Stanford Law Review Online: The Hunt for Noncitizen Voters

posted by Stanford Law Review

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published an Essay by Fatma Marouf entitled The Hunt for Noncitizen Voters. Professor Marouf writes that recent efforts by several states to purge noncitizens from their voter rolls may prevent many more citizens than noncitizens from voting:

Over the past year, states have shown increasing angst about noncitizens registering to vote. Three states—Tennessee, Kansas, and Alabama—have passed new laws requiring documentary proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register. Arizona was the first state to pass such a requirement, but the Ninth Circuit struck it down in April 2012, finding it incompatible with the National Voter Registration Act. Two other states—Florida and Colorado—have waged aggressive campaigns in recent months to purge noncitizens from voter registration lists. These efforts to weed out noncitizen voters follow on the heels of legislation targeting undocumented immigrants in a number of states. Yet citizens may be more harmed by the new laws than noncitizens, especially since the number of noncitizens registering to vote has turned out to be quite small. Wrongfully targeting naturalized or minority citizens in the search for noncitizens could also have negative ramifications for society as a whole, reinforcing unconscious bias about who is a “real” American and creating subclasses of citizens who must overcome additional hurdles to exercise the right to vote.

She concludes:

Some of the laws require voters to show government-issued photo IDs, which 11% of U.S. citizens do not have. Some have placed new burdens on voter registration drives, through which African-American and Hispanic voters are twice as likely to register as Whites. Others restrict early voting, specifically eliminating Sunday voting, which African-Americans and Hispanics also utilize more often than Whites. In two states, new laws rolled back reforms that had restored voting rights to citizens with felony convictions, who are disproportionately African-American. Each of these laws is a stepping-stone on the path to subsidiary citizenship. Rather than creating new obstacles to democratic participation, we should focus our energy on ensuring that all eligible citizens are able to exercise the fundamental right to vote.

Read the full article, The Hunt for Noncitizen Voters at the Stanford Law Review Online.

  October 31, 2012 at 9:30 am  Tags: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Election law, Immigration, Politics, voter rights  Posted in: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Election Law, Immigration, Law Rev (Stanford), Politics   Print This Post   No Comments

Moral Values and the Curriculum

posted by Chai Feldblum

What great fun to read all these posts!

There are three separate threads on the posts that I want to respond to: the impact of Robin’s analysis and exhortations on what our law school curriculum might look like; the three Rs: Robin, Robert (Cover) and Religion; and the intersection between moral values, relationships and marriage.

So, to the first –curriculum.

Among the changes I hope will follow from Robin’s work are significant changes to the law school curriculum. As Rebecca Lee notes:

As I see it, Robin’s challenge to law schools is particularly timely in light of the curricular revisions many schools are making in response to the changing legal economy. To best equip students to be lawyers and problem-solvers in the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly clear that law schools need to prepare their students to do more than just adjudicative analysis. Students will need a wider understanding of law and its uses and tools in various realms, and this training, I believe, can and should begin in the classroom. As law schools’ raison d’être evolves, so too should our legal commitments and methods, and this rethinking should likewise extend to our scholarship

I completely agree.  Moreover, I think it is essential for law schools to give students a rich grounding in theories of justice concomitantly with teaching them such legal skills.  Robin has noted in this book the importance of liberal progressives being able to deploy normative arguments that rely on a thick understanding of justice and moral goods and she will make an even more extensive argument on the importance of teaching students about justice in her forthcoming book about law schools.  To me, giving students a rich grounding in theories of justice is imperative both to changing our legal approach and our scholarship in the manner that Robin is suggesting.

But I also can’t imagine having students learn about, and critique, theories of justice without also having a deep understanding of how our political system – which ultimately creates the body of laws that reflect our vision of justice — really, actually, and honestly works.

