforcing. Over the course of the twentieth century, people on US soil saw an expanding list of civil liberties and civil rights. Important scholarship concentrates on the role of the courts, state and federal governments, advocacy groups, social movements, and foreign policy driving these constitutional and cultural changes. For instance, the scholarship illustrates that coming out of World War I, the US Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not protect something the Justices labeled “irresponsible speech.” The Supreme Court soon changed course, opening up an era ever since of more robust First Amendment rights. What has not been undertaken in the literature is an examination of the relationship of deportability to the sweep of civil liberties and civil rights. Starting in the second decade of the twentieth century, federal immigration policymakers began multiplying types of immigration statuses. A century later, among many others, there is the H2A status for temporary low-wage workers, the H2B for skilled labor, and permanent residents with green cards. The deportability of each status constrains access to certain liberties and rights. Thus, in 2016, when people from the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS act, they are not enforcing a uniform body of rights and liberties that applies equally to citizens and immigrants, or even within the large category of immigrants. Instead, they do so within a complicated matrix of liberties and rights attenuated by deportability, which has been shaped by the history of the twentieth century.

Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, this essay seeks to show (illegal) alienage in U.S. law in new lights. First, this essay demonstrates how the emergence of a positive law of citizenship, through which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the importance of citizenship for rights, is a relatively recent and historically contingent development in U.S. law. Second, this essay shows how the concept of “sovereignty” plays different roles in the U.S. positive law of citizenship and (illegal) alienage. This essay seeks also to evaluate the limits and possibilities of alternatives to “sovereignty” as grounds for the rights of noncitizens in the United States. And it seeks to make the point that the apolitical valences of “territoriality” and “social productivity” vis-à-vis “sovereignty” in U.S. law render illegal alienage in particular misleadingly outside the realm of the political. Ultimately, this essay seeks also to challenge understandings of “sovereignty” in political theory by integrating law and political theory, and to recast legal discourse on illegal alienage by turning attention to “sovereignty.”

In this chapter, Mousumi De presents the principles and implications of CRT in the context of Asian and Asian American experiences including the perspective, features, strategies, and new directions on how to facilitate the preparation of teacher candidates and work with all teachers to understand the complexity of the Asian and Asian American identity, their racialized experiences, and their sociohistorical, transnational contexts that continue to influence their lived experiences. This chapter highlights the important issues and challenges facing Asians and Asian Americans that have been camouflaged by their stereotypical treatment as model minorities. It also shares the work of many scholars on approaches for promoting diversity and inclusion, such as implementing anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and inclusive history curricula, cultural citizenship education, teaching for social justice, and culturally responsive and culturally sustaining teaching for addressing the marginalization of Asians and Asian Americans.

Against the prevalent assumption that the United States is and has been a nation-state, this article proposes to reconceptualize it as an empire-state, a state encompassing hierarchically differentiated spaces and peoples. In addition to being descriptively more apt, an empire-state approach provides a firmer basis for understanding the United States as a racial state, a state of white supremacy. Drawing on evidence from constitutional law, I examine the early development of the U.S. empire-state, the long 19th century. The article demonstrates how U.S. state formation has always entailed the racial construction of colonial spaces, specifically “territories” and American Indian lands. Through an extended consideration of Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 Supreme Court case associated almost exclusively with African Americans and hardly ever with empire, I argue for a unified framework to analyze the different but linked racial subjections of colonized and noncolonized peoples. The article concludes with several implications of an empire-state approach to the United States.

Neoclassic economics is a thing of considerable beauty. It yet finds an increasing tendency on the part of those trained in its discipline to rebel from its neatly fitted abstractions and intriguing diagrams. The rebellion stems from two sources. Veblen's sweeping attacks upon its postulates¹⁶ shock its theoretical foundations. The rapid changes in the industrial and business world discredited it on another front by bringing into increasingly sharp relief the divergence between the institutional assumptions of the orthodox theory and the conditions actually obtaining. The giant corporation, overhead costs, and the necessity for maintenance of volume, industrial concentration, the trade association, a widening spread among income classes, advertising, the growing inability of the consumer to gauge quality, the resort to reorganization instead of the “going out of business” of the long-run analyses – what place could the orthodox theory give to these important characteristics of the existing business economy?