Loyola Immigrant Justice Clinic Statement on Family Separations at Border

The Loyola Immigrant Justice Clinic at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles joins its colleagues in condemning the widespread family separations occurring along our southern border. Because of repeated misrepresentation of both fact and law by government spokespersons, the following points require clarification:

• In early May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a policy of "zero tolerance" against individuals, including families with children, arriving at the southern border. This policy is new, entirely a creature of the current administration, and wholly within the executive branch's discretion.
• This new policy mandates criminal prosecution and incarceration of individuals for misdemeanor first-time unlawful entry. The new, discretionary policy implements incarceration for this misdemeanor. Incarceration is not a requirement of the law.
• It is this draconian policy of incarceration for a first-time misdemeanor offense that has resulted in the wholesale separation of parents and caregivers from their children, a policy condemned by the American Academy of Pediatrics because of the traumatic effects of separation and the long-term damage done to already vulnerable children. A secondary effect is the overcrowding of federal courts previously focused on prosecution crimes such as human trafficking and the illegal drug and weapons trade. 
• This policy operates in conjunction with ICE's "surge initiative," a policy of targeting the sponsors of children released from federal custody by the U.S. government into the custody of caregivers. The two operate together to promote the isolation of children from relative caregivers, and to prolong their detention and isolation. 
• These policies are a violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the standards contained with the the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and basic norms of humane conduct. They are a stark departure from past practices, and represent an effort to use children as a weapon to enforce the president's inhumane immigration agenda.

U.S. Misguided in Decision to Leave UN Human Rights Council

By Mary Hansel, Deputy Director, Loyola International Human Rights Clinic

The U.S. decision to leave the UN Human Rights Council is disappointing on a number of levels and, frankly, shows a lack of understanding about how the international human rights system works. This decision will harm U.S. interests, as well as the Council itself.

By giving up its seat on the Council in misguided protest, the U.S. is actually limiting its own influence over the Council and its state members. Withdrawing from the Council means forfeiting a key position in shaping Council operations, agendas and human rights decision-making. Meanwhile, the Council will still conduct periodic reviews of and condemn the human rights records of the U.S. - and of Israel - as part of its Universal Periodic Review process and through various resolutions. (Indeed, one of the reasons the Council is so innovative is that all 193 UN member states are subject to human rights scrutiny, regardless of Council membership or treaty ratification.) Thus, the U.S. is cutting off its nose to spite its face here.

Despite the capitulation that the U.S. is hoping to achieve, many members of the international community are saying "good riddance" to the U.S., given the Trump Administration's apparent disregard of human rights and disruptive antics at the UN. However, the U.S. career diplomats who work with the Council are well-versed in human rights and tend to have a positive, moderating influence on other state members with egregious human rights records. Conversely, the U.S. departure means that the Council and its members will lose their potentially moderating influence over the U.S.

Reflections on Epic Systems v. Lewis

By Professor Hiro Aragaki

Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court decided three consolidated cases, styled Epic Systems Corp. v Lewis, Nos. 16–285, 16–300, 16–307, 584 U.S. __ (2018), that all raised the issue of whether a class arbitration wavier in various employment contracts was enforceable, given the potentially conflicting mandates of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).  In a 5-4 majority opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Court held that there was no conflict between the two federal statutes and that both were consistent with enforcing the class arbitration wavier.  Justice Ginsburg, writing for the dissent, also found no conflict but believed that both statutes were consistent with the opposite conclusion—namely, that the class arbitration wavier was illegal and should not be enforced.  In the alternative, the dissent reasoned that even if there were a conflict, the waiver was still unenforceable. 

The basic facts of these consolidated cases were that certain employees sought to bring a putative class action against their employers even though their employment contract contained a class arbitration waiver—that is, a clause that not only requires the employee to arbitrate rather than sue in court, but that also prohibits the employee from bringing a class arbitration on behalf of similarly situated employees.  The employees argued that the waiver was illegal and thus unenforceable, because NLRA section 7 had been construed by the National Labor Relations Board to give employees an absolute, non-waivable right to band together in a class when suing their employers.  See D. R. Horton, 357 N. L. R. B. 2277 (2012).  The employers countered that under the FAA section 2, class arbitration waivers must be enforced strictly according to their terms, in some cases even if those terms are otherwise illegal. 

