Source: https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/conlaw/2018/08/index.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 08:12:57+00:00

Document:
The American Constitution Society is pleased to announce a call for papers for a workshop on public law to be held the afternoon of Thursday, January 3, 2019, at the 2019 AALS Annual Meeting in New Orleans. A committee composed to ACS's Board of Academic Advisors will select approximately 10 papers, and each selected author will have the opportunity to discuss his/her paper, as well as the paper of another author, in depth with two experienced scholars from the ACS network, which includes Erwin Chemerinsky, Pamela Karlan, Bill Marshall, Reva Siegel, Mark Tushnet, and Adam Winkler.
Papers can be on any field related to public law, including but not limited to: constitutional law, administrative law, antidiscrimination law, criminal law, environmental law, family law, federal courts, financial regulation, public international law, society welfare law, and workplace law.
The deadline for submissions is 11:50 p.m. on October 19, 2018. Submissions should be works that will not be published as of January 1, 2019.
Submissions should be emailed in Microsoft Word or PDF format to juniorscholarsworkshop@acslaw.org. Please indicate in the subject line "Submission for ACS Junior Scholars Public Law Workshop" and include the author's name, school, and contact information in a cover email. The cover email should also identify the field(s) in which the paper falls.
Tenure-track and tenured faculty, or faculty with similar status, who have been full-time law teachers for 10 years or less as of December 31, 2018, are eligible to participate. Co-authored submissions are permissible, but each of the coauthors must be individually eligible to participate in the workshop.
Authors are limited to one submission each. Selections will be made by November 16, 2018. Authors must arrange their own travel to the AALS Annual Meeting.
Inquiries may be sent to Kara Stein, at kstein@acslaw.org.
Check out Jason Zengerle's feature in the NYT Magazine, How the Trump Administration is Remaking the Courts. Zengerle examines how President Trump, with the help (or "ruthless discipline") of Senate Republicans, is shaping the courts. And how he's doing this at a blistering pace. And how this compares to the gummed-up Senate in the Obama Administration.
Check out Emily Bazelon's piece in the NYT Magazine, When the Supreme Court Lurches Right: What happens when the Supreme Court becomes significantly more conservative than the public?
Maybe a mobilized Democratic Party can somehow overcome all the barriers of Republican entrenchment as it did in the 1930s . . . . If a new dominant national alliance emerges to the left of the Roberts Court, maybe the justices will find a way to become a part of it. Or the Republicans could remain in power because they make a persuasive case to the voters, not because the court aids in eroding the democratic process. In other words, maybe Dahl turns out to be right. Let's hope so. The democracy may be riding on it.
The Ninth Circuit last week authorized a constitutional tort under Bivens against an ICE official for forging a document that would have led to the plaintiff's deportation. (H/t Theo Lesczynski.) The ruling means that the plaintiff's case can move forward.
The case, Lanuza v. Love, arose when ICE Assistant Chief Counsel Jonathan Love submitted an I-826 form, forged with Lanuza's signature, at Lanuza's immigration hearing. The form indicated that Lanuza accepted voluntary departure to Mexico in 2000, breaking Lanuza's period of accrued continuous residency in the U.S. Without this continuous residency, Lanuza didn't qualify for cancellation of removal; and, based on the forged document, the immigration judge denied cancellation and ordered Lanuza removed. The Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed.
Lanuza then hired a new attorney, who discovered the forgery. (Among other things, the forged document referred to the "U.S. Department of Homeland Security," which did not yet exist at the time that Lanuza purportedly signed the form.) The agency then adjusted Lanuza's status to lawful permanent resident.
Lanuza brought a Bivens claim against Love for violation of his Fifth Amendment rights. The district court dismissed the case, but the Ninth Circuit reversed.
Indeed, there are few persons better equipped to weigh the cost of compromised adjudicative proceedings than those who are entrusted with protecting their integrity. And, more often than not, the Judicial Branch, not Congress or the Executive, is responsible for remedying circumstances where a court's integrity is compromised by the submission of false evidence. Thus, it falls within the natural ambit of the judiciary's authority to decide whether to provide a remedy for the submission of false evidence in an immigration proceeding.
The court also denied qualified immunity.
The ruling sends the case back to the district court for proceedings on the merits.
Check out these letters to Senators Grassley and Feinstein, here and here, by former attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel on Judge Kavanaugh's views on presidential authority.
The letters take on a new significance this week, as events draw even more attention to Judge Kavanaugh's views--and how those views might translate if any issue arising out of the Mueller investigation were to reach the Court.
In one letter, former OLCers write on Judge Kavanaugh's critical remarks on United States v. Nixon; in the other, they write on the proliferation of presidential signing statements when Judge Kavanaugh served as staff secretary to President Bush.
[W]e are troubled by Judge Brett Kavanaugh's apparent commitment to a version of the unitary executive theory of presidential power that holds that the President has total control of actions and decisions of any executive branch official, and that in many cases this control cannot be reviewed by a court of law nor regulated by Acts of Congress.
At its core, this book argues that the public school has served as the single most significant site of constitutional interpretation within the nation's history. No other arena of constitutional decisionmaking--not churches, not hotels, not hospitals, not restaurants, not police stations, not military bases, not automobiles, not even homes--comes close to matching the cultural import of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence governing public schools.
That's because of "the importance of that venue for shaping attitudes toward the nation's governing document." Still, "[i]n recent decades . . . such sentiments appear more often in the Court's dissenting opinions than in its majority opinions."
Driver tells us what to do about that.
In its opinion in Commonwealth v. Knox, a majority of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld a conviction for "terroristic threat" and of witness intimidation based on a video of a rap song performance that he wrote and performed and which was uploaded to YouTube by a third party.
