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September 29, 2015

The Trump Tax Plan in Two Words: "Donald Dust"

I recently provided some commentary to the media on Donald Trump's tax "proposals." To WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate in Washington, DC, I said, "It's a weird mix of proposals, but these plans at the end of the day are going to blow a hole in the budget." You can read the story here.

The reporter for that story asked me to summarize The Donald's plan in a word. I demurred. Nonetheless, I managed to summarize it in two words: Donald Dust.

As in The Donald blowing his magic dust of better/bygone/bogus days in yet another direction, this time over the tax code. Donald Dust is so magical that somehow slashing tax rates for the rich (from 39.6% to 25%), for partnerships and S-corps (from 35% to 15%), for capital gains and investment income (from 23.8%, including the Affordable Care Act surtax, to 20%), and for vast estates and inheritances (from 40% to zero) will not add trillions of dollars to the deficit, raise interest payments on our national debt, or slow the economy, but rather double the rate of economic growth from the present rate of 3% to 6%. Uh, and how are all those tax cuts for rich taxpayers and businesses better for the middle class? Oh, right, The Donald will also use some of his Dust to accomplish fundamental tax reform, something that hasn't happened since...er...a long time ago. Like, 1986. Maybe The Donald needs a Donald Wand to go along with his Donald Dust.

Which got me thinking. "Donald Dust" would make a good title for a poem (actually, it started out as a haiku, but...):

Donald Dust, Donald Dust,
Deliver us the American Dream, 
Donald Dust, Donald Dust,
A house, apple pie, ice cream. 
Donald Dust, Donald Dust,  
Tax cuts for me, my neighbor, you, and GE, 
Donald Dust, Donald Dust,
More cuts for estates, rich heirs, and Bobby McGee, 
How do you know what others can't see? 
How do you make 1 + 1 = 3? 
How do your tax cuts double GDP? 
Why do corporations pay less tax than me?
(please excuse the bad grammar)
Donald Dust, Donald Dust, 
Never mind all that, I really don't care, 
Just blow some of that Dust over yonder, 
I want your hair. 

September 25, 2015

"Liberty or Equality?" and the Obergefell Opinion

On Wednesday, September 23, I presented the annual Anthony Kennedy Lecture at the Lewis & Clark Law School.  The subject of my talk was "Liberty or Equality?", and the topic was Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in the recent Obergefell case, recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.  In the first part of my lecture, I placed the Obergefell opinion in context, taking into account Justice Kennedy's place on the current Court, and his past jurisprudence.  In particular, I noted that while Justice Kennedy is undoubtedly the co-called "swing Justice" on the Roberts Court, he is quite different from past swing Justices such as Sandra Day O'Connor and Lewis Powell.  The latter were considered to be moderate pragmatists, lacking strong judicial philosophies.  Not so for Justice Kennedy.  From his first years on the Court, his jurisprudence has been notable for a passionate commitment to Liberty in all of its aspect, and his firm belief that protection for Liberty is intrinsically tied to protection of individual Dignity.  This commitment appears in his  privacy jurisprudence of course (culminating in Obergefell), but also in other areas including notably free speech -- it is no coincidence that Kennedy is the preeminent advocate of First Amendment liberties on the modern Court.  Moreover, unlike his colleagues, Justice Kennedy's commitment to liberty transcends political boundaries, encompassing such "liberal" Liberty claims as abortion and the free speech rights of pornographers, and such "conservative" claims as property rights and commercial speech.  It is this lack of partisanship, rather than lack of philosophy, that has placed Justice Kennedy at the center of the modern Court.

