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The Angels that Surrounded My Cradle : The History, Evolution, and Application of the Insanity Defense
Get PDFThe “Pink Ghettos” of Public Interest Law: An Open Secret
Get PDFThere is a downside to public interest law careers and law school pro bono work for women. Law schools cue women to enter and remain at lower rungs of the profession by normalizing women in “caregiving” roles and locking predominantly female clinicians who do public interest work into a lower level status. The ABA contributes to this structural devaluation by ignoring female public interest lawyers. When combined with the culture of public interest organizations, these factors contribute to women’s stagnant progress in the legal profession.
This Article is the first to address this issue comprehensively. It describes the challenges women face in public interest careers including: 1) the indoctrination to be exclusively “client focused”; 2) the failure of public interest organizations to address gender segregation; and 3) the barriers to self-advocacy in organizations that are perpetually underfunded. Given men’s socialization to be “breadwinners,” these cultural factors in public interest law harm women more than men. In addition, the perpetual absence of data regarding women in public interest law stands in sharp contrast to the ABA’s continued focus on women in private practice. This sends the message that public interest law is unimportant and keeps women who work in public interest invisible, hampering the ability to address the gender segregation in the field.
This Article builds a framework for addressing this problem. It urges law schools to eliminate the gendered hierarchy that keeps public interest lawyers on the bottom and limit the number of pro bono hours students can work. It urges the ABA to collect and publish data on female public interest attorneys. And it urges public interest organizations to encourage women to think intentionally about their careers
Law Is What the Judge Had for Breakfast: A Brief History of an Unpalatable Idea
Get PDFAccording to a familiar adage the legal realists equated law with what the judge had for breakfast. As this is sometimes used to ridicule the realists, prominent defenders of legal realism have countered that none of the realists ever entertained any such idea. In this Essay I show that this is inaccurate. References to this idea are found in the work of Karl Llewellyn and Jerome Frank, as well as in the works of their contemporaries, both friends and foes. However, the Essay also shows that the idea is improperly attributed to the legal realists, as there are many references to it, in legal and non-legal sources, from long before the advent of legal realism. This suggests that the phrase has long reflected something of a received wisdom about adjudication. Tracing the question of the significance of digestion to one’s health, I argue that what we today take to be a humorous claim, may have been a much more serious one. For much of the nineteenth century it was widely believed that one’s health depended on one’s digestive health. Interestingly, this view is now once again taken seriously by scientists, which suggests that rather than scorn, the realists deserve credit for suggesting that the question be studied seriously
An Empirical Study of Political Control Over Immigration Adjudication
Get PDFImmigration plays a central role in the Trump Administration’s political agenda. This Article presents the first comprehensive empirical assessment of the extent to which immigration judges (IJs), the administrative officials charged with adjudicating whether a given noncitizen will be deported from the United States, may be influenced by the presidential administration’s political preferences.
We constructed an original dataset of over 830,000 removal proceedings decided between January 2001 and June 2019 after individual merits hearings. First, we found that every presidential administration—not just the current one—disproportionately appointed IJs with backgrounds in the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Department of Homeland Security, or the Department of Justice—agencies responsible for prosecuting noncitizens.
Second, using logistic regression to control for more than a dozen variables that might impact a decision to order removal, we found that the identity of the administration that appointed an IJ is not a statistically significant predictor of the likelihood of an IJ ordering removal. That is, after controlling for other variables, we did not find that Trump-appointed judges were any more likely to order removal than appointees of other Presidents.
Finally, we found that the presidential administration in control at the time of the decision is a statistically significant predictor of removal rates in certain circumstances. For example, IJs who were appointed by President George W. Bush (Bush II) were more likely to order removal during the Trump presidency than during prior administrations. Specifically, when all other variables were held constant, Bush II-appointed IJs were 22% less likely to order removal during the Obama presidency than during the Trump presidency and 22% less likely to order removal during the Bush II presidency than during the Trump presidency. These results suggest that a sitting President may exert some measure of direct or indirect influence over IJs’ removal decisions, undermining the assumption of administrative adjudicators’ independence