First, the Constitution allows states to criminalize threatening speech which is specifically intended to terrorize or intimidate. Second, in evaluating whether the speaker acted with an intent to terrorize or intimidate, evidentiary weight should be given to contextual circumstances such as those referenced in Watts.
not general or vague as to the targets, a circumstance that would have militated against a finding of a true threat. Had the lyrics been directed at police officers generally, or had they complained about perceived abuses by unnamed police officers, those lyrics objectively could have been understood as political commentary or as a musical ventilation of frustration about the rappers’ real-life experiences. That is not what occurred in this case.
Given this conclusion in the concurring opinion, it would seem that the court did not need to reach the recklessness issue.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court's opinion clearly rests on its interpretation of the First Amendment, so its amenable to a petition for certiorari. But that would seem to be a stretch.
The D.C. Circuit ruled in American Freedom Defense Initiative v. WMATA that the D.C. Metro's restriction on certain advertisements was a view-point neutral regulation in a nonpublic forum. But the court nevertheless remanded the case for a determination whether the restriction was "reasonable."
The ruling sends the case back to the district court for further proceedings. "Reasonableness" is usually a very low bar (thus favoring Metro), but the Court just this Term determined that a view-point neutral regulation in a nonpublic forum wasn't "reasonable." That case, Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, leaves the door cracked for AFDI on remand.
The ruling follows the recent Archdiocese of Washington v. WMATA, where the same court ruled that Metro's restriction on religious advertising was a permissible view-point neutral regulation in a nonpublic forum.
The AFDI case arose when AFDI sought to place an ad on Metro that, according to AFDI, was designed to "make the point that the First Amendment will not yield to Sharia-adherent Islamists who want to enforce so-called blasphemy laws here in the United States, whether through threats of violence or through the actions of complicit government officials." Around the same time, Metro was considering restricting ads, given the increasing number of complaints about ads disrespecting President Obama and ads on hot-button issues. A Metro employee told the Board that AFDI's proposed ad was the "straw that broke the camel's back," and the Board approved a temporary moratorium. The Board then rejected AFDI's ad under the moratorium, and later issued permanent restrictions on certain ads. The permanent policy, now in place, prohibits ads on "an issue on which there are varying opinions," politics (pro or con any candidate), religion (again, pro or con), and "industry position[s] or industry goal[s] without direct commercial benefit to the advertiser" (again, pro or con).
AFDI sued, arguing that the moratorium (but not the permanent policy) violated the First Amendment.
The court next said that Metro was a nonpublic forum (under Archdiocese of Washington), and that the restrictions were view-point neutral. The court rejected AFDI's arguments that the policy was view-point discriminatory because (1) Metro adopted the policy in response to AFDI (no evidence of this, and the straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back comment only meant that AFDI's ad, along with a whole bunch of other ads, led to the policy), (2) the policy was facially view-point based (not so under Lehman v. City of Shaker Heights), and (3) the religion restriction is inherently view-point based (AFDI didn't sufficiently develop or press this argument).
But while a view-point neutral regulation in a nonpublic forum usually satisfies the First Amendment, it also has to be reasonable. The court said that there was enough of a question here to remand the case for a determination of reasonableness under this Term's Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky (holding that a restriction on political attire in a poling place wasn't reasonable).
Check out Chicago-Kent Law Review's outstanding symposium issue, The Supreme Court and American Politics, edited by Profs. Christopher Schmidt and Carolyn Shapiro.
The National Archives and Records Administration this week issued a backgrounder and update on the dispute over Judge Kavanaugh's records, with links to congressional requests and NARA responses. The statement comes at a time when Senate Democrats accuse Republicans of failing to seek and release most of Judge Kavanaugh's records, including, critically, documents related to his time as staff secretary to President Bush (which might shed light on his involvement, if any, in controversial Bush Administration policies).
In the usual course of things, the Chair of relevant congressional committees would request--and receive--all relevant docs from NARA on a nominee under the Presidential Records Act. That's what happened during other, most recent confirmation proceedings, including Justices Sotomayor's, Kagan's, and Gorsuch's. But not here.
NARA explained that it holds "several million pages of paper and email records related to Judge Kavanaugh." Still, Senator Grassley requested only about 900,000 of these (not related to Judge Kavanaugh's time as staff secretary). NARA says that expects to review and release about 300,000 pages by August 20, but can't release the remaining 600,000 pages until later, "by the end of October."
The Senate scheduled Judge Kavanaugh's hearings to begin on September 4.
At the same time, NARA explains that it can't respond to Democrats' requests for Judge Kavanaugh's records (including records relating to Judge Kavanaugh's time as staff secretary), because under the Presidential Records Act "consistent practice has been to respond only to requests from the Chair of Congressional Committees, regardless of which party is in power." Senate Democrats took the extraordinary step of filing a FOIA request, and Senator Schumer this week threatened to sue NARA to get the docs not requested by Senator Grassley, and to get them more quickly.
is something that has never happened before. This effort by former President Bush does not represent the National Archives of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. The Senate Judiciary Committee is publicly releasing some of these documents on its website, which also do not represent the National Archives.
Check out the Notre Dame Law Review's symposium issue, The Future of Qualified Immunity.
What's Up with the Impeachment of the West Virginia Supreme Court (yes, the whole court)?
The West Virginia House this week voted to impeach the entire state supreme court. So what's up? Coverage here, NYT, WaPo (and here on the broader trend), and NYmag.com's Dailey Intelligencer.
This isn't the first time West Virginia's courts have been embroiled in constitutional/political disputes. We posted on Caperton here.

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