Benjamin Woodring ’16 Quoted in Federal Court

Benjamin Woodring’s work on Shakespeare and sanctuary was quoted on the opening page of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania’s important decision in City of Philadelphia v. Sessions, the most recent chapter in so-called “sanctuary city” litigation.

Philadelphia and other cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles, have sued Attorney General Jeff Sessions for withholding federal funds based on whether a city complies with a statute to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in providing information on a person's citizenship or immigration status. Ruling in favor of Philadelphia, Judge Baylson held that the Attorney General’s conditions violated the Constitution’s Spending Clause, and also held the statutue, 8 U.S.C. § 1373 itself, unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment, in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Murphy v. NCAA.

The judge’s 93-page opinion opens with quotations from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Coriolanus and from Woodring’s work on the history of sanctuary privileges. The Atlantic profiled the decision and its use of Shakespeare and Woodring’s article last week in a piece titled, “When Hamlet Starts Showing Up in Federal Court.”

Woodring’s “Liberty to Misread: Sanctuary and Possibility in The Comedy of Errors,” was selected for publication in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities while he was a student at the law school, and expanded upon research he had done on the subject for his English Ph.D. at Harvard.

“I’m honored to have my work cited,"said Woodring. “But more important to me is the affirmation of humanities scholarship’s relevance to and meaningfulness in legal discourse.”