After Eviction

Previous articleNext article FreeReading Regents and the Political Significance of LawCristina M. RodríguezCristina M. Rodríguez Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWhen the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, in June 2020, advocates celebrated. DACA—an acronym that no longer requires definition—lived to see another day.1 Newspaper headlines marked the decision as a decisive rebuff of the Trump administration’s efforts to end the Obama-era program that shielded so-called Dreamers from deportation while authorizing them to work in the United States.2 Initiated in 2012, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program had survived almost four years of a presidential administration overtly hostile to immigrants and immigration—a government bent on unraveling as much of the administrative and political legacy of its immediate predecessors as possible.3 The Supreme Court largely affirmed the Ninth Circuit’s holding that efforts by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to rescind DACA were arbitrary and capricious and therefore invalid, sending DHS back to the drawing board to accomplish its objectives.4 With the 2020 presidential election less than five months away and the very real possibility of regime change in the air, the decision seemed decisive. The Supreme Court had saved DACA, at least for the time being.On the other side of the presidential election, we can now say that the Dreamers and their lawyers succeeded in using the courts to run out the clock on one of the more high-profile efforts of the Trump presidency. This success calls for an explanation. The original legal theory of DACA was predicated on its discretionary and therefore defeasible character. The government justified DACA as a series of individual acts of prosecutorial discretion, defined as the inherent discretion law enforcement officials possess to forbear from enforcement, at their convenience, in order to prioritize enforcement resources. DACA’s founding document—a memorandum issued by the Secretary of Homeland Security—included the disclaimer standard in Executive orders and agency guidance documents: “this memorandum confers no substantive right.”5 DACA’s promise, then, lasted as long as the Executive wanted it to. The promise was durable as long as President Obama remained in office but unenforceable should the Executive branch fall into the hands of officials hostile to the program.Given the apparently weak anchor DACA provided, why was it so difficult for a new administration, whose enforcement priorities did not include categorical forbearance for Dreamers, to reorient the enforcement system in its preferred direction? A conventional answer, repeated as a description of many of the Trump administration’s stumbles across regulatory arenas, was that officials were incompetent, sloppy, and disingenuous. The myriad court opinions in the DACA rescission litigation of the Trump years, from across the country and up and down the judicial hierarchy, reflected a version of this thesis. No court concluded that DACA was required by law. All parties, including the Supreme Court, seemed to agree that an administration could end the program.6 But despite efforts to respond to the demands and criticisms of the lower courts, the Trump administration could not find its way to its desired conclusion.But if the Court has implicitly acknowledged that DACA is not legally required and expressly stated that the government has the authority to wind it down, in what sense was Regents a major victory? In this essay, I argue that Regents is not a triumph in immigration law or even a decision of immigration law; far from it, the opinion contains a roadmap to DACA’s demise. The decision’s salutary outcome for immigrants also distracts us from a more ominous turn in the Roberts Court toward a reading of the immigration laws that empowers both Congress and the President to do as they please—a reading exemplified by one of the Term’s other decisions, Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, in which the Court rejects a Suspension Clause challenge to expedited removal proceedings.7Regents does reflect a kind of political triumph, however, not just because DACA was saved but because the Court calls attention to the profound interests its recipients have in remaining in the United States and thus to their new social status, separate and apart from their legal status. And yet, within the Regents decision itself, as well as in the legal claims made against the Trump administration, are the very tools with which courts might again stymie political change designed to advance immigrants’ rights, relying on the exacting procedural regularity championed in Regents by Chief Justice Roberts.I. The Trump Administration’s Failed RescissionChief Justice Roberts opened his opinion in 2012, at the moment of DACA’s inception. But to understand what DACA sought to achieve as a matter of administration, it is important to understand what it replaced. As most every court to have heard a DACA-related dispute has recognized, implicit in the operation of an immigration enforcement regime is the authority of Executive officials to set priorities for law enforcement agents. Those priorities can encourage agents to forbear from arresting or deporting otherwise removable non-citizens as part of a larger systemic interest in channeling resources toward removals in the government’s highest interests. Beginning in 2010, Obama-era DHS officials articulated a set of priorities in guidance documents (known as the Morton Memos) in an effort to encourage line-level officials to consider non-enforcement against certain types of individuals, including those who met the criteria that would eventually define DACA – the hundreds of thousands of non-citizens lacking immigration status who had been brought to the United States as youth.8 After two years of trying to steer the enforcement system with these exhortations, DHS officials determined that few obvious or publicly visible changes to enforcement practices had occurred. The Department’s political