These cases therefore raised the specter of a conflict between two federal statutes: The NLRA, enacted in 1935, and the FAA, enacted in 1925.  Under traditional conflict of laws principles, in the event of an unavoidable conflict between coequal statutes the later-enacted statute controls (in this case, the NLRA).  In Epic Systems, that would translate into a victory for the employee.  So the employers had to hang their hat on the argument that there was no inherent conflict between the FAA and the NLRA. 

Former U.S. Soliciator General Verrilli Delivers Commencement Keynote Address

Loyola Law School, Los Angeles' 2018 Commencement address was delivered by Donald B. Verrilli Jr., partner, Munger, Tolles & Olson, LLP. Verrilli served as Solicitor General of the United States from 2011 to 2016. 

President Snyder, Dean Waterstone, distinguished faculty, alumni, family and friends, and members of the graduating class of 2018:

Thank you for inviting me to be with you today. Loyola Law School, Los Angeles is a special place and today is a special day, and I feel very privileged to be able to share it with you.

Let me start with a hearty congratulations to each and every one of you. Anybody who has been to law school knows that it was not easy to get to where you are today. So today is a day for savoring your accomplishments, reflecting on all the hard work you put in and all the obstacles you had to surmount, to earn the diploma that you will have in your hands in just a few moments. It’s a day for joy – a joy to be shared with the family and friends that helped you get to where you are now and that feel such pride in all that you have accomplished so far. So bask in it all. Enjoy the moment. Enjoy the satisfaction of having run this race well and crossing this finish line. 

It Takes a Village to Stop Cyber Crime

By Adjunct Professor Robert Kang

Adjunct Professor Robert Kang recently published It Takes a Village to Stop Cyber Crime: How Cyber Information Sharing Organizations Help Business in Need in the Association for Corporate Counsel's May 2018 magazine.

An excerpt appears below:

To minimize the need for luck, governments and various industries have created organizations designed to share security-related information among their members in a structured, regular manner. Often called “public/ private partnerships” and “information sharing organizations,” many of them follow a similar model: They are organized as nonprofit entities, and their members send information, like suspicious IP addresses and other threat indicators, to them. The sharing organization anonymizes (if requested), aggregates, and processes the submissions and, in some cases, enriches it with nonpublic information provided by government agencies or other sources.

Read the article in its entirety.

The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World

Below is an excerpt from Professor Jennifer Rothman's new book The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, published on Friday, May 18 in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journal.

The frequently uttered and simplistic dichotomy—that privacy is about protecting the shrinking violets of the world, while the right of publicity is about protecting those who seek the limelight—was never true, and does a disservice to both those who wish to avoid publicity and those who seek it out. Actors do not want videos of them changing in a hotel room distributed online, their children followed, or their images slapped onto billboards or used in television commercials without their permission. This is not necessarily because they want to be paid for such uses, but because such uses are upsetting and disturbing, can destroy their reputations and ability to author their own identities, and turn them into puppets with others pulling the strings.

Nor do those of us who wish to live less public lives want to hide in our homes. We take walks, post family photographs to Facebook and Instagram, blog and tweet about our experiences, create YouTube channels showing how to prepare various recipes or master a video game, and leave traces behind when buying books on Amazon. These acts do not mean that private figures wish to cede the right to control how our names, likenesses, voices, and other information about ourselves is used by others. We all live our lives in public. But by doing so we should not become public property.

Professor Levitt's Testimony on Census Citizenship Question

On May 8, 2018 Loyola Law School, Los Angeles Dean for Research Justin Levitt testified before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform regarding the 2020 census. An excerpt appears below:

In the current political climate, asking a question about citizenship status of every individual in the country is no mere request for information. Those who work in and with communities skeptical about the role of the federal executive branch fear that the question will prove explosive. Secretary Ross made the determination to ask this question despite his own admission that the career staff of “the Census Bureau and many stakeholders expressed concern [that doing so] would negatively impact the response rate,” and despite the absence of any opportunity to test that impact before implementing the change.

Read his full testimony below: