Salt Blog

Written by: Karla McKanders If Arizona's passing the immigration law on Friday is a measure of our nation's racial sensibilities, our country has a long way to go.  Our country has a long history of racial discrimination towards minority groups, including Latino immigrants. In the 1800s, Congress passed the Chinese exclusion laws barring persons of  Chinese descent from immigrating to the United States and implementing forced labor for those who violated the laws. California instigated the passing of discriminatory and racist exclusion laws. In the early twentieth century, states also passed alien land laws which barred ownership of property by non-citizens. These laws were targeted at Japanese immigrants who, as non-whites were barred from becoming citizens. In 1965, in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the Immigration Act was passed which abolished all racial quotas and racial considerations from influencing whether a person could immigrate to the United States. Our world is also all too familiar with the apartheid laws that excluded racial minorities in South Africa. In 1950, South Africa passed the Population Registration Act which formalized racial classifications and required all persons over eighteen to carry an identity card, specifying their racial group. All civil, political and economic rights were extended to persons based on the racial category in which they belonged. The Pass Laws required persons to produce a passport like document stating the person’s race. The penalty for failure to produce an identity card resulted in detention until the subject’s identity was verified. These laws may seem like a thing of the past, however, on Friday, Arizona passed Senate Bill 1070.  This law permits police officers and other state agencies to identify, prosecute and attempt to deport undocumented immigrants. The law would allow the police to detain people they reasonably suspect are in the country without authorization and makes it a criminal offense for not carrying immigration documents. Residents can also sue cities if they believe the law is not being enforced. In addition, “[t]he law creates new immigration crimes and penalties inconsistent with those in federal law, asserts sweeping authority to detain and transport persons suspected of violating civil immigration laws and prohibits speech and other expressive activity by persons seeking work.” Arizona Governor Jan Brewer claims that the law is in reaction to the federal government’s unwillingness to pass comprehensive immigration legislation and that the states have to enact and enforce their own immigration laws.

Written by: andre cummings In 2008 testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in the days following the failure of Lehman Brothers, former Federal Bank chair Alan Greenspan told Congress, “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”  Law and economics icon Judge Richard Posner wrote in 2009 a book entitled “The Failure of Capitalism” that “we are learning from [the crisis] that we need a more active and intelligent government to keep our model of a capitalist economy from running off the rails.” How did the economy run off the rails in 2008?  New revelations have just surfaced that should add additional “shocked disbelief” to Greenspan’s admittedly flawed worldview.  On Wednesday, news from Congressional interrogation now shows that Washington Mutual, once the nation’s largest savings and loan association, was deliberately packaging mortgages they knew were delinquent or strongly believed would become delinquent, and securitized them as CDOs to pass the risk of default on to investors. The bank admittedly and purposefully "used shoddy lending practices . . . to make tens of thousands of high-risk home loans that too often contained excessive risk, fraudulent information or errors” according to the congressional report. The bank, in its reckless pursuit of profits, in the face of competition that had materially minimized its returns resorted to innovative new financial instruments that instead of freeing up capital caused a financial collapse.

Written by:  Karla McKanders Shortly after health care reform passed, Republicans stated that there will be no cooperation with Democrats for the rest of the year.  Specifically, John McCain stated “There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year. They [Democrats] have poisoned the well in what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.” In addition, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, stated that he was withdrawing support of an outline for joint immigration bill with Democratic Senator Charles Schumer.  The joint bill proposed a pathway citizenship for undocumented immigrants by establishing biometric Social Security cards to ensure that illegal workers cannot get jobs; strengthening border security and interior enforcement; creating a process for admitting temporary workers; holding employers accountable for hiring undocumented workers; and implementing a tough but fair path to legalization for those already here. Graham echoed McCain’s sentiment that the passage of the health care bill “poisoned the well” of bipartisanship diminishing all hopes of cooperation on immigration reform. On the eve of health care reform, on March 21, 2010, many immigrant's rights advocates descended on the mall in Washington, D.C. to advocate for Congress to start discussions on immigration reform. More immigration rallies are being planned across the country to get Obama to place immigration reform on the Administration’s Agenda.

