By César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

The border that the United States shares with México is extraordinary and illusive. It meanders through political conversations and moves from place to place, leaving courts to wonder where it is and what it means to the lives of the ordinary people who occupy this extraordinary space. Courts imagine the border as a site of exceptional danger to which they have responded by creating a law of border exceptionalism. This essay describes the normative and empirical justifications and legal doctrine of border exceptionalism before challenging its foundations. Unmoored from its justifications, there is nothing to stop the law of border exceptionalism to spread far from the borderlands.