Marie-Eve Loiselle is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Transformations of Citizenship Leibniz Research Group. In 2020, Marie-Eve was awarded a Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship for studying the role of biometric technologies in the governance of the movement of people across state borders at the University of Toronto, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Prior to joining the Munk School, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
From 2016 to 2020 Marie-Eve was a research fellow at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Faculty of Law. She completed her PhD at the Australian National University (ANU) where she explores the role of legal discourses in the construction of the border wall between the United States and Mexico. Marie-Eve also holds a MA from the ANU and a law degree from the University of Montreal.
Research Projects
Identity in flux: Citizenship, statelessness, and the digital gap
“Legal identity” has been defined as “the recognition of a person’s existence before the law, facilitating the realisation of specific rights and corresponding duties (Govil, 2015).” The term has gained currency in the international development space over the last decade, especially since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the UN General Assembly in September 2015, which call for the provision of a “legal identity for all by 2030” in its target 16.9 (A/RES/70/01). Marie-Eve’s research seeks to bring to light two versions of legal identity circulating in the development literature. First, a substantive version of legal identity, discursively constructing registration as necessary for someone’s recognition as a person before the law. Second, a thin conception, which emphasises the administrative and formalistic nature of legal identity. Through a critical analysis of that literature, this research will explore how in fact these two versions often collide in discourses about legal identity, in turn promoting the conflation of this concept with that of digital identity and other notions such as legal personhood. Building on these findings, the project will assess how developments in the space of legal identity risk in practice pushing citizens deprived of a digital proof of their legal existence towards de facto statelessness.
Walled Landscape: Legal Discourse and the Construction of Physical Partitions
In addition, Marie-Eve is currently working on her book project Walled Landscape: Legal Discourse and the Construction of Physical Partitions. The book uses the US-Mexico border wall as a frame to provide an alternative understanding of the relationship between the law and wall building by sovereign states. Relying on an interdisciplinary approach that brings socio-legal studies into dialogue with geography, history, and border studies, the book will trace the legal history of American wall-building to the first half of the 20th century. At the theoretical level, it will offer a novel approach to conceptualizing the entanglement between the wall and the law; first by being attentive to the legal discourses that have contributed to the construction of walls along the U.S.–Mexico border; and second, by considering the normative power of the wall as a material structure that holds discursive qualities.
Publications
Journal and Book Chapters
Identities in Flux: From Legal Personality to Digital Identity, chapter in collection edited by Prof. Kathryn Henne (pending full review as requested by Cambridge University Press)
2021. The American Border Wall: A History of Legal Division, Law, Culture and the Humanities
2019. The Penholder System and the Rule of Law in the Security Council Decision-Making: Setback or Improvement? 33 Leiden Journal of International Law 139
2019. Elected Member Influence in the United Nations Security Council (with Jeremy Farrall, Christopher Michaelsen, Jochen Prantl, and Jeni Whalan) 33 Leiden Journal of International Law 101
2016. The UN Security Council as Regulator and Subject of the Rule of Law: Conflict or Confluence of Interest? (with Jeremy Farrall) in Hilary Charlesworth and Jeremy Farrall (eds.), Strengthening the Rule of Law through the UN Security Council (Routledge)
2013. The Normative Status of the Responsibility to Protect after Libya 5 Global Responsibility to Protect 317
Other Publications
2020. Borders, Bodies and See-All Technologies: Pushing the Limits of Bio-Surveillance (with Ayelet Shachar) Green European Journal
2015. Emancipating Rituals: Women’s Empowerment through Customary Justice, working paper
2014. Drifting Sovereignty, Regarding Rights Website
2013. This Saturday Australians will Finally Elect a President (with Jeremy Farrall ) The Conversation
2013. Security Council Sanctions: Can Australia Make a Difference? (with Christopher Michaelsen) The Conversation
2013. The Decline of Consent in International Law, The Interpreter