Collaborative Research Networks (CRNs) play a vital role within the Law and Society Association’s broader intellectual communities. CRNs provide a platform for LSA members to connect, exchange ideas, and collaborate with other scholars who share common interests. Through these networks, members not only organize sessions at the LSA Annual Meeting but also develop cross-disciplinary and cross-national research projects. CRNs help build deeper intellectual and professional connections among scholars, helping build a stronger sense of community within LSA and encouraging meaningful research collaborations.
CRNs can be based on a particular region (e.g., African Law and Society, East Asian Law and Society, South Asia), methodology (e.g., Critical Research on Race and the Law, Feminist Legal Theory), or subject area (e.g., Biotechnology, Bioethics and the Law, Citizenship and Immigration, Labor Rights, Regulatory Governance). Themes can be narrow or broad in scope.
For our new CRN Spotlight series, LSA will periodically showcase one of our 50+ Collaborative Research Networks. Read on to learn more about CRN 02: Citizenship and Immigration.
Like many LSA members, Santa Clara University School of Law Professor Carrie Rosenbaum has found that her work doesn’t fit neatly within traditional disciplinary boundaries.
“I had been attending the Immigration Law Teacher and Scholars’ Workshop, where I found a kind, supportive, and engaged scholarly community,” she says. “However, as an interdisciplinary scholar I was in search of an even more intellectually expansive community. I found it in the law and society world, and LSA in particular.”
During a stint as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley School of Law, Professor Rosenbaum discovered LSA and Collaborative Research Network 02: Citizenship and Immigration (CRN 02). Her involvement with LSA began in 2019, when she served as a commentator at an Author Meets Reader (AMR) session for Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants, written by Ohio State Moritz College of Law Professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández.
In 2020, Washington State University Professor Hillary Mellinger and California Western School of Law Professor Pooja Dadhania, who were familiar with her scholarship and her founding of a national writing network for immigration scholars, asked her to moderate and provide feedback at their LSA Annual Meeting session. Recognizing the opportunity for mutual enrichment and support in LSA’s interdisciplinary environment, Professor Rosenbaum stuck around, going on to present at, chair, and moderate several more Annual Meeting sessions. At the 2025 meeting in Chicago, she participated in AMRs for University of Miami School of Law Professor Rebecca Sharpless’ new book, Shackled: 92 Refugees Imprisoned on ICE Air, as well as Suffolk University School of Law Professor Ragini Shah’s new book, Constructed Movements, Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities.
Eventually, Professor Rosenbaum took on a leadership position in CRN 02 alongside Professor Mellinger and University of Michigan-Dearborn Professor Maya Barak. She derives great pleasure from working with her co-chairs, who she describes as generous, as well as reviewing presenter proposals and helping to coordinate conference sessions.
CRN 02 members study citizenship and immigration to understand the mechanisms that create “in” and “out” groups in society. In addition to examining labels such as race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and class, members are interested in the ways that globalization situates multiple legal orders with and against one another. The CRN facilitates discussions that allow members to deepen their scholarship through the exchange of feedback and ideas from people with a wide range of perspectives.
“Our mission is to connect scholars with each other, support interdisciplinary research, and foster potential collaboration and professional development for our community members,” she explains. “Ultimately, for me it’s really just the joy of learning and being in community.”
In addition to yearly events in conjunction with the LSA Annual Meetings, which include a business meeting, a new books panel, various roundtable sessions, and a social event (often co-sponsored by local immigrant rights organizations, such as the Center for Immigration Policy and Research at the University of Denver), CRN 02 experiments with other types of programming, such as professional development panels, local practitioner panels, and speed mentoring. A glance at some of the CRN’s 2025 Annual Meeting sessions in Chicago reveals the group’s unifying concern: critiquing and challenging oppressive systems and structures of authority that undermine social justice:
- How Puerto Rico’s Colonial Status Perpetuates Second-Class Citizenship of Puerto Ricans and Undermines the United States’ Commitment to Equitable Legal, Civil, Social, Economic Rights
- Legal Phantoms: Executive Action and the Haunting Failures of Immigration Law
- Current Issues at the Intersection of Immigration Law and National Security in the United States and Europe
- Refugee Experience in Europe and Its Consequences for Minoritization
Ongoing events in the United States have made it a particularly fraught time for teachers, scholars, and public intellectuals in the area of immigration law. CRN 02 members provide one another with informal support as they navigate urgent questions about the most effective ways to use their voices in both public discourse and the classroom.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘crisis’ because there is no immigration ‘crisis’ in the sense we often hear,” Professor Rosenbaum says. “The actual crisis is the lawless perpetuation of egregious human rights violations, like imprisoning people trying to move across borders, separating family members from each other, and what some professors have called a threat to democracy and increasing administrative state illegitimacy.”
