Anil Kalhan

Civil Liberties Ten Years After 9/11

A symposium co-sponsored by the Justice Action Center, the American Constitution Society, and the Federalist Society.

Friday, September 9, 2011
10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m
(Registration begins at 9:00 a.m.)
New York Law School, Events Center
185 West Broadway, New York, NY 10013

Hosted by the Justice Action Center at New York Law School and the New York Law School Law Review.

If you have any questions, please contact Lisabeth Jorgensen at Lisabeth.Jorgensen@law.nyls.edu.

REGISTRATION AND CONTINUING LEGAL EDUCATION

Admission to the Symposium is free for NYLS faculty, staff, students and alumni, and for non-NYLS students with school I.D. General admission is $25.00 for non-students who are not affiliated with NYLS.

This CLE program has been approved for a maximum of six hours of CLE credit in professional practice for both transitional and non-transitional attorneys. New York Law School offers tuition assistance for attorneys who may have difficulty attending CLE events due to cost considerations. Click here to see if you qualify.

To register, please click on the following link or copy and paste it into a separate browser window: https://nyls.wufoo.com/forms/civil-liberties-10-years-after-911/

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

9:00 a.m.–10:00 a.m.
Registration
Continental Breakfast, Registration, and Opening Remarks

10:00 a.m.–Noon
Panel 1: Separation of Powers: The Roles and Inter-Relationships of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branches since 9/11
2 CLE credits available in Professional Practice

This panel will discuss the appropriate scope of and limits on the powers of each branch of government since 9/11, including specific exercises of power by each branch that some have criticized as violating the Constitution’s checks and balances.

• Moderator: Linda Greenhouse, Yale Law School; Columnist, The New York Times
• David Cole, Georgetown Law School
• Richard Epstein, New York University School of Law; The Hoover Institution; University of Chicago Law School
• Peter Shane, Ohio State University Moritz College of Law
• Vince Warren, Executive Director, Center for Constitutional Rights
• John Yoo, University of California, Berkeley Law School; Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice 2001–03)

Noon–2:30 p.m.
Panel 2: National Security and Civil Liberties: A Decade of Striking a Delicate Balance, or a False Choice?
Lunch will be available starting at noon
2 CLE credits available in Professional Practice

This panel will address not only the overarching (alleged) tensions between liberty and security, but also specific measures that the government has implemented since 9/11 that affect particular civil liberties as well as the rights of particular groups of individuals.

• Moderator: Caroline Fredrickson, Executive Director, American Constitution Society
• Muneer Ahmad, Yale Law School
• Jamil N. Jaffer, Senior Counsel, House Intelligence Committee; Associate Counsel to the President, White House, 2008–09; Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General, National Security Division, U.S. Department of Justice, 2007–08
• Anil Kalhan, Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law
• Sigal Mandelker, Proskauer Rose LLP; Deputy Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division 2006–09
• Joanne Mariner, Director, Human Rights Program, Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, Hunter College
• Geoffrey Stone, University of Chicago Law School

2:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m.
Panel 3: Courts, Accountability, and Justice: Forums for Assuring that Justice Is Served
This panel will begin immediately after lunch is cleared and may start as early as 2:00 p.m.
2 CLE credits available in Professional Practice

This panel will discuss efforts to bring to justice individuals who have been accused of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks and other actual or planned acts of terrorism, as well as government and military officials and their contractors who have been accused of abuses. It will consider the appropriate judicial and non-judicial forums and procedures for ensuring that those who are responsible for acts of war, crimes, and abuses of power will be held accountable, consistent with principles of fairness and justice, and that those unjustly accused are exonerated.

• Moderator: Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs, Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
• Michael Chertoff, Covington & Burling LLP; Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security 2005-09
• Eugene Fidell, Yale Law School; President, National Institute of Military Justice
• Martin Flaherty, Fordham Law School; Princeton University
• Andrew McCarthy, Co-Chair, Center for Law and Counterterrorism; Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York 1993–96
• Anthony Romero, Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union

4:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m.
Wine and Cheese Reception

Abstract:

Up to one quarter of the world’s population is estimated to be landless, including 200 million people living in rural areas. For many of these people, the condition of landlessness threatens the enjoyment of a number of fundamental human rights. Access to land is important for development and poverty reduction, but also often necessary for access to numerous economic, social and cultural rights, and as a gateway for many civil and political rights. However, there is no right to land codified in international human rights law. This article, which was originally written as a briefing paper for the “Forum on Land, Business, and Human Rights” convened in Manesar, India by the Institute for Human Rights and Business in June 2009, provides a brief overview of the legal implications of access to land for a broad range of human rights. Land is a cross-cutting issue, and is not simply a resource for one human right in the international legal framework. Rights have been established in the international legal framework that explicitly relate to land access for particular groups, such as indigenous people and, to a more limited extent, women. In addition, numerous rights are affected by access to land, including the rights to housing, food, water and work, and general principles in international law also provide protections relating to access to land, such as equality and nondiscrimination in ownership and inheritance.

Full article available here….

9/11/2001-9/11/2011 — A Decade of Advocacy: A Practical Lawyering Perspective

Sponsored by the Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law, American Constitution Society – Drexel Chapter, Drexel International Law and Human Rights Society, Drexel Middle Eastern Law Students Association, National Lawyers Guild – Drexel Chapter, Drexel Philosophy Club

Panelists:

Deepa Iyer
Executive Director, South Asian Americans Leading Together

Deepa Iyer is the Executive Director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), a national, non-profit organization in the Washington DC area. Iyer has guided SAALT’s direction on policy advocacy, programs and partnerships since 2004. An attorney by training, Iyer has previously worked at Asian American legal organizations as well as the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where she addressed the post-September 11th backlash facing South Asian, Muslim, Sikh and Arab American communities. Regarded as an expert on the impact of September 11th on immigrants and minority communities, Iyer is the Executive Producer of a documentary on hate crimes, has written extensively on the post 9/11 backlash, and taught classes at Columbia University, Hunter College and the University of Maryland. Most recently, she is the guest editor of Race/Ethnicity, a journal on the 10-year anniversary of September 11th which is forthcoming from the Kirwan Institute for Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University in August 2011. For her work around 9/11 issues, Iyer has received community leadership awards from the Asian Pacific Institute for Congressional Studies (APAICS) and Chhaya CDC. Iyer serves as Vice Chair of the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans and on the Board of Directors of the Applied Research Center.

