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The Immigration Battle in American Courts. By Anna O. Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 266 pp. $90.00 cloth.
In The Immigration Battle in American Courts, Anna O. Law uses immigration law as a case study to provide a compelling analysis of the different developmental paths of the two highest U.S. federal courtsFthe Courts of Appeals (the Third, Fifth, and Ninth Circuits) and the Supreme Court, for an impressive array of years: 1881 to 2002. Law, interested in institutional changes that occurred in these courts, utilizes a mixed-method analysis that yields three core arguments. First, the Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals operate in different institutional contexts; each court's unique context acts as a filtering mechanism that shapes the judges' perception of what they should be doing and how they should be doing it. Second, the contexts of both courts have slowly changed over time; as such, neither the Supreme Court nor the Courts of Appeals have played a static role in the federal judicial system. Third, the changing institutional settings of the courts have consequences for the courts themselves, for the occupants of those institutions, and in the case of immigration law, for the immigrants who appear before the courts.
While the overarching theme of this study is institutional change, the book presents a strong and nuanced analysis of...