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March 25, 2019

Chile and Migration: The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and More

[Cross-posted from Immigration Prof]

 

Last week, I got behind in my blogging while I was in Santiago, Chile, recruiting international scholars and students, presenting talks on immigration, and meeting with alums and friends of UC Davis School of Law. 

During my visit, it became apparent that immigration -- as well as the United States' college admissions scandal -- was a hot topic.  As discussed in this Migration Policy Institute report, Chile has experienced a national debate on immigration. In response to public concern with Haitian, Dominican, and other immigrants, new President Sebastián Piñera has proposed greater restrictions on immigration.  The consensus appears to be that the Immigration Act of 1975 needs to be reformed; however, the Chilean Congress has been unable to act.

Pinera

Chilean President Sebastián Piñera

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

During my visit, I had the privilege of meeting with the deans and faculty at two amazing law schools.  First, I visited Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and lectured on judicial review and the U.S. immigration laws.  In this talk, I summarized recent developments in the Supreme Court's review of the constitutionality of the immigration laws and policies.  My ultimate conclusion is that the Court consistently engages in meaningful judicial review of the immigration laws. 

Chile law

Universidad de Chile law school

The next day, I visited the Universidad de Chile law school and delivered the following lecture:

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration: The United States and Chile, by Kevin R. Johnson. Remarks presented at the Universidad de Chile Law School, March 20, 2019

In December 2019, more than 150 nations approved the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration  (Global Compact).  Building on the 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, the Compact continues the process of promoting cooperation, coordination, and dialogue on migration in the international community. It identifies a number of objectives and commitments, primarily directed at cooperation and coordination. The Compact also calls for, among other things, nondiscrimination against migrants and providing proof of identity to migrants in a state.

A number of nations, including the United States, Australia, Chile, and the Dominican Republic, declined to sign the Global Compact. As with other international arrangements, a major concern was that the Compact would result in the surrendering of national sovereignty over immigration. Immigration is a controversial -- indeed explosive -- issue in many nations and strong voices often advocate for national sovereignty and the exercise of power over immigration and immigration controls.

More generally, in the United States President Trump has expressed skepticism about international institutions, including and especially the United Nations. In responding to international trade, immigration, and foreign policy generally, the President has consistently and unequivocally emphasized “America First.”  That approach, of course, places primacy on national sovereignty and serves as a frame for all of the U.S. government’s relations with other countries.

To calm sovereignty concerns with the Global Compact, the Compact did not impose binding obligations on nations but was a non-enforceable promise to cooperate and coordinate migration policies. In fact, the Compact expressly recognized national sovereignty over immigration and enforcement. It specifically provides that:

"[t]he Global Compact reaffirms the sovereign right of States to determine their  national migration policy and their prerogative to govern migration within their jurisdiction, in conformity with international law. Within their sovereign jurisdiction, States may distinguish between regular and irregular migration status, including as they determine their legislative and policy measures for the implementation of the Global Compact, taking into account different national realities, policies, priorities and requirements for   entry, residence and work, in accordance with international law."

Global Compact, Paragraph 15

Reasons Some States May Have Declined to Join the Global Compact

Reasons beyond concerns with ceding national sovereignty also likely contributed to some nations declining to join the Global Impact. The following reasons may have contributed to the decision of the United States, to not sign the Compact:

Immigration Regulation Raises Sensitive Domestic Political Issues

Immigration touches on issues of language, culture, and the sense of national identity. Such issues are controversial in the United States. They also are generally thought of as a primarily domestic, not international, concern and the subject of intense internal debate.

The Omnipresent Concern with Mass Migration.

When it comes to immigration, nations in the developed world often worry about mass migration and see a need to exercise control over immigration, with the corollary need for limits on the number of immigrants coming into the country. Such concerns raise controversial economic, political, social, and cultural issues that affect all people of society. Concerns with mass migration in the United States have hindered efforts at domestic immigration reform. Such reform has been discussed for many years. That is true even though it is generally agreed that the current U.S. immigration regime requires reform. The United States has an antiquated immigration system created by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which was passed by Congress at a time when exclusion and deportation of communists was paramount. These are not the major immigration concerns of the 21st century. Although amended on numerous occasions, the INA remains the basic U.S. immigration law. 

Concerns with the Long Term Impacts of Previous Migration and Refugee Accords.

Some of the nations’ resistance to the Global Compact may be rooted in concerns with the impact of the implementation of previous international accords, such as the United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees (1951) and the United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (1967) . Those treaties created powerful -- and binding on states -- international protections for noncitizens who flee persecution or have a well-founded fear of future persecution.

In the United States, the U.N. Protocol led Congress to pass the Refugee Act of 1980, which created the modern asylum system in the United States. Concerns with the numbers of asylum seekers in the United States have provoked concern and tough responses, including immigrant detention, family separation, and the return of Central American asylum seekers to Mexico. Such concerns may have contributed to the resistance to the Global Compact.

Inconsistency with Contemporary U.S. Immigration Enforcement Policies

Immigration policies in the United States today focus primarily on immigration enforcement. Besides not being crafted for the realities of modern migration pressures, the policies are not consistent with the humanitarian spirit of the Global Compact.

President Trump has spoken harshly of immigration and immigrants. He has bolstered immigration enforcement measures and has sought to restrict legal immigration. To that end, the Trump administration, among other things, has issued three versions of the Muslim ban, aggressively employed immigrant detention, and fervently advocated building a wall along the U.S./Mexico border. President Trump frequently declares that the nation’s southern border is in “crisis” and has talked about the “invasion” from the South. Such concerns almost certainly led to a general resistance in the United States to the call for migration cooperation in the Global Compact.       

President Trump also has specifically attacked Muslim, Mexican, Salvadoran, and Haitian noncitizens. The verbal attacks have translated into tough immigration enforcement measures directed at these groups. Although some of these measures have provoked controversy and been halted by the courts, many have gone into effect.           

The harsh tone combined with the tough enforcement measures in the United States have frightened immigrant communities, as well as people with affinities for those communities. Besides striking fear into immigrants, which have impacts on their well-being as well as their cooperation with government, the harsh rhetoric and attacks on immigrants has delayed indefinitely much needed congressional reform to the immigration laws.

The Need for International Cooperation

Global economic and political pressures fuel migration and affect many nations. No single nation can effectively address migration pressures and flows on its own. In the future, nations must recognize the following in addressing migration.

In addition, immigration law and policy affects the rights and well-being of human beings. Harsh policies adversely impact human lives. Nations must work to create humane, as well as manageable and efficient, immigration policies.

At the same time, migration of people from other countries bring changes to the receiving nations. Efforts need to be made to focus not on simply admission and removal but also on policies that facilitate the integration of immigrants into society.          

The Global Compact was designed to facilitate much-needed coordination and cooperation on migration matters. Multilateral work is much needed as nations around the world undoubtedly will continue to experience migration flows. Although some of the migrants are refugees fleeing civil strife or fearing persecution, migration also represents a response to economic opportunity, political freedoms, and family reunification.

Put simply, to effectively manage migration, the international community must work together. Building border walls between nations will not end immigration or the pressures for migration. Instead, international arrangements like the Global Compact offer the hope of the future – to effectively, efficiently, and humanely manage migration in the 21st century.

October 16, 2017

Oral Arguments in Jesner v. Arab Bank: Supreme Court May Favor Two Steps to Corporate Liability for Human Rights Violations

By William Dodge

[Cross-posted from Just Security]

Ed. note. This article is the latest in our series on the U.S. Supreme Court case Jesner. v. Arab Bank, a case that is slated to resolve the question of whether corporations can be sued under international law for human rights violations and terrorism.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Jesner v. Arab Bank, PLC, which presents the question whether corporations can be sued for human rights violations in U.S. courts under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). The plaintiffs alleged that Arab Bank knowingly funneled millions of dollars through its New York branch to finance terrorist attacks in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. In a parallel suit brought by U.S. citizens under a separate federal statute, the Antiterrorism Act, Arab Bank was found liable for doing just that. The Second Circuit rejected the plaintiffs’ claims, however, on the ground that corporations can never be sued under the ATS. I previewed the arguments made in the briefs here. I also filed a brief on behalf of International Law Scholars in support of the plaintiffs.

