Newton, MA-- BC Law Professor Daniel Kanstroom will deliver the annual ‘Law In Motion’ lecture at Northwestern University on February 23. The lecture, entitled "Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History," will focus on deportation enforcement in the United States.

“Although deportation is at least as old as the modern nation-state, we have never before seen an immigration enforcement system of the size, ferocity, and scope that has been built, ironically, in one of history's most open and immigrant friendly societies,” Kanstroom said. “More than a decade later, it is time to consider the justifications, accomplishments, and failures of this system.”

Kanstoom’s lecture will be followed by a response from Professor Jacqueline Stevens of Northwestern’s Political Science & Legal Studies department.

Daniel Kanstroom is a professor of law, the director of BC Law’s International Human Rights Program, and an associate director of the Boston College Center for Human Rights and International Justice. He teaches Immigration and Refugee Law, International Human Rights Law, Administrative Law, and the International Human Rights Semester in Practice.

Kanstroom was the founder and is also the current director of the Boston College Immigration and Asylum clinic in which students represent indigent noncitizens and asylum-seekers. Together with his students, he has won many high-profile immigration and asylum cases and has provided counsel for hundreds of clients over more than a decade. He and his students have also written amicus briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court, organized innumerable public presentations in schools, churches, community centers, courts and prisons, and have advised many community groups.

Kanstroom’s newest initiative, the Post-Deportation Human Rights Project, represents individuals who have been deported from the United States, develops new legal theories in support of such cases, and undertakes multidisciplinary empirical study of the effects of deportation on families and communities.

Kanstroom has published widely in the fields of U.S. immigration law, criminal law, and European citizenship and asylum law. His work has appeared in such venues as the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Journal of International Law, the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, and the French Gazette du Palais. His last book, Deportation Nation, was published by Harvard University Press in 2007, and his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora will be published in June 2012.

For more information on the lecture, please contact legalstudies@northwestern.edu.