This exchange has been for me both productive and thought provoking. In reviewing my book, Contesting Immigration Policy in Court, Stuart Chinn asks me to explore the implications of my research for scholarship in law-and-public-policy. As Chinn notes, immigration law doctrine has proved strikingly resistant to major innovation, even as advocates for immigrant rights have persisted for more than four decades in calling upon judges to adopt more rights-expansive legal frameworks. Moreover, Chinn correctly observes that my study offers no new explanation for the resilience of doctrines that encourage judicial deference on immigration matters. Leaving this task to others (see pp. 3–5, 10), my project instead investigates legal activism’s impact outside of the realm of judicial doctrine. Responding to Chinn’s thoughtful review prompts me to clarify that unlike some other studies of law-and-public-policy, my approach allows for the possibility that political dynamics may shift even as doctrine remains relatively fixed.

My findings suggest that a focus on rare precedent-setting judicial decisions, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in Plyler v. Doe, has prevented scholars of law-and-public-policy from investigating the political impact of many other litigation campaigns that do not leave a substantial doctrinal imprint and that are relatively unknown outside the specialized field of immigration law. By tracing the chains of relationships linking legal activism to the legislative and administrative policy spheres, I show that the frames, narratives, and performances generated by activity in court have profoundly shaped how other policy actors understand immigration matters. For instance, independent of any doctrinal impact, the process of litigating immigration issues played a crucial role in catalyzing a rights-oriented immigration lobby, comprised of bar association leaders and other liberal elites, whose involvement in immigration policymaking is now taken for granted in both the United States and France.

In other words, rather than addressing what motivates judicial deference (or its occasional absence) in immigration matters, I take a different and—especially to lawyers—somewhat counterintuitive approach. My analysis brackets the rules and remedies produced in these cases so as to examine how the lived experience of law has contributed to immigration politics. The study’s comparative scope proves to be particularly illuminating in this respect, as it sheds light on the multiple discursive and affective dimensions of French and American immigrant rights litigation. These cultural dimensions of law have no place in doctrinal analysis even though, as I show, they contribute in important ways to shaping social and political understandings.

It is true, as Chinn points out, that I do not place judges at the center of this analysis. My approach conceptualizes courts not as producers of rules but as a culturally productive setting. I argue that this constructivist sociolegal approach pushes us to look beyond doctrinally centered understandings of law reform. Because the doctrinal frameworks of immigration law have proved uniquely unchanging across national contexts, this domain demonstrates with particular clarity the extent to which the radiating effects of activity in court extend beyond—and are distinct from—the content of judicial decisions.