At oral argument, the Justices seemed to be looking at the question in two steps: (1) whether customary international law permits corporate liability; and (2) assuming it does, whether the ATS cause of action should be interpreted to permit corporate liability. Arab Bank’s lawyer Paul Clement joked about Chevron, the Supreme Court’s doctrine for deference to administrative agencies, which famously has two steps (p. 53). And the Supreme Court has recently articulated a two-step framework for applying the presumption against extraterritoriality. So perhaps the ATS will be next.

Justice Kennedy suggested that “what parties are bound” by a norm of international law should be part of the question at “Sosa step 1, where we ask if there’s a specific universal norm” (p. 24). (Sosa is the 2004 case in which the Supreme Court recognized a cause of action for claims brought under the ATS.) Plaintiffs’ counsel Jeffrey Fisher responded that rules of corporate liability, like respondeat superior, are questions of domestic law (p. 25). While that is true, it may be useful to distinguish two different corporate liability questions. Whether a particular norm of international law applies to corporations is a question of international law to be addressed at step one, as Justice Kennedy suggested. And as the U.S. government argued in its amicus brief, the norms that are actionable under the ATS do not distinguish between natural persons and corporations. As a second-order question, precisely what form corporate liability should take (Justice Kennedy mentioned strict liability, vicarious liability, and respondeat superior as examples) is a matter of domestic law. Indeed, Arab Bank’s counsel seemed to concede in a later exchange with Justice Kagan that the particular form of corporate liability—whether joint and several liability is available, for example—“might get you closer to a remedial question” to be addressed at step two of the analysis (p. 55).

Justice Breyer spent some time discussing various treaties that impose liability on corporations with Mr. Clement, Arab Bank’s lawyer (pp. 43-45, 47, 50-51, 56-57). But the details of these treaties are really beside the point. This is not just because the treaties are designed to operate through domestic law, as Mr. Clement pointed out (p. 57). It is also because plaintiffs have not brought their claims under the treaties but rather under customary international law. To be sure, some of these treaties may be relevant as evidence of customary international law. But the key question at step one of the ATS analysis is whether the customary international law norms that are actionable under the ATS distinguish between natural persons and corporations. As the amicus brief for the Yale Law School Center for Global Legal Challenges shows in detail, none of these norms do.

At the second step in the analysis, some of the Justices expressed concern about the foreign relations implications of holding corporations liable for human rights violations. Chief Justice Roberts noted that the ATS was passed “to avoid foreign entanglements” but wondered “if extending it to corporate liability is, in fact, going to have the . . . problematic result of increasing our entanglements” (p. 7). Justice Alito suggested that at “step 2 of Sosa,” on “the question of whether we should recognize a federal common law claim under particular circumstances,” the Court might “balance the international repercussions” of allowing suits against corporations against the repercussions of not doing so (p. 10). Mr. Fisher, lawyer for the plaintiffs, agreed that ATS suits could have “international implications,” but responded that the Court could address those concerns with “other kinds of doctrines that more directly deal with those concerns” like extraterritoriality, forum non conveniens, and political question (p. 11). Justice Sotomayor also mentioned personal jurisdiction under Daimler as a limitation (pp. 5-6), and Justice Ginsburg added the possibility of an exhaustion requirement (pp. 23-24). Denying corporate liability, Fisher argued, was simply “a mismatch” with concerns about foreign relations (p. 13).

Arguing for the United States as amicus, Brian Fletcher agreed with plaintiffs that the Second Circuit’s “categorical rule” against corporate liability was “wrong” (p. 27). He pointed out that this case would not have produced “less friction if it had been brought against the high-ranking officers and employees of the bank rather than against the bank itself” (p. 28). Later in the argument, Justice Kagan described the question of corporate liability as “completely orthogonal” to the foreign relations concerns raised by Arab Bank (p. 64). Mr. Clement responded that corporate liability and foreign relations overlapped in practice because “the real impact of corporate liability” is on foreign corporations in which foreign governments have an interest, “like Arab Bank” (p. 65). In fact, the suit against Arab Bank is an unusual one; foreign corporate defendants are the exception not the rule today. The Supreme Court’s decision in Kiobel to limit the geographic scope of the ATS cause of action to cases that “touch and concern” the United States has resulted in a large number of dismissals, as Mr. Fisher pointed out (p. 5), including virtually all of the suits against foreign corporations.

Justice Gorsuch repeatedly asked whether the ATS cause of action should be limited to U.S. defendants (pp. 16, 34, 71-72). He invoked an argument by Professors Anthony Bellia and Bradford Clark that the First Congress was concerned that “some action by an American citizen . . . might be tagged to the United States itself and be cause for just war by a foreign power” (p. 16). Justice Gorsuch also suggested that “you need an American defendant in order to have diversity jurisdiction” under Article III (p. 16).

With respect to Bellia and Clark’s argument, both Mr. Fisher for the plaintiffs (p. 16) and Mr. Fletcher for the U.S. government (p. 34-37) noted that limiting the ATS to American defendants would fail to account for the 1784 Marbois incident, which the Supreme Court in Sosa recognized as one of the events that inspired the provision. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito accepted in their own questions that the ATS was intended to reach cases like the Marbois incident (pp. 7, 14). Justice Sotomayor noted that the nationality of the defendant would also have been irrelevant in cases of piracy (pp. 37-38). And Mr. Fisher concluded by referring to the text of the ATS, which limits the citizenship of plaintiffs to aliens but places no limits on the citizenship of defendants (pp. 70-71).

There are other problems with the Bellia-Clark theory that were not mentioned at oral argument. Under their theory, the ATS was intended to address only situations where the United States would be in breach of international law if it did not provide redress to aliens injured by U.S. citizens. In such situations, the violation of the law of nations would occur not at the time of the tort but later, when the United States failed to provide redress. But this is hard to square with the text of the ATS, which refers to suits “by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” The word “committed” suggests that the international law violation occurs at the time of the tort, rather than some time later. Another problem with the Bellia-Clark theory is that the United States’ obligation under international law to provide redress would have been fully satisfied by other statutes (including the 1790 law mentioned by Mr. Clement (p. 35)), which provided criminal liability for assaults on ambassadors and the like. The ATS was clearly designed to go beyond what was necessary to satisfy the United States’ obligations under international law. None of the other Justices seemed interested in the Bellia-Clark theory at oral argument, and it will be surprising if it garners more than one vote.

Justice Gorsuch’s concern over Article III is also misplaced. First, there is strong historical evidence that the phrase “Laws of the United States” in Article III’s arising-under grant was understood at ratification to include the law of nations. Among other things, the phrase in Article III is broader than the corresponding phrase in the Supremacy Clause of Article VI, which refers more narrowly to laws of the United States made in pursuance of the Constitution. But the Supreme Court would not have to adopt this interpretation to satisfy Article III, because ATS suits now arise under the federal-common-law cause of action that Sosa recognized. Both of the Supreme Court’s prior cases under the ATS have involved one alien suing another, as have most of the successful cases across the federal courts since the landmark ATS decision by the Second Circuit in Filartiga over 35 years ago.

If the Justices stick to the question of corporate liability, the Second Circuit may be reversed by a large margin. The concerns expressed at oral argument by the more conservative Justices have little to do with corporate liability. But if the vote is a close one, it is likely to be decided by Justice Kennedy, whose concurring opinion in Kiobel stressed the narrowness of that decision and aimed to keep the door open both for suits against corporations and for suits where some of the relevant conduct occurred abroad.