Written by:  Deborah Post Last week we learned that Jim Perdue,  Chairman of Perdue Foods Inc., spoke to Maryland legislators on behalf of the small farmers he claimed would be forced out of business if the environmental law clinic at University of Maryland Law School is allowed to sue Perdue and one of its growers.  I was familiar with Perdue's relationship with small farmers.  Some years ago -- in 1998, to be precise -- I wrote a contracts exam using the pleadings filed in Monk v. Perdue Farms, Inc., 12 F. Supp.2d 508 (D.Md. 1998),  by plaintiff's attorney, Roger L. Gregory, then partner in the firm of Wilder and Gregory, now judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Monk was a case about racial discrimination. Several black farmers alleged that they were not accorded the same treatment under the terms of Perdue's standard form contract as white farmers.  In that respect, the Monk case bore some resemblance to Reid v. Key Bank of Southern Maine, Inc., 821 F.2d 9 (1st Cir. 1987), a case I cover in contracts when I teach students about the implied duty of good faith. Mr. Reid was the only borrower at the bank to have his line of credit cut off, his note accelerated, his collateral seized without the bank officers first calling him in to the bank for a meeting.  Reid is still mentioned in other casebooks in notes about lender liability or the subjective test for good faith, but these notes appear to sidestep the issues of race and motive altogether.  The relationship between motive, malice and racial prejudice is admittedly somewhat ambiguous in Reid because the jury found there was no racial discrimination by the bank.  Nevertheless, Reid is still a case that calls attention on the disparate treatment one black businessman received and the inferences that could be drawn from that fact.

Written by:  andre cummings The United States Senate will take up new financial sector regulation on Monday.  Momentum has been growing in recent weeks as it now appears that new regulation will receive bipartisan support.  The financial market crisis of 2008 has clarified the necessity that Congress better protect consumers from abusive Wall Street practices.  The Senate must concern itself with turning banking back into an industry that promotes wealth across the country rather than the pre-crisis trend of reckless pursuit of ill-gotten profits.  By establishing a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, Congress can commit to protecting American communities and consumers rather than protecting Wall Street’s recklessness.

Written by:  Steven Bender Within the last week SALT defended the Maryland law school environmental clinic from legislative attack seeking to condition release of public funds on disclosure of client names and other confidential information. SALT’s efforts are described at https://www.saltlaw.org/contents/view/universityofmaryland. This weekend the New York Times detailed the current legislative and judicial onslaught against law clinics across the country. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/us/04lawschool.html?emc=eta1.

Written by:  Jeff Pokorak The Carnegie report exhorts us to “put the client back into legal education.” I know many have done great work surfacing the biographies of clients and litigants in cases before our students.  From a fuller contextualization of the litigants Jesse Pierson and  Lodowick Post to the sad path of Ernesto Miranda's life, there is a wealth of information available to help us reanimate our classes with the (ghosts) of the case clients. But what I want to address here is the casual way in which we forget to name or humanize in our efforts to diminish or aggrandize.  Not only the common use of the words "defendant" or "victim" in criminal courts....  But recent writings of others made me wonder: Do slaves or former slaves actually have real names?  Do those executed exist outsideof a description of their status?  Follow me after the jump for examples of each....

Written by: Angela Onwuachi-Willig A  few years ago, at a retreat where we set certain short and long term goals, the SALT Board agreed that SALT would have a blog.  None of us knew much about blogs at that time, but we were persuaded that alternative methods of reaching the public to provide information about issues of social justice and human rights should be an integral part of our agenda as activist progressives. There are many opportunities for SALT members to speak out. We have our classrooms, and SALT, through its teaching conferences, has advocated for teaching that is activist, inclusive, and self conscious in focusing attention on issues of social justice. In our institutions, we can sponsor teach-ins, conferences, and symposia.  As legal scholars, we can write and publish law review articles.  As clinicians, we can represent clients from subordinated communities. As members of the academy, we can show up to public hearings on issues of importance in legal education like the accreditation standards for law schools. We can and do submit comments or responses to reports issued by the American Bar Association. Like many organizations with members who are knowledgeable people with something to say and information to share, however, SALT has had to adapt to a new world in which electronic and social media play a significant role.  While it may appear that the openness of the internet places us all on an equal footing --we can all write and we can publish what we write -- attracting an audience is not as easy as it might seem. It helps to have some name recognition.  It helps if an institution has a reputation which makes it a site in the virtual world where members of the public search for information that they need.  SALT has that reputation and its website is one of the places where people go to find out what position progressives have taken on a variety of issues. [showtime] THE WHO OF SALT The blog is different from our website.  On our website, we publish the letters and formal positions that the organization has taken.  The blog is not a forum for the expression of SALT’s positions, but a place where our members can publish commentary on emerging issues in law, politics, and education or where they can develop arguments about policies and problems that are persistent or seem intractable.  The SALT Board has no list of topics that should be addressed or any agenda that it has set for this blog.  The blog is owned by the membership, and the individual posts are not official, quasi-official, or even remotely related to SALT public positions.  We are offering the progressive community of law teachers an opportunity to be heard.