Beyond the Doctrine with Professor Lucas Guttentag

Please join the American Constitution Society (ACS) and the Stanford Immigration & Human Rights Law Association (SIHRLA) for a conversation with Professor Lucas Guttentag, who will discuss his career and reflections on the state of immigration advocacy.

With a career that spans advocacy, academia, and government, Prof. Guttentag is one of the nation’s leading experts on immigration law and policy. Guttentag founded the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Immigrants’ Rights Project (IRP) and directed it for twenty-five years from 1985-2010, litigating complex class action and appellate cases on behalf of refugees and noncitizens throughout the country. Prof. Guttentag has successfully argued major cases in the United States Supreme Court, the California Supreme Court, and many trial and appellate courts throughout the country. He served in the Obama administration as a senior counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security and to the Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2014-2016. His writings focus on the intersection of immigration, civil rights, and administrative reform, and Guttentag regularly advises advocates, NGO’s, philanthropies, and governmental entities on immigration policy and litigation strategy. With the advent of the Trump administration, he created the Immigration Policy Tracking Project with Stanford and Yale law students, a dynamic website profiled in the New Yorker and New York Times, to catalogue every Trump-era immigration policy and track its current status. Most recently, Prof. Guttentag has served in the Biden administration as Senior Counselor to the Deputy Attorney General.