Harvard Law & Policy Review

Michael Stephan  Last week, the Ninth Circuit reversed an immigration court decision that denied political asylum to a Chinese immigrant who claimed to have been persecuted in China for practicing Christianity.  The immigrant, Lei Li, was initially denied asylum relief because the Immigration Judge found Li’s story of persecution to be not credible.  The reason for the IJ’s adverse credibility finding: Li thought that Thanksgiving was a Christian holiday. The IJ, believing Thanksgiving to …

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Jay Willis In the wake of November’s midterm elections, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) was appointed this past January as Chair of the House Subcommittee on Higher Education, Lifelong Learning, and Competitiveness.  She takes over from Congressman Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX), who chaired the subcommittee during the 111th Congress. Though she is undoubtedly qualified to chair the committee, some of her recent comments indicate that she may pose serious resistance to the President’s educational …

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Yevgeny Shrago  I visited Washington, D.C. last weekend and walked around the rapidly gentrifying Columbia Heights neighborhood. While admiring the fantastic looking old houses and the shiny new development, I noticed dozens of abandoned houses dotting the streets.  These weren’t houses in the process of being gutted and rebuilt.  They were simply boarded up and vacant. With the way property values have shot up in that area since the D.C.’s metro put in the Green Line ten years ago, I was …

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Smita Ghosh On Jan. 22, members of the board of the North Carolina State Board of Community Colleges voted unanimously to give school officials the discretion to refuse to admit “threatening” students.  Members say that the rule, which allows colleges to deny admission to students who present an “articulable, imminent and significant threat” to others, has been on the table since the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech. The rule, which could go into effect in several months if it is approved by the …

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Anthony Kammer Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer was a good book and one that should be getting far more attention. Their thesis is that American inequality is at its base political—that is, inequality is not the result of rational market forces but is the byproduct of legislation lobbied for by organized industry insiders at the expense of an uniformed public. While people on the left have been making this point for some time, Hacker …

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Yevgeny Shrago  The wave of Tea Party victories in the last election cycle means renewed promises of closing the deficit with vague promises of future spending cuts. The inability of Tea Party governments on the state and local levels to fund deficits with cheap money means that it should be possible to observe what sorts of “unnecessary” government services the newly elected Tea Party candidates and other conservative “deficit hawks” would cut on the national level if (when?) the cheap credit …

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