Judicial Framing and Immigration Policymaking: Israel's Policy toward Self-Claiming Palestinian Informers

Abstract

How does the use of judicial framing, a repeated selection of certain features across a large number of related cases, enable courts to be active participants in national immigration policymaking? Previous legal studies have often underestimated the judicial impact on national immigration policies and focused, instead, on courts’ limited intervention in landmark cases. In this article, we show that by repeatedly using a particular judicial framing as part of their daily practice over a large group of legal cases, courts can help form a new national policy related to forced migration without setting any explicit legal precedent that challenges the decisions of the country's security authorities and government ministries. The analysis presented here examines the Israeli High Court of Justice's engagement in Israel's immigration policymaking toward Palestinians who claimed to have worked with Israeli security agencies as collaborators and were fearful of harsh reprisals if they remained in Palestinian autonomous areas. By looking beyond the outcomes of individual cases, our analysis opens another avenue for research on courts’ hidden intervention into national immigration policy through adopting and further developing new legal categories of forced migrants as part of their practice in the national arena.