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October 13, 2017

Professor Soucek Files Brief in Supreme Court Sexual Orientation Discrimination Case

Professor Brian Soucek filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that it should agree to hear Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital, a case that asks whether federal employment discrimination law protects against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Professor Soucek wrote the brief with Professor Jessica Clarke of the University of Minnesota Law School and lawyers at Hogan Lovells on behalf of 17 anti-discrimination law scholars. They argue that sexual orientation discrimination is based on, and reinforces, the outmoded gender roles that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was intended to disrupt. The argument is based in part on Soucek's article "Perceived Homosexuals: Looking Gay Enough for Title VII," and his recent essay for the Yale Law Journal Forum: "Hively's Self-Induced Blindness," which in turn drew on three decades of work by the scholars who signed on to the brief.

Other scholars joining the brief are Professor I. Bennett Capers of Brooklyn Law School, Professor Michael C. Dorf of Cornell Law School, Professor William N. Eskridge, Jr. of Yale Law School, Professor Cary C. Franklin of the University of Texas School of Law, Judge Nancy Gertner (Ret.), a lecturer at Harvard Law School, Professor Andrew M. Koppelman of Northwestern University School of Law, Professor Zachary A. Kramer of Arizona State University College of Law, Professor Sylvia A. Law of New York University School of Law, Professor Catharine A. MacKinnon of the University of Michigan Law School and Harvard Law School, Professor Samuel A. Marcosson of the University of Louisville School of Law, Professor Ann C. McGinley of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Law, Professor Douglas G. NeJaime of Yale Law School, Professor Betsy Rosenblatt of Whittier Law School, Professor Vicki Schultz of Yale Law School, and Professor Deborah Widiss of the Indiana University School of Law.

Professor Soucek holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Mark. R. Kravitz in Connecticut, and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. His primary teaching and research interests are antidiscrimination law, civil procedure, constitutional law, and refugee/asylum law.

June 23, 2017

Ninth Circuit: Employer's Counsel May be Subject to FLSA Liability for Calling ICE on Plaintiff

[Cross-posted from Immigration Prof.]

Here is an update on an imporstant Ninth Circuit decision from Ninth Circuit watcher Cappy White:

Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit in Arias v. Raimundo, No 15-16120, in a case interpreting the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), held that an employer’s attorney could be liable under FLSA’s anti-retaliation provision when that attorney allegedly retaliated against an undocumented employee by arranging to have the employee apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a scheduled deposition.  Judge Stephen Trott wrote the opinion for the court; Judges Kim McLane Wardlaw and Ronald Gould were also on the panel. 
The employee alleged in his complaint that he settled his case “due in substantial part to the threat of deportation created by Defendant’s communications with ICE,” and that the attorney had contacted ICE regarding other employees who have asserted their rights against employers he represented on at least five other occasions.
 
Relying in large part on Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Co. v. White, 548 U.S. 53 (2006), a Title VII case, the court distinguished the substantive provisions of employment laws with their anti-retaliation provisions, noting that the “economic control” test for determining whether a defendant is an “employer” is not relevant in determining who can be liable for retaliation.
 
Plaintiff is represented by attorneys from the Legal Aid at Work (formerly the Legal Aid Society -Employment Law Center) in San Francisco and California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc.
 
November 16, 2015

Employment Authorization, the DAPA Memo and the Fifth Circuit’s Opinion

Cross-posted from Immigration Prof Blog.

On November 9, the Fifth Circuit denied the federal government’s petition to stay the federal district court’s injunction in Texas v. United States. The ruling upheld the injunction, preventing the implementation of the administration’s extended DACA and DAPA programs, otherwise known as the DAPA memo. The court decided that the Obama administration’s proposed implementation of the DAPA memo was a substantive rule implemented in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act’s requirements for notice and comment rulemaking. Substantively, the court held that the executive branch overreached its authority to issue employment authorization to the millions of undocumented individuals that would qualify under the administration’s deferred action program. In this post I analyze the executive branch’s authority to issue employment authorization documents.

The DAPA memo stated that eligible undocumented individuals can apply for deferred action, and that “each person who applies for deferred action pursuant to the [DAPA] criteria . . . shall also be eligible to apply for work authorization for the period of deferred action.” DAPA Memo at 4. The Court of Appeals focused on the reference to employment authorization, and its ability to transform the rights of an undocumented person. The court noted that because the government was outside its authority to grant deferred action, it was also outside its authority to grant employment authorization.

