Law & Policy最新文献

Noncitizens seeking to make sense of US immigration systems encounter a labyrinth of information and deception. This paper is the first national study of scams targeting noncitizens seeking immigration legal services. I construct a county-year database (N = 3135 over a four-year time period, 2011–2014) across secondary data sources to analyze the correlates of immigration scam complaints submitted to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). I find that welcoming counties have more immigration scam complaints, while counties with exclusionary contexts tend to have fewer complaints. The results do not suggest that scams are more prevalent in welcoming contexts, because the actual number of scams is unknown. Instead, we can conclude that noncitizens tend to come forward to report immigration scams in welcoming contexts of reception, even after accounting for exclusionary policies. A robust safety net proved the most reliable predictor of immigration scams reported to the FTC. The concentration of immigration attorneys, legal aid services, and language access was also positively associated with the number of FTC scam reports. Taken together, these results suggest that immigrant-serving capacity and access to key services support noncitizens who report immigration scams, while hostility toward immigrants may deter them from exercising those same rights.

Since the late 1980s, immigrants convicted of certain criminal offenses have been subject to mandatory detention during their deportation proceedings. Due to court backlog and complicated cases, noncitizens mandatorily detained in this way can be held for years at a time, without any legal right to a bail hearing. While political rhetoric and policy aims of the past three decades have painted so-called “criminal aliens” as a highly dangerous group from whom the American public needs protecting, the criminal convictions that invoke mandatory detention and likely deportation are actually quite diverse, in large part due to the expansion of the “aggravated felony” ground of deportation to include a wide variety of less serious crimes. Drawing from 40 interviews with lawyers and other legal actors in New York City's detained immigration court from 2017 to 2018, this article explores the effects of aggravated felony–based mandatory detention. I argue that in doubly punishing immigrants who have already served time for criminal convictions, the immigration system funnels criminalized noncitizens—particularly those from poor Black and Latinx communities—toward deportation, perpetuating inequality and upholding existing racial hierarchies.

Sustainability indicators have become essential tools to deal with compartmentalized resources planning and management in cities. The development of water, energy, and food nexus (WEF nexus) indicators is a prominent goal of current research, but the focus is mainly on economic issues and material flows. Attention to the local scale and context, social aspects, and the inclusion of non-academic actors is mostly lacking. To address these gaps, this paper reports and reflects on the co-creation of sustainability indicators related to the WEF nexus in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. With a transdisciplinary approach, non-academic actors were included in the different stages of the process using the Urban Living Lab methodology, to improve the usability of the produced indicators' set. The case of São Paulo concerned on-going actions in the peri-urban and rural areas of the city which seek to improve environmental protection by stimulating more sustainable forms of agriculture. Thirty-four indicators were developed through a sequence of interactive activities, such as workshops, meetings, and field trips. The presented process aims to strongly enhance usability by actively involving users from the start, connecting the nexus approach to previous knowledge and familiar frameworks, paying attention to the local scale and context, and to social aspects, and by anticipating future use in various ways.

Since the late twentieth century, as part of a broad effort to maximize the profitability of commercial spaces and address the complaints of business interests, cities have increasingly criminalized the presence and behavior of populations perceived as disorderly. The resulting police interactions produce a range of deleterious outcomes, particularly for individuals contending with mental health and substance use disorders, homelessness, and other behavioral health concerns. Against this backdrop, we provide a case study of Let Everyone Advance with Dignity (LEAD), a novel public safety intervention developed in Seattle, Washington. LEAD diverts businesses' disorder complaints from police and 911 toward program personnel who provide long-term harm reduction services and resources. LEAD's non-punitive approach has demonstrated success in reducing the harms of criminalization, improving individual outcomes, satisfying business grievances, and, more broadly, disrupting the defining logic and practices of neoliberal urbanism. LEAD's successes carry theoretical implications, demonstrating the need for nonpolice alternatives to reconfigure the organizational field of public safety by intervening into the longstanding coalition between businesses and police. The LEAD model also offers insights about the concrete steps necessary to ensure public safety and community vitality without police involvement.

Quantitative studies emphasize a positive relationship between legal representation and asylum case outcomes but are stymied by potential case-selection bias. Moreover, few studies address whether an attorney's quality level might affect case outcomes or how high-quality representation should be conceptualized. The present study informs this literature by drawing on 28 interviews with immigration attorneys who practice before the Asylum Office. It finds that most interviewees accept challenging asylum cases and share a “big picture” understanding of what high-quality representation should entail. However, interviewees differ in their approach to declaration writing and their perceptions of the quality level of the private bar.

How does the state respond to members of the public seeking to mobilize its coercive power? Focusing on welfare fraud control units in the United States, we examine how race/ethnicity and written English proficiency affect access to systems for reporting welfare fraud suspicions. Using a correspondence audit, we assess fraud control authorities' likelihood of taking up reports from Latinas and Whites with higher and lower English proficiency. We find that fraud units are less likely to take up lower-proficiency Whites' reports, but that lower proficiency's uptake-dampening effect does not hold for Latinas. To explain the mechanisms underlying our experimental results, we draw on interviews with fraud investigators. The interview evidence reveals the determinations of investigative promise underlying these uptake disparities. For White reporters, English errors cue gatekeepers' preexisting skepticism about public reporters' reliability, decreasing enthusiasm for investing resources in these reports. Reports from lower-English proficiency Latinas offer special viability appeal, however, offsetting the negative influence on uptake probability that errors demonstrate for White reporters. Our results shed new light on contemporary racial/ethnic dynamics in the US welfare system, and advance social scientific understanding of how bureaucratic gatekeepers decide what to do—if anything—with volunteered reports of misconduct.

The extent to which courts meaningfully affect policy change has been the subject of heated debate among socio-legal and other public law scholars. I argue here that one key source of tension in the literature has been the lack of any clear theory of judicial power, especially in compliance and other impact studies. Indeed, many studies have conflated “impact” and power—a move that serves to confuse rather than clarify the topic. In this paper, I outline a theory of judicial power for the study of judicial impact. I then demonstrate the utility of this theory using two historical case studies. Ultimately, I argue that this theory allows for clearer and better-grounded inferences about the roles played by courts in policy and politics.