Law Commons^™

A Meditation On Moncrieffe: On Marijuana, Misdemeanants, And Migration, Victor C. Romero

Journal Articles

This essay is a brief meditation on the immigration schizophrenia in our law and legal culture through the lens of the Supreme Court’s latest statement on immigration and crime, Moncrieffe v. Holder. While hailed as a “common sense” decision, Moncrieffe is a rather narrow ruling that does little to change the law regarding aggravated felonies or the ways in which class and citizenship play into the enforcement of minor drug crimes and their deportation consequences. Despite broad agreement on the Court, the Moncrieffe opinion still leaves the discretion to deport minor state drug offenders in the hands of the federal …

Distilling Americans: The Legacy Of Prohibition On U.S. Immigration Law, Jayesh Rathod

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Since the early twentieth century, federal immigration law has targeted noncitizens believed to engage in excessive alcohol consumption by prohibiting their entry or limiting their ability to obtain citizenship and other benefits. The first specific mention of alcohol-related behavior appeared in the Immigration Act of 1917, which called for the exclusion of "persons with chronic alcoholism" seeking to enter the United States. Several decades later, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 specified that any noncitizen who "is or was ... a habitual drunkard" was per se lacking in good moral character, and hence ineligible for naturalization. Although the "chronic …

Naturalizing Immigration Imprisonment, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Only recently has imprisonment become a central feature of both t across every level of government and involving civil and criminal law enforcement tools.

Examining the population as a whole provides crucial insights as to how we arrived at this state of mass immigration imprisonment. While political motivations — parallel to those that fueled the rapid expansion of criminal mass incarceration — may have started the trend, this Article demonstrates that key legal and policy choices explain how imprisonment has become an entrenched feature of immigration law enforcement. In fact, legislators and immigration officials have locked themselves into this choice, …

The Trickle-Down War, Rosa Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The history of the European nation-state, wrote political sociologist Charles Tilly, is inextricably bound up with the history of warfare. To oversimplify Tilly’s nuanced and complex arguments, the story goes something like this: As power-holders (originally bandits and local strongmen) sought to expand their power, they needed capital to pay for weapons, soldiers and supplies. The need for capital and new recruits drove the creation of taxation systems and census mechanisms, and the need for more effective systems of taxation and recruitment necessitated better roads, better communications and better record keeping. This in turn enabled the creation of larger and …