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Full-Text Articles in Law
Modalities Of Social Change Lawyering, Christine N. Cimini, Doug Smith
Modalities Of Social Change Lawyering, Christine N. Cimini, Doug Smith
Articles
The last decade has seen the rise of new kinds of grassroots social movements. Movements including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Sunrise, and #MeToo pushed back against long-standing political, economic, and social crises, including income inequality, racial inequality, police violence, climate change, and the widespread culture of sexual abuse and harassment. As these social change efforts evolve, a growing body of scholarship has begun to theorize the role of lawyers within these new social movements and to identify lawyering characteristics that contribute to sustaining social movements over time. This Article surveys this body of literature and proposes a typology …
All The Presidents' Dreamers: Immigration Reform That Biden And Trump Can Agree On (And Why That Reform May Be Elusive), Victor C. Romero
All The Presidents' Dreamers: Immigration Reform That Biden And Trump Can Agree On (And Why That Reform May Be Elusive), Victor C. Romero
Journal Articles
While a sizeable gulf exists between the Trump and Biden administrations’ approaches to immigration, there is one policy area where these presidents would see eye-to-eye: a legal pathway for “Dreamers,” longtime undocumented residents who initially came to the U.S. as children. Notwithstanding this exceptional example of bipartisanship, how the nation now moves forward to create such a pathway is a conundrum. The political divide that has stalled a two-decades-long search for a congressional solution has its roots in America’s longstanding ambivalence about whether and how to provide basic opportunities to the least of its denizens. This Essay traces the current …
An Innovative Approach To Movement Lawyering: An Immigrant Rights Case Study, Christine N. Cimini, Doug Smith
An Innovative Approach To Movement Lawyering: An Immigrant Rights Case Study, Christine N. Cimini, Doug Smith
Articles
The role of lawyers in social change movements is more important than ever as communities mobilize around systemic racism, police killings, xenophobia, rising unemployment, and widening economic inequality. The immigrant rights movement is a critical part of these efforts to foment change. This Article leverages an in-depth case study – the rise and fall of the controversial immigration enforcement program known as Secure Communities - to explore how lawyers work as part of a community to challenge power and effectuate change. The dismantling of Secure Communities was widely credited to a relentless campaign to thwart the government’s then-expanding deportation strategy. …
The Sanctuary Of Prosecutorial Nullification, Zohra Ahmed
The Sanctuary Of Prosecutorial Nullification, Zohra Ahmed
Faculty Scholarship
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the shortcomings of existing sanctuary protections came sharply into focus.1 Historically, cities enacted sanctuary protections to extricate their law enforcement agencies from activities related to federal immigration enforcement. In sanctuary cities, local government agencies are typically restricted from sharing information with federal immigration authorities or from cooperating in apprehending individuals targeted for removal. 2 After the White House issued an Executive Order (EO) in late January 2017, many immigrant rights advocates recognized that external facing policies that proscribed direct cooperation would not suffice. 3 The EO announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement …
What We Talk About When We Talk About Sanctuary Cities, Michael Kagan
What We Talk About When We Talk About Sanctuary Cities, Michael Kagan
Scholarly Works
In this Essay, Professor Michael Kagan asserts when immigrant rights advocates ask their local, state and university leaders to become "sanctuary cities," "sanctuary states," "sanctuary campuses," and so on, they carelessly hurt immigrants in places like Nevada, Texas, and Arizona. And there are a lot of immigrants in those states. People who mean to help immigrants are hurting them. He first sets out assumptions he makes about the semantics and politics of "sanctuary" debates. These assumptions include setting out the kind of actual policies that are usually under consideration when people invoke the sanctuary label, and a way of understanding …
Persons Who Are Not The People: The Changing Rights Of Immigrants In The United States, Geoffrey Heeren
Persons Who Are Not The People: The Changing Rights Of Immigrants In The United States, Geoffrey Heeren
Law Faculty Publications
Non-citizens have fared best in recent Supreme Court cases by piggybacking on federal rights when the actions of states are at issue, or by criticizing agency rationality when federal action is at issue. These two themes-federalism and agency skepticism-have proven in recent years to be more effective litigation frameworks than some individual rights-based theories like equal protection. This marks a substantial shift from the Burger Court era, when similar cases were more likely to be litigated and won on equal protection than on preemption or Administrative Procedure Act theories. This Article describes this shift, considers the reasons for it, and …
U.S. Immigration Policy: Contract Or Human Rights Law?, Victor C. Romero
U.S. Immigration Policy: Contract Or Human Rights Law?, Victor C. Romero
Journal Articles
The current immigration debate often reflects a tension between affirming the individual rights of migrants against the power of a nation to control its borders. An examination of U.S. Supreme Court precedent reveals that, from our earliest immigration history to the present time, our immigration policy has functioned more like contract law than human rights law, with the Court deferring to the power of Congress to define the terms of that contract at the expense of the immigrant's freedom.