I then stirred up the pot a bit by raising some doubts about Obergefell, at least as written.  I noted that the plaintiffs in the case had raised both Due Process (i.e., Liberty), and Equal Protection (i.e., Equality) claims, and the Court's formulation of the questions presented preserved both.  Yet Kennedy's opinion is almost all Liberty, with a tiny dollop of Equality almost as an afterthought.  I suggested that this emphasis is probably a product of Kennedy's own preferences and comfort levels.  While Justice Kennedy has always been a strong advocate of Liberty claims, his relationship to Equality is more ambivalent.  He unquestionably is firmly committed to nondiscrimination principles, and even (unlike his conservative colleagues) a commitment to racial integration.  However, he has demonstrated -- notably in affirmative action cases -- grave discomfort with policies that classify individuals based on qualities such as race.  Indeed, this discomfort ties into his commitment to Dignity, because he sees such typecasting as itself in consistent with individual Dignity.  As a consequence, Liberty must have seemed the easier path to take.

Ultimately, however, I do believe this choice was a mistake, for several reasons.  First, I think that jurisprudentially, Equality is the stronger argument.  The Court's entire substantive due process jurisprudence, which was the basis of the Due Process holding in Obergefell, rests on somewhat shaky foundations, given its lack of textual grounding.  Equal Protection, on the other hand, is a well-established, textually based doctrine.  And the argument for extending heightened scrutiny to discrimination against LGBT individuals strikes me as extremely powerful, under existing precedent.  Second, an Equality based holding would have been broader, granter more protections to sexual minorities than a narrow decision focused on marriage.  Third, it is possible that an Equality based holding would have generated less intense opposition than a holding that redefines marriage (though this is admittedly speculative).  Finally, I also believe that Justice Jackson was correct in his argument, in the Railway Express case, that in a democracy, equality-based constitutional decisions are generally preferable to liberty-based ones, because they interfere less in legislative authority.

September 25, 2015

Corporations, the Constitution, and the Rights of Others

Cross-posted from Columbia Law School's Blue Sky Blog.

The Supreme Court's protection of corporate political expenditures in Citizens United v. FEC and corporate religious exercise in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby has rekindled perennial fears about the influence of corporations in U.S. politics and policy. One popular response has been to argue for stripping corporations of constitutional rights. For example, the proposed "People's Rights Amendment" would exclude corporations from the categories of "people, person, or citizen as used in this Constitution,"[1] thus denying corporations the constitutional rights of human individuals.

Unfortunately, denying corporate constitutional rights is unlikely to have much effect. Insofar as the Supreme Court has protected corporations under the Constitution, that protection does not expressly rely on the notion that a corporation per se has constitutional rights. To the contrary, a central strategy of the Court's corporate constitutional jurisprudence has been to avoid deciding whether corporations are the holders of constitutional rights. Constitutional decisions protecting corporations have not been based on the rights of corporate "persons," but on the less controversial rights of human persons. That is, "corporate" constitutional rights are actually based on the rights of others.

The Court does this in two ways. First, it sometimes treats a corporation as no more, and no less, than an "aggregation" of human individuals whose rights are the real rights implicated in corporate constitutional questions. Hobby Lobby expressly states the Court's reasoning: the corporate "person" is merely "a familiar legal fiction" created to protect the rights of "the people (including shareholders, officers, and employees) who are associated with the corporation." Thus the Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable search and seizure of corporate papers because such papers implicate the property and privacy rights of individuals. By contrast, a corporate entity cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination, because no individual's rights are compromised when a corporation (in contrast to, say, a CEO) is compelled to incriminate itself.

In the First Amendment free speech context, the Court bases corporate protection on individuals' rights in a second, very different way. The so-called "listeners' rights" theory of the First Amendment protects the public's right to hear messages, and thus requires neither a corporate nor an individual "right" to speak. Thus in Citizens United (and earlier, in First National Bank v. Bellotti (1978)) the Court held that corporate political spending must be protected in order to protect voters' First Amendment rights to receive diverse sources of political information.

The Court, then, has avoided the mistake of equating corporations with human individuals for constitutional purposes. However, its "rights of others" approach suffers from a different error: a fundamental misunderstanding of the corporate decisionmaking process. In the "aggregation" cases, the Court purports to protect the individuals associated with the corporation, but this erroneously assumes that the corporation's acts are in effect the acts of those individuals. The Court makes a similar error with respect to corporate political spending. Even if listeners have an interest in hearing corporate messages, that may conflict with the rights of the corporation's constituent individuals if they disagree with those messages. Citizens United dismissed this concern on the ground that shareholders control a corporation's messages through "corporate democracy."