Moein Khawaja
Executive Director, Council of American-Islamic Relations of Pennsylvania

Moein Khawaja was born and raised in Springfield, IL and has a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Illinois. His extensive activism experience began during his undergraduate years at the University of Illinois. Along with substantial involvement with the Muslim Students Association at the University of Illinois, Moein developed the first CAIR chapter for a university and an extensive leadership training program. He also facilitated the logistics of the MSA-national Central Zone Conference and was an intern at the Environmental Protection Agency. For his work, he earned the Illinois Leadership Certificate. In addition to owning and managing a small contracting business, Moein devoted a considerable amount of time in 2008 to the Barack Obama Presidential campaign as a volunteer coordinator. Moein is currently a fellow at the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute, a program of the University of Southern California Center for Religion and Civic Culture. In September 2009, he was hired as CAIR-PA’s new Civil Rights Director, and began in his capacity as Executive Director in May 2010. Through CAIR, Moein is dedicated to protecting the rights of all Americans and to promote the understanding and integration of Islam into the American experience.

Mary Catherine Roper
Staff Attorney, American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania

Mary Catherine Roper is a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia Office, where she coordinates litigation on a broad range of civil liberties issues, including freedom of speech, religious liberty, racial and ethnic justice, equality for lesbians and gay men, student rights, privacy, prisoners’ rights and police misconduct. Prior to joining the ACLU, Mary Catherine was a partner in the firm of Drinker Biddle and Reath, where she was well known for her commitment to pro bono work. Mary Catherine is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Anita B. Brody of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and served a year with the Disabilities Law Project as the first recipient of the Philadelphia Bar Foundation Public Interest Fellowship.

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When: Wed, Sep 7, 2011, 5:00pm

Where: Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law, Rm 140
3320 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA

Reception to follow.

K.G. Kannabiran, one of India’s “leading civil liberties lawyers for the last four decades,” died on December 30, 2010, at age 81. A biographical sketch, from the Hindu:

Born in 1929, Mr. Kannabiran obtained master’s degree in Economics and a degree in law from the Madras University before shifting to Hyderabad to set up legal practice in 1961. Since the late 1960s, he began to defend political dissenters that eventually marked the beginning of his over three-decade-long civil liberties and human rights work.

He was the president of Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee between 1978 and 1994 and went on to become the national president of People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL).

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He was a member of Concerned Citizen’s Tribunal that inquired into the Gujarat carnage. Earlier, he was appointed as senior counsel by the CBI in the prosecution of the accused in the Shankar Guha Niyogi murder case in Madhya Pradesh.

During the Emergency, he defended numerous political detainees and appeared in four major conspiracy cases — three of them in Andhra Pradesh — that had been filed to suppress political dissent.

In 1971, he filed a writ petition successfully challenging the Andhra Pradesh Preventive Detention Act, 1970, under which writers, poets and intellectuals had been arrested. [The Hindu]

Many of Kannabiran’s writings are collected in a 2004 book, “The Wages of Impunity: Power, Justice and Human Rights.”  His funeral was conducted “quietly” soon after he passed away, as his wife, Vasanth Kannabiran, explained in a guest post on Kafila:

As per his wishes and ours, and based on previous discussions we declared that the last rites would be simple, speedy and secular. The secular part we ensured. There were no flowers, no lamps, no mantras, no ceremonies. But the clamour for progressive “traditions” was what I found troubling in the extreme. In doing away with religious orthodoxy, all we have done is replaced it with other orthodoxies….

We all need symbols and some reassurance. But the slogans we raise however loud and clear – can Kanna hear them? Will they, like the traditional mantras, take his soul to heaven? Who are we reassuring? Why are we afraid of silence? Why are we making our radical orthodoxies more rigid and meaningless than the reactionary ones? What is reactionary and what is radical? Why are we in such haste to raise monuments to the people we love? If Kannabiran cannot live in the hearts of people, are tributes and memorials going to bring him to life? To be loud in praise is easy. It dies out in a moment….

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Instead of recreating the dead man in imaginative ways that would bring him alive to the public that loved him, we would rather show the dreary details of his funeral. How many people? How many placards? How many organizations? … It is not enough to write obituary pieces and hold meetings without any reflection of our conduct and attitudes.

The dead need no reification. Kannabiran was the voice of the poor. He never projected himself. He never needed to. [Kafila]

Here are a handful of remembrances reflecting upon Kannabiran and his work. Continue reading at SAJAforum…

(Posted at Dorf on Law)

One year ago this month, the Obama administration announced ambitious plans to overhaul the immigration detention system, based on a comprehensive review conducted for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials by detention and corrections expert Dora Schriro. How has the administration fared in implementing these reforms?

First, some background, drawing from my recent piece in the Columbia Law Review Sidebar. Since the mid-1990s, the number of individuals in immigration detention has skyrocketed, fueled by enforcement policies that subject ever-larger categories of noncitizens to removal charges and custody – most notably individuals alleged to be removable on many criminal grounds, which now include a sweeping array of offenses, both serious and minor. Many of these individuals have been deemed ineligible for the individualized bond hearings to which individuals ordinarily are entitled, and have therefore been categorically detained without regard to whether they present any flight risk or danger. Immigration officials now spend over $1.7 billion each year to run the “largest detention system in the country,” holding nearly 400,000 individuals per year in a sprawling network of hundreds of federal, state, local, and private facilities nationwide.