Justice Kennedy was surprisingly quiet at oral argument, asking just two questions about whether the identity of the party bound by the customary-international-law norm should be part of the analysis at step one. The question is a good one, and I believe the answer is yes—the particular norm of customary international law must apply to a corporation before a corporation may be sued under the ATS for violating that norm. And as the amicus brief for the United States explains, all of the norms actionable under the ATS do apply to corporations. Recognizing this fact should lead Justice Kennedy to adopt the position urged by the United States on the question of corporate liability and to reverse the Second Circuit.

January 31, 2017

A Teach-In About the Immigration Executive Orders

Please join School of Law faculty for a discussion of President Trump's Executive Orders regarding immigration law, immigrants' rights, and human rights.

Monday, February 6, 2017, 12:00 PM
King Hall Room 1001

 

Sponsored by

Aoki Center for Critical Race and Nation Studies

Immigration Law Association

La Raza Student Association

Middle Eastern South Asian Law Students Association (MESALSA)

Lunch will be served.

January 20, 2017

The UK Supreme Court’s Landmark Judgment Belhaj v. Straw: A View From the United States

Cross-posted from Just Security.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom gave its judgment in Belhaj v. Straw and Rahmatullah v. Ministry of Defence, two human rights cases brought against UK officials in UK courts. Plaintiffs did not claim that UK officials were the main actors in the alleged human rights violations, which included unlawful detention, rendition, and torture. Rather, plaintiffs claimed that UK officials had assisted other countries-principally, the United States and Libya-in committing such violations. The UK officials argued that a court could not decide the assistance claims without ruling on the legality of other countries' actions and that the cases should therefore be dismissed on grounds of state immunity or under the foreign act of state doctrine. But the UK Supreme Court unanimously rejected these arguments. This means that the claims may proceed to trial where the actions of the United States, Libya, and other countries may be reviewed.

Lord Mance gave the leading judgment, with concurring judgments by Lord Neuberger and Lord Sumption. The state immunity question was whether the suits against UK officials indirectly impleaded foreign states because, in order to maintain their claims against the former, the plaintiffs would have to show that the latter acted unlawfully. The act of state question was whether an English court should abstain from adjudicating upon sovereign acts committed by a foreign state, even outside its own territory.

How does the reasoning in Belhaj compare to the approach taken in the United States? What insights might we derive from the UK Supreme Court's treatment of these areas of law and the role of the judiciary in adjudicating questions that implicate international relations? 

State Immunity

The UK Supreme Court found the state immunity question to be quite straightforward. No foreign states had been directly impleaded because no claims had actually been brought against them. No foreign states had been indirectly impleaded "because the legal position of the foreign states" would not be affected by the suits. Para. 31 (emphasis added). The Court distinguished past cases in which foreign states were indirectly impleaded because the claims involved property in which the states had an interest. "The present appeals involve no issues of proprietary or possessory title. All that can be said is that establishing the appellants' liability in tort would involve establishing that various foreign states through their officials were the prime actors in respect of the alleged torts." Para. 29. Such "reputational" harm was not sufficient. Para. 29. As Lord Sumption put it in his concurring opinion: "No decision in the present case would affect any rights or liabilities of the four foreign states in whose alleged misdeeds the United Kingdom is said to have been complicit. The foreign states are not parties. Their property is not at risk. The court's decision on the issues raised would not bind them." Para. 197.

Although the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) differs substantially from the UK State Immunity Act, the approach of the UK Supreme Court on this question was similar to what one would expect in the United States. In Republic of Philippines v. Pimentel, 553 U.S. 851 (2008), the US Supreme Court held that a suit to determine the ownership of property allegedly stolen by Philippine President Marcos could not proceed because the Philippines had a legal interest in the property. This is equivalent to the indirect impleading of a foreign state that the UK Supreme recognized is barred under the State Immunity Act. But in Samantar v. Yousuf, 560 U.S. 305 (2010), the US Supreme Court held that a suit against a foreign official is not necessarily a suit against a foreign state to which state immunity attaches. It would follow a fortiori that a suit a against a domestic official is not necessarily a suit against a foreign state to which state immunity attaches, which is essentially what the UK Supreme Court held in Belhaj. (Parenthetically, it is worth remembering that, in contrast to the US Supreme Court's interpretation of the FSIA in Samantar, the House of Lords has interpreted the State Immunity Act as extending state immunity to foreign officials acting in that capacity. See Jones v. Saudi Arabia, paras. 31 & 69.)

Act of State Doctrine

The foreign act of state doctrine in the United Kingdom, on the other hand, has historically been quite different from the act of state doctrine in the United States. To give two obvious examples: (1) one strand of the UK act of state doctrine is not limited to acts performed within the foreign sovereign's own territory, see Buttes Gas and Oil Co. v. Hammer (No. 3) [1982] AC 888, while the US act of state doctrine is so limited; and (2) the UK act of state doctrine contains a public policy exception, see Oppenheimer v. Cattermole [1976] AC 249; Kuwait Airways Corp. v. Iraqi Airways Co. [2002] 2 AC 883, which the US act of state doctrine does not. Each of these differences played a key role in Belhaj.

The three reasoned judgments did not entirely agree about how to organize the past cases-Lord Mance divided the foreign act of state doctrine into three types, Lord Neuberger into four, and Lord Sumption into two-nor did they agree about the proper terminology. But in the end, all members of the Court agreed on the key points and on their application to these cases. Certain strands of the UK act of state doctrine are territorially limited (specifically the first two types identified by Lords Mance and Neuberger, which Lord Sumption called the "municipal law act of state doctrine"). These strands were thus inapplicable to those claims that involved acts-particularly those of the United States-outside the foreign sovereign's own territory. But each of the judgments also identified a strand of the act of state doctrine that is not territorially limited (specifically the third type identified by Lords Mance and Neuberger, which Lord Sumption called the "international law act of state doctrine"). This strand originated in Buttes Gas and applies to cases "where an issue is said to be inherently unsuitable for judicial determination by reason only of its subject matter." Para. 43 (quoting Shergill v. Khaira [2015] AC 359).

Critically, however, Lords Mance, Neuberger, and Sumption agreed that each strand of the foreign act of state doctrine was subject to a public policy exception and that the exception should apply in these cases. (Lord Mance preferred to view the exception as a limitation on the ambit of the doctrine, but did not think the distinction between ambit and exception was critical. Para. 89.) Thus, Lord Mance wrote: "The critical point in my view is the nature and seriousness of the misconduct alleged in both cases before the Supreme Court, at however high a level it may have been authorized. Act of state is and remains essentially a domestic law doctrine, and it is English law which sets its limits. English law recognizes the existence of fundamental rights, some long-standing, others more recently developed." Para. 98. Lord Neuberger similarly reasoned that, "assuming that the claimants were detained, kidnapped and tortured as they allege, the public policy exception would apply." Para. 168. And Lord Sumption said that the foreign act of state doctrine could not be applied to detention and torture because both "exhibit the same combination of violation of peremptory norms of international law and inconsistency with principles of the administration of justice in England which have been regarded as fundamental since the 17th century." Para. 278.

Differences in Approach Among the Judgments

Despite their agreement on the most important aspects of the case, there were some notable differences in approach. Lord Mance thought that "[t]he concept of foreign act of state needs to be disaggregated, or broken down, and approached at a more particular level of enquiry." Para 11(ii). For him, too much generalization "blurs the distinctions between different types of foreign act of state" and "impedes the important task of identifying the scope and characteristics of each type of foreign act of state." Para. 40. Lord Sumption was more inclined to generalize: "It is always possible to break down the cases into different factual categories, and deconstruct the law into a fissiparous bundle of distinct rules. But the process is apt to make it look more arbitrary and incoherent than it really is. I think that it is more productive to distinguish between the decisions according to the underlying principle that the court is applying." Para. 227. Lord Sumption's approach made him somewhat less likely to insist on all of the limitations to the act of state doctrine that might be found in past cases, for example the limitation of the territorial strands of the act of state doctrine to rights in property. See para. 231.

