Law Commons^™

Immigration Law's Arbitrariness Problem, Shalini Ray

Articles

Despite deportation’s devastating effects, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) specifies deportation as the penalty for nearly every immigration law violation. Critics have regularly decried the INA’s lack of proportionality, contending that the penalty often does not fit the offense. The immigration bureaucracy’s implementation of the INA, however, involves a spectrum of penalties short of deportation. Using tools such as administrative closure, orders of supervision, and deferred action, agency bureaucrats decide who is deported and who stays, and on what terms, on a purely ad hoc basis. In this “shadow system,” immigrants, their advocates, and the broader public lack basic …

Contaminated Relationships In The Opioid Crisis, Benjamin Mcmichael, Elissa Philip Gentry

Articles

Unlike past public health crises, the opioid crisis arose from within the healthcare system itself. Entities within that system, particularly opioid manufacturers, may bear some liability in sparking and perpetuating the current crisis. Unsurprisingly, the allegations underlying the thousands of claims filed in connection with the opioid crisis differ substantially. However, almost all of those claims rely, to some degree, on the strength of the relationship between opioid manufacturers and the healthcare providers who prescribed their products.

This Article argues that the underlying relationship is the heart of the crisis and that this problematic relationship is by no means a …

Appellate Courts And Civil Juries, Adam Steinman

Articles

In federal civil litigation, decisionmaking power is shared by juries, trial courts, and appellate courts. This Article examines an unresolved tension in the different doctrines that allocate authority among these institutions, one that has led to confusion surrounding the relationship between appellate courts and civil juries. At base, the current uncertainty stems from a longstanding lack of clarity regarding the distinction between matters of law and matters of fact. The high-stakes Oracle-Google litigation - which is now before the Supreme Court - exemplifies this. In that case, the Federal Circuit reasoned that an appellate court may assert de novo review …

Cannabis Banking: What Marijuana Can Learn From Hemp, Julie A. Hill

Articles

Marijuana-related businesses have banking problems. Many banks explain that, because marijuana is illegal under federal law, they will not serve the industry. Even when marijuana-related businesses can open bank accounts, they still have trouble accepting credit cards and getting loans. Some hope to fix marijuana's banking problems with changes to federal law. Proposals range from broad reforms removing marijuana from the list of controlled substances to narrower legislation prohibiting banking regulators from punishing banks that serve the marijuana industry. But would these proposals solve marijuana's banking problems?

In 2018, Congress legalized another variant of the Cannabis plant species: hemp. Prior …

Against Equality: A Critical Essay For The Naacp And Others, Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic

Essays, Reviews, and Shorter Works

We address a recurring problem in movement scholarship and activism: why do some civil rights organizations persist in promoting themselves as advocates of equal protection when street activists rarely mention it, and lawyers know that litigation brought under that clause almost always loses? Try to recall the last time you heard of a street protest by a group -- say Mexican-American school children in Tucson, Arizona, Black victims of police violence, or military women subjected to sexual harassment -- proceeding under the banner of equal protection. Or think when you last read of a lawyer who brought and won a …

Treat Every Defendant Equally And Fairly: Political Interference And The Challenges Facing The U.S. Attorneys' Offices As The Justice Department Turns 150 Years Old, Joyce Vance

Essays, Reviews, and Shorter Works

The US Attorneys' Offices are the flagships of the federal government's law-enforcement work. But as the Department of Justice (DOJ) approaches its 150th anniversary, there are deep concerns for their future. The four years of the Trump Administration have shaken public confidence in DOJ, and during his tenure, Attorney General William Barr all too often took on the role of the President's lawyer rather than upholding the integrity and credibility of line prosecutors to work free from political interference. This Essay, written in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, argues that, in a new administration, there must …

