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The U.S. Supreme Court’s pathbreaking decision in Padilla v. Kentucky seems reasonably simple and exact: Sixth Amendment norms were applied to noncitizen Jose Padilla’s claim that his criminal defense counsel was ineffective due to allegedly incorrect advice concerning the risk of deportation. This was a very significant move with virtues of both logic and justice. It will likely prevent many...

The traditional starting point for Sixth Amendment jurisprudence is the individual defense attorney, acting alone. Padilla v. Kentucky, however, replaced the image of the lawyer as a heroic and individualistic figure with an image of the lawyer as a team manager consulting with other professionals to provide integrated legal services. Public defender organizations already experiment with various...

For more than two decades, criminal procedure scholars have debated what role, if any, race should play in the context of policing. Although a significant part of this debate has focused on racial profiling, or the practice of employing race as basis for suspicion, criminal procedure scholars have paid little attention to the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has sanctioned this practice in a...

Local opposition to day laborers is built upon a standard diagnosis of the day labor “problem” and a common approach to its “remedy.” The diagnosis views day labor as a public nuisance that imposes negative externalities on a locality by disrupting normal patterns of business, traffic, and pedestrian exchange. The remedy involves the enactment of new land use regulations, known as...

Crimmigration law wastes one of the law’s most valuable tools: time. It eschews the temporal gauges that criminal law and immigration law rely on to evaluate who should be included or expelled from society. Instead, crimmigration law narrows the decision whether to exclude or expel the noncitizen from the nation to a single moment in time: the moment of the crime that makes the noncitizen...

Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 has focused attention on whether federal law preempts the prosecution of state immigration crime in local criminal courts. Absent from the current discussion, however, is an appreciation of how Arizona’s existing body of criminal immigration law—passed well before SB 1070 and currently in force in the state—functions on the ground to regulate migration. Drawing on...

This Article starts by analyzing the conventional wisdom, crystallized in the Ninth Circuit’s 1983 decision in Gonzales v. City of Peoria, that state and local law enforcement officers do not require express federal authorization to make arrests for criminal violations of federal immigration law. This view, I explain, is based on overreliance on the line between civil and criminal. Even if a...

In Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that state governments could mandate compulsory enrollment in the otherwise voluntary federal E-Verify program. Though it deals primarily with employment of unauthorized workers, this case raises broader questions of the role of federalism in the current immigration regime. State and local entities continue to engage in immigration...

Each year, the UCLA School of Law hosts the Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture. Since 1986, the lecture series has served as a forum for leading scholars in the fields of copyright and First Amendment law. In recent years, the lecture has been presented by many distinguished scholars. The UCLA Law Review has published these lectures and proudly continues that tradition by publishing an Article...

Despite talk of a “federalism revival,” state law is quietly losing ground in the U.S. Supreme Court, and the arbitration area is no exception. For as currently interpreted by the lower courts, the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) is on course to preempt a vast array of legislation that serves important public interests but that is only tenuously related to arbitration. The Court has implicitly...

Most people—and most lawyers—would assume that the U.S. Supreme Court has jurisdiction to review any determination of federal law by an inferior court, whether state or federal. And there was a time when it was so. But the Court’s recent justiciability decisions have created a perplexing jurisdictional gap—a set of cases in which state court determinations of federal law are immune from the...

The rise of the mixed-race population and its implications for our society has received attention in current discourse and media coverage. Some see it as a portent of the postracial world to come; others see it as just another challenge to which antidiscrimination law must adjust. Despite this new attention, racial mixing is not a new phenomenon by any measure. What have changed are the methods...

As immigration detention has increased in the United States over the past two decades, legislative changes have placed LGBTQ immigrants at a higher risk of being detained because of deportation policies that focus on poverty-related crime and increasingly stringent asylum requirements. Once detained, these immigrants are subjected to significantly higher rates of violence and are often denied...