leadership, in conjunction with the White House, thus devised DACA to protect Dreamers from deportation. The program, adopted by what came to be known as the Napolitano memorandum, invited applications for forbearance from those who satisfied carefully drawn eligibility criteria, virtually ensuring, though not guaranteeing, protection and work authorization for Dreamers.9By the time President Donald Trump took office, more than 750,000 Dreamers had been granted DACA status,10 which provided them actual and psychological relief from removal and enabled them to enter the workforce and live as if their immigration status were immaterial. As a candidate, Donald Trump vowed to rescind DACA immediately, but in his initial months in office, President Trump himself expressed ambivalence and even reservations.11 In September 2017, however, Attorney General Jefferson Sessions sent a one-page, four-paragraph letter to Acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke to “advise” that DHS should rescind the Napolitano memorandum initiating DACA on the ground that DACA was “an open-ended circumvention of immigration laws” and “an unconstitutional exercise of the authority of the Executive Branch.”12 The next day, in what had to have been a coordinated decision within the administration, Secretary Duke released her own memorandum terminating DACA,13 citing the Attorney General’s letter and the litigation that had called into question the legal authority for a second but now moribund Obama-era deferred action policy (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA)).14 The timing and content of each of these two administrative documents became central to the Supreme Court’s resolution of the legal question before it—whether the Trump administration’s efforts to rescind DACA had been lawful.The court case began in three different circuits, where an array of plaintiffs raised numerous substantive claims, two of which ended up before the Supreme Court: that the rescission of DACA was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act and that the rescission violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. In its culminating opinion, the Supreme Court first concluded that DACA did not fall into the class of non-enforcement decisions long held to be unreviewable by courts on the authority of Heckler v. Chaney.15 DACA amounted, instead, to a full-blown program for granting immigration relief and attendant benefits, justifying judicial review—review that jurisdiction-stripping provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) also did not preclude. The Court then proceeded to hold that the rescission of DACA in its entirety was indeed inconsistent with the requirements of the APA but that none of the plaintiffs’ allegations established a “plausible” claim of racial animus under the Equal Protection Clause.But DACA was a discretionary program that the administration should have been able to undo easily, not a program that should have survived more than three years of a concerted rescission effort (assuming Trump officials’ hearts were in it). Why did a clearly permissible outcome evade the Trump administration? Though incompetence has been charged repeatedly in public commentary, the explanations offered by Chief Justice Roberts underscore that the federal courts’ conceptualization of the administration’s fault changed throughout the litigation.In his letter to Secretary Duke, Attorney General Sessions justified the rescission as legally required, in part citing the litigation risk that maintaining the program posed, given that the Fifth Circuit had invalidated President Obama’s similarly structured DAPA initiative.16 At the time, Adam Cox and I argued that the administration was hiding behind flimsy legal arguments to duck political responsibility and accountability for ending a widely popular and successful program.17 The lower courts quickly put a stop to this evasion by demanding that the Trump administration provide reasons for the rescission beyond what the courts viewed to be erroneous legal claims.18 Judge John Bates in the District for the District of Columbia actually gave the administration an opportunity to remedy the APA violation by providing the court with a more extended rationale for the rescission.19 The administration obliged with a memorandum from a new DHS Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, in which she purported not to disturb the Duke memorandum and its legal conclusions but added multiple policy reasons to justify the rescission.20 By elaborating on its legal reasoning and offering a policy rationale for ending DACA that could justify the rescission if the court continued to find the legal reasoning wanting—just the sort of rationale courts typically do not second-guess—the path to rescission seemed to have been cleared.And yet, at the Supreme Court, the sufficiency of the Nielsen memo went untested. In its opinion, the Court dismisses the memo’s relevance because it had been framed as an elaboration of the Duke memo and yet bore “little relationship” to the original purported basis for the agency action.21 Under hornbook administrative law, then, the Nielsen memo constituted an irrelevant post hoc rationalization. In support of this conclusion, the Court lists the familiar case law, for which the standard citation is SEC v. Chenery Corp.22, and the reasons for rejecting an elaborated justification and insisting that the agency start a new policy process or issue a new decision to invoke new reasons: that such requirements promote accountability, ensure the parties and public can respond to the agency’s authority, preserve the orderly process of review, and constrain the agency from making its reasons and therefore its policy a moving target.23Thus focused on the Duke memo, the Supreme Court offers a two-part reason for finding the rescission procedurally flawed, each part of which I consider in more detail in Part II. The first is a legal rationale not yet hit upon by the federal courts but offered by the respondents from the District of Columbia: according to the Court, the Sessions letter