The lack of understanding on the part of the general public regarding the role and authority of the executive branch and the legislative branch sometimes takes my breath away.  By virtue of their profession, lawyers should be leaders in educating people about how our lawmaking system actually works and in helping people engage in citizen democracy.  But we don’t give our law students a comprehensive and rich understanding of lawmaking – the role of legislatures and agencies (as well as courts, which we cover quite well) in the making of law.

The good news is that this is beginning to change. Many schools are expanding their vision of what “teaching law” includes – which often extends to teaching students about advocacy in the political arena that makes law in the first place.

For this reason, I believe a forthcoming article on how law school clinics can lobby, co-authored by Professors Kevin Barry and Marcy Karin who head clinics that engage in both individual client work and policy work, is going to become a popular reading item. As Barry and Karin note in the beginning of their article:

In short, policy advocacy adds value for students, the law school, and the community. With respect to students, this type of clinical experience expands students’ toolkit of transferable legal skills and exposes them to the range of ways in which the law may offer solutions to a particular client or client base. It also responds to the growing student demand for policy advocacy opportunities and enables students to aspire to the highest ethical standards as set forth in the Preamble to the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. These rules state that all lawyers “should cultivate knowledge of the law beyond its use for clients [and] employ that knowledge in reform of the law.” MODEL RULES OF PROF’L CONDUCT Preamble (2012) (emphasis added).

And finally, Jill Hasday’s post brought home to me how important students’ policy advocacy work can be – and what has been missing so far in those efforts, in terms of curriculum.  Jill tells us:

Family caps, which at least nineteen states currently impose in some form, deny or limit TANF benefits to children conceived while their parents are already receiving TANF. For example, New Jersey’s TANF program provides that a family of two will ordinarily receive up to $322 a month, a family of three will ordinarily receive up to $424 a month, and a family of four will ordinarily receive up to $488 a month. These scant benefits are unlikely to cover a family’s basic needs, and New Jersey’s family cap limits them even further. New Jersey’s family cap means that a family that enters TANF with two people is still limited to just $322 a month if another child is born, $102 less than New Jersey itself otherwise thinks necessary for three people’s subsistence.

Well, the only reason there is not a mandatory family cap in ALL 50 states in this country is that, back in 1996, students in the Georgetown Federal Legislation Clinic who were working on behalf of their client, Catholic Charities USA, helped draft legal analyses and talking points against the family cap. The original welfare reform bill had required every state to have a mandatory family cap in its TANF program.  Catholic Charities (the client) took the lead in organizing a coalition against that provision.  Politics was such that the best Catholic Charities could get was a provision that permitted states to impose a family cap if they affirmatively chose to do so.  The students who worked with Catholic Charities over the course of that year learned critical legal skills by doing that work and (from my perspective) helped advance social justice by eliminating the nationwide mandatory family cap.

But here’s my final point – the work of Georgetown’s Federal Legislation clinic on welfare reform (and on many other legislative and administrative issues over the past two decades) has enabled students to learn about the political system and the making of law, and to develop important legal skills.  But there is SO much more about justice and values and normative goods (and arguments about normative goods) that could have been taught to the students if they had had available to them – as Robin calls for — a richer progressive natural law jurisprudence.  Think about what more the students could have learned if part of the law school curriculum would have been to engage them in a substantive goods conversation about the family cap – at the same time that they were working on the issue in a practical way.  (I can tell you — I did not engage the students in that conversation.  But I would do so now, as a complement to their advocacy work.)

So to end with Robin’s words:

As I argue in my book, one other cost of contemporary liberalism’s commitment to this dubious premise [state neutrality toward conceptions of the good] is that partly as a consequence, we don’t have a progressive natural law: liberals disdain the entire tradition, in part, because of their antipathy toward conceptions of the good, and antipathy toward the notion that the state should entertain them. So the part of the natural law that I believe is of most interest — the part inspired by Aquinas and most developed by Finnis and his students, that explores the content of the common good and the role of the state, and of law, in realizing it — suffers from a lack of participation by those who ought to be most engaged.

Amen. (Designed as a segue to my next post: “The Three Rs: Robin, Robert (Cover) and Religion.”)

