Supreme Court

In recent years, the U.S government has aggressively used detention of immigrants as a tool for enforcing the immigration laws. Immigration detention became national news in 2014 when the Obama administration detained tens of thousands of Central American women and children fleeing violence in their native lands.

Jack Chin and I participated in a podcast on Bloomberg BNA. The topic: Immigration in the Supreme Court's upcoming term.

LISTEN HERE TO THE PODCAST: "IMMIGRATION EVOLUTION"

Cracks are beginning to show in the deference that courts usually give to Congress in the immigration arena.

Tougher immigration laws have spurred the courts to import constitutional norms into the field, once subject to Congress's plenary power.

A little over a week ago, an equally divided Supreme Court left intact a lower court injunction barring the implementation of a major immigration initiative of the Obama administration. The program and litigation had proven to be controversial.

The 2015 Term of the Supreme Court just ended.  Next Term. the Supreme Court will review two potentially significant immigration cases.  Both implicate significant doctrinal issues of immigration law that have perplexed the courts for many years.  The Solicitor General sought review of adverse lower court decisions in both cases.

The cases are:

The Supreme Court did not decide United States v. Texas today.  It did grant certiorari in Jennings v. Rodriguez. (Download Jennings here.)

The issues in that case are 

The Case Western Reserve Law Review published its symposium on the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Whren v. United States.

I recently joined PublicSquare.net for a debate on its program Scholars Mate. The topic was U.S. v. Texas, a major Supreme Court case involving immigration and executive power.

Here is the video. Thanks to PublicSquare.net for the opportunity!

In a recent speech, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens discussed Professor Gabriel "Jack" Chin's paper Effective Assistance of Counsel and the Consequences of Guilty Pleas. 

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Zubik v. Burwell on March 23, 2016, six years to the day the Affordable Care Act (ACA) became law. The petitioners, a group of religious organizations, have challenged the ACA's contraceptive coverage requirement.

Here is the transcript to the oral argument earlier today in United States v. Texas, which raises the question of the lawfulness of the Obama administration's expanded deferred action program for undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents (known as DAPA) announced in November 2015.