Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar

Less than the sum of its parts: institutional realities and legal aspirations in early twenty-first century American immigration

This essay considers the implications of some of the legal and institutional forces shaping immigration in the early twenty-first century, and explores what the character of the American system implies for citizenship and migration in an advanced industrial democracy with a complex regulatory state. The essay argues, first, that immigration law must be understood not as a raw reflection of mass public attitudes or a carefully reasoned prescriptive scheme, but instead as a politically generated, fractured system allocating benefits and burdens among a variety of constituents and public agencies. This allocation plainly affects more than just actual or potential migrants. It also shapes the lives of employers, law enforcers, politicians, and the larger public of American citizens. These interactions showcase how much the future of the nation-state may depend not only on seemingly inexorable forces reshaping the international system, but on how law is understood by the public, adjudicated by courts, and enforced by public organizations. Put differently, how much even powerful nation-states are able to shape their context heavily depends on often-tenuous compromises at the intersection between law, politics, and organization.

Modeling Partial Agency Autonomy in Public-Health Policymaking

Abstract This Article considers the conditions under which administrative agencies - particularly those with public health-related missions - may obtain partial autonomy from external interests or politicians. In the process, it critiques the proposition that administrative agencies in advanced industrialized countries such as the United States are routinely “captured” by external economic interests. Through case studies and the application of relevant theory from law and the study of political organization, the Article describes how agencies can produce a measure of autonomy by forging coalitions of stakeholders both internal and external to the agency, and considers how partial autonomy may be modeled as a strategic process involving decisions under uncertainty. The Article then investigates how American publichealth agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration, the Food Safety Inspection Service, and the Centers for Disease Control have been able to use their partial autonomy to develop significant health policy innovations. Although agencies are by no means guaranteed even a partial degree of autonomy, they are nonetheless capable of affecting their political and legal environment, with consequences not only for public-health policy but also for the legitimacy of the nation-state