Highly esteemed constitutional and immigration law scholar, Pratheepan (Deep) Gulasekaram, will join the Colorado Law faculty as Professor of Law this month. Prof. Gulasekaram’s research focuses on the constitutional rights of noncitizens and federalism concerns in immigration law. He is co-author of the leading immigration casebook used in law schools (Immigration & Citizenship: Process and Policy (West Academic 9th Ed. 2021)). His book, The New Immigration Federalism, provides an in-depth empirical and theoretical analysis of the resurgence of state and local immigration lawmaking. He has also extensively explored the relationship between the Second Amendment and immigrants as a way of understanding constitutional protections for noncitizens.
Gulasekaram has taught at Santa Clara University School of Law since 2007. He has also taught as Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School, Berkeley Law School, University of California Berkeley, and as Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering at New York University School of Law.
In this interview, Professor Gulasekaram sits down with Colorado Law’s Emily Battaglia to answer a few questions about his work and what he is looking forward to in his new position here at Colorado Law.
Hi Deep – thank you so much for taking the time to answer a few questions about your work and the expertise you will be bringing to the law school as a new faculty member. We can’t wait for you to join us.
DG: Likewise!
For my first question I am eager to know --what drew you to immigration law?
DG: My interest stems from my personal history. I was born in Sri Lanka during a time of civil war, and when I was a toddler, my parents migrated to the U.S. to get away from the deadly conflict and seek a better future for our family. We settled in an immigrant enclave in southern California, and I grew up with people from all over the world, with various regular and irregular immigration statuses.
As an adult, I had to navigate the immigration system again when my mother and I naturalized into U.S. citizens. Finally, soon after graduating from law school, I witnessed firsthand the enforcement backlash against immigrants, including members of my family, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Studying, teaching, and writing about immigration law gave me the ability to contextualize these myriad experiences within American history and law, and to articulate a normative vision for immigration policy.
Could you describe some of the current projects you are working on?
DG: I am currently finishing a project entitled The Second Amendment's "People" Problem, which attempts to determine if any interpretative theory can justify excluding noncitizens from "the people" who may exercise the right to keep and bear arms. The question whether certain persons are excluded from "the people" has taken on renewed importance in the wake of the Supreme Court's 2022 NYSRPA v. Bruen decision, which struck down a long-standing state gun permitting scheme and prescribed historical inquiry as the exclusive methodology for assessing the constitutionality of firearms regulations.
In the wake of Bruen, courts have struggled to determine whether several highly regulated groups - e.g., felons, children, noncitizens - are covered by the Second Amendment. My paper concludes that when the right to keep and bear arms is understood as an individual right of self-protection, noncitizens (including unlawfully present noncitizens) cannot be excluded categorically from 'the people" who can exercise Second Amendment rights or other core Bill of Rights protections that inure to "the people."
The other major project on the horizon is a co-authored paper entitled The Borderline Constitution. This project seeks to map out how the Constitution functions at the nation's border and places deep in the interior of the country that are treated as the border equivalent. The goal of the project is to shed light on this liminal constitutional space, and to show how the absence of constitutional safeguards at the border threatens the integrity of constitutional protections in mainstream and "domestic" applications, even to citizens.
What is your proudest career accomplishment so far?
DG: My most impactful scholarly contribution thus far is the original empirical work that informed my book, The New Immigration Federalism. My co-author and I demonstrated that jurisdictions passing anti-immigrant measures were not facing particularly acute public policy pressures from unlawful migration, despite the claims made by local lawmakers, enforcement advocates, courts, and even some academics. Instead, our quantitative and qualitative research showed that partisan polarization and white nationalism were the prime factors motivating those enactments. Our work exposed how a network of coordinated individuals and anti-immigration organizations helped foment federal legislative stasis on immigration, thereby setting the necessary background conditions for their multi-jurisdictional campaign at the state and local levels.
Can you talk a little bit about the origin and mission of your nonprofit, World Children’s Initiative?
DG: Before I went to law school, two close friends from college and I were interested in global healthcare. They followed that passion to became doctors, and so we decided to focus on sustainable, long-term improvements in health care access for children in highly under-resourced environments. The basic animating idea behind our work is to train and equip local doctors so that they can serve local populations without reliance on foreign doctors or foreign aid. Our most successful project so far has been our work in Kampala, developing the capacity of doctors to treat congenital heart defects in children at the Uganda Heart Institute. We trained their medical staff in pediatric cardiac catheterization techniques and helped them design a treatment center for children. Ugandan doctors and nurses now fix heart defects in hundreds of children every year, without foreign aid. Currently, we are partnering with Operation Smile, a giant in the nonprofit medical mission world, to help improve access to essential surgical care in Madagascar. Our goal is to help Malagasy surgeons improve outcomes for basic, but highly impactful surgeries, like those involving childbirth complications or fixing broken bones after trauma.
Obviously, this work is well-outside my areas of research and teaching. In fact, it has very little to do with law at all. But, every now and then, I get to use some of the skills I learned in law practice-- like drafting agreements or assessing our legal exposure. In addition, as part of our mission involves teaching, my time as a law professor has helped me think through how to design curricula and package our educational resources.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful answers! I have one final question - in your move from California to Colorado, what are you most excited for?
DG: I don't think I can pinpoint one specific thing. Having been a Californian nearly my entire life, the fact of moving to Colorado is a big change and an exciting new adventure for my family. My kids are excited to live in a place where it snows! I’m less thrilled about the snow but I’m absolutely thrilled to begin working with my new colleagues at one of the country's premier public institutions.