Leila Kawar

Leila Kawar is a socio-legal scholar whose work examines the cultural dimensions of legal practice. Her comparative research has focused on how the work of lawyers, judges, and other legal experts intersects with the politics of migration, citizenship, and labor. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Law and Society at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law. Her first monograph, Contesting Immigration Policy in Court: Legal Activism and Its Radiating Effects in the United States and France, is published in the Law and Society Series of Cambridge University Press and is a co-winner of the Law and Society Association’s Herbert Jacob book prize. Contesting Immigration Policy in Court also received the annual book award from the Migration and Citizenship Section of the American Political Science Association.

Her current research project explores the migration question through the lens of international social law. Through a combination of historical and ethnographic research, the project explores the engagement of the International Labour Organization with migration issues from the interwar period through the post-Cold War era. The analysis foregrounds how the migrant worker as a juridical subject has been produced by shifting legal practices and principles as well as by changing territorializations of “the social state.”

Kawar is the recipient, with co-PI John Valadez, of a 2024 Vital Impact Project Award through the LSA Meet the Moment Research Initiative for their project The Jungle, a short documentary film, intended for national broadcast on PBS, about the horrific experiences of children in American agricultural work.