With the onset of this vast system of mass immigration detention, longstanding detention-related problems have not simply persisted, but have widely proliferated. Literally dozens of reports within the last three years alone by advocates and government agencies have documented serious and widespread detention-related concerns, including overly restrictive and severe forms of custody, abusive and inadequate detention conditions, lack of access to counsel and family members, lack of adequate medical and mental health care services, sexual harassment and abuse, frequent and large-scale transfers of detainees between facilities, and prolonged and indefinite detention.

In her report, Schriro confirmed important aspects of this picture. She emphasized that although immigration detention is a civil form of custody, not criminal punishment, the facilities, personnel, and standards used to hold immigration detainees all inappropriately draw from criminal justice models, causing most immigration detainees to be held – systematically and unnecessarily – under overly severe and restrictive circumstances that are inappropriate to their status as civil detainees. In response to Schriro’s report, the Obama administration pledged reforms intended to overhaul and reconstruct this quasi-punitive detention regime – which might be termed a system of “immcarceration” – into what one official characterized as a “truly civil detention system.”

So one year later, how’s that hopey changey, “truly civil” stuff working out for ya?

Well, as immigrants’ rights advocates acknowledge, the Obama administration can point to a few significant changes in policies and practices, including the creation of an online detainee locator system designed to prevent individuals from “disappearing” in the detention system altogether and the restoration of an earlier policy encouraging parole and release from detention of arriving asylum-seekers who present neither a flight risk nor any security threat. Officials have also taken initial steps to expand “alternatives to detention” and to detain some individuals in less restrictive settings, based on more refined and particularized determinations of the risks presented by individuals subject to immigration custody.

Nevertheless, despite an apparently sincere commitment by senior officials to make detention conditions more humane, implementation of these reform initiatives has proceeded rather sluggishly. Conditions of confinement are not the only factor contributing to detention’s excessiveness, and at least so far the administration’s efforts leave intact a range of other practices that contribute to the excessive and quasi-punitive nature of detention for many noncitizens. Moreover, while one certainly shouldn’t expect transformational change to happen overnight, as advocates have documented large numbers of noncitizens continue to be detained – often for prolonged periods of time – under abusive and improperly punitive conditions:

Immigrant advocates nationwide continue to report widespread due process and human rights violations, including the overreliance on incarceration, mistreatment by guards, denial of access to legal service providers, inadequate medical care, misuse of solitary confinement, and discrimination against sexual minorities. These violations demonstrate that the commitment to reform made by ICE leadership has yet to have any substantive impact on the ground. Further, the actual or perceived fear of retaliation expressed by detained immigrants and advocates alike during the fact-finding stage of this report reiterate the urgent need for ICE leadership to strongly reinforce its detention reform policies among agents, personnel, and private contractors working in the field. . . .

Oversight, transparency and accountability are critical to achieving reform, and yet these are the weakest features of the reform process thus far. Over the past year ICE appointed regional detention managers and created a Detention Monitoring Council at ICE headquarters. However, despite these changes, there is little evidence that ICE leadership’s intention to improve oversight practices and precipitate a cultural shift within the agency has been meaningfully achieved . . . . [link]

There’s an even more fundamental dilemma, however, standing in the way of the Obama administration’s detention reform aspirations. While the administration has pledged to make the circumstances of detention civil and non-punitive, it simultaneously has demonstrated a clear commitment to expanding its predecessors’ aggressive, quasi-punitive interior immigration enforcement policies more generally – policies which reinforce a broader convergence between immigration and criminality in law and public discourse. ICE officials have long made clear that notwithstanding their proposed detention reforms, mass immigration detention will continue “on a grand scale.” And sure enough, just last week Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano proudly announced that the Obama administration had deported more individuals than any other administration in U.S. history – facilitated most notably by aggressively expanding efforts, such as the so-called “Secure Communities” program, to enlist state and local law enforcement in the large-scale identification of potentially deportable non-citizens. Even though the majority (and fastest growing group) of individuals detained and deported through these expanded enforcement initiatives – as Schriro herself noted in her report – have either no prior convictions or relatively minor criminal histories, officials have gone to great lengths to emphasize that many of these individuals have been deported on account of prior criminal convictions.

In this context, the administration’s detention reform initiatives are in deep tension with its overall approach to immigration control and interior enforcement. With a rapidly increasing number of potential detainees identified through programs such as Secure Communities, the government will face mounting pressures not only to hold even more noncitizens in its custody, but to do so at minimal cost. And by reinforcing the convergence between immigration and criminality in public discourse, the administration has made itself increasingly vulnerable to attacks – such as the scathing “vote of no confidence” recently leveled by the ICE detention officers’ union – over any initiatives that would devote time, energy, and not least money to making detention more humane and less punitive and severe.

One overall result has been a pattern of reactions that echo the “confusing and deeply contradictory” criticisms that the Obama administration faces in other policy areas: “[Obama] is a liberal zealot, in the view of the right; a weak accommodationist, in the view of the left.” The administration finds itself even further mired in that purgatory by its unwillingness or inability to move forward on comprehensive immigration reform – an initiative which could, depending on how it were crafted, help begin to roll back the decades-long convergence between immigration and crime control in law, policy, and public discourse. While congressional dysfunction and other legislative priorities obviously have played major roles in the inability to enact major immigration reform legislation, the Obama administration even appears unwilling to use its considerable administrative powers to move immigration policy in its preferred direction.

