Source: https://facultyblog.law.ucdavis.edu/2017/06/default.aspx
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 06:23:54+00:00

Document:
I am so pleased that the School of Law is presenting a panel discussion next week on the 2016 Supreme Court term. Special thanks to Marc Levinson '73 and the Sacramento office of law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP for hosting us.
Here is the media advisory that just went to the press this week. Note the line that reads, "UC Davis School of Law hopes to make this the first of an annual series of 'U.S. Supreme Court Year in Review' events"!
Topics to include major decisions and the addition of Justice Gorsuch to the Court during the 2016 term.
Why: To inform the local legal community about the latest news from the high court, including detailed analysis of its most important decisions of the term on topics including immigration, criminal law, education, and more. Panelists will also discuss the impact of the new jurist on the bench, Justice Neil Gorsuch. UC Davis School of Law hopes to make this the first of an annual series of "U.S. Supreme Court Year in Review" events.
When: Friday, July 7, from 12:00 to 1:30 P.M.
Who: A panel of UC Davis law faculty and an attorney from Orrick's San Francisco office.
One-on-one interviews with the panelists will be available after the event.
The audience includes members of Sacramento's legal community, who pre-registered to attend.
For more information, contact Karen L. Charney at klcharney@ucdavis.edu.
The Supreme Court's 2016 Term has come to an end. Today, the last day of the Term, the Court in the biggest news agreed to review the travel ban decisions in the 2017 Term. In a per curiam order, the Court stayed the injunction in part. Justice Thomas, joined by Justices Alito and Gorsuch, concurred in part and dissented in part. He would have stayed the injunctions in full.
In Hernandez v. Mesa, which involved a cross border shooting by U.S. immigration enforcement officer of a young Mexican national, the Court in a per curiam pinionr vacated and remanded the case to the court of appeals to consider whether the family could sue for violation of the Fourth Amendment under the Supreme Court's 1971 Bivens decision. The order, which is analyzed here, observed that the case involved "a heartbreaking loss of life." Justice Gorsuch did not participate in the case.
The Court ordered reargument in two immigration cases.
In Jennings v. Rodriguez (reviewing the legality of detention of immigrants without a bond hearing) and Sessions v. Dimaya (reviewing a Ninth Circuit decision, written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt, striking down a criminal removal provision as unconstitutionally vague), the Court will hear rearguments next fall. The Court likely was split 4-4 in these cases Justice Gorsuch will break the tie.
2. Esquivel-Quintana v. Sessions (interpreting criminal removal provision).
3. Maslenjak v.. United States (denaturalization).
4. Lee v. United States (ineffective assistance of counsel claim based on erroneous advice on immigration consequences of guilty plea).
The Court agreed to review is seven immigration-related cases in total in the 2016 Term, which is a relatively large number. Two (Maslenjak and Santana-Morales) touched on citizenship and denaturalization. Five (Jennings, Dimaya, Esquivel-Quintana, Lee v. U.S.. Hernandez v. Mesa) involved immigration enforcement, which should not be surprising in light of the Obama administration's immigration enforcement push. Increased immigration enforcement under President Trump will likely lead to a steady stream of immigration cases to the Supreme Court.
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.
It is a big immigration news day!
We are asked to delineate the statutory and constitutional limits to the President’s power to control immigration in t his appeal o f the district court’s order preliminarily enjoining two sections of Executive Order 13780 (“EO2” or “the Order”) , “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States. ” The Immigration and Nationality Act (“INA”) gives the President broad powers to control the entry of aliens , and to take actions to protect the American public. But immigration, even for the President, is not a one - person show. The President’s authority is subject to certain statutory and constitutional restraints. We conclude that the President, in issuing the Executive Order, exceeded the scope of the authority delegated to him by Congress. In suspending the entry of more than 180 million nationals from six countries, suspending the entry of all refugees, and reducing the cap on the admission of refugees from 110,000 to 50,000 for the 2017 fiscal year, the President did not meet the essential precondition to exercising his delegated authority: The President must make a sufficient finding that the entry of these classes of people would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States. ” Further, the Order runs afoul of other provisions of the INA that prohibit nationality-based discrimination and require the President to follow a specific process when setting the annual cap on the admission of refugees. On these statutory bases, we affirm in large part the district court’s order preliminarily enjoining Sections 2 and 6 of the Executive Order.
