When Crossing the US Border is Perilous for International Scholars, We Must Give Them Other Options
Academia has been forced to play one of the leading roles in the Trump administration's war on the key institutions of society and on the rule of law more broadly. Other aspects of the Trumpian strategy of deliberately creating chaos have been more directly damaging to human lives -- dismantling USAID, handing American public health agencies over to the anti-science lunatics, rounding up people in a now-Supreme Court-approved strategy of open racial profiling, and on and on -- but the assault on academia has been relentless and pointed.
One of the MAGA strategies has been to make it difficult and even dangerous for foreign scholars and students to show up at the US border, with prominent stories of professors being turned away upon arrival at US airports, along with denials and delays of student visas as part of a strategy to punish Harvard in particular. But although I would like to be able to say that American scholars are responding as effectively as possible to the new crackdown, I regret to report that at least one large professional group has failed the test.
The Law & Society Association (LSA) has announced that its annual conference, which will be held in San Francisco next year, must be attended in person. Yes, that is a big deal, as I will explain. LSA is an organization that has been publicly claiming for decades to be committed to engaging with voices from outside the United States, yet it has now effectively told non-US-based scholars to show up in person or forget it.
This will take a bit of time to tease out, but I do not want to bury the lead here. I am absolutely astounded by this decision, and I think that it was not only a huge mistake strategically but also a missed opportunity to affirm LSA's stated principles of inclusion.
I will not use this column to get into the question of whether annual conferences are "a good use of time and money," which is a subset of the question of whether scholarship is socially valuable and thus whether universities are valuable. Suffice it to say that I think that all of those things are valuable, and those who participate in and organize scholarly conventions reveal through those actions that they agree with me. So when I say that there will be some people who will not be able to attend the LSA annual meeting next year, anyone who responds, "Oh boo hoo, like that matters," is entitled to their (ignorant) opinion but is simply not part of this conversation.
So back to the issue at hand. For readers who are not familiar, LSA is a uniquely interdisciplinary professional association that runs several ongoing programs (encouraging the professional development of new scholars being the most useful, in my opinion) but which is important in most of its members' minds because of its large annual meetings. The meetings bring thousands of scholars together to participate in hundreds of sessions over four days every late Spring or early Summer. At each session, somewhere between three and six scholars discuss their works-in-progress around a common theme, with feedback from assigned discussants as well as an informed and engaged audience. (There are also other types of sessions, such as author-meets-reader conversations, but scholarly panels are the bulk of every year's program, as they should be.)
LSA was a thrilling event when I first started attending a quarter-century ago, because it was truly interdisciplinary and also because it was simply so large and intellectually diverse. On a given day, I could attend a session on the death penalty, then a session on global environmental cooperation, then one on the history of financial crises in South America, then one on progressive taxes, and then go to dinner with colleagues whom I had met at those or other sessions.
The one thing that was missing at my first LSA conference was any session devoted to tax scholarship, which was my area of research as a then-new legal scholar. Without an ex ante plan to do so, I ended up spending the next twenty-plus years creating what I am fairly certain has consistently been the second-largest subject-matter-specific group of scholars to attend each year's conference, typically with between forty and sixty scholars from around the world speaking on our "Law, Society, and Taxation" sessions.
Then Trump returned. This past Spring, with the sessions already arranged and everyone making plans to go to Chicago (the 2025 location), I started to receive worried emails from some of our most loyal and valued colleagues who are based outside of the US, asking me about the chaos and apparent dangers of crossing the US border. I could only tell them that I sympathized with their concerns and that I would understand if they chose to stay home.
Happily, however, we soon received an email from the organizers of the conference, who announced that although the conference had returned (after the Covid lockdowns) to in-person-only participation in 2023, they were going to make it possible for anyone who did not want to cross the border to participate remotely via zoom. I was living in Canada at the time, and even though I am a US citizen, the legal uncertainty for everyone made crossing the border at worst perilous and at best an avoidable risk.
Therefore, along with many of my colleagues from around the world, I signed up for the remote option. And to be clear, those non-US colleagues were worried because many of them are people of color or from disfavored countries, and in some cases because they have written scholarship that would not be welcome in the White House. LSA, after all, attracts public policy scholars who deal in nuance.
What the conference organizers did not tell anyone (and it is unclear when this decision was made) is that "remote participation" meant exactly one thing: logging into the session on which you yourself were a panelist. Nothing else. Why is that a big problem? Because the whole point of these conferences is the immersive experience that I described above: attending session after session to learn about new areas of research and also to stay on top of subjects with which one is already familiar. (Dinner is admittedly not an option for remote attendees.) And in my case, I had co-organized ten sessions in 2025 with a total of forty presentations on various topics in tax scholarship, yet I was able only to attend the one to which I had assigned my own paper.