In approaching the question of public policy, the judgments also laid different emphases on domestic and international law. Lord Mance preferred to look "to individual rights recognized as fundamental by English statute and common law, rather than to tie them too closely to the concept of jus cogens." Para. 107. Lord Neuberger agreed that the public policy exception should "depend ultimately on domestic law considerations," but added that "generally accepted norms of international law are plainly capable of playing a decisive role." Para. 154. Lord Sumption, on the other hand, looked primarily to whether international law had been violated in deciding whether to apply the public policy exception, see paras. 249-80, though even he acknowledged that "the influence of international law does not mean that every rule of international law must be adopted as a principle of English public policy." Para. 257.

The three reasoned judgments also took different views on the relevance of foreign act-of-state decisions. Lords Mance and Sumption each discussed the US cases at length, see paras. 47-56, 209-212, as well as cases from Germany, France, and the Netherlands, see paras. 67-72, 201. Lord Mance cautioned that US law was "not necessarily transposable to English law," para. 57, but also said "we should be unwise not to take the benefit of it." Para. 57 (quoting Buttes Gas and Oil Co. v. Hammer (No. 3) [1982] AC 888). Lord Sumption disapproved of the flexible US approach expressed in Sabbatino, see para. 212, without mentioning the US Supreme Court's more recent decision in Kirkpatrick, which is rather less flexible. He seemed to prefer the "instructive" approach of the French and Dutch courts. Para. 201. But Lord Neuberger advised "great caution before relying on, let alone adopting, the reasoning of foreign courts in connection with the Doctrine." Para. 133. He found the US decisions "to be of very limited assistance." Para. 134.

Act of State as International Comity

One thing that all three judgments agreed on, however, was that the act of state doctrine is a doctrine of domestic rather than international law. Drawing a distinction with state immunity, Lord Mance noted early in his judgment that "foreign act of state in most if not all of its strands has been developed doctrinally in domestic law." Para. 7. Lord Neuberger wrote that "the Doctrine is purely one of domestic common law." Para. 118. And Lord Sumption added that "[t]he act of state doctrine . . . does not reflect any obligation of states in international law." Para. 261. As I have noted in other writing, the act of state doctrine is a doctrine of international comity rather than international law. I wrote there (p. 2077) that international comity "describes an internationally oriented body of domestic law that is distinct from international law and yet critical to legal relations with other countries."

The fact that a particular doctrine is based on international comity does not mean that it must give a decisive role-or indeed any role-to the executive branch; many comity doctrines, from the conflict of laws to the enforcement of foreign judgments to the doctrine of forum non conveniens, are administered entirely by courts (pp. 2132-40). With respect to the act of state doctrine, one US Court of Appeals has recognized an exception allowing the executive to waive the doctrine, see Bernstein v. Nederlandsche-Amerikaansche, 210 F.2d 375, 376 (2d Cir. 1954), but the US Supreme Court has never approved it and has rejected a broader role for the executive in determining when the doctrine applies. See W.S. Kirkpatrick & Co., Inc. v. Environmental Tectonics, Intern., 493 U.S. 400, 405, 408-09 (1990). Before we leave the three judgments in Belhaj, it is worth noting that each of them rejected the possibility that the act of state doctrine should apply whenever the Foreign Office indicated that the case would embarrass the United Kingdom in the conduct of its foreign relations. Lord Neuberger was willing to list this as his "possible fourth rule," para. 124, but found "little authority to support the notion that the fourth rule is part of the law of this country." Para. 132. Allowing the executive to dictate to the judiciary, he thought, "would be quite unacceptable." Para. 149. Lord Mance similarly saw "little attraction in and no basis for giving the Government so blanket a power over court proceedings." Para. 41. And Lord Sumption felt that allowing the act of state doctrine to turn on the degree of embarrassment to the government "would not be consistent with the accepted principles governing the relations between the courts and the executive in England." Para. 212.

The fact that a particular doctrine is based on international comity does mean that each country is free to shape the doctrine as it thinks best. Whether one feels that it is instructive to look to the experiences of other countries or not, the simple fact is that the act of state doctrine is quite different in different countries. In contrast to the United Kingdom, the United States does not recognize a non-territorial strand of the act of state doctrine and limits the doctrine to "the official act of a foreign sovereign performed within its own territory." W.S. Kirkpatrick & Co., Inc. v. Environmental Tectonics, Intern., 493 U.S. 400, 405 (1990). On the other hand, the US version of the doctrine has no public policy exception; if the act of state doctrine applies, a US court must accept its validity "[h]owever offensive to the public policy of this country" it may be. Banco Nacional de Cuba v. Sabbatino, 376 U.S. 398, 436 (1964). Still, it seems likely that US courts would not recognize fundamental violations of human rights as acts of state to begin with. See Kadic v. Karadzic, 70 F.3d 232, 250 (2d Cir. 1995) ("we doubt that the acts of even a state official, taken in violation of a nation's fundamental law and wholly unratified by that nation's government, could properly be characterized as an act of state"). These differences among nations make the act of state doctrine a fascinating topic for comparative study. They also reinforce the point that the act of state doctrine is one of international comity rather than international law.

December 18, 2016

On the Protection of Cultural Heritage

Earlier this month, I spoke at an international gathering of national societies for the promotion of international humanitarian law organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. I spoke on protection of cultural heritage. These were my remarks.

4th Universal meeting of National IHL committees, December 1, 2016, Geneva -- Statement by Karima Bennoune, Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights

Honourable Chair, Excellencies, distinguished delegates, ladies, and gentlemen,

I am honoured to take the floor before this important gathering in my capacity as Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights.   My recent thematic report to the General Assembly concerned the intentional destruction of cultural heritage as a violation of human rights and I am pleased to have the opportunity to share with you some of my key findings.

Cultural heritage is significant in the present, both as a message from the past and as a pathway to the future. Viewed from a human rights perspective, it is important not only in itself, but also in relation to its human dimension. While specific aspects of heritage may have particular resonance for and connections to particular human groups, all of humanity has a link to such objects, which represent the "cultural heritage of all humankind." Cultural heritage includes tangible heritage, composed of structures and remains of historical, religious, or cultural value, and also intangible heritage made up of customs, beliefs, languages, artistic expressions and folklore.  Tangible and intangible heritage are interlinked and attacks on one are usually accompanied by assaults on the other.

The right of access to and enjoyment of cultural heritage forms part of international human rights law, finding its legal basis, inter alia in the right to take part in cultural life.  Cultural heritage is a fundamental resource for other human rights also, in particular, the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of religion, as well as the economic rights of the many people who earn a living through tourism related to such heritage, and the right to development.  The preservation and restoration of cultural heritage is also a critical tool for reconciliation and peace-building.

Given this importance of cultural heritage for human rights, I welcome the fact that, in its recent Resolution 33/20 (2016) on "cultural rights and the protection of cultural heritage," the Human Rights Council agreed that "the destruction of or damage to cultural heritage may have a detrimental and irreversible impact on the enjoyment of cultural rights."  The Council encouraged States to consider implementing the recommendations that I made to the General Assembly on these issues.

A special protection regime governs heritage protection in times of conflict. The core standards include the 1954 Hague Convention and the protocols thereto. The Hague Convention, requires States parties to respect cultural property and to refrain from any act of hostility directed against it or any use of it likely to expose it to such acts, subject only to imperative military necessity (art. 4).  The Second Protocol strengthens the rule by further limiting the military necessity exception.

