Developing Citizenship

Abstract

These are lucid and challenging books. I take them as an invitation to think about how we lawyer citizenship. In response to The Citizen and the Alien, I consider how the two aspects of Linda Bosniak’s soft on the inside, hard on the outside understanding of citizenship remain in permanent and hierarchical contact for noncitizens, thereby shaping the process of their representation. In response to Ayelet Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery, I look at what it would mean to use citizenship as a framework for lawyering that combats global inequality, and suggest a correlation between different dimensions of inequity and different models of citizenship.