One could, with Edward Alden, conclude that the combination of detention conditions reform, on the one hand, and aggressive interior enforcement, on the other, show that “it’s possible to be tough without being unfair and inhumane.” However, absent a broader reconsideration of immigration control policies that are premised upon convergence with criminal enforcement – and some efforts to move forward on more fundamental immigration reform – the inherent tensions between those two sets of initiatives make it likely that the administration’s ever-increasing “toughness” will undermine any meaningful efforts to show “fairness” and “humanity” when it comes to immigration detention.

(Posted at SAJAforum)

Via Climate Progress:

[T]he big new Time magazine cover story for their European, Asian, and South Pacific editions, Through Hell And High Water, doesn’t make the cut for the U.S. edition’s cover (as the screen capture [below] shows).  In fact, can someone tell me if it made the print edition at all, since I can’t find the story in the table of contents?

Equally significant, the Time story itself never mentions the link to climate change or global warming at all, even though it is pretty basic physics…. [link] 

What does in fact “make[] a school great,” you ask?  You won’t find this in TIME Magazine, but at least according to a pair of reports [one, two] reprinted on the Asia Society website back in September 2008, it is “crucial” for U.S. schools to improve students’ development of “international knowledge and skills.” Ahem.

[HT: Manan Ahmed]

Related post on SAJAforum: NATURAL DISASTERS: How you can help the Pakistan flood victims

The recent floods caused by torrential monsoon rains have affected as many as 14 million people in Pakistan, more than the combined total of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The area affected equals the size of the State of Florida.

Please join the South Asian Bar Association of New York (SABANY) and help with the flood relief efforts in Pakistan. $10 minimum donation. Cash only or checks only. *This is not open bar.*

All proceeds will be donated to Relief4Pakistan:

Relief4Pakistan is a grassroots donation campaign designed in response to the deadly floods in Pakistan and the millions impacted. The campaign is a partnership between Pakistani Peace Builders, a new initiative of Pakistani-Americans and concerned global citizens, and ML Resources Social Vision, a private venture philanthropy dedicated to supporting innovative organizations and initiatives with expected high social returns.

Relief4Pakistan aims to centralize donations toward the emergency first response relief efforts in Pakistan in order to maximize impact. By directing funds to Mercy Corps, you can be part of a large and effective campaign to support relief efforts on the ground and raise much-needed public awareness of the large-scale disaster that is rapidly unfolding.

Why Mercy Corps?

Both Pakistani Peace Builders and ML Social Vision deliberated over which of the numerous organizations that are currently operating in Pakistan (all of whom are doing incredible work) should be the recipient of our efforts. After an enormous amount of thought and due diligence, Mercy Corps was chosen as a vehicle to assist those is need in Pakistan. Our selection was made based on the organization’s transparency, efficiency, and previous efforts in Pakistan.

Currently, there is an urgent need for food, shelter and clean water and Mercy Corps staffers are on the ground in Pakistan working to provide clean water, staple foods and clean-up tools for affected families. Mercy Corps’ efforts at this time are concentrated in the Swat Valley and the Sindh Province (where Mercy Corps’ team is assessing the specific needs), two of the most affected areas in this disaster.

Mercy Corps demonstrates both transparency and efficiency in their aid efforts, and is able to respond quickly to emergencies, working with local organizations and communities in Pakistan for a more sustained and strategic impact.

Who is Mercy Corps?

Mercy Corps is a global aid agency that focuses on disaster response, sustainable economic development, health services, and emergency and natural disaster relief. The organization exists to alleviate suffering, poverty, and oppression by helping people build secure, productive, and just communities.

Mercy Corps is known and respected for its expertise in responding to global emergencies such as this one, as well as its long-term commitment to Pakistan. It has been working in Pakistan since the Afghan Refugee crisis in 1986 and has played a key role in relief and recovery efforts during both the 2006 earthquake and the 2009 Internally Displaced Person (IDP) crisis.

Mercy Corps has long been recognized as an excellent steward of the resources entrusted to it. Over the last five years, Mercy Corps has used 88 percent of their resources for programs that help people in need. According to their website, “ensuring that resources are wisely spent is the cornerstone of our values, vision, and strategy for growth in the future.”

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Gstaad, 43 West 26th StreetDATE: Monday, September 13, 2010
TIME: 7:00-10:00pm
LOCATION: Gstaad, 43 W 26 St, New York, NY 10010
DONATION: $10 minimum donation. Cash only or checks only. *This is not open bar*

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About SABANY:

The South Asian Bar Association of New York (SABANY) is an organization of South Asian attorneys practicing in the New York City metropolitan region. SABANY is dedicated to the needs, concerns, and interests of lawyers of South Asian heritage. We are committed to promoting the professional development of the South Asian legal community through networking, advocacy, and mentoring. Each year we host panels, CLE courses, and workshops on career development, social justice issues, and current events. We also organize monthly networking events, a Public Interest Fellowship Benefit, and a Leadership Awards Gala. SABANY is dedicated to ensuring the civil liberties of the South Asian community in New York, by acting as a conduit between the South Asian community and legal services and educational programs in the area. It is our goal to educate South Asian Americans about their legal system and to encourage more participation by our community in the legal profession.

Marc Galanter
“Whither Indian Law? Impending Changes and Possible Futures”

Sponsored by the Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law, the University of Pennsylvania South Asia Center, the University of Pennsylvania Center for the Advanced Study of India, and the Drexel Law Review

Marc Galanter, the John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and LSE Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, studies litigation, lawyers, and legal culture. He is the author of a number of highly regarded and seminal studies of litigation and disputing in the United States (including “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change,” one of the most-cited articles in the legal literature. His work includes pioneering studies on the impact of disputant capabilities in adjudication, the relation of public legal institutions to informal regulation, and patterns of litigation in the United States. He is also co-author of Tournament of Lawyers (with Thomas Palay, 1991) which is widely viewed as the most robust explanation of the growth and transformation of large law firms.

