Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Law and History Review
Publication Date
11-2025
Page Number
189
Keywords
anarchism, rule of law, lawyering, administrative state
Disciplines
Law | Legal History
Abstract
Michael Willrich’s American Anarchy is at once an extraordinary history of ideas about anarchism and the rule of law, a history of lawyering, and a history of the simultaneous emergence of a capacious administrative state alongside a robust set of judicially protected civil liberties. While Willrich tells a rich and intricate story of illiberal border administration, American Anarchy also shows radical immigrants at work over decades in New York, with the border and its oppressive administrative apparatus little more than a dim memory. This essay explores how the book is more than a history of the border—it’s a history of immigrants, of how people and their ideas become distinctively American, a process that happens not through the formal rules of immigration law, but through a host of other legal processes—through contract and labor, through paying rents and acquiring property, through discrimination and the formal and informal rules of race, and through political participation, expression, and assembly. With Beth Lew-Williams and others, Willrich is part of a new wave of legal historians who are looking beyond the border to understand not just the administrative processes of immigration but its substantive transformations, and ultimately the role of law in shaping American identity.
Recommended Citation
Daniel J. Sharfstein,
Reading American Anarchy as a Legal History of Immigrants: Forum on Willrich's American Anarchy Forum: Willrich's American Anarchy, 43 Law and History Review. 189
(2025)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/1732