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Restoring the State's Power to Defame: The Legal Life of Character in the Era of Roosevelt and Trump
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2020
Abstract
While the abstract equality of citizens before the law is imagined as protection from arbitrary, subjective legal judgments of an individual's character, I argue that judgments of character play a pivotal yet unexamined role regulating access to citizenship in American law. Through a comparative analysis of President Trump and President Theodore Roosevelt, I show how their seemingly personal obsession with libel law reveals a deeper interest in consolidating the state's power as sole arbiter of character in order to weaponize the “good moral character” requirement in immigration and naturalization law as an instrument of racial and ethnic exclusion.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2020
References
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52 Ibid., 19.
53 Ibid., 1.
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55 Wessler, “Is Denaturalization the Next Front?”
56 deGooyer.
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59 Rhode, 19.
60 Ibid., 18.
61 Executive Order 13768: “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States.” See also Brittny Mejia, “It's Not Just People IN the U.S. Illegally – ICE Is Nabbing Lawful Permanent Residents Too,” Los Angeles Times, 28 June 2018, at www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-lawful-resident-20180628-htmlstory.html.
62 Lapp, “Reforming the Good Moral Character Requirement for U.S. Citizenship,” 1593.
63 Mendelson, “Constructing America,” 1035, 1017.
64 Ibid., 1053.
65 Ibid., 1038.
66 Ibid., 1038, 1039.