ABSTRACT
This chapter draws attention to Carey McWilliams' role as a public intellectual and a legal activist who championed citizenship rights for immigrant communities. As a social historian, cultural critic, journalist, editor of The Nation but also as a lawyer, McWilliams was an active participant in the social turmoil of his time (from migrant labor struggles to the Zoot Suit Riots, the Sleepy Lagoon case, or the Japanese American internment) and he engaged his “legal imagination” to devise new tools for social justice. In both his activism and in his writings, one finds insightful discussions about the intricacies of culture and race, difference, equality, and the law in theoretical articulations that are still relevant for immigration and critical race studies, and certainly also for human rights debates. The ultimate goal of this analysis is to align McWilliams' work with the alternative democratic tradition of human rights proposed by James Tully, which signals the struggle for rights as one always in progress, as rights are proposed, discussed, and contested among diverse constituencies, and not just state-driven and imposed.
