Rutgers Law Review

Commentaries

DETRIMENTAL RELIANCE ON DETRIMENTAL RELIANCE: THE COURTS’ CONFLICTING STANDARDS FOR THE RETROACTIVE APPLICATION OF NEW IMMIGRATION LAWS TO PAST ACTS
Anjum Gupta

A decade ago, the United States Supreme Court held that a newly enacted law that attaches adverse immigration consequences to certain criminal convictions could not be retroactively applied in the case of an immigrant who was convicted of the offense pursuant to a guilty plea before enactment of the new law. Since then, the courts of appeals that have addressed the same issue in the context of an immigrant who was convicted at trial, rather than after a guilty plea, have done so with remarkable divergence. Some courts have held that, unlike immigrants who pled guilty, immigrants who went to trial cannot show that they detrimentally relied on the old law; accordingly, the new law may be applied retroactively. Other courts have rejected the detrimental reliance requirement. In this article, I argue that detrimental reliance, while properly viewed as a factor in retroactivity analysis, must not be viewed as a requirement for challenging the retroactive application of a new law to past acts.
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Symposium 2012:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965: Where Do We Go From Here?

Friday, April 13, 2012 | 9:15 am – 5:00 pm
The State House Annex, Trenton, New Jersey

Topics will include:

Protecting the Right to Vote: The Voting Rights Act a Half Century Later,
Where are We and What Challenges Remain

Protecting Access to the Polls While Protecting Against Voter Fraud:
Is Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act Working?

Protecting Minority Representation Through Redistricting under Section 2

Remembering The People and Practices Leading
to the Passage of the Voting Rights Act

The Voting Rights Act Half a Century Later: Where Do We Go From Here?

For a complete list of speakers or to register, click here. CLE credit available through Rutgers Institute of Professional Education.

Featured Articles: Volume 64, Issue 1

WHAT CONSERVATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION? MODERATING FIVE DEGREES OF JUDICIAL CONSERVATISM AFTER SIX YEARS OF THE ROBERTS COURT
Charles W. “Rocky” Rhodes

Recent headlines trumpet that the Roberts Court is “The Most Conservative Court in Decades.” Current and former Supreme Court Justices complain that precedents are being “dismantled” and lament that “[i]t is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.” The President and Democratic Senators decry the Court for allowing “powerful interests” to bankroll American elections, alleging that “the strike zone for corporations gets better every day.” Academics join the chorus as well, contending, in the words of Professor Laurence H. Tribe, that the Roberts Court has lost any “legitimate claim” of abiding “to an incremental and minimalist approach to constitutional adjudication, to a modest view of the judicial role vis-a-vis the political branches, or to a genuine concern with adherence to precedent.” Download PDF

RISK REGULATION AND REGULATORY LITIGATION
Patrick Luff

The appropriate scope of regulation has been a ubiquitous policy debate in the United States since the nation’s founding. For some time now, a unique phenomenon has been developing in the world of litigation—litigation has become a regulatory device as a result of courts more frequently issuing decisions with widespread regulatory effects. This use of the judiciary as a forum for regulatory policy developed partly through congressional design—the civil rights statutes, for example, were designed with private regulatory enforcement in mind6—and partly through necessity. Download PDF