Welcome to my website!
My name is Joel Sati, and I am a PhD Candidate in Jurisprudence & Social Policy at Berkeley Law. I am also a 2022 graduate of Yale Law School.
First and foremost, I am a philosopher by training. My main research interests are in the philosophy of criminal law, immigration, and their intersection (a field crudely known as “crimmigration”). My dissertation project, titled “A Punishment of the Severest Kind”: Immigration Enforcement, Social Degradation, and the Harm of Illegalization, develops an account of illegalization that I define as state practices of criminalization that use immigration enforcement as the central mechanism of social degradation. I examine the notion of illegality in multiple ways: as not having legal status, as a legal term of art (e.g., ‘illegal alien’), and as a social label (e.g., ‘illegals’). Moreover, I am interested in how those labels attach to (some) citizens, those who lack documentation, those who have not yet naturalized, and those who have yet to migrate.
First and foremost, I am a philosopher by training. My main research interests are in the philosophy of criminal law, immigration, and their intersection (a field crudely known as “crimmigration”). My dissertation project, titled “A Punishment of the Severest Kind”: Immigration Enforcement, Social Degradation, and the Harm of Illegalization, develops an account of illegalization that I define as state practices of criminalization that use immigration enforcement as the central mechanism of social degradation. I examine the notion of illegality in multiple ways: as not having legal status, as a legal term of art (e.g., ‘illegal alien’), and as a social label (e.g., ‘illegals’). Moreover, I am interested in how those labels attach to (some) citizens, those who lack documentation, those who have not yet naturalized, and those who have yet to migrate.
As far as my background is concerned, I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at UC Berkeley, and I received my Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 2022. I received my B.A. in Philosophy, summa cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa, from the City College of New York in 2016.
Outside of the academy, I am a 2018 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans fellow, and the 2019 recipient of the FOUNDATIONS OF CHANGE Thomas I. Yamashita Prize. I also have bylines in national publications such as the Washington Post and Berkeley Blogs. I was a 2020-21 fellow at the Immigration Initiative at Harvard, and a 2021-2022 fellow at the Penn Migration Initiative.