 

 

 

  October 24, 2012 at 8:12 pm  Tags: law school curriculum, lawmaking, Politics  Posted in: Administrative Law, Symposium (Normative Jurisprudence)   Print This Post   No Comments

Stanford Law Review Online: Politicizing the Supreme Court

posted by Stanford Law Review

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published a Note by Eric Hamilton entitled Politicizing the Supreme Court. Hamilton writes that the Framers carefully constructed a Supreme Court independent from the political branches of government:

To state the obvious, Americans do not trust the federal government, and that includes the Supreme Court. Americans believe politics played “too great a role” in the recent health care cases by a greater than two-to-one margin. Only thirty-seven percent of Americans express more than some confidence in the Supreme Court. Academics continue to debate how much politics actually influences the Court, but Americans are excessively skeptical. They do not know that almost half of the cases this Term were decided unanimously, and the Justices’ voting pattern split by the political party of the president to whom they owe their appointment in fewer than seven percent of cases. Why the mistrust? When the Court is front-page, above-the-fold news after the rare landmark decision or during infrequent U.S. Senate confirmation proceedings, political rhetoric from the President and Congress drowns out the Court. Public perceptions of the Court are shaped by politicians’ arguments “for” or “against” the ruling or the nominee, which usually fall along partisan lines and sometimes are based on misleading premises that ignore the Court’s special, nonpolitical responsibilities.

He concludes:

The health care law’s closely watched journey through the three branches of government concluded in the Supreme Court, a rare opportunity in the sun for the Court. What would have been a shining moment for the Constitution in a vacuum was instead validation of the Framers’ apprehensions. Our Constitution is the longest-lasting in the world because of Americans’ enduring reverence for it. But when elected officials exploit Americans’ patriotism to score political points, they jeopardize the Framers’ carefully constructed balance of power. Instead, honest public discourse on the Constitution and the Court is the surest security for our government.

Read the full article, Politicizing the Supreme Court by Eric Hamilton, at the Stanford Law Review Online.

  August 30, 2012 at 9:30 am  Tags: constitution, Constitutional Law, Courts, founding, framers, history, Politics, Supreme Court  Posted in: Constitutional Law, Courts, Current Events, History of Law, Jurisprudence, Law Rev (Stanford), Politics, Supreme Court   Print This Post   No Comments

Stanford Law Review Online: Evaluating Merger Enforcement During the Obama Administration

posted by Stanford Law Review

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published an Essay by Jonathan Baker and Carl Shapiro entitled Evaluating Merger Enforcement During the Obama Administration. Professors Baker and Shapiro take issue with Daniel Crane’s assertions in his Essay of July 18:

We recently concluded that government merger enforcement statistics “provide clear evidence that the Obama Administration reinvigorated merger enforcement, as it set out to do.” Three weeks later, in an article published in the Stanford Law Review Online, Professor Daniel A. Crane reached the opposite conclusion, claiming that “[t]he merger statistics do not evidence ‘reinvigoration’ of merger enforcement under Obama.”

Crane is simply wrong. The data regarding merger enforcement unambiguously support our conclusion and cannot reasonably be read to support Crane’s assertions. Crane’s conclusion regarding merger enforcement is inaccurate because he relies upon flawed metrics and overlooks or misinterprets other important evidence.

They conclude:

Our analysis of merger enforcement at the DOJ during the George W. Bush Administration—based on the enforcement statistics and more—showed that it was unusually lax and in need of reinvigoration. It is too early to reach a comparably definitive conclusion about merger enforcement at the DOJ during the Obama Administration, but nothing in Daniel Crane’s article seriously challenges our interpretation of the preliminary data as demonstrating that the necessary reinvigoration has taken place.

Read the full article, Evaluating Merger Enforcement During the Obama Administration by Jonathan Baker and Carl Shapiro, at the Stanford Law Review Online.

