Aoki Center/HistoryDepartment Collaboration - The Free People of Color Lecture Series: Julian Lim "'A Radical Remedy': The Making of Plenary Power in the U.S. West."

Professor Julian Lim, Arizona State "'A Radical Remedy': The Making of Plenary Power in the U.S. West." This chapter from my current book-in-progress will examine the debates and uncertainties surrounding the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the government's power to restrict and regulate immigration. Contextualizing the passage of the 1882 law and the U.S. Supreme Court's 1889 articulation of plenary power as reflective of broader territorial anxieties about the U.S. West, this chapter begins to place the development of federal immigration law alongside federal Indian law and territorial law and explores the role of plenary power in shaping the U.S.' "manifest destiny" by the turn of the twentieth century. ------ Julian Lim is an associate professor of History at Arizona State University. She holds a bachelor's degree in literature and a law degree from UC Berkeley and received her doctorate in history from Cornell University. Trained in history and law, she focuses on immigration, borders, and race, and has taught in both history department and law school settings. Lim's award-winning first book, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), examines the history of diverse immigrants in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the development of immigration policy and law on both sides of the border. She has published articles on race, immigration and refugee law, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the Pacific Historical Review, the California Law Review, and the U.C. Irvine Law Review. She is also the recipient of various research and travel awards and fellowships. She is currently working on her second book: an examination of U.S. territorial control and border expansions from the 1880s to the 1910s, and the correlating development of the plenary power doctrine in U.S. immigration law. Research Interests: U.S.-Mexico Border, Immigration, Frontiers and Borderlands Comparative Race Relations, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century U.S. History Race and Law ---- The Free People of Color Lecture Series is hosted by the Aoki Center at King Hall and the UC Davis Department of History to explore the rights of people of color in the United States following the Civil War and inquire how that history continues to shape our thinking today. The Series will bring leading scholars from around the country to answer such questions as: What does freedom mean in the absence of chattel slavery? Which rights adhere to all free people, and which rights functioned more as privileges belonging to a narrow few? How did the establishment of birthright national citizenship transform the legal rights both of citizens and of so-called aliens? These questions were sharply contested before, during, and after the Civil War, in the battles over Chinese and Irish immigration on both Atlantic and Pacific coasts, in struggles over Native American sovereignty and belonging, in debates over the rights of married and single women, in laws over apprenticeship for minors, in statutes that segregated races by place and privileges and rights, and in the reform of prisons and jails across the country. This UC Davis Humanities Institute Transcollege Research Cluster will provide opportunities for students and faculty in law and history to collaborate on scholarship and to exchange ideas that will enrich their work.