For Professor Rosenbaum, one of the most important tasks facing critical scholars of immigration at the moment is changing the narrative for mainstream audiences by making their research and findings legible to journalists at every level, from local reporters to those at publications like the New York Times. This could help combat the disorienting and paralyzing effects of disinformation from government officials that is repeated in the press.
Equally important is individual and collective reflection on a scholar’s role in social change. Indeed, the 2025 Annual Meeting programming might have been slightly different if it had been planned after the 2024 U.S. Presidential election.
“I think a whole session could be dedicated to, ‘How do we do the work that we do? And do the ideas need to be any different? Why are we writing?’” Professor Rosenbaum says.
The growing urgency of these questions is at times invigorating, and other times terrifying. Recently, as her friends have similarly shared, Professor Rosenbaum has found herself either so full of ideas that she doesn’t know where to start, or so discouraged by the limitations of scholarship in addressing the real and immediate harms that she can only stare at a blank screen.
But if her career thus far is any indication, that screen will not remain blank for long. As a film theory and political science undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Professor Rosenbaum studied under Black Marxism author Cedric Robinson, who cultivated in her a lifelong interest in the relationship between rights, race, and immigration. She was further inspired by Angela Davis and the Critical Resistance/Prison Abolition movements, so after graduating, she started a chapter of Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes, an organization dedicated to criminal justice reform. Moved to take her advocacy to the next level, Professor Rosenbaum went to law school at the University of California, Davis, where Professor Millard Murphy was running one of the few Prison Law Clinics in the country at the time. When she started practicing immigration law in the wake of 9/11, she got involved with the National Lawyers Guild as a board member and Immigration Committee co-chair, supporting organizing efforts and providing pro bono representation for individuals picked up in immigration raids. Inspired by her UC Davis professors Kevin Johnson and Bill Ong Hing, she started writing on her own, publishing her first law review article without institutional support or research assistance. Thanks to generous support from her mentors—which has inspired her current passion for supporting the work of others—she published a new article each year, got invited to symposiums and panels, and developed a love for exchanging ideas that could potentially lead to social change.
“Scholars have a critical responsibility to use their positions of power to call out systemic oppression and injustice, to expand the conversation, and to explore creative visions for the future, particularly now,” Professor Rosenbaum says.
Acknowledging the varying levels of risk involved, she adds, “Colleagues have real concerns about how to continue doing this work in meaningful ways and without self-censorship.”
For some scholars, this looks like producing and disseminating knowledge that can support litigation efforts spearheaded by the ACLU, as well as law schools and immigration clinics around the country. For others, it means sharing their expertise in legal scholarship and legal practice with academics from other disciplines, who are increasingly turning their focus to immigration. Inevitably, though, legal scholars and practitioners will need to grapple with the vulnerability of a legal system based on checks and balances, rule of law, and other lofty concepts that require a consensus of individuals acting on good faith.
These challenges, destabilizing and existential, are difficult for even the most forward-thinking academics, which makes the need for community engagement and respectful critique particularly acute.
“Our CRN lets us explore overlaps in ideas, resources, and other research that we may not have found if we hadn’t had this opportunity to come together,” says Professor Rosenbaum. “Supportive engagement through the CRN and in the broader community strengthens our collective work, sets an example for our students, and allows us to more meaningfully conceptualize possibilities for transformative justice across lines of citizenship, formal membership, and belonging.”