Law, Literature, and the “Situation” of Immigration

Abstract

In American immigration cases, the courts have simultaneously imagined different kinds of situations in which immigrants are regulated: situations where the plenary power doctrine suspends the ordinary operation of the law and situations where everyday legal norms are operative. Focusing on the exclusionary era between 1882 and 1905, this article demonstrates how legal discourse imagines and describes the situations in which particular kinds of administrative action are to occur. These situations were fraught with an ambivalent tension between the extraordinary and the ordinary that corresponded to popular literary conventions in the late nineteenth century. Genres like naturalism and the western similarly demarcated ordinary and extraordinary situations, and the law’s composite sense of situation simultaneously drew upon and disseminated narrative conventions that existed in a wider cultural milieu. These correlations can inform our understanding of the connection between sovereignty and administrative discretion.