Annual Howard Adelman Lecture: Immigration Exceptionalism and the Dual State
October 19, 2026
4:00pm - 6:00pm (ET/Toronto)
This is an in person event.
Attendance is free, but please RSVP by October 15 2026
Location: Helliwell Centre, Osgoode Hall Law School, 1014 Osgoode Hall, Keele Campus (building #32 on the campus map)
Guest Speaker: Audrey Macklin, Professor of Law and Chair in Human Rights, University of Toronto
Discussants: Deepa Nagari, PhD candidate in York University’s Socio-Legal Studies and Kushan Azadah, recent PhD graduate, York University
Abstract:
The second Trump Administration’s campaign of mass detention and deportation of non-citizens has prompted commentators to invoke of the theory of the Dual State developed by German Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel. The Dual State defined a bifurcated legal order emerging under the Nazi regime, one for ‘friends’ (the normative state) and the other for ‘enemies’ (the prerogative state). My presentation identifies the continuity between elements of the Dual State and immigration exceptionalism, through which all liberal democracies structure and justify the diminution or negation of non-citizens’ legal rights in the name of sovereignty. I contend that Immigration exceptionalism greases the slide toward a dual state, and helps explain why the spectacular cruelty, arbitrariness, and violence directed at non-citizens is at the vanguard of President Trump’s authoritarian governance.
Bios:
Audrey Macklin is Professor of Law and Rebecca Cook Chair in International Human Rights. She studied law at University of Toronto (LLB 1987) and Yale Law School (1991), and clerked for Justice Bertha Wilson at the Supreme Court of Canada. After commencing her academic career at Dalhousie Law School, she was appointed at University of Toronto in 2001 and called to the Bar in 2004. From 1995-1997, Prof. Macklin was a Member for the Immigration and Refugee Board (Refugee Protection Division), and served as Director of the Centre for Criminology and Socioloegal Studies from 2017-2023.
Professor Macklin researches, teaches, advocates and publishes widely in the fields of migration, citizenship, refugee, and human rights law, as well as administrative law. She is active in public-facing work that includes pro bono interventions at all levels of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada and human rights engagement in Canada and abroad. She frequently appears in media in Canada and internationally on issues relating to migration, counter-terrorism, refugees, citizenship and business and human rights. Her work has been cited numerous times by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Prof. Macklin is a Fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research (CIFAR), and recipient of the Carolyn Tuohy Award for Public Policy.
Deepa Nagari is a 5th-year PhD candidate in York University’s Socio-Legal Studies. Her research focuses on how asylum laws and policies (such as the US-Canada Safe Third Country Agreement) shape asylum pathways into Canada. She also explores how advocates, organizations, municipalities, and cities are adapting their services, policies, and advocacy to these rapid shifts.
Kushan Azadah is a political scientist and migration scholar whose work examines refugee governance, migration policy, and the contested boundaries of protection in Canada. He recently completed his PhD at York University, where his dissertation traced Canada’s responses to Afghan displacement from the Cold War to the present, situating refugee policy within changing relations between the state, civil society, and the wider geopolitical order. His current research turns to the afterlife of exceptional resettlement programs, asking how refugee protection encounters questions of settler colonialism, reconciliation, and political belonging in what is now called Canada. He is also a researcher with the Global Migration Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Thank you to Nancy and the Adelman family for their continued support of the lecture series.