had concluded that DACA was unlawful because it contained the same legal defects the Fifth Circuit had found in DAPA. Because the Fifth Circuit focused its analysis on the benefits DAPA conferred (primarily eligibility for work authorization), the Secretary failed to appreciate that the Sessions letter left her with discretion to decouple the two parts of DACA and consider whether its forbearance policy standing alone, without benefits, passed legal muster.24 The second of the Court’s rationales also sounds in basic administrative law—that when it changes a policy, an agency must consider the reliance interests engendered by that policy, not because those interests are necessarily legally dispositive, but because they are always substantively relevant.25 Leaving aside the puzzlement expressed by Justice Thomas in his partial dissent—why should these reliance interests matter if some or all of the program itself was without legal foundation?—the Court gave the administration two clear assignments on remand if it hoped to continue the rescission effort.With this move, Chief Justice Roberts found a political sweet spot for someone hoping not to take sides on the merits. He did not allow the rescission to proceed, but he also avoided concluding that DACA was lawful. He thus did not close the door to an eventual gutting of DACA through elimination of the path to work authorization that made it so valuable. But whether Regents amounts to a “win” depends both on whose perspective we take and the timeframe we adopt. In the months after the decision, DACA recipients had clearly triumphed. The story’s denouement unfolded in a courtroom in the Eastern District of New York. After Regents, the government did indeed return to the drawing board. Attorney General William Barr rescinded all DOJ authorities relevant to the case, including a 2014 memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel elaborating why the much larger DAPA program was consistent with the INA and within the Secretary’s authority.26 At DHS, Acting Secretary Chad Wolf rescinded the Nielsen and Duke memoranda and styled his own memo as beginning the process of considering DACA anew. He pledged that, while DHS conducted its fresh process, the agency would honor existing DACA grants but would no longer adjudicate new or pending applications. In his memorandum explaining these steps, Acting Secretary Wolf acknowledged the reliance interests of existing DACA holders by repeating back the Supreme Court’s articulation of those interests. But he then offered: “[w]hatever the merits of these asserted reliance interests on the maintenance of the DACA policy, they are significantly lessened, if not entirely lacking” for those who had never received deferred action in the first place.27Litigants immediately challenged this new quasi-rescission. But rather than determine if DHS had properly adhered to the procedural path cleared by the Supreme Court, Judge Nicholas Garaufis found Wolf’s appointment to have been unlawful, thus invalidating his actions as lacking authorization—a conclusion reached by numerous courts reviewing various DHS actions in the waning days of the Trump administration.28 Whether DHS could correct this structural defect and try yet again to rescind DACA became moot with the election of Joseph R. Biden to the presidency in November 2020. Biden pledged during the campaign to shore up DACA. Not long after his inauguration, he followed through by declaring his intention to “fortify” the program.29But even though the election brought the rescission saga to an end, a deeper, more speculative strain of Regents is now in play. Despite being a procedural decision on its surface and in its holdings, Chief Justice Roberts’s novel reasoning forecasts still more legal wrangling over both DACA’s validity and, more generally, the capacity of a new president to chart a different path on immigration policy.II. Immigration and the Roberts CourtRegents ensured that DACA would survive into a new administration determined to preserve it. But the decision itself is neither a victory for immigrants’ rights in a jurisprudential sense nor a particularly probative data point in a more holistic account of immigration law in the Roberts era. Most immediately, the opinion provides a roadmap to DACA’s demise by inviting litigants and judges to separate its two pillars—categorical forbearance from removal on the one hand and eligibility for work authorization and benefits tied to deferred action status on the other—and to invalidate the latter. Beyond DACA, the prospects for a jurisprudence that restrains the coercive power of the government against non-citizens grew even dimmer this Term, despite Regents. In the unrelated decision, the Roberts Court yet another challenge to the of a enforcement and removal power expressly by what to be the Court’s from its of of the INA with a for basic process This opinion much less interest from the and public than the of DACA, but it is of far to the of immigration law first to DACA through the courts is its which the Regents Court to do As DACA was an exercise of the Secretary’s enforcement of typically from judicial The so-called benefits of DACA from the decision to forbear from removal in of and administrative back that those benefits to a of deferred it that the Obama administration deferred action as the through which to provide Dreamers some relief because of these legal discretion to an established regulatory with a and process by which recipients of forbearance could for authorization documents in various of the litigation over both DACA and the Supreme Court and the lower courts have the government’s across that the are unreviewable of enforcement In Regents, the Court to Heckler v. and its holding that the decision to to the law is not to judicial because it is to agency discretion, that is not a non-enforcement By an process to who met criteria, the administration a for immigration not a non-enforcement By DACA as a program with each to legal review, the Court thus the for the government by the of what the administration to accomplish in a way that more