Skip to content
LPBN-Icon-v1
ImmigrationProf Blog
A Member of the Law Professor Blogs Network

Guest Column: Cappy White on Judge Posner and Immigration

By immigrationprof

White2 Carter “Cappy” White, an experienced immigration and civil rights lawyers at UC Davis, has submitted this guest column:

Saturday’s CSpan Broadcast of “America and the Courts” features Seventh Circuit Posnerr Judge Richard Posner’s April speech on immigration to the Chicago Bar Association and is available here: http://www.c-span.org/Series/America-and-the-Courts.aspx [For a story from this blog about the speech, click here.]

Posner speaks of how interesting, complex, and difficult asylum cases are. He is critical of both the immigration bar and bench. He cites the disparities in asylum grants and the article, “Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication,” by Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Andrew I. Schoenholtz & Philip G. Schrag at 60 Stan. L. Rev. 295 (2007), available here: http://lawreview.stanford.edu/content/index.htm

Posner’s prescriptions to improve the system include increasing the size of the Board of Immigration Appeals to pre-Ashcroft levels, adding more immigration judges in order to decrease their workload, providing better training for immigration judges, and convening a nationwide conference of Court of Appeals judges to discuss why their adjudication of asylum claims is so uneven. Posner also would increase the number of immigration clinics at law schools, and makes special mention (at 20:00 to 21:30) of the quality work performed by the immigration clinic at Notre Dame.

KJ