New special issue on "Global Mobility Law: Rethinking the Role of Law in Movement Across Borders"
How do different laws work together to shape how people move across borders? 
MOBILE researchers Sarah Scott Ford and William Hamilton Byrne have guest edited a special issue of the International Journal of Migration and Border Studies.
This special issue seeks to advance the emerging field of global mobility law by approaching the problem of examining how different legal regimes and legal interpreters interact across time and place to enable and restrict movement as a methodological problem. The contributions include:
- rethinking areas of law that are commonly approached as belonging to separate regimes;
- asking critical questions about how legal regimes are formed and how they come to govern particular areas of society;
- challenging assumptions that are often taken for granted by legal positivist approaches; and
- highlighting the role of law in casting a formal veil over exercises of state power.
Featuring contributions from researchers at the MOBILE Center of Excellence for Global Mobility Law and other specialist scholars, the collection employs a wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches.
The special issue grew out of the agenda of MOBILE’s 2024 inaugural international conference, and followed a workshop generously supported by the Carlsberg Foundation.
Read Int. J. Migration and Border Studies 9(6) now.
Infrastructuring pathways: traversing the legal infrastructure of mobility in South America
Andrea Jiménez Laurence (MOBILE, University of Copenhagen) combines legal and empirical methods to show how overlapping legal regimes in South America create new mobility pathways, which can be overlooked when focusing on a single regime.
Authoritarian borders? Turning authoritarian international law inside-out
Christopher Szabla (Durham University) draws on legal and political theory to analyse border control as a form of authoritarianism, arguing that it is shaped by political ideology rather than neutral technical arrangements.
Reconciling the tensions of the European deportation regime: how the law shapes compulsory mobility across borders
Anouk Lamé (MOBILE, University of Copenhagen) analyses more than 130,000 recent deportation judgments from French lower courts, to show how a patchwork of legal rules shapes forced movement across borders.
Freedom of movement, sovereignty, and the Third World in postwar international law (1948-1968)
Sara Cosemans (KU Leuven) goes back to 1948–1968 to explore how actors from the Global South helped shape freedom of movement in international law, and how arguments about sovereignty were used to protect the interests of the Global North.
Global commerce and global mobility law
Francesco Corradini (CBS) examines how law and economics shape one another, from 19th-century Western-Ottoman relations to modern global value chains, broadening global mobility to include the movement of goods, capital and law across borders.
Citizenship as transnational mobility capital
Christian Prener (MOBILE, University of Copenhagen) develops the concept of transnational mobility capital to show how citizenship lets people convert economic, social or cultural capital into the capacity to move, creating new patterns of inequality.
An international human rights law of migration? Reflections on the place of a right to immigrate
Frédéric Mégret (McGill University) closes the issue by calling for a radical rethinking of a right to immigrate in international human rights law by weighing it against the state's power to decide who can enter.