The court rested its conclusion on statutory grounds -- that the requirements of Immigration and Nationality Act § 212(f), 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f) had not been satisfied -- and did not reach the Establishment Clause holding of the district court. At the outset, it found that standing was established and that the case was "ripe" for review.
The court emphatically rejected the notion that the travel ban was not subject to judicial review: "Whatever deference we accord to the President's immigration and national security judgments does not preclude us from reviewing the policy at all. [citations omitted] . . . . We do not abdicated the judicial role, and we affirm our obligation `to say what the law is' in this case. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 177 (1803)." (Slip opinion, p. 32). The court stated that "[i]n conclusion, the Order does not offer a sufficient justification to suspend the entry of more than 180 million people on the basis of nationality." Slip op., p. 43.
We affirm in part and vacate in part the district court’s preliminary injunction order. As to the remaining Defendants, we affirm the injunction as to Section 2(c), suspending entry of nationals from the six designated countries for 90 days; Section 6(a), suspending [the U.S. Refugee Program] for 120 days; and Section 6(b), capping the entry of refugees to 50,000 in the fiscal year 2017. We vacate the portions of the injunction that prevent the Government from conducting internal reviews, as otherwise directed in Sections 2 and 6, and the injunction to the extent that it runs against the President. We remand the case to the district court with instructions to re-issue a preliminary injunction consistent with this opinion. (footnote omitted).
This morning, the Supreme Court decided Sessions v. Morales-Santana and held that the Constitution applies to gender distinctions in the derivative citizenship laws. Justice Ginsburg, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, wrote the opinion for the Court. Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Alito, concurred in the judgment in part. Justice Gorsuch took no part in the consideration or decision in the case.
The issues in the case were: 1) Whether Congress’s decision to impose a different physical-presence requirement on unwed citizen mothers of foreign-born children than on other citizen parents of foreign-born children through 8 U.S.C. 1401 and 1409 (1958) violates the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection; and (2) whether the court of appeals erred in conferring U.S. citizenship on respondent, in the absence of any express statutory authority to do so.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the laws governing citizenship for the children of unmarried parents violated the father’s constitutional right to be treated the same as a U.S.-citizen mother. (The statute was amended in 1986 to reduce the number of years that a father must have lived in the United States, but it continues to apply different standards for men and women.) The court of appeals declared Morales-Santana a U.S. citizen.
In previous cases raising similar issues, a majority of the justices had not been in agreement.
Justice Ginsburg noted that the statutory provisions in question "date from an era when the lawbooks of our Nation were rife with overbroad generalizations about the way men and women are." (citations omitted). Gender distinctions now are subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause. "Prescribing one rule for mothers, another for fathers, § 1409 is of the same genre as the classifications we [have] declared unconstitutional . . . ." In the majority's view, the gender distinctions are "stunningly anachronistic" and violate the Equal Protection guarantee.
The majority, however, declined to rewrite the statute. That is within the purview of Congress. In the interim, the Court agreed with the U.S., government and ruled that a five-year requirement under another subsection of the statute should apply prospectively to children born to unwed U.S.-citizen mothers.
Justice Thomas, concurring in part in the judgment, would not decide the constitutional issues but would simply find that the Court could not provide the relief sought by Morales-Santana.
Immigration law has been exceptional in its immunity from judicial review. Sessions v. Morales-Santana is another step down the road toward applying ordinary constitutional norms to the immigration and nationality laws. Six justices agreed that the Equal Protection Clause applied to gender distinctions in the derivative citizenship laws. We shall see whether the decision marks the beginning of a trend in this Term's immigration decisions -- several that raise constitutional questions.

References: v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 § 212
 § 1182
 v. 
 v. 
 § 1409
 v.