Dissertation Title: Justifying Citizenship Deprivation
Doctoral Supervisor: Professor Jeremy Waldron
Biography: Anja Bossow is a JSD candidate from Germany and an Editor at Verfassungsblog. She holds an LLM in Legal Theory from NYU, where she studied as a Dean’s Graduate Scholar and German Academic Exchange Service Scholar and was a recipient of the David H. Moses Memorial Prize for obtaining the highest academic average. She also holds an LL.M from the London School of Economics (LSE) where she received the Lawyers Alumni Prize for obtaining the best overall result, and a BA in Law with French Law from the University of Oxford. Anja’s research interests include immigration and constitutional law, international human rights law as well as citizenship theory and constitutional theory.
Research: Anja’s dissertation determines the legitimacy of citizenship deprivation powers within a liberal-democratic constitutional order. By integrating (comparative) citizenship and immigration law with rights theory and normative constitutional theory, she offers a legal-theoretical account of when, why and how governments acting within the framework of a liberal-democratic constitutional order may deprive us of citizenship status. Her dissertation creates a framework for evaluating the legitimacy not just of citizenship deprivation but a range of closely allied practices, including denaturalization for fraud, felon disenfranchisement and deportation. It forms part of a broader research agenda that seeks to clarify both the nature of these membership control practices, including the harm they inflict upon the individual, assess the coherence of the justificatory rationales that governments advance to justify them and determine how a constitutional framework underpinned by a liberal-democratic framework of political justice ought to regulate them.