He is an outspoken critic of misrepresentations of the American civil justice system and of the inadequate knowledge base that makes the system so vulnerable to misguided attacks.

Much of his early work was on India. He is recognized as a leading American student of the Indian legal system. He is the author of Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (1984, 1991) and Law and Society in Modern India (1989, 1992). He is an Honorary Professor of the National Law School of India, served as advisor to the Ford Foundation on legal services and human rights programs in India, and was retained as an expert by the government of India in the litigation arising from the Bhopal disaster. He is currently engaged in research on access to justice in India.

A leading figure in the empirical study of the legal system, he has been editor of the Law & Society Review, President of the Law and Society Association, Chair of the International Commission on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is a member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received degrees in philosophy and law from the University of Chicago. In addition to the University of Wisconsin and the London School of Economics, he has taught at Chicago, Buffalo, Columbia, and Stanford.

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When: Tue, Aug 31, 2010, 4:15pm

Where: Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law, Rm 240
3320 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA

Reception to follow.

Abstract:

In recent years, scholars have drawn attention to the myriad ways in which the lines between criminal enforcement and immigration control have blurred in law and public discourse. This essay analyzes this convergence in the context of immigration detention. For decades, courts and observers have documented and analyzed a wide range of detention-related concerns, including mandatory and presumed custody, coercion and other due process violations, inadequate access to counsel, prolonged and indefinite custody, inadequate conditions of confinement, and violations of international law obligations. With the number of detainees skyrocketing since the 1990s, these concerns have rapidly proliferated – to the point where some commentators resist the very term “detention” in this context as sanitized and misleading, masking quasi-punitive circumstances that approximate criminal “incarceration” or “imprisonment.” If convergence of immigration control and criminal enforcement more generally has given rise to a system of crimmigration law, as some observers maintain, then perhaps excessive immigration detention practices have evolved into a quasi-punitive system of immcarceration.

A recent report by Dora Schriro, a senior Homeland Security official, gives official imprimatur to crucial aspects of this picture, acknowledging explicitly that most detainees are – systematically and unnecessarily – held under circumstances inappropriate for immigration detention’s noncriminal purposes. In response, the Obama Administration has pledged reforms to reconstruct this regime as a “truly civil detention system.” This essay considers the possibilities and limits of these initiatives, which target excessive conditions of confinement but leave other excessive practices intact. Notwithstanding these proposed reforms, the expansion of existing enforcement initiatives means that the government will continue to detain noncitizens, in the words of its own head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “on a grand scale” – which may constrain its ability to dismantle many of the detention regime’s quasi-punitive features. While excessive detention conditions may well be tempered for many individuals, large-scale immcarceration seems here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Full article available here….

Symposium: Perspectives on Fundamental Rights in South Asia, Drexel Law Review, Vol. 2 No. 2 (Spring 2010):

Guest Editor’s Preface
by: Anil Kalhan | download this article (pdf)

This symposium issue of the Drexel Law Review marks the anticipated launch of a new section on Law and South Asian Studies of the Association of American Law Schools, including several contributions that were initially presented during a session of the proposed section at the AALS Annual Meeting for 2010. The proposed AALS section comes at a moment of heightened interest in the region among lawyers, policymakers, and the public at large in the United States, and is part of a rapidly growing constellation of scholarly initiatives on law in South Asia that have emerged internationally in recent years.

Foreword: World of Our Cousins
by: Marc Galanter | download this article (pdf)

Most of the people who live under some version of the common law today live in South Asia, as do a large portion (perhaps a majority) of those who live under a working constitutional democracy. Nevertheless, until very recently this part of our world was quite invisible to the American legal academy and profession. It is a pleasure to introduce this symposium, apparently the first of any mainstream American law review to focus on South Asian law. Its appearance is one of several markers that the neglect of South Asia by American law schools is being left behind.

The Substance of the Constitution: Engaging with Foreign Judgements in India, Sri Lanka, and South Africa
by: Shylashri Shankar | download this article (pdf)

The last two decades have seen an expansion of judicial power in developing and newly democratizing countries across the globe. The enhanced role for the judiciary, which some scholars have categorized as a “juristocracy,” has accompanied a dialogue or at least a tendency for judges to look beyond their national borders at other courts for assistance in resolving difficult national, legal, and political disputes. The Supreme Court of Pakistan has drawn on the rationale of India’s apex court to support public interest litigation, while India’s courts have referred to judgments from South Africa, the United States, Canada and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to argue for a right to life with dignity. Such engagement with foreign laws has provoked criticism from influential judges like Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court for eroding national sovereignty and even imposing foreign interpretations on culturally contextual national issues.

No Justice, No Peace: Conflict, Socio-Economic Rights, and the New Constitution in Nepal
by: Elisabeth Wickeri | download this article (pdf)

One day after the signing of the November 21, 2006 Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA) between the Nepali government and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), Kathmandu’s The Himalayan Times editorial board declared, “Nepal has entered into a new era of peace, democracy and governance.” The CPA formally ended the more than ten-year conflict waged by Maoist insurgents since 1996. Over the next thirteen months, a new interim constitution was adopted, the royal family’s property was nationalized, and a republic was declared, dissolving the world’s last Hindu royal kingdom. National elections were held the following year. For hundreds of thousands of Nepalis, peace was a welcomed change. In the southern plains and hill regions, where much of the guerilla fighting had been concentrated, farmers were finally able to return to work.

