I remember while in law school reading a contracts case penned by Robert Jackson or Learned Hand some other famous guy (I’m sure it wasn’t Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., as he was dead by the time it was written and I understood what the case said) in 1944 or so. I thought to myself how odd that the world was consumed by war, millions were dying all over, and the courts still engage in figuring out who has to pay…

The end of the Trump presidency hopefully means the end to the war on legal immigration. It also means undoing the damage done, a difficult task.  While putting Humpty Dumpty together again will take some time, in the spirit of “back to normal” I would like to take a look at Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam decided June 25, 2020. Thuraissigiam is about expedited removal. Expedited removal is a process whereby immigration officers, not immigration judges, order removal when…

On New Years Eve Day, Richard L. Thornburgh, a former governor of Pennsylvania and a former United States Attorney General, died. As Attorney General of the United States, Thornburgh played a leading role in the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. I didn’t know and never met Mr. Thornburgh. (I know more “-bergs” than “-burghs, for one thing.). However, in 2006 our professional paths briefly crossed. In May 2006, the United States government appealed a Ninth Circuit …

In has been four months since I last blogged. Not because there is nothing going on, but because there is so much going on. Back in the not so halcyon days of Spring 2020, California, and much of the rational part of the United States was in lock down because of the pandemic that was killing people. A whopping 22,000 had died by the last time I blogged. We watched New York City struggle and hoped to avoid that carnage…