Small, family-run corporations, such as that involved in Hobby Lobby, may accurately represent the wishes of their constituents.  The same is not true of larger corporations, however.  Corporate law does not, and is not intended to, run corporations in a "democratic" way. Rather, in the interests of money-making efficiency, the law concentrates power in professional managers. They enjoy nearly unreviewable discretion to control the resources of the corporation with negligible input from shareholders.

As intended, this arrangement is likely to benefit shareholders financially. But it does not protect them from corporate political spending or other speech acts they disagree with. Shareholders can sue management only for deliberate malfeasance, and political spending has been treated as a proper matter for management discretion. Furthermore, the Court itself has stated that corporate rights are meant to protect not only shareholders, but also other corporate constituents, such as employees. Those individuals, however, have even less power than shareholders with respect to corporate decisionmaking. Employees cannot vote in corporate elections and can be fired for disagreeing with management.

The protection of corporate constituents may present a compelling state interest justifying the regulation of corporate speech. Corporate political spending in particular could compromise the speech and property interests of corporate constituents who may disagree with the political message. This argument questions the reasoning of Citizens United, and is consistent with the proposed "Democracy for All Amendment," which would expressly permit campaign finance law to regulate corporations and natural persons differently.[2]

ENDNOTES

[1] See S.J. Res. 18 & H.J. Res. 21, 113th Cong. (1st Sess. 2013). I should disclose that I am a member of the Legal Advisory Committee of Free Speech for People, an advocacy group that supports this amendment, as well as the "Democracy for All Amendment," discussed below. See Free Speech for People, www.freespeechforpeople.org.

[2] See S.J. Res. 19 & H.J. Res. 119, 113th Cong. (2nd Sess. 2014).

The post is adapted from the recent article, Corporations and the Rights of Others, 30 Const. Comment. 335 (2015), which is available here.

September 25, 2015

Drafting of the Restatement of the Law, Charitable Nonprofit Organizations, at ALI

I recently returned from an American Law Institute Advisers meeting regarding the drafting of the Restatement of the Law, Charitable Nonprofit Organizations, held at ALI headquarters in Philadelphia. The project was originally a statement of principles of nonprofit law but has been converted to a traditional restatement. Much good work went into the drafting of the Principles, but it was eventually determined that a traditional Restatement would serve better than a statement of principles. The work to date on the Principles will be converted and adapted for restatement use. The project has two reporters and an associate reporter and the usual advisers and member consultative group.

September 23, 2015

Things You Didn't Know about Magna Carta

The following is a lightly edited version of a short talk I gave on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta for the September meeting of the Schwartz-Levi Inn of Court at UC Davis School of Law.

Tonight I will be discussing a few of the lesser known aspects of Magna Carta.  I'm sure you're all familiar with the broad outlines; the barons of the realm of England extracting various concessions from King John at Runnymede Field, and I won't rehearse that history in any detail.

Let's start with the words "Magna Carta."  When British Prime Minister David Cameron appeared on the David Letterman show in 2012, he admitted that he wasn't sure how to translate the Latin words Magna Carta.  But he said it with an English accent, so it didn't sound quite as stupid as it would have if an American had said it.  The basic translation, of course, is "Great Charter," but it's important to note that originally the sense of "Magna" as "Great" wasn't "great" in terms of significance but "great" in terms of size.  The document nowhere refers to itself as Magna Carta.  A clerk gave the charter this name a few years later to distinguish it from a smaller document known as the Charter of the Forest.  So the original sense of "Magna Carta/Great Charter" was more "physically big charter" than it was "significant charter."

If we were to go back in time and ask Englishmen in the 17th century when Magna Carta was signed, they would have said 1225.  This year, 2015, would be the 790th anniversary of Magna Carta, according to them.  And the monarch who signed Magna Carta was Henry III, not John.  This seems to be a rather significant discrepancy.

What explains it?  Well, King John immediately asked the pope to declare Magna Carta invalid because he signed under duress, and the pope did so.  After John's unexpected death in 1216, the document was re-issued under the name of John's son, the new boy king Henry III, and it was re-issued again in 1225, when Henry III had reached his majority.  It was this document, with significant deletions from the original, that later generations celebrated as Magna Carta, and in many ways appropriately so, because this was the only document that was of continued legal significance.  The 1215 document was invalid.  Only much more recently have we given more attention to 1215, King John, and the original text.

The text of Magna Carta contains numerous promises from the king to his barons and subjects.  Promises from kings to subjects are great, of course, but the real issue is enforcement.  Magna Carta had a solution, but it wasn't a particularly good one.  It provided for 25 barons to serve as enforcers of Magna Carta against the king.  If the king violated the provisions, the barons "shall distress and injure us in all ways possible - namely, by capturing our castles, lands and possessions and in all ways that they can."  As Harvard Law professor Larry Tribe has argued, "for all that we justly celebrate Magna Carta as the well-spring of the rule of law, its carefully wrought mechanism for legally restraining abuse of royal power was nothing more than institutionalized civil war.  Nothing could more strikingly illustrate the theoretical and practical difficulty of reining in the power of him who reigns."  This provision was not included in the re-issue under the Henry III, and it would take many more centuries before better answers to this problem, other than simply attacking the king, were formulated.

Magna Carta has become far more a symbol of constitutionalism than it ever was originally.  Generations of English and American lawyers have cited it to courts in support of personal liberties.  Indeed, the citations became so frequent that many English courts simply grew frustrated.  Chief Justice Roberts noted recently that if a lawyer is citing Magna Carta, he is probably losing.  This has been true for a while.  In the seventeenth century, a juror complained about the then typical practice of judges fining jurors for verdicts with which the judges disagreed.  When the juror cited Magna Carta, the judge responded, "Magna Carta, Magna Farta."  I challenge anyone to distinguish adverse precedent more concisely.                      

Today is California Admission Day, and the organizers of this program have asked me to connect California's admission to the Union in 1850 to Magna Carta of 1215.  This is not an especially easy task, but here's my best effort.  California's admission was signed into law by President Millard Fillmore.  But Fillmore was not supposed to be president.  He ascended to the presidency when President Zachary Taylor died unexpectedly, under mysterious circumstances, just two months earlier.  President Taylor, in February 1850, had approved the proposed California constitution, concluding that it was republican in form.  And here's the connection.  Zachary Taylor was a direct descendant of King John.  And he's not the only American president who is a direct descendant of King John.  So were Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison, John Quincy Adams, both Harrisons, Cleveland, both Roosevelts, Coolidge, Hoover, Nixon, Ford, both Bushes, and Obama.  Three of the four Presidents on Mount Rushmore are grandchildren, many times over, of King John.  So America owes a lot to the loins of King John.

And of course we all know King John was a bad king.  We don't call him John I, but simply John, because he so thoroughly soiled the name that no subsequent English monarch ever adopted it.  It is tempting to speculate that he is the source of our expression "going to the john," but, sadly, I have no evidence to back that up.  But we shouldn't completely dismiss him.  If John had been a model king, there would have been no Magna Carta.  Similarly, if James II had been a good king, there would have been no English Bill of Rights.  And if George III had behaved appropriately, there would have been no American Declaration of Independence or U.S. Constitution.  It brings to mind the old problem in Christian theology about the nature of Judas; without Judas's betrayal of Christ, there would have been no crucifixion and no resurrection.  So shouldn't Judas get at least some credit?  So too, perhaps, with these bad kings.  For every twenty toasts to Magna Carta, we should perhaps raise one to King John, even if he would have privately complained about being forced to sign a "Magna Farta."

 

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.