Public defense might be one of the rare professions in which doing one’s job too well can lead to being fired. The reasons for this are structural—public defenders are tasked with an obligation they cannot fulfill without upsetting those tasked with helping them fulfill it—and the system can be fixed structurally: by creating a state-level office whose job it is to defend public defenders.
Earlier this week, the Milton L. Schwartz/David F. Levi Inn of Court held its first meeting of the academic year at UC Davis School of Law. Because the meeting was on the anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, Judge Emily Vasquez asked me to offer some remarks on the impact of September 11 on the law. Here are my remarks:
The blockbuster movie The Post tells a very important real-life story about the efforts of the journalists and leaders of the Washington Post (including Katherine Graham, the first female head of a major American newspaper) and the New York Times to publish parts of a collection of classified documents (the “Pentagon Papers”) detailing non-public information about America’s controversial involvement in the Vietnam War.
The Chief Justice of California Tani Cantil-Sakauye has expressed concerns with federal immigration tactics at California courthouses in the following letter:
Dear Attorney General Sessions and Secretary Kelly:
The 2015 issue of California Legal History could easily be titled the King Hall issue. A publication of the California Supreme Court Historical Society, it is an annual journal that publishes scholarly articles and the oral histories of prominent figures of the bench and bar of California.
In my last column, I began analyzing SB 396, a laudable but legally questionable effort by the California legislature to repeal, by ordinary legislation, provisions of Proposition 187, a 1994 voter-enacted measure that imposed harsh restrictions on unlawful immigrants in the State, restrictions that have since been blocked indefinitely by a federal district court judge.
In the space below, I analyze a pending effort by California lawmakers to cleanse the California statute books of (what are to my mind) some mean-spirited provisions concerning the treatment of undocumented immigrants in the State. While the goals of this legislative endeavor are understandable, the attempt reflects fundamental misunderstandings of the scope of the legislature's authority, and the essence of judicial review (i.e., the power of courts to declare enactments unconstitutional.)
How This Episode Has Arisen-Background on Proposition 187
While many analysts this month are understandably focused on the blockbuster rulings that are due from the Supreme Court in June-the back end of the Supreme Court litigation process, if you will-in my column today I introduce and briefly analyze the front end of three cases on which the Court has granted review for the next Term, which begins this fall.
In today's column, the first in a two-part series, we begin to analyze and assess an important decision handed down last week by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concerning discrimination against would-be jurors who happen to be gay or lesbian. In SmithKline Beecham Corp. v.
