Karla McKanders
Clinical Professor of Law
Associate Director, Legal Clinic
Karla McKanders directs the
Immigration Practice Clinic and teaches Refugee and Immigration Law. Her work has taken her throughout the U.S. and abroad teaching and researching the efficacy of legal institutions charged with processing migrants and refugees. In 2011, she received a Fulbright grant to lecture in Morocco. Before joining Vanderbilt’s law faculty, Professor McKanders was a tenured associate professor of Law at University of Tennessee College of Law. During the 2016 – 2017 academic year, she was a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Howard University School of Law, where she directed the Civil Rights Clinic. Before she joined the law faculty at the University of Tennessee, she was a clinical teaching fellow at Villanova University School of Law in the Clinic for Asylum Refugee and Emigrant Services. Professor McKanders serves on the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration Advisory Committee.
Professor McKanders was a law clerk for Judge Damon J. Keith with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit after earning her law degree at Duke University and undergraduate degree at Spelman College. She has been cited as an authority on immigration and refugee law by such media outlets as Reuters, ABC News and Al-Jazeera.
Research Interests
Immigration, refugee law, civil rights, race and the law
Representative Publications
- Arabs at Home and in the World: Human Rights, Gender Politics and Identity, Taylor & Francis, 2019 (editor)
- "Immigration to Blue Cities in Red States: The Battleground Between Sanctuary and Exclusion," 21 Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 1051 (2019)
- “Morocco at the Crossroads: The Intersection of Race, Gender and Refugee Status,” in Women and Social Change in North Africa: What Counts as Revolutionary? Cambridge University Press, 2017 (
D. Gray and N. Sonneveld, eds.)
Full Text | SSRN
- “The Subnational Response: Local Intervention in Immigration Policy and Enforcement,” in Compassionate Migration and Regional Policy in the Americas, Palgrave McMillan, 2017 (Steven W. Bender and William F. Arrocha, eds.)
Full Text | WWW
- “Refugee Reception and Perception: U.S. Detention Camps and German Welcome Centers,” 40 Fordham International Law Journal 523 (2017) (with Valeria E. Gomez)
Full Text | SSRN
- "Immigration Enforcement and the Fugitive Slave Acts: Exploring Their Similarities," 61.4 Catholic Law Review 921 (2012)
Full Text | SSRN | WWW
- "Federal Preemption and Immigrants' Rights," 3 Wake Forest Journal of Law & Policy 333 (2013)
Full Text | SSRN | PDF
- "Sustaining Tiered Personhood: Jim Crow and Anti-Immigrant Laws," 26 Harvard Journal of Racial and Ethnic Justice 163 (2010)
Full Text | SSRN
- "The Unspoken Voices of Indigenous Women in Immigration Raids," 14 Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 1 (2010)
Full Text | SSRN
- "Welcome to Hazleton! 'Illegal' Immigrants Beware: Local Immigration Ordinances and What the Federal Government Must Do About It," 39 Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 101 (2007)
Full Text | SSRN