In Padilla v. Kentucky, the United States Supreme Court imposed a Sixth Amendment mandate on criminal defense attorneys to warn their clients of the immigration consequences of a criminal plea. Rooted in Sixth Amendment precedent, the Court's new constitutional requirement arose principally out of its concern that the unique nature of immigration consequences required heightened due process protections. This Comment analyzes Padilla's specific impact on the concept of a right to appointed counsel in deportation proceedings. Although no deportation Gideon right existed before Padilla, signs indicate that the Court may be willing to revisit the issue. After explaining Padilla's relation to right to counsel jurisprudence, the Comment explores how the Court's newly heightened concerns over due process protections in immigration proceedings will affect its future analysis of the right as applied to the immigration context. This Comment concludes with an analysis of the manner in which the Court might come to recognize a categorical right to counsel in deportation proceedings.
Transnational Class Actions and the Illusory Search for Res Judicata
The transnational class action—a class action in which a portion of the class consists of non-U.S. claimants—is here to stay. Defendants typically resist the certification of transnational class actions on the basis that such actions provide no assurance of finality for a defendant, as it will always be possible for a non-U.S. class member to initiate subsequent proceedings in a foreign court. In response to this concern, many U.S. courts will analyze whether the “home” courts of the foreign class members would accord res judicata effect to an eventual U.S. judgment prior to certifying a U.S. class action containing foreign class members. The more likely the foreign court is to recognize a U.S. class judgment, the more likely an American court will include those foreigners in the U.S. class action.
Current scholarship accepts propriety of the res judicata analysis but questions the manner in which the analysis is carried out. This Article breaks from the existing literature by arguing that the dynamics of class litigation render the res judicata effect of an eventual U.S. class judgment inherently unknowable to a U.S. court ex ante. In particular, I argue that certain “litigation dynamics”--specifically the process of proving foreign law via experts, the principle of party prosecution, and the litigation posture of the action--complicate the transnational class action landscape and prevent a court from accurately analyzing the res judicata issues at play. This is exacerbated by the “structural dynamics” of class litigation: the complexity of foreign law on the recognition and enforcement of judgments, the newness of class action law in most foreign countries, and the distinction between general and fact-specific grounds for nonenforcement of a U.S. class judgment. Accordingly, I argue that U.S. courts should abandon their illusory search for res judicata.
Instead, courts should avoid the res judicata problem altogether by employing an opt-in mechanism for foreign class plaintiffs, whereby such plaintiffs are not bound unless they affirmatively undertake to be bound by U.S. class judgment. An opt-in mechanism for foreign plaintiffs also provides several advantages over the current opt-out mechanism: it allows all foreign claimants to participate in U.S. litigation if they so choose; it provides additional due process protections for absent foreign claimants; it respects international comity; and it sufficiently deters defendant misconduct.
Is It Really That Simple?: Circuits Split over Reasonable Suspicion Requirement for Visual Body-Cavity Searches of Arrestees
In Bell v. Wolfish, the United States Supreme Court upheld visual body-cavity strip searches on pretrial detainees but called for a balancing of privacy and security interests. For the three decades following Bell, courts routinely read in a reasonable suspicion requirement as part of that balance. That changed in 2008 when the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that the Fourth Amendment permits strip searches of all arrestees, regardless of whether there is any reasonable suspicion that an arrestee possesses contraband. In 2010, the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third and Ninth Circuits followed suit. In light of the recent split, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to determine whether the Fourth Amendment permits a jail to conduct a suspicionless strip search of every individual arrested for any minor offense regardless of the circumstances. This Comment recounts the context of Bell, traces the courts' previously uniform interpretation of that decision, and explores this emerging debate, ultimately concluding that institution-specific security concerns could be a factor worthy of great weight in the Bell balancing equation.
False Efficiency and Missed Opportunities in Law and Economics
This Article points out a simple flaw common to many law-and-economics analyses, ranging from fundamental models like the Hand Formula to narrower arguments like those that oppose the doctrine of unconscionability.
The flaw is straightforward: economic analyses of law often assume, either implicitly or explicitly, that when it is more efficient for an activity to occur than for it not to occur, it is efficient for legal rules to encourage the activity. Even on grounds of efficiency alone, however, knowing in isolation whether an activity produces more wealth than its absence is insufficient to conclude that the activity is efficient. The determination of efficient legal rules requires an answer to a further question too often neglected by legal economists: what are the activity's alternatives? Even if an activity is more efficient than its absence, it may produce less wealth (perhaps significantly less wealth) than its alternatives, once its harms are taken into account. Encouraging all activities that appear to produce wealth on their own runs the risk of encouraging opportunistic behavior whose effect is more to transfer wealth than to create it.
