Kaufman Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
Chantal Thomas (Professor, Law, Cornell Law School)
The rights of immigrants, and arguments for immigration law reforms, are often hotly contested, not least by the states against whom they are asserted. The gradual emergence of an international law of migration has thrown into question presumptions of absolute sovereign prerogative over territorial borders: if national borders are far from open to migrants, they are less presumptively, or more contestedly, closed. Yet the search for an ethics of migration law and policy appears trapped between an apologetic pragmatics of population management on the one hand versus a utopian cosmopolitanism, on the other: what remains is to transcend nationalism while eschewing universalism, through an embrace of the (legal, political and cultural) “stranger.”
Chantal Thomas is Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, where she also directs the Clarke Initiative for Law and Development in the Middle East and North Africa. Professor Thomas teaches in the areas of Law and Development and International Economic Law. Prior to joining Cornell, Professor Thomas chaired the Law Department of the American University in Cairo, and also served on the University of Minnesota and Fordham University law faculties. She has been a Visiting Professor teaching international economic law at institutions such as the Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London, and Soochow University in China. Professor Thomas has consulted for the USAID Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Affairs, and she currently serves on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law and the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law. Professor Thomas focuses her scholarship on the relationship between international law, political economy, and global social justice in a variety of contexts. Her recent writings include: Developing Countries in the WTO Legal System (with Joel Trachtman, Oxford University Press 2009); Law and Neoclassical Economic Development: Toward an Institutionalist Critique of Institutionalism, 96 CORNELL LAW REVIEW 101 (2011); and Migrant Domestic Workers in Egypt: A Case Study of the Economic Family in Global Context, 58 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LAW 987 (2010).
