From immigration law to government speech, Colorado Law faculty are helping to shape the narrative around important issues through their books in progress. Of those several faculty books in progress, the following are already under contract for publication.
Immigration Law and Policy: Ming H. Chen
Constructing Citizenship for Noncitizens (forthcoming, Stanford University Press)
Associate Professor Ming H. Chen teaches courses related to immigration and directs the Immigration Law and Policy Program at Colorado Law. She holds faculty affiliations in political science and ethnic studies and serves on the Colorado Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Abstract: For the past decade, U.S. immigration policy has taken a laissez-faire approach toward immigrant integration and focused nearly exclusively on enforcement: stopping unlawful entry, stopping criminal aliens, and stopping foreign terrorists. The book argues that this is a mistake and that immigration lawyers, scholars, and policymakers concede too much when they focus all their energies on responding to immigration enforcement. Chen promotes an alternative vision for immigration policy that is premised on stronger state-sponsored pathways to full citizenship and prescribes affirmative integration for noncitizens seeking to adjust their status at each stage of the journey to full membership, from newcomer to resident to citizen.
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Feminism and Criminal Law: Aya Gruber
The Feminist War on Crime (forthcoming, University of California Press)
Professor Aya Gruber teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law and procedure, comparative/international law, critical theory, and feminism. Her forthcoming book ties together many of the ideas from her articles on rape law, prostitution and human trafficking, domestic violence reform, and more.
Abstract: Today’s young feminists are preoccupied with men’s sexual misbehavior and call for swift reform and punishment. But they also object to racialized mass incarceration and recognize that the U.S. has the ignoble distinction of the most punitive nation on Earth. The many #MeToo devotees who believe criminal law is racially fraught and know that inequality is caused by larger social forces, not just individual bad actors, are well positioned to end the feminism-criminal law alliance. Gruber speaks to this cohort, explaining how feminists, in their past efforts to secure women’s protection from domestic violence and rape, became soldiers in the late-20th-century war on crime and complicit in the rise of mass incarceration. She demonstrates through a granular analysis of feminist criminal reform over several decades that policing and punishment are dangerous weapons to be used only as a last resort and sketches a way forward.
International Law and Decisionmaking: Anna Spain Bradley
The Impact of One: How Individual Choice Shapes International Law (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press) 
Associate Professor Anna Spain Bradley specializes in international law and neuroscience. She also serves as assistant vice provost for faculty development and diversity for the CU Boulder campus.
Abstract: Told through the lens of historical accounts and original interviews, the book charts groundbreaking decision moments in international law—from the bombing of Hiroshima, to the Rwandan genocide, to the intervention into Libya—and reveals how certain people, and their emotions, biases, and beliefs, shaped global outcomes in powerful yet unexamined ways. Drawing upon insights from neuroscience, Spain offers a theory of how individual choice—involving emotion, empathy, and bias—has affected the development of international law and introduces a novel approach for understanding the role of human cognition and choice in global decisionmaking.
Free Speech and Expression: Helen Norton
The Government’s Speech and the Constitution (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press)
Professor Helen Norton holds the Ira C. Rothgerber Jr. Chair in Constitutional Law and is a former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Abstract: Governments have been speaking for as long as there have been governments, and new expressive technologies now empower government to speak in new ways through Twitter and other social media postings, webcasts, blogs, wikis, virtual worlds, and more. This raises important and interesting questions about the constitutional value and harms posed by the government’s speech. Norton’s book explores how the government’s speech sometimes performs constitutionally valuable functions, as well as examines the dark side of the government’s speech by posing questions such as, “Under what circumstances does the government’s speech threaten equality or liberty such that it offends the Equal Protection or Due Process clauses?” and, “Under what circumstances, if any, does the Constitution prohibit our government from lying to us?"