procedural and the of judicial despite finding DACA to be the Court does not to the of its parts on the merits. the Court fault with the Secretary’s own to decouple DACA’s two and then the and of a In finding this legally to the Secretary, Roberts is the Sessions letter to Secretary Duke, as the Chief Justice himself the Secretary’s in not clearly the Roberts and legal on DACA as a But Roberts on the that DACA policy has the same legal defects that the courts as to to chart his through the In the litigation over the Fifth in v. United had determined the relevant legal question to be whether the Secretary had authority to DAPA recipients for benefits, not whether he had authority to forbear from the class of who into the In other even under letter and the of litigation risk raised by the Fifth the Secretary could have a version of DACA. And under administrative v. agency to rescind a policy must consider in its whether the of the existing might be Because forbearance was at the very of DACA, DHS to have a policy of without and the Sessions letter did not that Regents opinion thus gave the Trump administration a a to DACA and for The agency could return to the drawing find the benefits to be legally while maintaining a policy, which it then could have out if it had articulated policy reasons for this of enforcement that took into account reliance interests on which And as in what out to be the waning months of the Trump administration, Chad Wolf the rescission process to a that the Court’s before Judge Garaufis found his authority the Court’s roadmap is no longer of to the administration But it does steer litigants of for to challenge DACA’s very down a clear path that the Court Despite not DACA’s the and reasoning of the Court’s opinion are both forbearance the of work authorization and other benefits is in This in part from the on by the Chief Justice of the Fifth Circuit’s reasoning in v. United which after a lower court decision an immigration relief program not actually at issue in Regents and that did not in a Supreme Court decision on the merits. be Attorney General Sessions put the Fifth Circuit opinion at issue by to on it in his DACA letter to the But not does Chief Justice Roberts v. United States and the of DAPA into his of the of the DACA he in an extended of the Fifth Circuit’s analysis when Secretary that she had no legal discretion to continue DACA. In his of the decision, Chief Justice Roberts up making a case for the of the And by that the Secretary consider this he is at the very least that it well be legally if not legally put if the Chief Justice it that a forbearance policy the legal it would have been for to the matter back to the agency for of an to the litigation over DAPA its not to raised the categorical forbearance it same legal Justice Thomas in his Regents opinion from the APA in which he Congress has not categorical to the removal But by the time the DAPA case had reached the Fifth that court seemed to have forbearance as a of the authority to prioritize removal for a court to the forbearance of DACA would be a of a very basic enforcement As Adam Cox and I have DACA is no less enforcement discretion for the of discretion to the Secretary and away from individual even as individual agents continue to that we have a presidential administration that to rather than wind down DACA, the central of in the Regents opinion into the courts the Biden administration to continue eligibility for work authorization other to recipients of deferred action under the DACA DACA’s to its on the to this Though a promise of forbearance the and psychological with the of eligibility for work authorization is what has made DACA for hundreds of thousands of non-citizens without legal status who are Chief Justice Roberts does not on the merits whether DHS has the authority to eligibility for work But he also does not take the of of the lower courts, which the Trump administration’s conclusion that DACA was He offers as an for the agency a that work authorization for being Sessions had but on with if the administration had through with such an and it had reached the Supreme Court a second time, Roberts and his upon would have in that of work authorization was After the making deferred action recipients to for back to the The administration would then have had to rescind or those after through and and why it was so – that, as even Justice recognized, would be no But would the Chief Justice have sent the Trump administration back for more memoranda he them to and for all up with articulated policy reasons for all of DACA, the for the Court to the of DACA on the the Court was to a decision on the the 2020 election have its the Biden administration has its intention to DACA through and This to more procedural to the program in the of it through what be a legal by the of and some of its in the District of where the who invalidated DAPA now on the and when DACA to the Court under this new no one should be if forbearance at the end, it to Congress to provide a anchor of for the The way the Chief Justice in Regents the work authorization question as for legal and the expressed by some of the at in the DAPA case back in justify the litigation risk with DACA as the Court does indeed to on a version of DACA, its decision Regents as an of the Court’s of administrative and an that Executive be by clear and even In so the Court would the of the Executive branch to and into its of a deportation regime that Congress thus far has been or to This of the Executive in the of accountability and the of would in turn another of immigration law that the Supreme Court but has been in years, including during the a of decisions over the years, the Court has the of its opinion in Regents, finding that DHS has power to to the immigration laws in of In at least two the Court rejects the of and on the political in that from And in other the Court provisions with to that would be of immigrants’ including in that in basic In other the real of the Roberts Court’s immigration jurisprudence has been to the political in with waning interest in the Executive the power Congress has to