I have heard worrying reports of violations of these provisions in recent conflicts. I call on states to recognize that any military necessity exception to the ban on targeting cultural property must be interpreted narrowly, taking into consideration the impact on cultural rights.  All military decisions resulting in the destruction of or damage to cultural heritage should be subject to close public scrutiny.

I note with concern that many States have not adhered to the 1954 Hague Convention and its Protocols, in particular the Second Protocol, which now has 69 parties, since the most recent accession by Norway. I was pleased to learn of the commitment that has been made for the first time by a permanent member of the Security Council, namely, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to ratify the Second Protocol, and I look forward to the achievement of that important step. I call upon all permanent members of the Security Council to follow suit in the next two years so as to demonstrate collective leadership on this critical issue which is at the heart of meaningful peace and security.

In addition to tackling the role of States, attention must also be paid to the robust use of international standards such as article 19 of The Hague Convention - and developing other strategies - for holding non-State actors to account and preventing their engaging in destruction.

Individual criminal responsibility arises from serious offences against cultural heritage, which can rise to the level of war crimes or to crimes against humanity when carried out with discriminatory intent, and may also be evidence of intent to destroy a group within the meaning of the genocide convention. A human rights approach emphasizes accountability.  I welcomed the decision of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to charge the destruction of cultural and religious sites as a stand-alone war crime for the first time in the case of Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi which has recently resulted in a guilty verdict and 9-year sentence.  I endorse the conclusions in the Al Mahdi judgment that the crime in question aimed at "breaking the soul of the people of Timbuktu" and was of "significant gravity."  I very much hope to see similar prosecutions in future, and to that end I remind States of the vital need to collect and preserve evidence of any such crimes.

In the early twenty-first century, a new wave of deliberate destruction is being recorded and displayed for the world to see, the impact magnified by widespread distribution of the images. Such acts are often openly proclaimed and justified by their perpetrators and represent a form of cultural warfare being used against populations which I condemn in the strongest possible terms.  Such attacks represent an urgent challenge to cultural rights that requires rapid and thoughtful international response.

Acts of deliberate destruction are often accompanied by other grave assaults on human dignity and human rights, including acts of terrorism. They have to be addressed in the context of holistic strategies for the promotion of human rights, and peacebuilding.  Protection of cultural heritage must be included in the mandates of peacekeeping missions.  We must care about the destruction of heritage in conjunction with our grave concern for the destruction of the lives of populations. 

Acts of intentional destruction harm all, target freethinkers in majority groups and often disproportionately affect persons belonging to minorities. They contribute to intolerance and tensions between people, and deprive all humanity of the rich diversity of cultural heritage.

In responding to intentional destruction of cultural heritage today, it is critical to employ a human rights approach. Beyond preserving and safeguarding an object or a manifestation in itself, a human rights approach obliges one to take into account the rights of individuals and populations in relation to them.  It is impossible to separate a people's cultural heritage from the people itself and their rights.

A critical, related question concerns the protection of the defenders of cultural heritage who are at risk and who may even lose their lives in defence of cultural heritage, such as Samira Saleh al-Naimi, an Iraqi lawyer abducted and killed in September 2014 after denouncing destructions of religious and cultural sites by Daesh in her home city of Mosul, and many others who today continue to labour in obscurity and danger. We must not wait until we are mourning the deaths of at-risk cultural heritage defenders to rally to their cause.

People like them are cultural rights defenders. States must respect their rights and ensure their safety and security, but also provide them, including through international cooperation, with the conditions necessary to complete their work, including all needed material and technical assistance, grant them asylum when necessary and ensure that when displaced they are able to continue their work and to take part in the protection and reconstruction of their country's cultural heritage.

I also encourage the development and adoption of a fully gender-sensitive approach to the protection of cultural heritage and to the combating of its destruction, which should include promoting the inclusion of women cultural heritage experts in relevant forums and institutions.

A human rights approach also embraces prevention and the allocation of sufficient budgetary resources both at the national and international levels. Preventive action and education, especially for young people, on the importance of cultural heritage and cultural rights for all without discrimination, and the relevant norms of IHL, are vital. 

Let me conclude by stressing again how crucial it is to consider that destruction of cultural heritage is a human rights issue, including in times of conflict, when human rights law must be taken seriously as a necessary complement to international humanitarian law. When cultural heritage is destroyed, this bears important consequences for a wide range of human rights for current generations and those to come.  

Today, in our collective role as custodians of the past achievements of humanity, we are faced with a stark choice. Will we engage with cultural heritage in its diversity in such a way as to allow cultural rights to flourish and will we protect it, teach youth about it, learn from it and from the history of its destruction, and make use of heritage and its reconstruction to understand ourselves and find solutions to the grave problems that we face? Will we be up to the challenge of protecting the heritage of humanity? If the answer is no, the rights of current generations will be violated, and we will incur the scorn of future generations. Would we not prefer to bequeath a richer legacy? The intentional destruction of cultural heritage is a human rights issue. The approach to stopping it needs to be a holistic one, encompassing all regions, focused on both prevention and punishment, and targeting acts committed by both State and non-State actors, in conflict and non-conflict situations. We must not only respond urgently, but also take the long view.

Thank you.

October 17, 2016

Time to End Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage

In her role as UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Professor Karima Bennoune is taking part in a discussion of the special report she will present to the United Nations General Assembly. 

Speakers:

  • Ms. Karima Bennoune
  • Mr. Pablode Greiff (Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation & guarantees of non‐recurrence)
  • Mr. Omara Khan Massoudi (Former Director of  the National Museum  of Afghanistan, UNESCO Consultant, Kabul)
  • Father Najeeb Michael (Director of the Research Dominican Center, Erbil, Iraq)
  • Ms. Diane Alai (Representative of the Bahai International Community to the United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland)
  • Ms Kristen Carpenter (Oneida Indian Nation Visiting Professor of Law, Harvard Law School)

Moderator: Dr Ousseina Alidou (Professor, Department of African American and African Studies, Rutgers University)

With a performance by Malian artist Yacouba Sissako

Video message from Maestro Placido Domingo, President of Europa Nostra

Date: Thursday, October 27, 2016

Time: 5:30pm - 8pm

Venue: Conference Room 12, UN Headquarters, New York, New York

RSVP by October 24th at https://goo.gl/forms/YwyfgpVCFxFgs5Zp1

December 10, 2015

How the Right and the Left Are Getting San Bernardino Wrong

This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post on December 7, 2016.

14 people are dead. 21 are injured.

A young couple armed for battle attacked a Christmas party full of the husband's colleagues. In the face of this nightmare -- both the 355th mass shooting in 336 days in the United States, and one that came less than three weeks after the Paris attacks -- right and left alike are sticking to their scripts rather than grappling with the complex reality. If we are to successfully prevent future massacres, that has to change.

First and foremost, we have to think of the victims and their families.

And then we have to declare all-out war on the political ideology of Islamism that motivated Syed Farook and Tafsheen Malik, while simultaneously standing firm against all attempts to discriminate against Muslims generally. We have to disarm all potential terrorists by toughening up gun control laws and by discrediting the foul ideas that motivate them. (And we have to name those ideas without fear of being labelled politically incorrect. ) The right and the left, more worried about their fight with each other than the fight against terrorism, have made this an either/or choice when it is both/and. We cannot succeed by only doing one of these things or the other.

The right rushed in almost immediately. Twitter was full of smears of all Muslims, President Obama, immigrants, etc. Ann Coulter tweeted: "it's been a 50 year invasion." "Where," shrieked Pamela Geller, "are the programs in mosques and madrassas teaching against jihad? NONE." Are there enough such programs and are they succeeding? No. But, as someone who has spent years traveling the world talking to Muslims, including clergy, who are challenging extremism, I know that this is simply a lie. As the icing on the cake, Marco Rubio now denies that there is any discrimination against Muslims in America.