Uterine Prolapse and Maternal Morbidity in Nepal: A Human Rights Imperative
by: Payal Shah | download this article (pdf)

In 2008, the Supreme Court of Nepal recognized what maternal health advocates in Nepal had known for decades: the status of reproductive health of women in Nepal is in a serious state, and it is also clear that no plan has been made to address this problem. In the present context, there are approximately six hundred thousand women suffering from the problem of uterus prolapse and it is also evident that no preventive or remedial programs focusing on problems relating to reproductive health and uterus prolapse have been initiated. The Supreme Court’s proclamation in this case, Prakash Mani Sharma v. Government of Nepal (Sharma), marked the first time that a legal body, international or national, has recognized explicitly that a high incidence of uterine prolapse may constitute a violation of human rights, including specifically women’s reproductive rights.

The Jammu and Kashmir State Subjects Controversy of 2004
by: Sehla Ashai | download this article (pdf)

In 2004, the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly passed the Jammu and Kashmir Permanent Residents Disqualification Bill (the “Disqualification Bill”), which proposed that women who married nonstate subjects could no longer claim state subject status and would thereby lose both preferential treatment in government hiring and the ability to acquire new property in the State. Various political actors decried the Disqualification Bill’s violation of Kashmiri women’s fundamental rights under the Indian Constitution, while proponents of the Disqualification Bill issued apocalyptic pronouncements about the end of constitutionally guaranteed autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir if the Disqualification Bill failed to pass. Arguments for and against the Disqualification Bill fell largely along the lines of a false and dangerous dichotomy, casting feminism and Kashmiri autonomy as inherent opposites.

Political Censorship and Indian Cinematographic Laws: A Functionalist-Liberal Analysis
by: Arpan Banerjee | download this article (pdf)

India produces more motion pictures than any other country. Indian cinema is synonymous with the extravagant musicals of “Bollywood,” a portmanteau word that the Oxford English Dictionary credits the British detective novelist H.R.F. Keating with inventing. There also exists a parallel arthouse genre of Indian cinema. Internationally, the most well-known proponent of the latter school is probably the late Bengali director Satyajit Ray, whose many laurels include an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. Throughout history, these two divergent cinematic schools have shared an unfortunate common characteristic—that of rigorous state censorship.

You are cordially invited to the
7th Annual
SABANY Public Interest Fellowship Event
Please join us and spread the word!

Tickets on sale now

Wednesday, April 21, 2010
7:00pm-10:30pm

Aicon Gallery
35 Great Jones Street
New York, NY

Our famous Lychee Martinis, Wine, Beer & Food will be served.

SABANY established the Public Interest Fellowship to help support law students who spend their summers working in unpaid legal internships that provide services to underserved communities in the New York area.

Guest Speaker Sameer Ashar

Sameer Ashar is the Associate Dean for Clinical Programs, Associate Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law and teaches the Immigration and Refugee Rights and Community Economic Development Clinics. He received his J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was Lead Articles Editor for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and edited and organized symposia on political lawyering and economic justice. He received his B.A. in politics and economics with high honors from Swarthmore College.

Professor Ashar has served as a Skadden Fellow with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, worked as an associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and was a law clerk to the Honorable Deborah A. Batts of the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York. He has taught the NYU School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic and the University of Maryland School of Law Civil Rights Clinic. He is the author of law review articles on immigration, race, public interest law, and clinical legal education. Professor Ashar has presented at the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) conferences, annual meetings of the Law and Society Association, and at numerous law schools, including Berkeley, Seton Hall, Stanford, and Washington University. Professor Ashar is Chair-elect of the Poverty Law Section of AALS, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Law and Society Association, and a former board member of the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund and Swarthmore College.

Tickets on sale now:

SABANY Members:

$30.00 for Private Sector Attorneys
$15.00 for Public Interest Sector and Non-Attorneys
$10.00 for Law Students

SABANY Non-Members:

$40.00 for Private Sector Attorneys
$25.00 for Public Interest Sector and Non-Attorneys
$15.00 for Law Students

Tickets Purchased at the door:

SABANY Members:

$40.00 for Private Sector Attorneys
$25.00 for Public Interest Sector and Non-Attorneys
$15.00 for Law Students

SABANY Non-Members:

$50.00 for Private Sector Attorneys
$35.00 for Public Interest Sector and Non-Attorneys
$25.00 for Law Students

If you are unable to join us on April 21st, please consider purchasing a $50 donation ticket to help support the SABANY Public Interest Fellowship Program.

[Link]

Drexel Summer Theory Institute

About the Institute

The Drexel Summer Theory Institute is a new initiative for 2010 for Drexel students with public interest law internships in the greater Philadelphia area. The Institute is modeled on a similar program established by two public interest lawyers, Nisha Agarwal and Jocelyn Simonson, for Harvard law students with public interest internships in New York City. Institute Fellows will meet with the facilitators one evening a week to discuss works of social and critical theory as they relate to the Fellows’ public interest work. Although the conveners will seek to tailor the readings to the interests of the group, some examples of the kinds of thinkers we might engage with include Michel Foucault, F.A. Hayek, bell hooks, Martha Nussbaum, and Pierre Bourdieu.

The Summer Theory Institute will involve a significant but not overwhelming commitment on the part of the Fellows. The Fellows will be asked to attend all ten evening sessions, prepare for each meeting ahead of time, write short response papers to the readings, participate in the discussions, and lead one week’s discussion. If feasible, we may also arrange a joint session or event towards the end of the summer in New York with our counterparts from the Harvard program.

The goal of the Institute is to provide a space in which students can think critically about and reflect more deeply upon their everyday experiences practicing public interest law, using social theory as a lens through which to do so. Working together to think through the role that social theory can play in legal practice and activism allows the Fellows to engage more meaningfully with their organizations’ methods of pursuing justice on a day-to-day basis. By creating the space to discuss larger theoretical concepts outside of the work environment, the Institute enhances the Fellows’ senses of the potential for intellectual rigor and personal fulfillment in public interest work. The Institute also aims to foster a community of leaders who will bring their enthusiasm for pursuing social change through the law back to the Drexel community at the end of the summer.