Sacrificing Legitimacy In A Hierarchical Judiciary, Tara Leigh Grove

Essays, Reviews, and Shorter Works

Scholars have long worried about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. But commentators have largely overlooked the inferior federal judiciary - and the potential tradeoffs between Supreme Court and lower court legitimacy. This Essay aims to call attention to those tradeoffs. When the Justices are asked to change the law in high-profile areas - such as abortion, affirmative action, or gun rights - they face a conundrum: To protect the legitimacy of the Court, the Justices may be reluctant to issue the broad precedents that will most effectively clarify the law - and thereby guide the lower courts. The Justices …

Sex, Crime, And Serostatus, Courtney K. Cross

Articles

The HIV crisis in the United States is far from over. The confluence of widespread opioid usage, high rates of HIV infection, and rapidly shrinking rural medical infrastructure has created a public health powder keg across the American South. Yet few states have responded to this grim reality by expanding social and medical services. Instead, criminalizing the behavior of people with HIV remains an overused and counterproductive tool for addressing this crisis - especially in the South, where HIV-specific criminal laws are enforced with the most frequency.

People living with HIV are subject to arrest, prosecution, and lengthy prison sentences …

Unintended Legislative Inertia, Mirit Eyal-Cohen

Articles

Institutional and political forces create strong inertial pressures that make updating legislation a difficult task. As a result, laws often stagnate, leading to the continued existence of obsolete rules and policies that serve long-forgotten purposes. Recognizing this inertial power, legislatures over the last few decades have increasingly relied on a perceived solution -- temporary legislation. In theory, this measure avoids inertia by requiring legislators to choose to extend a law deliberately.

This Article argues that temporary legislation is a double-edged sword. While some temporary laws ultimately expire, many perpetuate through cycles of extension and reauthorization. Temporary legislation often creates its …

Redliking: When Redlining Goes Online, Allyson Gold

Articles

Airbnb's structure, design, and algorithm create a website architecture that allows user discrimination to prevent minority hosts from realizing the same economic benefits from short-term rental platforms as White hosts, a phenomenon this Article refers to as "redliking." For hosts with an unused home, a spare room, or an extra couch, Airbnb provides an opportunity to create new income streams and increase wealth. Airbnb encourages prospective guests to view host photographs, names, and personal information when considering potential accommodations, thereby inviting bias, both implicit and overt, to permeate transactions. This bias has financial consequences. Empirical research on host earning rates …

The Least Of These: The Case For Nationwide Injunctions In Immigration Cases As A Critical Democratic Institution, Allen Slater, Richard Delgado

Articles

No abstract provided.

If Only I Had Known: The Challenges Of Representation, Jenny E. Carroll

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Emerging Lessons Of Trump V. Hawaii, Shalini Ray

Articles

In the years since the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Hawaii, federal district courts have adjudicated dozens of rights-based challenges to executive action in immigration law. Plaintiffs, including U.S. citizens, civil rights organizations, and immigrants themselves, have alleged violations of the First Amendment and the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause with some regularity based on President Trump's animus toward immigrants. This Article assesses Hawaii's impact on these challenges to immigration policy, and it offers two observations. First, Hawaii has amplified federal courts' practice of privileging administrative law claims over constitutional ones. For example, courts considering separate challenges …

Beyond Bail, Jenny E. Carroll

Articles

From the proliferation of community bail funds to the implementation of new risk assessment tools to the limitation and even eradication of monetary bail, reform movements have altered the landscape of pretrial detention. Yet, reform movements have paid little attention to the emerging reality of a post-monetary-bail world. With monetary bail an unavailable or disfavored option, courts have come to rely increasingly on nonmonetary conditions of release. These nonmonetary conditions can be problematic for many of the same reasons that monetary bail is problematic and can inject additional bias into the pretrial system.

