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Commanding Legality

The Juridification of Immigration Policy Making in France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Leila Kawar
Leila Kawar*
Affiliation:
Bowling Green State University
*
Contact the author at [email protected].
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Abstract

The emergence of constitutional review in France has attracted substantial attention from scholars of public law. Yet little has been written about the political implications of the expansion of rights-based review on the part of France’s highest administrative jurisdiction, the Conseil d’Etat. The argument is made in this article that repeat litigation by French lawyers defending the cause of immigrants is an important site for observing the symbolic power of legal forms. The analysis focuses on cases challenging immigration-related administrative regulations and shows how the process of repeatedly adjudicating these issues has focused attention away from litigants and their claims at the same time that it has reinforced the centrality of the Conseil d’Etat and its formalist jurisprudence in administrative governance. This detailed examination of the practical operation of France’s highest administrative jurisdiction leads to the surprising conclusion that this distinctly nonadversarial form of adjudication has contributed over the long term to institutionalizing a juridification of immigration-related administrative policy making.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , Spring 2014 , pp. 93 - 116
Copyright
© 2014 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

The author would like to express her thanks to Pamela Brandwein, Lynette Chua, David Klein, Mitchel Lasser, Johann Morri, Michael McCann, and Stephen Wasby for their comments and suggestions in preparing this article for publication. I especially thank Mark Massoud, since it was through our ongoing collaboration that I was prompted to develop and sharpen the theoretical framework in this article. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Cornell Law School Research Colloquium and at the Western Political Science Association and Law and Society Association annual meetings.

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