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Full-Text Articles in Law
How Much Procedure Is Needed For Agencies To Change “Novel” Regulatory Policies?, Ming Hsu Chen
How Much Procedure Is Needed For Agencies To Change “Novel” Regulatory Policies?, Ming Hsu Chen
Publications
The use of guidance documents in administrative law has long been controversial and considered to be one of the most challenging aspects of administrative law. When an agency uses a guidance document to change or make policy, it need not provide notice to the public or allow comment on the new rule; this makes changes easier and faster and less subject to judicial review. Under the Obama Administration, guidance documents were used to implement policy shifts in many areas of administrative law, including civil rights issues such as transgender inclusion and campus sexual harassment and immigration law issues such as …
Leveraging Social Science Expertise In Immigration Policymaking, Ming H. Chen
Leveraging Social Science Expertise In Immigration Policymaking, Ming H. Chen
Publications
The longstanding uncertainty about how policymakers should grapple with social science demonstrating racism persists in the modern administrative state. This Essay examines the uses and misuses of social science and expertise in immigration policymaking. More specifically, it highlights three immigration policies that dismiss social scientific findings and expertise as part of presidential and agency decision-making: border control, crime control, and extreme vetting of refugees to prevent terrorism. The Essay claims that these rejections of expertise undermine both substantive and procedural protections for immigrants and undermine important functions of the administrative state as a curb on irrationality in policymaking. It concludes …
Administrator-In-Chief: The President And Executive Action In Immigration Law, Ming H. Chen
Administrator-In-Chief: The President And Executive Action In Immigration Law, Ming H. Chen
Publications
This Article provides a framework for understanding the role of the President as the Administrator-in-Chief of the executive branch. Recent presidents, in the face of heated controversy and political division, have relied on executive action to advance their immigration policies. Which of these policies are legitimate, and which are vulnerable to challenge, will determine their legacy. This Article posits that the extent to which the President enhances the procedural legitimacy of agency actions strengthens the legacy of the policies when confronted regarding their substance. This emphasis on shoring up administrative procedure is a form of expertise that should be counted …
Beyond Legality: The Legitimacy Of Executive Action In Immigration Law, Ming H. Chen
Beyond Legality: The Legitimacy Of Executive Action In Immigration Law, Ming H. Chen
Publications
Recent uses of executive action in immigration law have triggered accusations that the President is acting imperially, like a king, or as a lawbreaker. President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) programs, which provide protection from deportation and a work permit during a temporary period of lawful presence, serve as the lightning rod for these accusations. But even as legislative and litigation challenges to DACA proceed, many states appear to accept and comply with it, including nearly all of the states that have joined the Texas v United States lawsuit that challenges …
Language Rights As A Legacy Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964, Ming Hsu Chen
Language Rights As A Legacy Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964, Ming Hsu Chen
Publications
The fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 offers an important opportunity to reflect on an earlier moment when civil rights evolved to accommodate new waves of immigration. This essay seeks to explain how civil rights laws evolved to include rights for immigrants and non-English speakers. More specifically, it seeks to explain how policy entrepreneurs in agencies read an affirmative right to language access.
Governing By Guidance: Civil Rights Agencies And The Emergence Of Language Rights, Ming Hsu Chen
Governing By Guidance: Civil Rights Agencies And The Emergence Of Language Rights, Ming Hsu Chen
Publications
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this Article asks how federal civil rights laws evolved to incorporate the needs of non-English speakers following landmark immigration reform (the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act) that led to unprecedented migration from Asia and Latin America. Based on a comparative study of the emergence of language rights in schools and workplaces from 1965 to 1980, the Article demonstrates that regulatory agencies used nonbinding guidances to interpret the undefined statutory term "national origin discrimination" during their implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Their efforts facilitated the creation of language rights, …
Where You Stand Depends On Where You Sit: Bureaucratic Politics In Federal Workplace Agencies Serving Undocumented Workers, Ming H. Chen
Where You Stand Depends On Where You Sit: Bureaucratic Politics In Federal Workplace Agencies Serving Undocumented Workers, Ming H. Chen
Publications
This Article integrates social science theory about immigrant incorporation and administrative agencies with empirical data about immigrant-serving federal workplace agencies to illuminate the role of bureaucracies in the construction of rights. More specifically, it contends that immigrants' rights can be protected when workplace agencies incorporate immigrants into labor law enforcement in accordance with the agencies' professional ethos and organizational mandates. Building on Miles' Law that "where you stand depends on where you sit," this Article argues that agencies exercise discretion in the face of contested law and in contravention to a political climate hostile to undocumented immigrants for the purpose …