In theory, nonmonetary conditions offer increased opportunities …

Abdication Through Enforcement, Shalini Ray

Articles

Presidential abdication in immigration law has long been synonymous with the perceived nonenforcement of certain provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. President Obama’s never-implemented policy of deferred action, known as DAPA, serves as the prime example in the literature. But can the President abdicate the duty of faithful execution in immigration law by enforcing the law, i.e., by deporting deportable noncitizens? This Article argues “yes.” Every leading theory of the presidency recognizes the President’s role as supervisor of the bureaucracy, an idea crystallized by several scholars. When the President fails to establish meaningful enforcement priorities, essentially making every deportable …

Squaring A Circle: Advice And Consent, Faithful Execution, And The Vacancies Reform Act, Ronald J. Krotoszynski Jr., Atticus Deprospo

Articles

Successive presidents have interpreted the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 to authorize the appointment of principal officers on a temporary basis. Despite serving in a mere "acting" capacity and without the Senate's approval, these acting principal officers nevertheless wield the full powers of the office. The best argument in favor of this constitutionally dubious practice is that an acting principal officer is not really a "principal officer" under the U.S. Constitution because she only serves for a limited period. Although not facially specious, this claim elides the most important legal fact: an acting principal officer may exercise the full …

Against Congressional Case Snatching, Ronald J. Krotoszynski Jr., Atticus Deprospo

Articles

Congress has developed a deeply problematic habit of aggrandizing itself by snatching cases from the Article III courts. One form of contemporary case snatching involves directly legislating the outcome of pending litigation by statute. These laws do not involve generic amendments to existing statutes but rather dictate specific rulings by the Article III courts in particular cases. Another form of congressional case snatching involves rendering ongoing judicial proceedings essentially advisory by unilaterally permitting a disgruntled litigant to transfer a pending case from an Article III court to an executive agency for resolution. Both practices involve Congress reallocating the business of …

Incentivized Torts: An Empirical Analysis, John Shahar Dillbary, Cherie Metcalf, Brock Stoddard

Articles

Courts and scholars assume that group causation theories deter wrongdoers. This Article empirically tests, and rejects, this assumption, using a series of incentivized laboratory experiments. Contrary to common belief and theory, data from over 200 subjects show that group liability can encourage tortious behavior and incentivize individuals to act with as many tortfeasors as possible. We find that subjects can be just as likely to commit a tort under a liability regime as they would be when facing no tort liability. Group liability can also incentivize a tort by making subjects perceive it as fairer to victims and society. These …

Groundhog Law, Richard Delgado

Articles

An unexpected question from a conference participant sends Rodrigo in search of the professor's counsel. A young stranger from another discipline had asked him why law seems never to advance and posited that the reason may be that, lone among disciplines, law is uninterested in advancing human knowledge. The questioner even raised the possibility that law may not belong on a university campus along with departments such as Physics, English, and History, and might well consider relocating to community colleges where it would find a disciplinary home along with courses on welding, automobile mechanics, and high-speed cooking.

Rodrigo, who at …

The Case Against Collective Liability, J. Shahar Dillbary

Articles

Collective liability-defined as the imposition of liability on a group that may include innocent actors-is commonplace. From ancient to modem times, legislators, regulators, and courts have imposed such liability when they believe that the culprit is a member of the group. Examples of collective liability abound: from surgical teams held jointly liable for a misplaced sponge to entire families evicted from their homes for the drug-related activity of a single person under the "One Strike Rule." Courts recognize, of course, that collective liability punishes the innocent, but they view it as a necessary evil to smoke out and punish an …

State-Created Fetal Harm, Benjamin Mcmichael, Meghan Boone

Articles

Half a century of state-level restrictions on abortion access might cause a casual observer to conclude that state governments have a long-standing commitment to protecting fetal life. And yet, over the last several decades, state governments and local law enforcement are increasingly taking steps that actively undermine fetal health. Through the passage of state fetal endangerment laws and the prosecution of pregnant women under stretched interpretations of existing criminal laws, states are actively creating conditions that result in poorer fetal health outcomes-including an increase in fetal and infant death.

This Article seeks to make three important contributions to the scholarly …

A Biden Executive Branch And Its Supporters May Find The Federal Courts An Obstacle, Heather Elliott

Articles

No abstract provided.