  August 21, 2012 at 9:30 am  Tags: Antitrust, bush administration, executive branch, FTC, merger enforcement, mergers, Obama administration, Politics  Posted in: Antitrust, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law Rev (Stanford), Politics   Print This Post   One Comment

Stanford Law Review Online: The Dirty Little Secret of (Estate) Tax Reform

posted by Stanford Law Review

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published an Essay by Edward McCaffery entitled The Dirty Little Secret of (Estate) Tax Reform. Professor McCaffery argues that Congress encourages and perpetuates the cycle of special interest spending on the tax reform issue:

Spoiler alert! The dirty little secret of estate tax reform is the same as the dirty little secret about many things that transpire, or fail to transpire, inside the Beltway: it’s all about money. But no, it is not quite what you think. The secret is not that special interests give boatloads of money to politicians. Of course they do. That may well be dirty, but it is hardly secret. The dirty little secret I come to lay bare is that Congress likes it this way. Congress wants there to be special interests, small groups with high stakes in what it does or does not do. These are necessary conditions for Congress to get what it needs: money, for itself and its campaigns. Although the near certainty of getting re-elected could point to the contrary, elected officials raise more money than ever. Tax reform in general, and estate tax repeal or reform in particular, illustrate the point: Congress has shown an appetite for keeping the issue of estate tax repeal alive through a never-ending series of brinksmanship votes; it never does anything fundamental or, for that matter, principled, but rakes in cash year in and year out for just considering the matter.

He concludes:

On the estate tax, then, it is easy to predict what will happen: not much. We will not see a return to year 2000 levels, and we will not see repeal. The one cautionary note I must add is that, going back to the game, something has to happen sometime, or the parties paying Congress and lobbyists will wise up and stop paying to play. But that has not kicked in yet, decades into the story, and it may not kick in until more people read this Essay, and start to watch the watchdogs. Fat chance of that happening, too, I suppose. In the meantime, without a meaningful wealth-transfer tax (the gift and estate taxes raise a very minimal amount of revenue and may even lose money when the income tax savings of standard estate-planning techniques, such as charitable and life insurance trusts, are taken into account), one fundamental insight of the special interest model continue to obtain. Big groups with small stakes—that is, most of us—continue to pay through increasingly burdensome middle class taxes for most of what government does, including stringing along those “lucky” enough to be members of a special interest group. It’s a variant of a very old story, and it is time to stop keeping it secret.

Read the full article, The Dirty Little Secret of (Estate) Tax Reform by Edward McCaffery, at the Stanford Law Review Online.

  August 14, 2012 at 10:00 am  Tags: Congress, death tax, estate tax, Politics, special interests, tax, tax law, taxes  Posted in: Current Events, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law Rev (Stanford), Politics, Tax, Uncategorized   Print This Post   2 Comments

Stanford Law Review Online: The Money Crisis

posted by Stanford Law Review

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published an Essay by former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold entitled The Money Crisis: How Citizens United Undermines Our Elections and the Supreme Court. Senator Feingold explains how the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United threatens the integrity of our political process:

As we draw closer to the November election, it becomes clearer that this year’s contest, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, will be financially dominated by big money, including, whether directly or indirectly, big money from the treasuries of corporations of all kinds. Without a significant change in how our campaign finance system regulates the influence of corporations, the American election process, and even the Supreme Court itself, face a more durable, long-term crisis of legitimacy.

[In Citizens United,] the Court was presented with a narrow question from petitioners: should the McCain-Feingold provision on electioneering communications (either thirty days before a primary election or sixty days before a general election) apply to this movie about Hillary Clinton? The movie, of course, was not running as a normal television commercial; instead, it was intended as a long-form, “on demand” special.

