Law Commons^™

The Immigration-Terrorism Illusory Correlation And Heuristic Mistake, Mary De Ming Fan

Articles

The national broil over immigration reform is fermenting an illusory correlation and mistaken heuristic. Two events illustrate the involvement of legislators in the manufacture and mplification of this heuristic mistake. A controversial bill passed by the House of Representatives in December 2005 explicitly and extensively packaged immigration control with antiterrorism.' During his term as a congressman, J. D. Hayworth published a book claiming that inflows of people over the U.S.-Mexico border pose a "terrorist threat," that the nation has witnessed an "illegal alien crime spree," and that high immigration rates from Mexico threaten social instability.[para] Such pronouncements by legislators generate …

Sending The Bureaucracy To War, Elena Baylis, David Zaring

Articles

Administrative law has been transformed after 9/11, much to its detriment. Since then, the government has mobilized almost every part of the civil bureaucracy to fight terrorism, including agencies that have no obvious expertise in that task. The vast majority of these bureaucratic initiatives suffer from predictable, persistent, and probably intractable problems - problems that contemporary legal scholars tend to ignore, even though they are central to the work of the writers who created and framed the discipline of administrative law.

We analyze these problems through a survey of four administrative initiatives that exemplify the project of sending bureaucrats to …