SelectedWorks @ Widener University Commonwealth Law School
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A Broader View of the Immigration Adjudication Problem
No full textAre too many individuals diverted from civil immigration adjudication? Each year, the government completes millions of diversions from civil immigration adjudication through explicit and implicit waivers, the expedited removal program and the increasing criminalization of immigration law.By uncovering and analyzing this diversion phenomenon, this article exposes an important piece of the immigration adjudication problem that has been largely undiagnosed. While judges, scholars, government officials and practitioners have acknowledged serious problems within the civil immigration adjudication system, this article widens the view to incorporate the issue of whether too many are being sidetracked from the system altogether.This article concludes that too many are being rerouted from the civil immigration adjudication system because some of the identified diversions are not true to the administrative process design criteria of efficiency, accuracy and acceptability. The government should reevaluate its efforts to steer foreign nationals away from civil immigration adjudication under the four guiding principles proposed here: (1) not all diversions are bad; (2) government coercion, misinformation or a lack of information should play no role in the diversion process; (3) no-option waivers should not be implemented and (4) open-ended, prospective waivers also should not be used
Book Review (reviewing Kenneth P. Murchison, The Snail Darter Case: TVA Versus The Endangered Species Act, 2007)
No full textWe Have Met the Special Interests, and We Are They
No full textMy purpose here is to broaden our focus and argue that, while the influence of campaign contributors is likely to draw most of the popular attention surrounding the power of special interests within the judiciary, the exercise of judicial power will advantage certain interests at the expense of others regardless of the method of judicial selection a particular state uses. Accordingly, we should be careful that attempts to control the influence of special interests do not, in fact, simply advantage one set of special interests
Police Paternalism: Community Caretaking, Assistance Searches, and Fourth Amendment Reasonableness
No full textPolice spend an estimated two-thirds to four-fifths of their time on “community-caretaking” activities having little or nothing to do with the investigation of crime. Such activities include checking on persons who may be hurt or ill, ensuring that highways are clear and safe for travel, and generally offering assistance to members of the public who need it. When these community-caretaking functions require police to access places where people reasonably expect privacy, the Fourth Amendment requires that they be performed “reasonably.” The Supreme Court, however, has left the specifics of this reasonableness standard undefined, and lower courts have done little to fill the gap. This Article argues that extant tests are inadequate, and courts should apply different tests of reasonableness depending on the party whose assistance is needed. Third-party assistance searches, where the person to be helped is different from the person searched, should be evaluated based on a weighing of the extent of the intrusion, the amount of the harm sought to be avoided, and the likelihood of the police action avoiding that harm. First-party assistance searches, where the person to be helped is the person searched, however, do not require balancing. There, the police essentially act on behalf of the person they are helping. Therefore, the desires of that person should be paramount, and the police should be permitted to act only when they reasonably believe that the person would desire their assistance
A Comparative Examination of the Purpose of the Criminal Justice System
No full textA recent Gallup poll found that only 20% of Americans have a substantial amount of confidence in our criminal justice system, a 14% decline from only four years ago. Since the legitimacy of our criminal justice system depends upon the public’s confidence in that system, this is matter of great concern. As a result of my acquaintance with both our system and the inquisitorial system used in Europe and elsewhere, I am aware of the specific areas that lead the American public to distrust our process and the way in which those areas are dealt with in the inquisitorial system. As is noted in this article, a fundamental difference arises from the fact that, as one distinguished American author has noted, our adversarial system is based on the “fight theory” while the inquisitorial system is based on the “truth theory.” The article identifies each of the areas in our system that can give rise to public mistrust, such as plea bargaining, constitutional questions, selection and training of judges, prosecutorial discretion, and our trial process. I then describe the inquisitorial approach to each issue, and point out how that approach is less troublesome to the public and better promotes the ascertainment of truth. I also discuss why there is a disconnect between our judges and lawyers who value our system highly and the great majority of Americans who distrust the process. I then review what we can learn from the inquisitorial process that might assist us in restoring Americans’ faith in our criminal justice system
Why I Teach
No full textI teach because I want our profession to be infused with integrity. I want my students to learn to use professionalism as the everyday lenses through which they view their legal practices, rather than to compartmentalize ethics into just another class or bar exam topic
Opening a Portal into the World of Central Banking: A Review of Legal Foundations of International Monetary Stability Rosa M. Lastra
No full textThe term portal entered the commonplace lexicon in the 1990s. High-tech denizens co-opted the term to symbolize a gateway into the cyberworld of the internet. Just as yahoo and google provide access to the internet\u27s riches, Rosa Lastra has provided a user-friendly portal into the arcane, jargon-laced and complex world of central banking. Just like an internet portal, Rosa Lastra has provided an extraordinary tool to decipher and understand the workings of international monetary stability, equally useful for the apprentice as well as the wizard
