Within-race variations in sentencing outcomes: Nationality and punishment among Asians in United States federal courts

There is robust evidence that Asians are not treated differently from Whites and receive greater leniency than Blacks and Hispanics in criminal punishment. Some research findings even suggest that Asians receive the most favorable sentencing outcomes among all racial/ethnic groups. This line of research, however, has not paid attention to Asian nationality groups. Particularly, it is unclear whether there is within-race variation among offenders from different Asian countries. Using the data compiled by the United States Sentencing Commission to examine whether and how an Asian's nationality affects criminal punishment, this study focuses on sentences imposed on offenders who are Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Korean, Pakistani, and Vietnamese nationals. Results from logistic, ordinary least squares, and Tobit regression analyses indicate that with legal and extralegal factors held constant, Asians of different nationalities face varying odds of incarceration or downward departures, and they receive dissimilar sentence lengths.

Assessing President Obama's Appointment of Women to the Federal Appellate Courts

A major legacy of the Obama presidency was the mark he left on the federal courts with respect to increasing judicial diversity. In particular, President Obama's appointments of women to the federal judiciary exceeded all previous presidents in terms of both absolute numbers and as a share of all judges; he also appointed a record-setting number of women of color to the lower federal courts. In this Article, I take an intersectional approach to exploring variation in the professional backgrounds, qualifications, and Senate confirmation experiences of Obama's female appeals court appointees, comparing them with George W. Bush and Bill Clinton appointees. These data reveal that women of color appointed by Obama differ from both white women and minority men in terms of ABA ratings, the types of professional experiences they bring with them, and whether they were confirmed by a roll call vote.

Umpiring and Gerrymandering

In the United States, the growth of judicial power started as a way to curb over-reaching, sometimes corrupt, state legislatures and manifested itself in allowing the judicial branch, as opposed to the other branches, to resolve more disputes over contracts, property, debts, and other distinctly nineteenth-century problems. For the last seventy-five years or so, however, something else has propelled its influence: the growth of constitutional review at the federal level, the power to invalidate state and federal civil laws and executive branch actions as well as state and federal criminal prosecutions. This chapter discusses what has become an acutely American dilemma, a fear that the courts will do too little in enforcing constitutional rights and a fear they will do too much. It considers the problems posed in each direction and the risks of politicizing the federal courts if they become the exclusive source of identifying constitutional individual and structural rights.

Epilogue

When it comes to the who-decides questions at the local level, the states have been versatile over time, developing more and more democratic answers. At the national level, the country remains largely fixed in an eighteenth-century republican form of government, one that remains non-democratic in many ways. Are there ways in which these two different approaches to government can complement each other? The conviction of this book is that American constitutional structure cannot be understood without appreciating how the national and state governments handle it. The hope is that a greater appreciation of American federalism offers ways to improve the functioning of each side. The epilogue addresses the gap between the increasingly democratic state governments and non-democratic federal government, the role of the state and federal courts in addressing change, and the structural values of federalism and localism in creating stable and lasting change.

Authority to Decide

To realise that there is no Court in Australia with unlimited jurisdiction is at one stroke to recognise the continuing importance of Justice Leeming’s standard work, and the relevance of this second edition. The ‘autochthonous expedient’, as Sir Owen Dixon named it, has much to answer for: it leads inexorably to a bifurcated system of state and federal courts, which has many toils and snares for the unwary. To compound the problem, the state courts enjoy a large amount of ‘invested’ federal jurisdiction, which means that on many occasions they exercise it without appreciating the fact that they have done so.

Emerging Cryptocurrencies and IRS Summons Power: Striking the Proper Balance between IRS Audit Authority and Taxpayer Privacy

To protect the privacy and other civil liberties of its citizens, federal courts place limits on the power and actions of government. These limits create a need for balance between the IRS’s mission of tax law enforcement and taxpayers’ privacy rights. A much-watched contemporary lower court case intersecting cryptocurrencies, summons power, and taxpayer privacy is Coinbase v. U.S. There, the IRS sought to summons massive amounts of customer information from Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange platform. This article examines the history of the IRS summons power and argues that the Coinbase court correctly extended a wealth of summons enforcement case law by weighing the protection of taxpayer privacy with the tax compliance mission of the IRS. By allowing the IRS summons to stand, but limiting and defining the scope of relevant records allowed to be examined, the Coinbase court correctly balanced IRS tax enforcement with taxpayer data privacy.

The Geography of Law: Understanding the Origin of State and Federal Redistricting Cases

Knowing where legal complaints arise can tell us something about them and reveal clues about their conditions of origin. In this paper, we examine the geographic origins of litigation challenging the boundaries of electoral districts—an increasingly salient and prominent source of political conflict. We construct an original dataset of all redistricting cases in state and federal courts nationwide, from 1960 to 2019. We show that redistricting litigation surfaces not just in states where there are regions undergoing rapid population change or that have a greater proportion of aggrieved racial minority groups but also in areas where there is close partisan competition. The filing of redistricting litigation is highly responsive to hypercompetitive political environments, suggesting that parties pursue judicial intervention vigorously when political power hangs in the balance and not simply due to demographic changes associated with decennial population measurement. These findings have important implications for understanding the temporal and spatial dynamics of redistricting politics and the consequences of intense partisan electoral competition in the United States.

Private Securities Litigation

This chapter focuses on the erratic and unacceptable private securities litigation framework that prevails in the United States. The litigation structure contained in the federal securities acts was based on a different era and is not suitable for today’s securities markets. Although federal legislation has been enacted to address perceived shortcomings on an episodic basis, significant gaps and inconsistencies exist. Likewise, the federal courts, faced with a fractured statutory regimen, frequently have construed the remedial provisions in a wooden and unduly restrictive manner. The consequence of these congressional and judicial actions is a disparate liability framework that lacks sound logic, consistency, and even-handed treatment for plaintiffs and defendants alike. This chapter provides several examples of the inconsistencies and disparate treatment that prevail under the federal securities laws. Thereafter, recommendations for corrective measures are proffered. These proposals, if adopted and effectively implemented, should instill a substantially greater degree of certainty, uniformity, and equity than currently exists.