The following essays are part of a collaboration between the Journal of Law and Religion and Political Theology. Editors from both journals selected the two texts interrogated and interpreted here—James Baldwin’s essay “Equal in Paris” and the United States Supreme Court decision in the case United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). The purpose of the collaboration was twofold. The first purpose was to see what new interpretations arise when scholars working primarily in law read the essay by Baldwin, who has been a touchstone in much contemporary Black theology, and when scholars working in religious studies read the legal decision in Wong Kim Ark, a case in which the Supreme Court extended citizenship to the child of Chinese immigrants who conceived and bore him on American soil. The second purpose was to divide publication between the journals, with each journal publishing three of the six essays, with a view to building bridges between readers of each journal over a topic at the intersection of both law and political theology.

On October 12, 2017, the United States Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, took a short trip from Pennsylvania Avenue across the Potomac to Falls Church, Virginia. The Attorney General went to Falls Church to address personnel of the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), the agency that administers the United States’ immigration courts. The Attorney General's chosen topic for the day was “the fraud and abuse in our asylum system.” “Over the years,” the Attorney General argued, “Congress has rationally passed legislation designed to create an efficient and fair procedure to properly admit persons and expedite the removal of aliens who enter the United States illegally.” The Attorney General is referring here to the “expedited removal” procedures that Congress created in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. Expedited removal gives the Department of Homeland Security the power to deport, without a hearing, any person who was not admitted to the United States and who cannot prove continuous presence for the prior two years. The Department of Homeland Security currently exercises a narrower expedited removal authority pursuant to the Department's prosecutorial discretion. Only individuals apprehended within two weeks of entry and within 100 miles of a land border are subject to expedited removal, per Department regulations.

In her essay “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote, “Nobody had been aware that mankind, for so long a time considered under the image of a family of nations, had reached the state where whoever was thrown out of one of these tightly organized closed communities found himself thrown out of the family of nations altogether.” Surveying the aftermath of the world wars, the same aftermath that eventually led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Arendt found that a person had to be emplaced—the subject of a political space—in the state-oriented order of geopolitics to be cognizable as a subject of human rights. The stateless, being displaced, were excluded from such a regime of rights and from the global political community. Bare humanity, Arendt argued, was an insufficiently binding political identity. As she wrote in her arresting language, “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”