The Court of Appeals is wrong. The employer sanctions provisions of Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) expressly grant wide latitude to the agency, and Congress specifically intended to provide the agency with this broad authority. And so, the Court of Appeals got it backwards when it concluded that

“[I]f DAPA’s deferred-action program must be subjected to notice-and- comment, then work authorizations may not be validly issued pursuant to that subsection until that process has been completed and aliens have been ‘granted deferred action.’”

As the government argued and the dissent concluded, the agency has the authority to grant employment authorization regardless of DAPA; it is its authority to regulate worksite immigration enforcement that allows it to also grant deferred action on a category of individuals for its convenience.

Congress granted the agency this broad authority precisely to enable the agency create what is now the vast and largely-expanded infrastructure for worksite enforcement. If Congress had not vested the agency with flexibility in creating the categories for proper employment authorization, the carefully-created compromises in the employer sanctions provisions would not have been sustainable.

When Congress first set up employer sanctions and worksite immigration enforcement scheme in IRCA, it made the explicit decision to give the executive branch the authority and discretion to provide employment authorization to certain classes of noncitizens. INA § 274A(h)(3) defines an “unauthorized alien” for employment purposes:

As used in this section, the term “unauthorized alien” means, with respect to the employment of an alien at a particular time, that the alien is not at that time either (A) an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence, or (B) authorized to be so employed by this Act or by the Attorney General.

The clear meaning of this language is to give the Attorney General discretion to authorize employment under the Act. IRCA provides specific guidance to the agency about its power to determine who is eligible for work, and yet the employer sanctions provision is silent on the question of how unlawful presence should be considered. The Act further provided, “The Attorney General shall, not later than the first day of the seventh month beginning after the date of enactment of this Act, first issue, on an interim or other basis, such regulations as may be necessary in order to implement this section [which included INA § 274A].”

The Attorney General acted pursuant to this power, issuing regulations governing the types of individuals who were employment authorized by virtue of their immigration status as well as those eligible to apply for employment authorization subject to agency approval. Among those authorized to apply for employment authorization subject to agency discretion were individuals with deferred action. See 8 CFR 274a.12(c)(14).

It is important to remember that employment authorization provisions were developed as a comprehensive worksite enforcement scheme aimed at punishing EMPLOYERS, not employees, for hiring unauthorized workers. Employment authorization was seen by Congress as a way to make it easier for employers to identify authorized employees and to create a safe harbor for employers who were wary of the effects of worksite enforcement efforts on their own liability. The impetus for employer sanctions was less about protecting American workers (as the Court of Appeals suggests) than it was about making employers accountable for hiring foreign-born workers. The employer sanctions were not targeting unlawful presence. Rather they were targeting employers who hired workers without employment authorization. The distinction is important because employers fought very hard to ensure that they were not converted into private immigration enforcement officers. They, as well as Congress, wanted to leave it up to the agency to make decisions about employment authorization, especially in those cases in which immigration status itself did not automatically confer employment authorization. The agency’s regulations, implemented in 8 CFR 274a.12(c), list at least 25 such situations. Employment authorization, therefore, has become a critical element in the enforcement scheme designed to protect employers by providing a safe harbor. That employment authorization, and the agency’s ability to grant it, are questioned today, almost 30 years after implementation, should cause employers great concern.

There are important effects beyond undermining the employer sanctions provisions. From a civil rights perspective, the employer sanctions provisions would strip all meaning from prohibitions on alienage discrimination that also were a part of the grand bargain between Congress and employers in the implementation of worksite immigration enforcement. Under the alienage discrimination provision, an employer cannot discriminate against an employment-authorized worker on the basis of alienage. The provision was put in place alongside the safe harbors in the employer sanctions provisions to ensure that employers did not discriminate in their hiring practices and claim that they did not have the capacity to distinguish between employment-authorized and unauthorized workers. The Court’s ruling now puts employers in a bind if they cannot rely on the agency’s authority to grant employment authorization. In other words, when Congress implemented IRCA, it understood that there would be a universe of unlawfully present individuals seeking work. It defined “unauthorized alien” specifically in the statute to give the agency the flexibility to monitor, regulate and control that universe. Employment authorization does not make an individual lawfully present, nor does it provide any of the benefits that the Court of Appeals imagines. It does, just as Congress intended, provide the immigration agency the flexibility and authority to authorize employment as it sees fit, so that the ultimate goal of employer sanctions – to make the employer accountable for unauthorized work – can be achieved.