Conservation Biology and Private Land: Shifting the Focus

This research discusses the Supreme Court decision Number: 813 K/Pid/2023 regarding the criminal law enforcement of premeditated murder committed by Ferdy Sambo. This decision changed the sentence for convicts from the death penalty to life imprisonment. This penal reduction needs to be studied using a constructivist paradigm. The constructivist paradigm will examine the operation of law in society which is influenced by people's experiences, whether social, religious, cultural, including ideological. The Supreme Court's decision provides legal considerations regarding mitigating reasons for the convict. This is the difference with the decisions of the lower courts. From a constructivist perspective, this is not quite right. It is necessary to state the factors of community experience in making decisions for convicts. Moreover, there was a dissenting opinion by the judge in adjudicating the Supreme Court's cassation decision Number: 813 K/Pid/2023. The difference of opinion is based on legal considerations that the reason for self-defense is forced, the self-respect or honor of the convict does not need to be considered. Then there are allegations of immoral acts whose truth has not been clarified by the convict to the victim. The reality of the experience was not explored enough in the decision, both social factors and environmental factors of the convict.This research discusses the Supreme Court decision Number: 813 K/Pid/2023 regarding the criminal law enforcement of premeditated murder committed by Ferdy Sambo. This decision changed the sentence for convicts from the death penalty to life imprisonment. This penal reduction needs to be studied using a constructivist paradigm. The constructivist paradigm will examine the operation of law in society which is influenced by people's experiences, whether social, religious, cultural, including ideological. The Supreme Court's decision provides legal considerations regarding mitigating reasons for the convict. This is the difference with the decisions of the lower courts. From a constructivist perspective, this is not quite right. It is necessary to state the factors of community experience in making decisions for convicts. Moreover, there was a dissenting opinion by the judge in adjudicating the Supreme Court's cassation decision Number: 813 K/Pid/2023. The difference of opinion is based on legal considerations that the reason for self-defense is forced, the self-respect or honor of the convict does not need to be considered. Then there are allegations of immoral acts whose truth has not been clarified by the convict to the victim. The reality of the experience was not explored enough in the decision, both social factors and environmental factors of the convict.

1. Introduction A stark contrast exists between the widespread application of positive political economy models in the study of the executive and legislative branches of government and the relative dearth of such work on the judiciary. In particular, the U.S. Supreme Court is widely regarded as a totally independent body whose rulings are not influenced by political or other outside pressures. Indeed, the dominant political science model of Supreme Court decision making, the attitudinal model, argues that the rules and structures of the U.S. political system allow justices to vote sincerely without constraints from Congress and/or the president (Segal and Spaeth 1993). In contrast to this dominant view, several authors have begun to analyze Supreme Court decisions guided by the positive models of bureaucratic behavior that exist in both the economics and the political science literature. Toma (1991) finds that Congress signals its opinion of the Court's direction through budgetary allocations, and that budget changes have a significant effect on Court decisions. Her more recent work (Toma 1996) focuses on the role of the chief justice as an agent of Congress who reacts to budgetary signals to bring Court decisions in line with congressional preferences. Spiller and Gely (1992) find strong evidence of congressional influence over Court decisions in industrial labor relations cases. Caporale and Winter (1998) find support for the existence of both executive and congressional influence over Supreme Court decisions in criminal procedure cases. This paper investigates possible outside influences on Supreme Court decisions in economic cases. We find that Republican presidents and more conservative leadership of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees are significantly correlated with more conservative Supreme Court economic decisions. In addition, we find that conservative decisions are positively correlated with the fraction of the Court appointed by Republican presidents. This provides strong support for a presidential of appointment channel of judicial influence. Also, we find that the lagged inflation rate significantly influences the direction of the Court's economic decisions. Finally, we demonstrate the robustness of our results using an alternative measure of congressional ideology. 2. Theories of Supreme Court Behavior The Traditional Legal Model Courts are the mere instruments of the law, and can will nothing. When they are said to exercise discretion, it is a mere legal discretion, a discretion to be exercised in discerning the course prescribed by law; and, when that is discerned, it is the duty of the Court to follow it. Judicial power is never exercised for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Judge; always for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Legislature; or, in other words, to the will of the Law. Chief Justice John Marshall, 18241 As recent legal analysts have noted, the vast bulk of legal scholarship and content of law school training largely rests on Justice Marshall's contention.2 Explicitly or implicitly, an assumption is made that court decisions are based centrally on reasoned arguments. This view, in which judges apply neutral principles and logical reasoning to the Constitution, prior precedents, or statutes in resolving cases is labeled the legal Perhaps the clearest proponent and strongest advocate of the traditional model was Christopher Columbus Langdell, the Harvard Law School's first dean.3 For the Langdellian judge, judicial decisions are based on logical reasoning or reasoning by example. Primary importance is placed on textual interpretation and legal precedent. From this framework, decisions can be viewed as inevitable conclusions based on the analysis of earlier cases. Clearly, this model left no room for any expression of judicial individuality or personal ideology. The Attitudinal Model In contrast to the formalism of the traditional model, political scientists have developed an alternative theory of Supreme Court (and other judicial) decision making: the attitudinal model. …