The left meanwhile, as exemplified by the tepid statements of Democratic candidates -- has only been willing to talk about gun control and has mostly refused to name a key part of the problem in this case -- Muslim fundamentalism or Islamism, a virulent political ideology (which represents the far right of the Muslim political spectrum). That ideology today poses a global threat and is one that many (but not enough) people of Muslim heritage themselves have been fighting against all around the world for years. Hilary Clinton deems it insulting to say "radical Islam." Not saying it, when it represents a reality, is much worse.

The double standards have been stunning. On the right, people who denounced anyone who dared make a connection between the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooter and its own extreme anti-choice discourse were instantly linking the San Bernardino bloodbath to "Islamic" terrorism before there was any evidence other than that the first suspect had a foreign sounding name. On the left, the same people who had instantly (and correctly) recognized the politics of the Planned Parenthood shooting were reticent to admit any connection to terrorism here or to discuss the possible political motivation, even as thousands of rounds of ammunition were being found in the "IED factory" Farook and Malik had in their garage.

The soundtrack to all of this has been a diatribe from the Far Right in the West increasingly suggesting that all Muslims are members of one big sleeper cell and that there is something inherently wrong with this religion, and this religion only. Such views contravene basic tenets of humanism and decency. They also give a powerful weapon both to actual fundamentalists and those who apologize for them by suggesting that the extremists are just fighting an oppressive, imperialist West and defending Muslim interests. Making Muslims into victims, or making them feel like they are, plays into the hands of the fundamentalists who know just how to play that card.

While the Western Right sometimes advocates bigotry and international crimes -- like killing the families of terrorists as Donald Trump appallingly suggests -- in response to Muslim fundamentalist violence, the Western Left often refuses to recognize the reality of that violence and the actual danger posed by its underlying ideology.

They should listen to progressives of Muslim heritage whose words also belie the claims of the Gellers of the world. For example, Algerian anti-extremist activist Cherifa Kheddar, whose own brother and sister were killed by the Armed Islamic Group in 1996, clearly explains that you cannot end jihadist violence without "prioritizing the fight against fundamentalism which makes the bed of jihadism."

A similar point was made by a petition authored by Muslim journalist Mohamed Sifaoui and published last summer in the leftwing and secular French magazine Marianne that was signed by some 2000 people, mostly people of North African, Muslim heritage. "Islamism imposes a war on us and its principle weapon is terrorism, but Islamism also imposes on us a great ideological battle that we must face up to collectively."

In facing up to this very battle, President Obama got some things right in his Oval Office speech though he mainly pledged -- somewhat incongruously -- to continue the same strategy against a threat which has evolved, and emphasized what he would not do. However, he rightly reminded us that Muslim Americans are an integral part of the community. Discrimination is an unacceptable response to terror. Allowing terror suspects to arm themselves inside our borders is not a good idea. And at the same time he insisted that Muslims must confront extremism which is a grave threat and one that has, in fact, taken root in certain quarters, including here in the U.S..

What we need to do now -- rather than giving a forum to self-appointed spokespeople like CAIR who have not led the fight against extremism -- is listen to those who have actually been taking on this very struggle the President referenced. One of those brave people, Ani Zonneveld, the Malaysian American head of Muslims for Progressive Values based in Southern California, wrote to me the day after the San Bernardino slaughter. "You cannot be religious and go out and kill in Islam, and yet again we are witnessing murder in the name of our faith. The fact that guns are easily accessible and there have been more than 355 mass shootings in America to date should be irrelevant to our internal conversation. Our conversation should be why and what is it in our theology that has been so bastardized to give people permission to kill? Until we honestly root this out, we will by default be blamed."

To enable the "rooting out" Ani calls for, the right and the left need to focus on the actual problem and not on each other. They all need to carefully distinguish between Muslims, people of Muslim heritage and immigrants on the one hand, and Islamist extremists on the other. They must be tolerant toward the former who are key allies, and unwaveringly intolerant of the latter. As a necessary first step, they must speak the name of the problem: "Muslim fundamentalism."

The memory of the victims of San Bernardino, and of so many other recent terror attacks around the world, demands nothing less from us today.

October 8, 2015

Los Angeles Times Op-Ed: The refugee tragedy in our own backyard

On September 11, three UC Davis students, Aldo Martinez Gomez, Amanda Whitney, and Anita Barooni, and I went to provide a free legal orientation to refugees detained in the Mesa Verde Detention Center in Bakersfield. The students and volunteers met with over 250 refugees and immigrants from all over the world, providing pro se assistance, self-help materials, and legal support. However, we also left feeling a bit defeated because the need was so overwhelming, and the people were desperate for more meaningful legal assistance.

The students' outrage and courage inspired me to write this opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times with my friend and colleague, Jayashri Srikantiah at Stanford.

I did not want what we witnessed to remain invisible, because in the words of MLK, "In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

 

October 1, 2015

TIME Ideas: Borders Should Be Checkpoints, Not Roadblocks, to Migrants

I was invited to contribute an essay to TIME Magazine's "Ideas" section.

The result is this: "Borders Should Be Checkpoints - Not Roadblocks - to Migrants."

An excerpt:

The Syrian refugee crisis unfortunately is simply the latest mass migration to challenge the global community. Just last summer, for example, the U.S. was the destination for tens of thousands of women and children fleeing rampant gang violence in Central America. Many other contemporary examples of large movements of people—Haiti, Africa and Vietnam—come to mind.

How do we as global community respond to large-scale migration flows caused by civil war, mass disaster or severe economic deprivation? Unfortunately, the law performs the worst in the situation where it is needed the most. Tight controls over numbers of people admitted do not help address mass migrations of people. More liberal admissions are urgently needed.

International law and the law of individual nations should be more open and admit migrants who want to work in low- and medium-skilled (as well as high-skilled) jobs that are highly valued by the economies of Western nations, which have experienced dwindling labor forces with decreasing fertility rates. We should show our true commitment to the global community by welcoming refugees fleeing violence, natural disaster, and lack of opportunity with open arms, not try to stop them from entering the country.

Read the full essay at TIME Ideas. Thanks to TIME for the opportunity!

September 2, 2015

New Faculty Research: Legal Studies Research Paper Series, Vol. 17 No. 4

Here is a look at some of the most recent scholarship from UC Davis School of Law faculty from the Social Science Research Network's Legal Scholarship Network. Click through the links to download the works.

LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP NETWORK: LEGAL STUDIES RESEARCH PAPER SERIES
UC DAVIS SCHOOL OF LAW

"Business and Human Rights Litigation in U.S. Courts Before and after Kiobel" 
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 440

WILLIAM S. DODGE, University of California, Davis, School of Law
Email: dodgew@uchastings.edu

This Chapter examines the landscape for business and human rights cases in U.S. courts under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) both before and after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. It concludes that such cases today face a series of challenges, including personal jurisdiction, the question of corporate liability, the standard for aiding and abetting liability, and satisfying Kiobel's "touch and concern" test.

"Employment Arbitration after the Revolution" 
DePaul Law Review, Vol. 65, 2016 Forthcoming
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 443

DAVID HORTON, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: dohorton@ucdavis.edu
ANDREA CANN CHANDRASEKHER, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: achandrasekher@ucdavis.edu

This invited contribution to the DePaul Law Review's Clifford Symposium on Tort Law and Social Policy examines 5,883 cases initiated by employees in the American Arbitration Association between July 1, 2009 and December 31, 2013. Its goal is to shed light on the state of employment arbitration after the U.S. Supreme Court's watershed opinions in Rent-A-Center West, Inc. v. Jackson and AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion.