As a simple example, a legal regime that followed the Hand Formula would encourage businesses to earn $100,000 by causing $95,000 worth of unavoidable harms to others; that incentive alone, while probably objectionable for other reasons, is not inefficient because, instrumentally speaking, the $100,000 social gains justify the $95,000 social losses. But a rule based on the Hand Formula would also encourage economic actors to engage in that $100,000-earning activity rather than one that paid $90,000 but caused no harms; that incentive is inefficient.
Some economic analyses acknowledge related points, but the law-and-economics movement insufficiently understands the flaw that this Article describes. Similarly, critics of the law-and-economics movement—while aware of other fundamental flaws in legal-economic analysis, such as the inapplicability of the rational-actor model in many circumstances—do not readily enough engage economic models on their own terms. This Article attempts to remedy those oversights, and in doing so, it suggests greater caution in applying economic reasoning to law.
Unnatural Resource Law: Situating Desalination in Coastal Resource and Water Law Doctrines
This Article offers the first legal analysis of desalination, the process of converting saltwater into freshwater. Desalination represents a key climate change adaptation measure because the United States has exploited nearly all of its freshwater resources, freshwater demands continue to grow, and climate change threatens to diminish significantly existing freshwater supplies. However, scholarship has yet to address the legal ambiguities that desalination raises in the context of property, water law, and coastal resource doctrines.
This Article addresses these ambiguities and suggests the legal adaptations necessary to accommodate desalination as a climate change adaptation. Under current legal doctrines, the chain of title for desalination is uncertain. Emerging desalination projects face questions about the entity with proprietary authority over seawater, the nature of the right to intake seawater, the nature of a desalinator's interest in desalinated water, and the nature of the interest that a utility, upon receiving water from a desalinator, holds in the desalinated water. This Article argues that legislation is necessary to clarify this chain of title both because existing common law doctrines are insufficient to resolve these issues and because development of new common law cannot keep pace with emerging desalination projects. Thus, the Article proposes legislation that (1) clarifies federal sovereignty over saltwater, (2) considers the public trust doctrine in creating a permit scheme for the intake of saltwater, (3) recognizes desalinators as service providers rather than holders of private property in desalinated water, and (4) recognizes municipal utilities as holding vested property rights in desalinated water. Finally, the Article proposes that this clarified chain of title for desalination can serve as a model for developing ecosystem service markets, public trust doctrine applications, and property theories aimed at adapting other resource doctrines to cope with climate change.
United State v. Pickett: The Fifth Circuit Renders Point of Origin Irrelevant in Evaluating the Application of the Border Search Exception
On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that the border search exception applied, regardless of a defendant's point of origin, as long as the defendant crossed a border. United States v. Pickett, 598 F.3d 231, 235 (5th Cir. 2010), cert. denied, 131 S. Ct. 637 (2010).
Combo Maritime, Inc. v. U.S. United Bulk Terminal, LLC: The Fifth Circuit Finds Comparative Fault Principle Unaffected By Burden-Shifting Presumption of Fault in Admiralty Case
Reversing the district court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that United could seek contribution from Carnival after settling with Combo, reasoning that contribution can be sought by a settling tortfeasor who releases all claims, that the presumption of fault against a defendant in the case of drifting vessels is not to be applied between codefendants, and that the presumption of fault does not affect the principle that joint tortfeasors are entitled to allocate damages relative to their proportionate degree of fault. Combo Maritime, Inc. v. U.S. United Bulk Terminal, LLC, 615 F.3d 599, 2010 AMC 2196 (5th Cir. 2010).
Peterson v. City of Forth Worth: The Fifth Circuit Demands More Than the Demanding Standard of Monell to Establish Municipal Liability under § 1983
Ultimately, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas concluded that while Peterson made a colorable claim for the excessive use of force against the individual officers, he failed to meet the rigorous standard necessary to impose municipal liability, and the court consequently dismissed his complaint under summary judgment. Affirming this decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that twenty-seven claims of excessive force did not amount to an official city policy permissive of excessive force and, thus, the city could not be liable. Peterson v. City of Fort Worth, 588 F.3d 838, 852 (5th Cir. 2009), cert. denied, 79 U.S.L.W. 3195 (U.S. Oct. 4, 2010) (No. 09-983).
Smith v. Xerox Corp.: The Fifth Circuit Maintains Mixed-Motive Applicability in Title VII Retaliation Claims
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that the mixed-motive framework applies to Title VII retaliation cases and a plaintiff can present circumstantial or direct evidence to obtain a mixed-motive jury instruction. Smith v. Xerox Corp., 602 F.3d 320, 329, 331-32 (5th Cir. 2010).
Marine Casualty Investigations
This Article will focus primarily on the government entities (e.g., Coast Guard and NTSB) responsible for conducting marine casualty investigations. These formal investigations allow evidence to be gathered and preserved in a more orderly manner than can be done during, or even immediately after, a serious collision, fire, oil discharge, sinking, or other casualty, when response is the primary goal and the “Incident Command Center,” whether run solely by the Coast Guard or in conjunction with other federal and state agencies, is still in full swing.