On July 28 and July 29, 2020, 770 Juris Doctors will travel to Raleigh, North Carolina, to take a two-day bar examination during the COVID-19 pandemic. A group of Juris Doctors registered for the North Carolina Bar in July have come together to push for alternatives to an in-person exam to no avail. As the [...]
Regulators need to know what happens out in the world to understand and to oversee the industries under their supervision. Information flow may be a particular challenge for overseeing payday lending. At present, most states do not have database systems to track payday lending operations. Even when states do have database systems, federal regulators may [...]
A spectre is haunting the American legal profession – the spectre of diploma privilege. Facing the psychological and physical trauma of COVID-19, and buoyed by growing calls for diversity and equity in the wake of centuries of racial and social injustice blithely and sometimes viciously perpetuated by lawyers in positions of power, a new generation [...]
On Friday, June 26, 2020, the Supreme Court of the United States decided a Suspension Clause challenge to expedited immigration proceedings. In the widely anticipated judgment, the Court determined that no habeas could be brought as the original habeas petitioner was not in fact asking for the habeas relief of release. In so many words, [...]
No less than Columbus’ namesake founded U.S. legal education. Christopher Columbus Langdell devised the “case method”—the formalistic “science” of “discovering” law from appellate court opinions through the process of “legal reasoning.” As dean of Harvard Law School in the late nineteenth century, Langdell institutionalized the case method during the eras of Reconstruction, Redemption, and Jim [...]
With a view to ensure that classes are not scheduled online, this week, the Trump administration is considering a policy targeting nonimmigrant F-1 and M-1 students. The policy position is that students on these visas attending schools that operate entirely online may not take a full online course load and remain in the United States. [...]
“The enemy is the unphilosophical spirit which knows nothing and wants to know nothing of truth.” – Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952) Even in this grievously faltering United States, presidential elections are praised as essential evidence of a law-based democracy. This ritualized practice continues although “We the People” are suffering at [...]
Author’s Update: I did not know about this when I wrote this article, but on July 6, 2020 Harvard and MIT have sued the Federal Government to have the ICE guidance declared unlawful and to return to the earlier guidance in the pandemic. As they say, lead, follow, or get out of the way. “America [...]
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 invalidation, in Department of Homeland Security, et. al. v. Regents of the University of California, et. al. of the Trump Administration’s attempt to rescind the DACA program has obvious practical (if only temporary) significance for millions of Americans. The Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program provided renewable two-year deferrals from [...]
July 4 is here, and we have an opportunity to adopt a more truthful narrative about the celebration of our nation’s birth and the racism upon which it was formed. This year while we look back on the almost 250 years since Americans freed themselves from England’s oppression, we must acknowledge that our nation has [...]