Review: <i>Green Persuasion: Advertising, Voluntarism, and America’s Public Lands</i>, by Jeffrey K. Stine

The internal structure of urban construction land expansion (UCLE) is closely related to urban sustainability, and the UCLE in China’s port city has a unique pattern. This study attempted to monitor the internal structure evolution of UCLE based on construction land transfer data in Ningbo’s central city from 2002 to 2015. Equality fan analysis and kernel density analysis were applied to characterize the spatial–temporal dynamics of different types of UCLE and to summarize their evolution patterns. The results revealed that in the whole study area, the rank of the expansion size and intensity of construction land was: industrial land &gt; traffic land &gt; residential land &gt; public land &gt; commercial land. The dominant directions of all types of UCLE were the directions of the port zones. In the port zones, there were more apparent expansion trends and higher expansion intensities of industrial, traffic and public lands, which meant that the port had significant impact on UCLE, especially in terms of industrial land. Additionally, commercial and residential land expansions showed a circle-shaped gradient pattern; industrial land sprawl was in a leapfrog pattern; public and traffic land sprawl was illustrated in a bi-centric pattern. In the future, local government should encourage the development of residential and public land rather than industrial land, and shift the present industry structure which dominated by industry to a more balanced structure, in order to achieve sustainable development.

Impacts of a mandatory shift to decentralized online auctions on revenue from public land leases in Ukraine

In Mount Laurel Township v. Mipro Homes, LLC., 878 A.2d 38 (2005), 910 A.2d 617 (2006), the New Jersey courts were faced with the question whether the local government in Mount Laurel had legitimately exercised its power of eminent domain when it acquired a piece of property zoned for residential use under the disguise of open space preservation. In the past forty years, Mount Laurel's population exploded eight-fold and continues to grow at a rate of approximately 1,000 people per year. The property in question had already undergone some development when Mount Laurel exercised its power of eminent domain. Was Mount Laurel's motive to control population growth? If so, may Mount Laurel exercise the power of eminent domain to control population growth? This paper provides an overview of urban sprawl and the legacy of Berman v. Parker. Next, I summarize the facts and legal issues set forth in Mount Laurel v. Mipro, a case in which a local government exercised its power of eminent domain under the disguise of the New Jersey open space preservation act. A critical analysis of the New Jersey Appellate Court and New Jersey Supreme Court's decisions follows. I argue that Mount Laurel's taking to control the population growth was exercised in bad faith and that no public purpose was achieved when Mount Laurel prevented Mipro from developing twenty-three residential homes. I also argue that the New Jersey Supreme Court missed an opportunity to explain why it did not think that Mount Laurel did not exercise eminent domain in bad faith and what, precisely, would constitute bad faith. The N.J. Supreme Court's three-paragraph decision is disappointing in light of the intelligent and engaging arguments Mipro and Mount Laurel made at oral argument.

