This dissertation examines how legal scholars can contribute to debates within liberalism about border control.;This dissertation challenges these exceptional understandings of border control by exposing the legal processes that render border control laws exceptional and by investigating legal strategies that migrants successfully deploy to resist exceptional border control laws.;The dissertation begins by exploring the exceptional understanding of border control adhered to by many liberal theorists. It then moves on to examine how border control law establishes legally anomalous zones and legally exceptional classes of people, both of which allow states to deploy legal forms as a one-way projection of power over noncitizens. Next, the dissertation offers a critique of laws operating in this manner, arguing that such laws fail to comply with norms that are constitutive of what Lon Fuller termed "legality". The dissertation then considers a legal strategy that migrants and their allies use to challenge legally exceptional border control measures: church sanctuary practices, whereby non-citizens take up residence in sacred buildings to avoid deportation. Faith-based communities frequently justify sanctuary as a means to correct particularly egregious outcomes emerging from border control procedures that violate principles of legality. Moreover, states commonly defer to these arguments by mitigating the harsh outcomes of border control law in cases where sanctuary has been offered. The dissertation concludes that greater attention ought to be paid by liberal theorists to legal arguments made within extra-state institutions such as faith-based communities that are responsive to the interests of non-citizens and that successfully resist---and develop alternatives to---legally exceptional border control activities.;Many liberal theorists view border control as exceptional. Such theorists contend that standard liberal principles regulate relations among members of a political community. As such, these principles are not applicable with their full force to the border control context because this context raises the analytically prior question of who counts as a member of the community. Along similar lines, the legal systems in liberal states characterize border control law as legally exceptional. In this exceptional area of law, human rights norms---especially due process nouns---are attenuated.
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