TALK CANCELED DUE TO ILLNESS

What kind of legal history might account for the unique and continued practice of forfeiture in the United States? Law enforcement, as many recent writers have argued, has grown increasingly dependent on this failsafe way to gain revenue, since civil asset forfeiture has few procedural safeguards. Unlike criminal forfeiture (in personam), civil forfeiture generally proceeds against the offending property (in rem), not against the person.

This week in 1798, John Adams passed the Naturalization Act, the first of four laws collectively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. These laws were highly controversial in their time and remain so today; all but one was struck down within four years, but echoes of their intended policies ring through to our current, rapidly-escalating national immigration and sanctuary crisis.

This presentation uncovers the destabilizing and transformative dimensions of a legal process commonly described as assimilation. Lawyers working on behalf of a marginalized group often argue that the group merits inclusion in dominant institutions, and they do so by casting the group as like the dominant majority. Scholars have criticized claims of this kind for affirming the status quo and muting significant differences of the excluded group.