President Trump issued a proclamation in December 2017 purporting to remove two million acres in southern Utah from national monument status, radically shrinking the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument and splitting the Bears Ears National Monument into two residual protected areas. Whether the President has the power to revise or revoke existing monuments under the Antiquities Act, which creates the national monument system, is a new question of law for a 112-year-old statute that has been used by Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama to protect roughly fifteen million acres of federal land and hundreds of millions of marine acres. If President Trump’s shrinkages stand, they will be the largest removal of public lands from protected status in U.S. history, and will put the remaining national monuments on the chopping block. This article advances a novel theory showing that the President lacks the power to revise or revoke monuments. The Antiquities Act gives a power only to protect public lands, not to remove them from protection. Arguments developed so far in litigation and scholarship fail to recognize a general feature of public-lands law: It consistently denies the President the power unilaterally to remove lands from statutorily protected categories once they are placed within those categories. The Antiquities Act should be read to be consistent with this field-wide pattern. The article explicates the reasons for this pattern. Generally speaking, public-lands law has been very little theorized; but it needs a theory now. Public-lands law is a field defined by structured normative pluralism. It integrates a range of deeply conflicting public-lands purposes, from mining and drilling to wilderness preservation, across a range of statutes and agencies and acreage totaling nearly a third of the land area of the United States. The asymmetric premise against any Presidential power remove lands from protection is rooted in this structure, specifically the President’s obligation to preserve for Congress the option of protecting lands, and the dangers of hasty or corrupt Presidential action. The article traces these rationales across the history of statutory, executive, and judicial articulations of public-lands law and shows that they apply to the present Antiquities Act dispute. The article also highlights the political and cultural dimension of the dispute: a series of three-way conflicts among “public-lands populists” who seek increased use of and access to public lands (whose agenda the Trump Administration has incorporated into its economic and ethno-national populism), recreationists and environmentalists, and indigenous communities in the Bears Ears region. Conflicts among these groups amount to fights over collective identity--the nature of the “public” that public lands should serve. This dimension of the conflict does not fall outside the doctrinal analysis of the Antiquities Act. Rather, with a clear theoretical view of public-lands law, it is possible to see that these agendas are already integral to the field itself. They are central threads of its pluralism, and their competing claims fit within its structure. An account of the larger field of cultural conflict both enriches the theory of public-lands law and helps to show how the field should resolve the present fight.

Community volunteers on public land need support

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the creation of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law School, Professor (and former ELC Director) Richard Brooks delivered the Norman Williams Distinguished Lecture in Land Use Planning and the Law, entitled Speaking (Vermont) Truth to (Washington) Power. Like many of Professor Brooks’ works, this lecture explored common scholarly themes of federalism, sustainability, land use, and environmental activism, as well as topics unique to his work, including legal value assessments, environmental justice, social justice, and the nature of legal and institutional change. After exploring several examples of the inclusive, progressive nature of Vermont’s laws, Professor Brooks concluded that Vermont’s power to effect change on a national scale was somewhat disproportionate to its size (both geographically and based on population) and arose out of Vermont’s community-focused, inclusive, and progressive legal and social values. Brooks’ Williams Lecture relates in several ways to my own scholarship addressing the national crisis unfolding on federal public lands, driven by the current Administration’s zeal for energy development, mining, and unraveling the protections set in place by previous administrations. From the opening of coastal zones throughout the nation to offshore drilling to the President’s reduction of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, the Trump Administration has charted a course nearly reminiscent of the disposal era of the late nineteenth century, stopping just short of outright transfers of public lands into private and state hands. This is a crisis not only because of the unprecedented speed and breadth of the Department of Interior’s efforts to erode environmental and natural resources protection measures implemented by previous administrations, but because of the permanence of some of these actions, inflicted on landscapes and ecosystems that might not ever be able to recover. Brooks’ Williams Lecture reflects similar themes in mid-nineteenth century Vermont, when industry ravaged the state’s natural resources (and particularly, its forests), leaving a denuded shell of the state’s pre-colonial natural glory, and contains an obvious parallel between that period of Vermont’s history and the present circumstances facing western public lands. This article explores Brooks' theme of speaking local truth to national power west of the 100th meridian, in the public lands states. I have organized this tribute in two parts: (1) an explanation of the Brooks principle of speaking local environmental truth to national power and (2) an application of this principle to the western public lands states.