It finds that employees have filed fewer cases since Concepcion. It also determines that employees "win" - defined as recovering an award of $1 or more - 18% of matters. Finally, it performs logit regressions to investigate the impact of several variables on case outcomes. It concludes that employees are less likely to be victorious when they face a "high-level" or "super" repeat playing employer. Conversely, fact that a case involves a "repeat pairing" - an employer that has appeared at least once before the same arbitrator - does not influence win rates.

"The Ambivalence in the American Law Governing the Admissibility of Uncharged Misconduct Evidence" 
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Evidence Law and Forensic Science, Forthcoming
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 438

EDWARD J. IMWINKELRIED, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: EJIMWINKELRIED@ucdavis.edu

The English common-law courts gave birth to the character evidence prohibition and helped spread the prohibition throughout the common-law world. Under the prohibition, a prosecutor may not introduce testimony about an accused's uncharged misconduct on the theory that the uncharged misconduct shows the accused's propensity to commit crimes and that in turn, the propensity increases the probability that the accused committed the charged offense. According to the orthodox version of the prohibition, the government may introduce the testimony only if the prosecutor can demonstrate that the evidence is logically relevant on a non-character theory, that is, a theory that does not entail an assumption about the accused's personal, subjective bad character.

Today, though, in much of the common-law world, by virtue of case law and legislation the prohibition is no longer in effect as a rigid, categorical rule. Rather, the courts may admit uncharged misconduct as character evidence when, in their view, the character trait has special relevance or there is striking similarity between the charged and uncharged offenses. In contrast, in the United States the prohibition survives largely intact as a categorical rule. Indeed, the general prohibition is codified in Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b); and the vast majority of states have a statute or court rule modeled after 404(b). Yet, today there is an ambivalence in the American law governing the admissibility of uncharged misconduct:

In federal practice and three handfuls of states, the prohibition has been selectively abolished. For example, Federal Rules 413-14 abolish the prohibition in prosecutions for sexual assault and child molestation. Congress enacted the rules over the vocal opposition of both the Judicial Conference and the A.B.A. and despite empirical data indicating that revidivism rates for those crimes are lower than the rates for many other offenses such as property crimes.

At the same time, in other types of prosecutions there is a marked trend to toughen the standards for admitting uncharged misconduct evidence. Substantively, a number of American jurisdictions have tightened the requirements for both the plan and "res gestae" theories for introducing uncharged misconduct. Procedurally, several jurisdictions have imposed new pretrial notice requirements, demanded that the prosecution explicitly articulate a complete, non-character theory of relevance on the record, and forbidden trial judges from giving "shotgun" jury instructions which do not specify the particular non-character theory that the prosecution is relying on. The distinction between character and non-character theories can be a thin line, and all these steps have been taken to ensure that any uncharged misconduct admitted possesses genuine non-character relevance and is used for only that purpose during deliberations.

Some find the current ambivalence of American law dissastifying and urge that American jurisdictions resolve the tension by following the example of other common-law jurisdictions that have abandoned a general, rigid prohibition. However, doing so would be at best premature. There has yet to be a comprehensive investigation of the trial-level impact of Rules 413-14. Moreover, the most recent psychological research calls into question the validity of inferring a person's character or disposition from a single act or a few instances of conduct-which is what Rules 413-14 authorize a jury to do. Finally, American courts should be especially solicitous of the policy protecting accused from being punished for their bad character. In the United States, that policy has special importance; the Supreme Court has held that the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment forbids status offenses. If an American jury succumbed to the temptation to punish an accused for his or her past - nothwithstanding a reasonable doubt about their guilt of the charged offense - the conviction would impinge on a policy with constitutional underpinning.

"The Myth of Arrestee DNA Expungement" 
University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online, 2015, Forthcoming
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 447

ELIZABETH E. JOH, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: eejoh@ucdavis.edu

Building on a trend that began with collecting DNA from convicted offenders, most states and the federal government now collect DNA from felony arrestees. The national DNA database now contains information on more than 2 million arrestees. While some of these arrests will result in guilty pleas or convictions, a substantial number will not. In fact, in many cases arrests lead to dismissed criminal charges or no charges at all. Should these arrestees forfeit their genetic information nevertheless? Every jurisdiction that collects arrestee DNA permits eligible arrestees to seek the expungement of their genetic profiles. While formal expungement is the law, it turns out that arrestee DNA expungement is largely a myth. In most states that collect arrestee DNA, the initial decision by the police to arrest that person turns out in most cases to lead to the permanent collection and retention of the arrestee's genetic information, regardless of whether charges are dismissed or never brought at all. This essay is the first to provide preliminary data on actual arrestee DNA expungement, and argues for quick, efficient, and state-initiated expungement procedures.

"Race-Based Law Enforcement: The Racially Disparate Impacts of Crimmigration Law" 
Case Western Law Review, Forthcoming
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 437

KEVIN R. JOHNSON, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: krjohnson@ucdavis.edu

This Essay was prepared for the Case Western Law Review's symposium on the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996). Racially-charged encounters with the police regularly make the national news. Local law enforcement officers also have at various times victimized immigrants of color. For example, New York City Department (NYPD) officers in 1999 killed Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea, in a hail of gunfire; two years earlier, officers had tortured Haitian immigrant Abner Louima at a NYPD police station. Both victims were Black, which no doubt contributed to the violence. In less spectacular fashion, police on the beat by many accounts regularly engage in racial profiling in traffic stops of U.S. citizens and noncitizens of color.

Removals of "criminal aliens" have been the cornerstone of the Obama administration's immigration enforcement strategy. Well-publicized increases in the number of removals of immigrants also have been the centerpiece of President Obama's political efforts to persuade Congress to pass a comprehensive immigration reform package. The hope behind the aggressive enforcement strategy has been to convince Congress that this is the time to enact comprehensive immigration reform.

In the last few years, a body of what has been denominated "crimmigration" scholarship has emerged that critically examines the growing confluence of the criminal justice system and the immigration removal machinery in the United States. That body of work tends to direct attention to the unfairness to immigrants, as well as their families, of the increasing criminalization of immigration law and its enforcement. This Essay agrees with the general thrust of the crimmigration criticism, but contends that it does not go far enough. Namely, the emerging scholarship in this genre fails to critically assess the dominant role that race plays in modern law enforcement and how its racial impacts are exacerbated by the operation of a federal immigration removal process that consciously targets "criminal aliens."

Part I of this Essay considers parallel developments in the law: (1) the Supreme Court's implicit sanctioning of race-conscious law enforcement in the United States, with the centerpiece of this symposium, Whren v. United States, the most well-known example; and (2) the trend over at least the last twenty years toward increased cooperation between state and local law enforcement agencies and federal immigration authorities. Part II specifically demonstrates how criminal prosecutions influenced by police reliance on race necessarily lead to the racially disparate removal rates experienced in the modern United States. Part III discusses how some state and local governments have pushed back on cooperation with federal immigration authorities, with effective community police practices being an important policy rationale invoked by local law enforcement for that resistance. Part III of this Essay further contends that more attention should be paid to the racially disparate impacts of linking immigration removals to the outcomes of a racially-tainted criminal justice system. It further sketches some modest reforms to the U.S. immigration laws that might tend to blunt, rather than magnify, some of these racial impacts.

"Corporate Speech and the Rights of Others" 
30 Constitutional Commentary 335 (2015)
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 442

THOMAS WUIL JOO, University of California - Davis Law School
Email: twjoo@ucdavis.edu

The Supreme Court is often erroneously criticized for giving business corporations the constitutional rights of human persons. In fact, constitutional decisions protecting corporations tend to be based not on the rights of corporate "persons," but on the rights of other persons: human individuals such as shareholders or persons who listen to the content of corporate speech. Shareholders' property and privacy interests have been invoked to protect corporations from regulatory takings and from unreasonable searches, for example.