This was, to say the least, upsetting. It also amounted to being blindsided, because that was not in fact "the deal" that we were offered when the remote option had been announced. Even so, it seemed most likely to be a one-off, because everyone had been blindsided, certainly including last year's organizers. Although their response was highly sub-optimal and badly communicated, that was water under the bridge. For next year, a new organizing group would be constituted, and they would have the advantage of a long planning window and knowing in advance that participation from abroad would still be an issue -- indeed, with no guarantee that things might not get even worse between now and next May.
My hope, therefore, was that the new call for papers would formalize a remote participation option for scholars living abroad, allowing us to attend as many sessions as we chose.
As an aside, this would have had the huge added benefit of allowing people (both in the US and abroad) with disabilities and who have difficulty traveling to attend remotely as well, which has been a serious point of contention for many years. In any case, even though I have been one of the people who has generally supported in-person participation (again, however, with what should have been obvious exceptions for various categories of accommodations), the new world of reasonable fears about crossing borders clearly called for a fully hybrid conference.
That is not to say that there are not familiar arguments against hybrid conferences, but those arguments were barely carrying the day before Trump II came along.
In any case, Law & Society's announcement and call for papers came out last week, and I eagerly devoured the information to see what the new model would be. And the new model is ... the old model. In-person only, no exceptions.
For those of us with concerns about cross-border travel, the conference organizers offered an "International Travel Resources" page that includes only the most basic (and frankly obvious) information presented as five bullet points, followed by links to some US government agency websites and to some good groups like the ACLU and Advocates 4 Trans Equality.
That information, such as it was, was accompanied by this disclaimer (emphasis in original):
While LSA has made every effort to provide accurate information to help meeting participants arrive safely and enjoy their stay, we cannot guarantee entry into the United States.
Although LSA is not able to provide legal advice, we offer the following practical tips to guide your interaction with immigration officers at the port of entry[.]
Meanwhile, the truly minimalist "Disability Accommodations" page announces that "LSA strives to make the Annual Meeting accessible for all individuals," which it quickly clarifies to mean for those who are there in person: "If you have any problems regarding accessibility while on site at the meeting, please inform an LSA staff member."
As I wrote above, I find all of this to be both strategically and substantively mistaken. LSA is not an organization that makes merely pro forma claims about wanting to become a more international body. It has, in fact, made sure to hold its conferences every few years in non-US cities. True, those cities are not part of the Global South (with the lone exception of Mexico City in 2017), but the non-US conferences are explicitly part of the association's stated efforts to expand its conversation beyond only US-based scholars.
As a purely strategic matter, therefore, it is inconceivable to me that the association's best response to the rest of the world's very reasonable desire not to present itself at the US border would amount to saying: "Hey, here's the U.S. Border Patrol and Customs 'Top Ten Travel Tips' page." (That was, in fact, one of the seven "more resources" listed on the "International Travel Resources" page).
This is even more troubling, however, as a substantive matter. I have always been proud of LSA for its espousal of solidarity with the global community, its commitment to engaging with scholars from around the world, and its desire to -- as the front page of the LSA website puts it in large print -- continue "[c]onnecting sociolegal scholars from around the world." And although I rarely use the word ironic, how ironic is it that the 2026 conference's chosen theme is (no, I am not making this up) "Sanctuary?" The description of that theme begins: "A sanctuary is a place of refuge or safety, especially for those who feel unwelcome outside it." What about those who not only feel but are in fact unwelcome inside a place?
I should be clear that I have not looked up who is involved in planning the conference this year, and although the leadership of the association is surely listed somewhere online, the nature of committee-led decisions and other unknowables make it impossible (and probably inappropriate) to blame one or more people for this situation. I confess that I am somewhat tempted to be more pointed about this, but I have spent enough time in committee rooms to know that things can spin out of control and take on lives of their own. (Name your favorite Hollywood dud, for example, and it will often be impossible to answer the question: "Who approved this?")
In the end, hundreds if not thousands of scholars from around the world who would have wanted to engage with their colleagues at LSA remotely were told to either put on their big-girl and big-boy pants or go away. Even if it is impossible or unwise to place blame on particular people, this is an organization that is failing its members and forgetting its mission. Trump's reign has made things bad enough. Seeing an unforced error like this is, to put it mildly, disheartening.
- Neil H. Buchanan