How it is that the United States—the country that cherishes the ideal of private property more than any other in the world—has chosen to set aside nearly one-third of its land area as public lands? Now in a fully revised and updated edition covering the first years of the Trump administration, Randall Wilson considers this intriguing question, tracing the often-forgotten ideas of nature that have shaped the evolution of America’s public land system. The result is a fresh and probing account of the most pressing policy and management challenges facing national parks, forests, rangelands, and wildlife refuges today. The author explores the dramatic story of the origins of the public domain, including the century-long effort to sell off land and the subsequent emergence of a national conservation ideal. Arguing that we cannot fully understand one type of public land without understanding its relation to the rest of the system, he provides in-depth accounts of the different types of public lands. With chapters on national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, Bureau of Land Management lands, and wilderness areas, Wilson examines key turning points and major policy debates for each land type, including recent Trump Administration efforts to roll back environmental protections. He considers debates ranging from national monument designations and bison management to gas and oil drilling, wildfire policy, the bark beetle epidemic, and the future of roadless and wilderness conservation areas. His comprehensive overview offers a chance to rethink our relationship with America’s public lands, including what it says about the way we relate to, and value, nature in the United States.

The normative contradiction between Supreme Court Decision Number 23 P/HUM/2024, which raised the age limit for regional head candidates, and Constitutional Court Decision Number 70/PUU-XXII/2024, which precisely nullified the norm regarding the minimum age limit, creates legal uncertainty and potential serious implications for the organization of the Regional Head Elections (Pilkada). This research employs a descriptive analytical method with a normative juridical approach to analyze the legal validity of Supreme Court Decision No. 23 P/HUM/2024 in relation to Constitutional Court Decision No. 70/PUU-XXII/2024 concerning the age limit for candidacy in the 2024 National Simultaneous Regional Head Elections. This approach primarily focuses on the study of library legal materials (secondary sources), which include primary legal materials such as the 1945 Constitution, laws pertaining to the Supreme Court and Constitutional Court, and relevant Supreme Court and Constitutional Court decisions. It also incorporates secondary legal materials in the form of legal scholars' opinions. Data collection was carried out through a literature review (document study), supplemented by limited field study, and analyzed using a qualitative juridical method to formulate answers to the existing legal issues. The research findings indicate that the Supreme Court's (MA) decision regarding the age limit for candidacy registration in the 2024 National Simultaneous Regional Head Elections (Pilkada) lacks binding legal force and there's no legal basis for the MA to review provisions stipulated by Law No. 10/2016 concerning Pilkada. In this instance, the MA has exceeded its authority. Consequently, the legal validity of the MA's decision, in light of the Constitutional Court's (MK) decision on the age limit for Pilkada candidacy registration, is deemed legally invalid under applicable laws and regulations. Therefore, with the MA's decision being invalid, the Constitutional Court's decision is the one that prevails.

This chapter takes a look at the various ways in which public values in public lands are being protected. After the Wilderness Act, more public land legislation that significantly limited how certain public lands could be used regardless of which agency was managing them soon followed. Indeed, within a month, Congress established the first of what has become a significant and growing collection of “national recreation areas” on public lands. During this time, environmentalism also became a growing trend in public land legislation. Shortly after the Nixon administration took office in 1969, Congress produced a series of comprehensive environmental laws, an outpouring of environmental regulatory lawmaking unmatched before or since. In 1966, Congress enacted the first version of the Endangered Species Act, as part of a larger bill focused on public lands managed primarily for wildlife. Congress also took numerous steps to promote collaboration between federal land-management agencies and state and local governments and the private sector.

Typhoons Reming and Milenyo have brought a different challenge to Albayanos. During the last quarter of 2006, two super typhoons hit Albay: Milenyo in September and Reming in November. The latter was the worst that ever hit Legazpi City. The typhoons caused severe damage and devastation to the province. It left thousands of families homeless, destroyed agricultural lands and disrupted people’s economic activities. A considerable number of these families are still staying in either designated transit areas and or makeshift houses while those who managed to return to their homes are still struggling with the day-today concerns of restoring their houses and ways of living. Generally, this research was intended to raise awareness, generate sympathy and action among various stakeholders in improving the situations of the families living in tents, makeshifts and even those accommodated by host families through making private or public lands and buildings available for transit use. The research is a 26-minutes video production which showcases the plight of the Albayanos after typhoon Reming; particularly, the internally displaced persons who are still living in tents, evacuation centers, shanties encroaching upon residential areas, and those residing with host families or in unsafe zones. Through the collaborative effort between and among Local Government Units (LGUs) and Non- Government Organizations (NGOs), greater awareness, sympathy and involvement in the lives of the displaced individuals and families have generated both public and private lands and buildings which have been made available for transit use until permanent relocation sites can be provided by the local governments to said victims.