In the First Amendment context, Citizens United and other opinions have invoked the rights of others in a different way, invalidating corporate speech regulations on the ground that they infringe upon the public's right to hear corporate messages. These "rights of others," however, can conflict with the rights of other others: corporate shareholders who might not want corporate assets used to express such messages.

The Court has dismissed this concern with the inaccurate assertion that shareholders control a corporation's messages through "corporate democracy." This contention, and not corporate constitutional "personhood," is the true fallacy of corporate speech jurisprudence. Corporate governance is not democratic. In the interests of money-making efficiency, the law concentrates power in professional managers. As intended, this arrangement is likely to benefit shareholders financially. But it does not give them meaningful input into corporate decision-making, leaving them open to the misuse of corporate property. Thus the "rights of others" may justify the regulation of corporate speech.

"Remembrance of Early Days: Anchors for My Transactional Teaching" 
UC Davis Bus. L.J. 107, 2014
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 444

EVELYN A. LEWIS, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: ealewis@ucdavis.edu

This essay discusses teaching transactional skills as part of traditional non-clinical, substantive law classes. It offers a very personal perspective gleaned from the author's 40 years of combined experience as a San Francisco transactional law practitioner and law professor. Of necessity, due to length constraints, the author offers only a few selected opinions about what she thinks works in teaching transactional skills in substantive law classes. Despite this limited focus, the author weighs in, at least a bit, on a myriad of subjects, including the current push for law graduates to be more "practice ready," the importance of skin-in-the-game type mentoring both pre- and post- law school graduation, the different challenges in training transactional lawyers versus litigators, the merits of using multifaceted large drafting projects versus more discrete problems, course advising needs, the teacher as recruiter, balancing desires for breath versus depth of exposure, and using what the author calls factual "side-bars" as accommodation of traditional casebooks to the transactional perspective. The author hopes these offerings of her matured discernment from longevity in the field of transactional law skills training, in the various iterations she notes in the essay, provide some helpful insights to current teachers of transactional law skills, both clinical and non-clinical.

"A New Understanding of Substantial Abuse: Evaluating Harm in U Visa Petitions for Immigrant Victims of Workplace Crime" 
Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Vol. 29, 2015
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 439

EUNICE HYUNHYE CHO, Southern Poverty Law Center
Email: eunice.cho@splcenter.org
GISELLE A HASS, Georgetown University - Center for Applied Legal Studies
Email: Giselle.Hass@gmail.com
LETICIA M. SAUCEDO, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: lmsaucedo@ucdavis.edu

This Article examines the legal concept of "substantial physical or mental abuse" suffered by immigrant victims of crime in the workplace, particularly as it relates to the ability to qualify for U non-immigrant status (commonly referred to as a "U visa"). Enacted for the dual purposes of strengthening law enforcement capacity and providing humanitarian relief to victims of crime, the U visa allows non-citizen victims of crime who are helpful in a crime's detection, investigation, or prosecution to remain in the United States, obtain employment authorization, and attain lawful permanent residency. To qualify for the visa, victims must demonstrate that they have suffered "substantial physical or mental abuse" as a result of the criminal activity.

Although legal scholars, medical and mental health experts, and government agencies have more robustly explored the concept of "substantial physical or mental abuse" in the context of domestic violence and sexual assault against immigrant women, there has been no focused exploration of this concept in relation to abuse of immigrant workers. In recent years, labor and civil rights enforcement agencies have increasingly certified U visa petitions in cases involving victims of workplace crime, but greater clarity is needed on the concept of substantial abuse in this context.

This Article provides for the first time a comprehensive framework to evaluate abuse suffered by victims of workplace crime in the U visa context. Based on a multi-disciplinary analysis, the Article argues that adjudicators have erroneously conflated the U visa's "substantial physical or mental abuse" standard with the standard of "extreme cruelty" developed in the context of immigration remedies for victims of domestic violence. The Article also argues that U visa adjudicators and advocates must account for the specific dynamics of abuse experienced by immigrant victims of workplace-based criminal activity, which are distinct from abuse displayed in more familiar cases of domestic violence, and examines particular forms of harm and vulnerabilities experienced by victims of workplace crime. The Article finally provides examples to assist adjudicators, policy-makers, and practitioners in the identification and assessment of workplace based U visa cases envisioned by the U visa statute and regulations.

"The Implications of Alabama Department of Revenue v. CSX Transportation Inc. and Direct Marketing Association v. Brohl" 
State Tax Notes, Vol. 76, No. 6, 2015
UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper No. 2616561
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 441

DAVID GAMAGE, University of California, Berkeley - Boalt Hall School of Law
Email: david.gamage@gmail.com
DARIEN SHANSKE, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: dshanske@ucdavis.edu

This essay analyzes the implications of two recent Supreme Court cases on state and local taxation: Alabama Department of Revenue v. CSX Transportation Inc. and Direct Marketing Association v. Brohl. We argue that both of these decisions not only fail to resolve major issues in state and local taxation, but actually unsettle these issues.

"The Last Preference: Refugees and the 1965 Immigration Act" 
Forthcoming in The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965: Legislating a New America (Gabriel J. Chin & Rose Cuison Villazor eds., 2015).
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 446

BRIAN SOUCEK, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: bsoucek@ucdavis.edu

The 1965 Immigration Act is remembered - and celebrated - for having replaced an immigration system driven by national origins with a preference system privileging family ties and occupational skills. But while the rest of the 1965 Act, in President Johnson's words, welcomed immigrants "because of what they are, and not because of the land from which they sprung," the last of its preferences, given to refugees, emphatically did not. Not only did the 1965 Act fail to embrace the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention's protection for refugees persecuted because of their nationality, the Act itself discriminated on the basis of refugees' nationality. To qualify, those persecuted had to hail from a "Communist or Communist-dominated country" or "the general area of the Middle East." A separate provision allowed for entry of those "uprooted by catastrophic natural calamity as defined by the President."

By tying refugees' status to "the land from which they sprung," to America's anti-Communist foreign policy and national security interests, and, importantly, to the discretion of the President, the 1965 Act's refugee provision suggests a counter-narrative to descriptions of the Act as part the domestic anti-discrimination agenda of the mid-1960s, or as a reassertion of Congressional control over immigration. The 1965 Act turned refugee policy into another weapon of the Cold War, to be deployed largely as the President chose. It would be another fifteen years before Congress again attempted (or at least purported) to do for refugees what the 1965 Act did for most other immigrants: end national origin discrimination and formalize the criteria and procedures governing admission to the United States.

"Chae Chan Ping v. United States: Immigration as Property" 
Oklahoma Law Review, Forthcoming
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 445

ROSE CUISON VILLAZOR, University of California, Davis
Email: rcvillazor@ucdavis.edu

In this symposium Essay, I explore an overlooked aspect of Chae Chan Ping v. United States: Ping's argument that his exclusion from the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act violated his property right to re-enter the United States. In particular, Ping contended that the government-issued certificate that he acquired prior to leaving the United States gave him the right to return to the United States. Such right was based on "title or right to be in [the United States] when the writ issued." Importantly, Ping claimed that this right could not be "taken away by mere legislation" because it was "a valuable right like an estate in lands." Similar to his other claims, the Supreme Court rejected this property argument. The Court's treatment of his property claim is understandable because Ping's contention may perhaps be described as "new property," which did not become legible to courts until several decades later.

In reconsidering Ping's property arguments, I aim to achieve two goals. First, as a thought piece, this Essay aims to show what the plenary power doctrine might have looked like had Ping succeeded in convincing the Court that his right to return constituted a property right. Second, this Essay highlights the intersections between property law and immigration law and the ways in which individual property rights might serve as limiting principles to the Supreme Court's formulation of the nation's absolute right to exclude non-citizens from the United States.