How to Apply

If you are a 1L or 2L interested in becoming a Fellow in the Drexel Summer Theory Institute, please submit a statement of interest by April 26, 2010. Statements of interest should be emailed to dsti2010 [at] kalhan-dot-com. In your statement of interest, please explain:

1) Your anticipated internship plans for the summer;
2) Your interest in the Summer Theory Institute.

No prior experience with social or critical theory is necessary to participate. Instead, we are looking for a group of Fellows who are excited about public interest work and open to thinking in innovative and sometimes critical ways about that work. Fellows must be located in the Philadelphia area for the full ten weeks of the Institute.

About the Conveners

The 2010 Drexel Summer Theory Institute will be convened and facilitated by Umbreen Bhatti, Anil Kalhan, and Blair Thompson ’11.

Umbreen Bhatti is the Staff Attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, where she conducts litigation and non-litigation advocacy on a broad range of civil liberties issues, including free speech, religious liberty, racial justice, privacy, students’ rights, prisoners’ rights, and police misconduct. Umbreen is the Delaware State Bar Association’s Roxana C. Arsht Fellow, a Fellow of the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute, and a member of the board of Public Allies Delaware. Prior to joining the ACLU, Umbreen was an associate in the Washington, DC office of Latham & Watkins, LLP.

Anil Kalhan is an Associate Professor of Law at Drexel University, where he has taught immigration law, criminal law, First Amendment, and comparative constitutional law. He is an affiliated faculty member at the South Asia Center at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the board of directors of the South Asian Bar Association of New York, the council of advisors for South Asian Americans Leading Together, and the Immigration and Nationality Law Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. He previously has worked at Cleary Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, where he served as co-coordinator of the firm’s immigration and international human rights pro bono practice group, and the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project.

Blair Thompson is a second-year law student at Drexel University. Since starting law school, she has been an intern at the Juvenile Division of the Public Defender in Baltimore, the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, and a co-op student at Philadelphia Legal Assistance. Before law school, Blair taught in Hong Kong and in Cape Town, South Africa, where she implemented a program in high schools involving group discussion of classical texts. She graduated from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland where she studied philosophy and the history of math and science.

Questions

Questions may be directed to the conveners at dsti2010 [at] kalhan-dot-com.

Links:

• Harvard Summer Theory Institute – Overview
• Harvard Summer Theory Institute – Final Report for 2008
• Harvard Summer Theory Institute – Final Report for 2009
• Nisha Agarwal & Jocelyn Simonson, Thinking Like a Public Interest Lawyer: Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy, 34 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change __ (2010)

The South Asian Bar Association of Philadelphia
invites you to a

Chai Chat

with

Professor Anil Kalhan
Associate Professor of Law
Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law

“Rethinking Immigration Detention”

Tuesday April 6, 2010
5:30pm to 7:00pm

at the offices of
Kolsby Gordon Robin Shore & Bezar LLP
2000 Market Street – 28th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19103

Chai and other light refreshments will be served.

For planning purposes, RSVPs to andersonsk@ballardspahr.com by April 2, 2010 are appreciated, though not required.

Back in July 2009, we took note of what experts then were calling an “impending humanitarian disaster“: the displacement of as many as 2.5 million individuals due to the government’s military offensive in the North-West Frontier Province. Soon thereafter, the Pakistan government announced plans to return displaced individuals to their homes, and mainstream news coverage of the crisis subsided and public attention turned elsewhere.

Seven months later, how does the situation look for internally displaced persons? Writing at Changing Up Pakistan, Kalsoom Lakhani provides an update, arguing that although the IDP situation has been “out of the headlines,” the crisis remains severe….

Continue reading at SAJAforum….

Come hear Nisha Agarwal, Director of the Health Justice Program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, discuss NYLPI’s use of law and organizing to address issues of racial and ethnic health disparities in New York City. Her talk will focus on two innovative campaigns: (1) improving access to pharmacies for limited English proficient individuals and (2) eliminating race and class segregation in academic medical centers. She will describe how these campaigns have evolved from community education and organizing to legal action to legislative victories and how law students can get involved in these projects and others.

Nisha Agarwal is the Director of the Health Justice Program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, where she began her legal career as a Skadden Public Interest Fellow. Ms. Agarwal’s work at NYLPI focuses on bringing a racial justice and immigrant rights perspective to health care advocacy. In collaboration with community-based organizations and coalitions across New York City, Ms. Agarwal is working on campaigns on language rights in pharmacies, racial discrimination in hospitals, medical deportation, and the closure of community hospitals and clinics in medically under-served areas. Nisha is also active in the South Asian Bar Association of New York, where she serves as Vice President for Public Interest, and is the co-founder of the Harvard Law School Summer Theory Institute for public interest law students. Ms. Agarwal earned her BA, summa cum laude, from Harvard College in 2000 and received a British Marshall Scholarship for graduate studies at Oxford University. She received her JD from Harvard Law School in 2006.

* * *

When: Wed, Mar 31, 2010, 4:15pm

Where: Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law, Rm 240
3320 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA

When the BBC Asian Network was launched back in 2002 as a nationwide digital radio station throughout Britain, the BBC’s then-radio director, Jenny Abramsky, called it “one of the most important things the BBC has ever done.”  Since then, the Asian Network has developed a loyal following, both in Britain and, via the internet, around the world.

[Because of immigration patterns, "Asian" is the UK word for South Asians.]

Today, however, the Asian Network’s future is very much in doubt. On the eve of British general elections, a strategy review by BBC management proposes major changes in the BBC’s operations — including the closure of the Asian Network (and another network, BBC 6 Music) altogether….

