Saúl Ramírez

Saúl Ramírez is a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. He researches questions at the intersection of law and sociology, race and ethnicity, and crime and immigration (crimmigration). His current projects draw on his qualitative data to scrutinize a socio-legal puzzle—the incongruity between the hegemonic jurisprudence on deportations in the United States as a legal issue vis-à-vis its modern-day social realities—by, inter alia, juxtaposing incarceration’s collateral consequences and deportation’s ramifications to investigate whether and, if so, how deportation is punishment; and, consequently, underscore why immigrants’ repertoire of constitutional safeguards during removal proceedings ought to mirror the legal protections available in criminal court. His teaching interests include legal and social theory, race and the law, criminal law, and immigration law.

Saúl received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, where he double-majored in Chicano Studies and Ethnic Studies and double-minored in Education and Global Poverty and Practice. He earned High Honors, a Distinction in General Scholarship, and the Ethnic Studies Departmental Citation. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he earned the C. LaRue Munson Prize for his advocacy in criminal and immigrant defense clinics. He holds an A.M. in Sociology from Harvard University. He received support in graduate school from The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans and The OpEd Project’s Public Voices Fellowship. His scholarship has received funding from the Russel Sage Foundation and Harvard grants and fellowships from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Center for American Political Studies, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in Sociology at Harvard (ABD), and his doctoral dissertation is titled Assimilation Pathways, Deportation Effects, and American Identity.