(Posted March 8, 2010)

HUNTINGDON, Pa. -- One of the major hot-button issues in American politics is immigration policy, and Juniata College is hosting a lecture by a DePaul University political science professor on "Making Policy in the Margins: The Federal Judiciary's Role in Immigration Policy" at 7 p.m., Monday, March 15, in Sill Boardroom in the von Liebig Center for Science on the Juniata campus.

Anna O. Law, assistant professor of political science at DePaul University in Chicago, Ill., will discuss how immigration cases are more likely to prevail in the U.S. Courts of Appeals because the process of an appeal, as courts consider the facts of a single case and decide whether justice was done, increase the likelihood of a favorable decision.

Law will discuss how the U.S. Court of Appeals functions as error correction courts, while the U.S. Supreme Court functions as a legal arbiter on important political and policy questions.

The professor has a new book, "The Immigration Battle in American Courts," due out in June. The book covers how the Supreme Court and Appeals Courts decide cases in dissimilar ways, concentrating on how each court's institutional settings can shape the goals, preferences and perceptions about their jobs.

She also was featured as an expert commentator for the 2007 PBS documentary "The Supreme Court."

Law has been at DePaul since 2003, where she teaches courses in the American Political System, United States Immigration and Law Policy, The Criminal Justice System and American Jury System and a film course that examines U.S. immigration policy through popular movies.

She earned a bachelor's degree in politics in 1992 from Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. and went on to earn a master's degree in American civilization in 1993 from Brown University in Providence, R.I. She was a Fellow at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California at San Diego during the 2002-2003 academic year, and earned a doctorate in government in 2003 from the University of Texas at Austin.



Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.