Continue reading at SAJAforum….

The Indian Supreme Court is widely recognized as a complex and dynamic institution. It has been the subject of much acclaim, as well as criticism. The Court has even been charged with overreaching itself and intruding into the domains of the executive and the legislature. In an era of globalization and judicial activism, the experience of India, offers a valuable perspective on the role judges play in a vibrant democracy.

What explains the choices that India’s Supreme Court justices make? Do judges make distinctions between the religious and political affiliations of the accused when adjudicating anti-terror cases? If so, why, and under what conditions?

In an era of globalization, India’s experience offers a valuable perspective on the role judges play in a vibrant democracy. Hear Shylashri Shankar address these questions, in a talk drawing from her recent book, Scaling Justice: India’s Supreme Court, Anti-Terror Laws, and Social Rights.

Shylashri Shankar is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. She was previously an Assistant Professor in the Government Department at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre on Religion and Democracy at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. She has received degrees from the University of Delhi, University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Columbia University. She is the author of Scaling Justice: India’s Supreme Court, Anti-Terror Laws, and Social Rights (Oxford Univ. Press 2008). She has written several articles in edited books on secularism, the judiciary in India and Sri Lanka, India’s courts and religious conversion, cross-judicial borrowing and national constitutions, among others. She has also written op-eds in national newspapers and magazines on democratic transition and consolidation in South Asia and the Middle East, judicial independence, ethnic conflict, and terrorism.

* * *

When: Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 4:30pm

Where: Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law, Rm 340
(reception to follow in 3rd Floor Gallery)
3320 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA

Open Program on Law and South Asian Studies
Annual Meeting, Association of American Law Schools
New Orleans, LA
Saturday, January 9, 2010

This session will consist of (1) a panel on contemporary issues in constitutional law and fundamental rights in South Asia (the papers from which will be published in the Drexel Law Review as part of its Symposium on Law and South Asia) and (2) a short business meeting on the formation of the proposed AALS Section on Law and South Asian Studies.

Opening Remarks:

• Marc Galanter, John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law and South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, and Centennial Professor, Department of Law, London School of Economics and Political Science

Panelists:

• Sehla Ashai, Staff Attorney, National Immigrant Justice Center, Heartland Alliance, Chicago, IL — “Competing Constitutions: The State Subject Controversy of Jammu and Kashmir”

• Payal Shah, Legal Fellow for Asia, Center for Reproductive Rights, New York, NY — “Maternal Mortality in Nepal: A Case for Using International Law for Accountability and Justice”

• Shylashri Shankar, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi, India — “The Spirit of the Constitution: Engaging with Foreign Judgments: India, Sri Lanka, and South Africa”

• Elisabeth Wickeri, Executive Director, Leitner Center for International Law & Justice, Fordham University Law School, New York, NY — “Towards a Lasting Peace in Nepal: Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in the New Constitution”

Moderator:

• Anil Kalhan, Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law, Philadelphia, PA

Registration and other details for the AALS Annual Meeting are available here.

How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?
Being Young and Arab in America

Just over a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois posed a probing question in his classic The Souls of Black Folk: “How does it feel to be a problem?” he asked. Today, Arab and Muslim Americans, the newest minorities in the American imagination, are the latest “problem” of American society, and their answers to Du Bois’s question increasingly define what being American means today.

In a wholly revealing portrait of a community that lives next door and yet a world away, Moustafa Bayoumi introduces us to the individual lives of seven twentysomething men and women living in Brooklyn, home to the largest number of Arab Americans in the United States. Through telling real stories about young people in Brooklyn, Bayoumi jettisons the stereotypes and clichés that constantly surround Arabs and Muslims and allows us instead to enter their worlds and experience their lives. [link]

Panelists:
Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law- Moustafa Bayoumi, Associate Professor of English, Brooklyn College
- Jimmy Yan, General Counsel, Office of Manhattan Borough President
- Yasmin Dwedar

* * *

When: Thu, Dec 3, 2009, 4:30pm

Where: Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law, Rm 140
(reception and book signing to follow in 3rd Floor Gallery)
3320 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA

Call for Papers – Drexel Law Review Symposium on Law and South Asia:

The Drexel Law Review is pleased to announce a symposium issue focusing on law and policy in South Asia to be published during Spring/Summer 2010. We invite the submission of articles, essays, and book reviews on any topic related to law or public policy in one or more countries in South Asia, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma/Myanmar, India, Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sikkim, or Sri Lanka.

Submission guidelines:

• There are no minimum or maximum length requirements for submission, but we encourage submissions ranging between 10-65 journal pages (between 3,000 and 20,000 words, including text and footnotes). We encourage authors to target the lengths of their submissions to this range.
• Please include with your submission (1) a short cover letter explaining your interest in publishing in the symposium issue and the scholarly contribution that your article makes, and (2) a curriculum vitae.
• Articles should be fully supported and citations should conform to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (18th ed.) (http://www.legalbluebook.com)
• We accept Adobe PDF or Microsoft Word submissions, but authors should be prepared to use Microsoft Word 2003 or 2007 during the editing process.

Submissions should be sent by email to lawrev@drexel.edu, with the subject heading: 2010 Symposium Submission. In the email, please include your name, institutional affiliation, email address, postal address, and phone number.

Please direct any questions to the Symposium Editor at lawrev@drexel.edu.

Submission deadline: Submissions will be accepted and reviewed on a rolling basis through December 31, 2009.

For more information about the Drexel Law Review visit:
http://drexel.edu/law/lawreview

Inquiries should be directed to the Symposium Editor at lawrev@drexel.edu.

http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2009/11/call-for-papers-articles-essays-and-reviews-about-south-asia.html