Yet Chief Justice Roberts clearly wanted a much broader, sweeping outcome, and it is now clear that he manipulated the Court’s process to achieve that result. Once only a question about an “on-demand” movie, the majority in Citizens United ruled that corporations and unions could now use their general treasuries to influence elections directly. Despite giving strenuous assurances during his confirmation hearing to respect settled law, Roberts now stands responsible for the most egregious upending of judicial precedent in a generation. As now-retired Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent to the majority in Citizens United: “[F]ive Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”

He concludes:

The Court has a clear opportunity. A new challenge from Montana could allow the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision in Citizens United, and at least two justices have hinted that the 2010 ruling is untenable. In granting a stay of a Montana Supreme Court decision upholding that state’s anticorruption laws, Justice Ginsburg, writing with Justice Breyer, found the pulse of the chaos Citizens United has wrought: “Montana’s experience, and experience elsewhere since this Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, make it exceedingly difficult to maintain that independent expenditures by corporations ‘do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.’”

Justice Ginsburg is correct. Today’s framework for corruption cannot stand.

Read the full article, The Money Crisis: How Citizens United Undermines Our Elections and the Supreme Court by Russ Feingold, at the Stanford Law Review Online.

Note: corrected for typos

  June 14, 2012 at 7:30 am  Tags: campaign finance, citizens united, Politics, Supreme Court  Posted in: Advertising, Corruption, Jurisprudence, Law Rev (Stanford), Politics   Print This Post   2 Comments

The Middle Path of Reform

posted by Craig Livermore

A contrarian approach is perhaps endemic to the reformer.   If A is the problem, then it is natural to assert anti-A as the solution.  In the realm of education, if we have been losing ground as a nation, and if the skills gaps among racial groups have not been closing, then the obvious choice of legal reform efforts, beginning in the 1980′s and 1990′s, has been to blame the highly regulated system of public educational bureaucracies.  If such educational systems were A, then the solution, for the reformer, must be the anti-A of choice, competition, and accountability to loosen the stasis of ineffective systems.  Thus was born the state assessment movements of the 1990′s which culminated in the federal choice and accountability No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation of 2002, the charter school movement which began in the 1990’2, and the rise to preeminence of accountability educational leaders such as Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein of New York who began reforms in 2002, and Michelle Rhee of Washington, D.C., who was appointed Schools Chancellor in 2007.

However, in 2010, Rhee and Klein are no longer Schools Chancellors, significant reforms and flexibility to NCLB are being advocated by President Obama, and the charter school and choice movements are struggling to determine how to replicate the results of highly successful charter models more broadly.  Although successes exist, there are a myriad of frustrated reformers originally arrayed with weapons of Harvard Business Review terminology, data-driven instruction, and high expectations who have been slain on the battle field by entrenched interests, the lack of human capital for extremely difficult work, and psycho-social and academic barriers, especially in the urban context, which are rooted in depth beyond what human beings can face with any level of comfort.

The United States is undoubtedly moving into another epoch in educational reform.  The question is:  Will we continue to manifest bipolar disorder and revert back to A, or will a dialectic of A and anti-A yield a uniquely informed synthesis?   One could argue that it is precisely such synthesis underlying President Obama’s Blueprint for Reform for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (NCLB is the current version of this legislation), as well as his competitive grant program Race to the Top under the American Recovery Reinvestment Act.  In his educational approach, Obama seeks to unleash local ingenuity through competition, walk the federalism tight rope by encouraging, but not requiring, states to adopt common national assessment standards, and maintain accountability for school performance, but with more funding for school improvement.

But the middle path of synthesis is not compromise.  It is a third way (or a fourth way, etc.), and thus its thoughtful substance threatens deeply the worlds of A and anti-A.  Recent political history, of course, has overtly challenged visions of complexity.  As the current political landscape collides with the next wave of educational reform that is upon us, we can only hope that synthesis is possible.  If one is a supporter of the Obama vision–and I am–then one must believe that the tortoise must outlast the hair.  One must have the integrity and resilience to maintain faith when the fears of the world have necessitated a reversion to anti-A.  One must have the courage to live in uncertainty and seek complex solutions to the almost unbearably complex challenges we face.

  November 30, 2010 at 7:31 pm  Tags: Education, Education Law, Politics, president obama, Reform  Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments