Supreme Court roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Charge-dropping, sanctuary, and the people’s voice in prosecution is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Discrimination law roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Labor and employment roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

This map, made using records obtained through FOIA, shows Hudson Yards qualifies as a distressed urban area under the EB-5 program by connecting the luxury development to public housing in Harlem. https://t.co/WuqtrUKSGH (?: @markbyrnes525) pic.twitter.com/s4uSrSkt0t

— CityLab (@CityLab) April 12, 2019

What an amazing story: “Manhattan’s new luxury mega-project [Hudson Yards] was partially bankrolled by an investor visa program called EB-5, which was meant to help poverty-stricken areas.” The far West Side of lower Manhattan, not far from Tribeca, the Village, and Chelsea, is hardly known for its poverty, but creative subsidy seekers carved out an “area” that connected the Hudson Yards site, gerrymander style, through midtown and Central Park to public housing projects in Harlem. And presto: access to benefits meant to revive high-unemployment urban areas. [Kriston Capps, CityLab]

Reader David Link writes:

It’s only bad if you think the point of the Poverty/Industrial Complex is designed to alleviate poverty, rather than just being a set of white collar jobs programs. This gerrymander is a visual example of the usual, multiple links between poverty/social justice/community improvement rhetoric and the people who ultimately benefit. From what I’ve heard, it sounds like a good step for New York, and the only excess cost is to those who aren’t skeptical enough to accept the rhetoric.

How Hudson Yards connects to Harlem is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Constitutional law roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

The Supreme Court yesterday in a 5-4 decision upheld the Trump administration’s travel ban, citing the relevant statute’s extreme deference toward executive branch national security determinations on the entry of persons, as well as the Court’s own historic deference toward executive branch discretion in this area.

The four liberal justices dissented, but did not agree on reasoning. Breyer and Kagan went for a low-key, minimalist fix — keep the injunction in place while ordering additional factfinding about implementation — that might have begun as an effort to craft a narrow decision conservatives would join. Only two Justices, Sotomayor and Ginsburg, went along with the arguments that persuaded the Ninth Circuit judges below.

Both dissents, however, stressed the significance of improper animus / discrimination against religious belief, the same issue championed by the Court’s conservatives in Masterpiece Cakeshop earlier this month.

Legal buffs may be interested in Thomas’s concurrence in which he pronounces universal injunctions “legally and historically dubious.”

Finally, and of interest to all Americans, the Court through its majority opinion officially repudiated Korematsu v. U.S. (1944), the decision in which it once upheld forced wartime internment of Japanese-Americans. Korematsu had never been officially repudiated until today.

The podcast above with Caleb Brown and Ilya Shapiro is at this link. Earlier here and here. Other views: Eugene Volokh, Ilya Somin. More: Roger Pilon.

Supreme Court upholds travel ban is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

May 30 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“For over 60 years, the executive branch has, through regulatory fiat, imposed a ‘border zone’ that extends as much as 100 miles into the United States.” Within this zone, the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) service can set up fixed or mobile checkpoints that require travelers, whether foreign- or native-born, to stop and submit to questioning and possible search “to get to work, go to the store, or make it to a vacation destination in the American Southwest.” Were the government to try using these same techniques at frankly internal checkpoints — in Omaha, say, or Indianapolis or Cheyenne — a range of constitutional protections would come into play to limit police discretion and protect citizens’ rights to go about their business freely. But the border, or areas within 100 miles of it, are different. One problem: since the coasts count as borders too, an estimated two-thirds of the American public lives in areas that are just one executive decision away from having a checkpoint system.

The Cato Institute is launching a new online initiative, “Checkpoint America: Monitoring the Constitution-Free Zone.” Patrick G. Eddington explains in the Cato Daily Podcast above, and in this blog post.

“Checkpoint America” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“Surprised by Neil Gorsuch’s ruling? You weren’t paying attention.” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system