The Court of Appeals displayed a fundamental lack of understanding of IRCA and the relationship between employment authorization and DAPA. If it had understood the genesis and history of employment authorization and its relationship to employer sanctions, it would have understood that deferred action is a mechanism to provide the agency with the type of flexibility necessary to enforce employer sanctions. Bringing people out of the shadows, as President Obama suggested, is really about maintaining the employer sanctions system that Congress so carefully crafted almost 30 years ago.

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.

May 10, 2013

The Breadth of the Ministerial Exception and Ecclesiastical Deference: A State Supreme Court Case Highlights Questions Left Open by Last Year’s U.S. Supreme Court Hosanna-Tabor Ruling

Cross-posted from Justia's Verdict.

In my column today, I analyze an interesting case that a state Supreme Court will soon decide that illustrates, and has implications for, important national questions concerning the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment.  In particular, the Kentucky case, Kant v. Lexington Theological Seminary, demonstrates the need for the U.S. Supreme Court to answer many of the key questions it left open in last year's blockbuster ruling in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, where the Court recognized a so-called "ministerial exception" enjoyed by religious institutions in employment discrimination suits.  I begin by providing background on the 2012 Hosanna-Tabor ruling, and then explain how the Kentucky courts thus far have understood and extended that ruling in the Kant dispute.

The Supreme Court's Recognition of a "Ministerial Exception" to Employment Discrimination Law

The plaintiff in the Hosanna-Tabor case, Cheryl Perich, was a commissioned minister in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod who worked as a faculty member at a small church-operated K-8 parochial school in Michigan, where she taught, at various times, among other things, math, language arts, social science, gym, art and music.  She also taught a religion class four days a week; led students in daily devotional exercises and prayers; and led a school-wide chapel service a few times a year.  She later developed narcolepsy and informed her employer about her condition and, ultimately, her intention to assert her legal rights under the disability laws.  She was ultimately fired, and brought a charge with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against Hosanna-Tabor, claiming that she had been terminated in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).  The EEOC then filed suit against Hosanna-Tabor, alleging that it had unlawfully fired Ms. Perich in retaliation for her assertion of her ADA rights.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the school, holding that the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment bar employment discrimination suits brought on behalf of ministers against their (employer) churches, and that Ms. Perich fit the definition of "minister" for these purposes.  The Court began with a brief history of the Constitution's religion clauses that highlighted the need for government not to interfere with important internal church processes.  It then discussed cases in which the Court had, under the Constitution, deferred to church tribunals that were established within a church's hierarchy to resolve disputes over the proper use of church property or assets when disagreements between various individuals or factions within the church arose.   The resolution of these "quintessentially religious controversies," the Court reminded, is "strictly a matter of ecclesiastical government" that is committed to "the highest ecclesiastical tribunals" and not something for the courts to undertake.  Relying on these principles and on the experience of lower courts in this realm, the Justices unanimously (albeit in three separate opinions) concluded that the First Amendment compels a "ministerial exception" to employment antidiscrimination laws that precludes the application of these laws to claims concerning the employment relationship between religious institutions and their ministers.

The Kant Lawsuit

The Kentucky case now pending was filed by Laurence Kant, who was formerly employed as a tenured faculty member at the Lexington Theological Seminary (LTS).  LTS is affiliated with the Disciples of Christ Christian denomination.  The dominant (but perhaps not sole) purpose of LTS, reiterated at the beginning of its Faculty Handbook, "is to prepare faithful leaders for the church of Jesus Christ and, thus, to strengthen the church's participation in God's mission for the world."  All of the Seminary's degree programs are faith-based, and are designed to prepare graduates for Christian ministry.

Mr. Kant is not a Christian minister; he is not even a Christian.  He is of the Jewish faith and during all relevant times he maintained his Jewish religious beliefs.  While at LTS, he taught a range of courses focusing on, among other areas, biblical studies, Jewish studies, Jewish-Christian studies, world religions, biblical languages, and religion and culture.  In 2006, he was awarded tenure.  The LTS Faculty Handbook (mentioned above) described tenure in the following terms:  "Tenure . . . means appointment to serve until retirement, resignation or dismissal for adequate cause. . . [T]he only grounds for dismissal or a tenured faculty member are moral delinquency, unambiguous failure to perform the responsibilities outlined in this Handbook, or conduct detrimental to the Seminary. . . Along with tenure, however, go the responsibilities specified in the Handbook as well as an added expectation of leadership in the faculty."

In 2009, after the nation's financial crisis hit LTS's endowment hard, LTS declared a financial emergency and announced its intention to take dramatic steps, including the elimination of the tenure of its faculty along with other cost-cutting measures, designed to keep the institution solvent.  Pursuant to this plan, LTS terminated Kant's employment in 2009.

Mr. Kant then sued in state court, alleging breach of the contractual promises in the Faculty Handbook that his employment could be terminated only for specified reasons, none of which was present here.  By a 2-1 vote, the Kentucky Court of Appeals (and the case is now pending in the Kentucky Supreme Court, which accepted Mr. Kant's request for review) rejected Kant's lawsuit on two separate but related grounds.  First, the court held that the case "involved an ecclesiastical matter" that foreclosed the exercise of jurisdiction by a civil court.  Second, the court ruled that LTS enjoyed immunity from the breach of contract claims under the ministerial exception doctrine recognized in Hosanna-Tabor.  (Although one of the two members of the majority wrote a separate concurrence some of which could be read as relying only on the ministerial exception, he did observe that the main opinion "becomes the majority with my concurrence" and also commented in his opinion that LTS's restructuring "is an ecclesiastical matter over which no civil court has subject matter jurisdiction."  Thus, the majority opinion is best understood as having relied on both grounds.)

In both respects, the Kentucky court's ruling goes significantly beyond the Supreme Court's ruling in Hosanna-Tabor, and highlights the need for the Supreme Court to provide additional guidance in this area.

The "Ecclesiastical Matters" Rule Barring Judicial Resolution

Let us first consider the Kentucky court's decision that it could not weigh in on Kant's contract claims because to do so would impermissibly draw it into resolving ecclesiastical matters.  The majority opinion says "Kant's claims . . . cannot be decided without interpreting the Faculty Handbook to determine whether it allows for restructuring of LTS under a financial emergency and for eliminating tenured faculty under those circumstances.  Indeed, an inquiry into the rationale for LTS's decision making as to who will teach its students-all of whom attend there with a desire to become pastors or ministers-would be an inquiry into an ecclesiastical matter by this Court."

This seems like a non sequitur to me.  The first sentence is undeniably correct; Kant's breach of contract claims require interpreting the promises-and the limits on those promises-made in the Faculty Handbook; the handbook is the contract on which Mr. Kant relies.  But the second sentence would not seem to follow; deciding whether the Faculty Handbook contract implicitly contains a right of LTS to eliminate tenure in times of financial emergency does not involve religious doctrinal or ecclesiastical matters in any way.  If LTS had fired Kant because it said that he had engaged in religiously immoral behavior within the meaning of the Faculty Handbook, deciding whether certain deeds were morally delinquent (within the context of the church community) might draw courts into ecclesiastical matters.  But deciding whether a contract has an exception for financial emergency does not.

To see this, imagine that Kant had taught physical education, rather than religious studies.  And imagine that the Faculty Handbook promised that tenured members of the faculty would be entitled to use the Seminary's gymnasium after school hours for free.  If the Seminary later tried to begin charging tenured faculty for use of the gym (because of financial exigencies), would anyone argue that a breach of contract claim relying on the Handbook would implicate ecclesiastical matters?

Or imagine a contract that was entered into not with an LTS employee, but rather with an outside provider of services.  Let us suppose LTS hires a roofer to put on a new roof.  The contract states:  "In order to promote the use of the LTS facility as a continuing Seminary, Roofer X shall put on a roof suitable for educational structures for which LTS will pay him $Y."  Now imagine further that the roofer puts on a new roof, and LTS, because it is at that time in some financial difficulty, refuses to pay the roofer (so that it will have money to buy new books for its library instead).  If the roofer then sues on the contract, we could not say that interpreting the contract and inquiring into whether the reason LTS has not paid-the desire to spend the money on other religious-instruction-related programs-is permitted under the contract as an excuse for non-payment draws a court into ecclesiastical matters, even though such a contract claim would involve an inquiry into "the rationale for LTS' decisionmaking" as to how to devote its resources.  Certainly the ecclesiastical-matters barrier to adjudication cannot mean that religious institutions can never be sued for breach of contract, and just because the contract with Kant involves faculty personnel does not mean that interpreting it involves ecclesiastical matters.  To the extent that the Supreme Court's invocation of ecclesiastical deference in Hosanna-Tabor and other cases has been misunderstood, clarification by the high Court will be helpful.

The "Ministerial Exception"

This point leads us nicely into the ministerial exception topic, because it may well be that what troubled the Kentucky Court of Appeals most was not the ecclesiastical nature of the contract, but rather the ministerial nature of the party suing-Kant.  And there are aspects of this case that make it a more attractive candidate for application of the ministerial exception than was Hosanna-Tabor.  In particular, the fact that Kant taught at a wholly sectarian Seminary-as contrasted with the parochial school in Hosanna-Tabor, a place designed not for religious ordination but rather for a general, if religiously-based, education-leans in LTS's favor.

Yet there are a number of other differences between the two cases that cut against the application of the ministerial exception in Kant.

First, Hosanna-Tabor involved an exception to anti-discrimination laws.  The Court there explicitly "express[ed] no view on whether the exception bars other types of suits, including . . . breach of contract" [claims].  There will be enough time to address the applicability of the exception to other circumstances if and when they arise."  The Kant court acknowledged this caveat in Hosanna-Tabor, but nonetheless-and without any analysis or explanation other than the mention of the fact that some lower federal courts had applied the ministerial exception to contract claims-simply extends the exception.  Maybe it makes sense to apply the ministerial exception outside of the context of anti-discrimination laws, but certainly some discussion of why this is so-and how far the exception should reach-is in order.

Second, and very important, the Kant court found that Mr. Kant fell within the ministerial exception because of the religious-instruction function that he performed within LTS-"teaching students who desired to become involved in Christian ministry."   As the court noted, "[b]ecause Kant's primary duties involved teaching religious-themed courses at a seminary," he is covered by the exception.  This seems far too quick.  For starters, as the dissent points out, there is a difference between teaching religion (when one is trying to convince students to accept certain religious beliefs, or at least reinforce those beliefs), and teaching about religion, which is an academic exercise in ideas, not an attempt to inculcate particular spiritual beliefs.  And on the record in this case, Mr. Kant may very well have been doing the latter.

More generally, and perhaps more fundamentally, there is a divergence between the Kant court's approach and that of the Supreme Court majority in Hosanna-Tabor on the question of how we decide whether someone is a minister for these purposes.  In Hosanna-Tabor, the Court eschewed any rigid formula, but it did stress not just the function of a particular employee, but also the status and title that that employee enjoyed and used.  Indeed, in Hosanna-Tabor, the Court identified four reasons why Ms. Perich should be considered a minister: (1) the "formal title" of minister was given to her by the church when she was commissioned; (2) as a prerequisite to that commission, she undertook religious training and education designed to demonstrate her faith and her ability to minister; (3) she used the title herself and held herself out as a minister and a believer; and (4) she undertook certain "functions . . .  performed for the Church."  Three of the four factors (the first three) focus on title and status, rather than function.  Indeed, the Court in Hosanna-Tabor chided the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (the lower court in the case) for failing "to see any relevance in the fact that Perich was a commissioned minister."   As the Court observed, "the fact that an employee has been ordained or commissioned as a minister is surely relevant, as is the fact that significant religious training and a recognized religious mission underlie the description of an employee's position."  And yet the Kant court all but ignored the fact that Mr. Kant is not-and could not be, since he is openly Jewish-considered a minister within the Disciples of Christ church.  He professed no belief in, and was not commissioned under, any Christian faith.  Neither he, nor the church, would consider him a minister for any purpose other than a legal immunity from suit.

It is true that Justice Alito (joined by Justice Kagan) wrote separately in Hosanna-Tabor to make clear their views that function-and not just titles or status-should matter in deciding who is a minister.  But they seemed to be writing particularly about religions that don't use commissions or ordinations or titles of ministers; thus, their opinion needn't be read to say that, for religions that do use such titles, the status of a particular employee should not be an important factor.  Moreover, the fact that Justices Alito and Kagan felt they had to write separately serves to underscore how important status/title was in the analysis of the majority opinion, which six Justices signed onto without elaboration or reservation.  In any event, whether one feels the Kant ruling is an overly expansive application of the ministerial exception or not, the larger point is that before too long, the Supreme Court is going to need to step back in and clarify precisely how broadly, and to whom, the exception applies.