⚖️🗽JENNIFER DOHERTY @ LAW360 ANALYZES JUDGE ILLSTON’S  MASSIVE TAKEDOWN OF EOIR’S ANTI-DUE-PROCESS REGULATIONS — I Speak Out On Why Judge Garland Needs To Pull Plug On The EOIR Clown Show 🤡 Sooner, Rather Than Later! — PLUS, BONUS COVERAGE: My “Open Letter” To Judge Garland!

 

Jennifer Doherty
Jennifer Doherty
Reporter
Law 360
Photo: Twitter

https://www.law360.com/articles/1363797

Here’ what I had to say to Jennifer:

. . ..

Retired Immigration Judge Paul Wickham Schmidt, a former chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals who was also general counsel to the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the time of the EOIR’s creation, likewise praised Judge Illston’s order in an interview with Law360 Thursday.

Judge Schmidt, a vocal opponent of the Trump administration’s management of the EOIR, characterized the rule as part of a larger effort to discourage immigrants by stacking the courts against them, rather than a good-faith effort to reduce ballooning backlogs.

“When your docket is 1.3 million, it’s not the fact that someone is getting a few extra days in a continuance, it’s the fact that DHS is adding more cases,” he said.

As for whether the DOJ under President Joe Biden would continue defending the rule — as it is for one of the Trump-era asylum rules — Judge Schmidt said it was hard to say. But newly confirmed Attorney General Merrick Garland should prioritize changing the EOIR, as he stated his mission would be to restore nonpartisanship and defense of civil rights as pillars of the department, the judge said.

“If Garland wants to straighten out the Department of Justice, he’s got to straighten out EOIR. EOIR is a living refutation of everything Garland says he stands for,” Judge Schmidt told Law360.

Representatives for the DOJ did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

The immigrant advocates are represented by Jingni (Jenny) Zhao, Anoop Prasad and Glenn Michael Katon of Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus, Seferina Young Berch, Stephen Chang, Naomi Ariel Igra, Michael O McGuinness, Scott T. Nonaka and Irene Inkyu Yang of Sidley Austin LLP, and Judah Ben Lakin and Amalia Margarete Wille of Lakin & Wille LLP.

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Thankfully, Jennifer is operating “outside the paywall” on this particular article. So, all of you can get full access to her outstanding reporting on this case at the above link.

Dear Judge Garland:

Congratulations again and best wishes on your recent appointment as our Attorney General. I write to beg you, as a former DOJ colleague, Senior Executive, and administrative judge to deal immediately with a festering problem undermining the entire U.S. Justice system that is unfolding right under your nose, whether or not you have had time to focus on it.

A number of the individuals and organizations whose help you will need to fix EOIR and achieve equal justice for all in America are instead having their time and precious resources diverted to defending our justice system and the Constitution from absurdly illegal and obscenely counterproductive decisions and actions now being taken in YOUR NAME, such as the illegal EOIR regulations in this case. Indeed, these regulations and many other travesties still being pursued by EOIR at the behest of the former regime should have been on the chopping block long before you were even sworn in.

Not only are you now squandering Executive Branch and private sector resources that could better be devoted to solving problems, you are also wasting the time and trying the patience of thoughtful Federal Judges like U.S. District Judge Susan Illston. Certainly, as a former highly admired and respected Federal Judge, you know the value of judicial time in our system.

Additionally, failure to take immediate steps to end the dysfunction, disorder, and nonsense still streaming from EOIR on a daily basis is not only destroying vulnerable human lives, but also costing you goodwill with the very NGOs and talented, dedicated, often pro bono advocates whose assistance and support will be absolutely necessary for you to succeed in your stated objectives of returning integrity to the DOJ, eradicating institutionalized racism, and finally, finally achieving long overdue equal justice under law for all in America.

As I told Jennifer, EOIR is a “living contradiction” of everything you said in your confirmation hearing. It’s also a repudiation of the values that I have always seen and respected in you, even if mostly from afar.

I beseech you to “pull the plug” on today’s EOIR and put someone in there who can start getting it back on track: A “Due Process/Human Rights/Immigration Guru,” if you will. In terms to which we both can relate, you must find a judicial leader in the image of our late great colleague from the Carter DOJ, and your former colleague on the D.C. Circuit, Judge Patricia M. Wald. As we both know, she was was brilliant, energetic, yet highly practical, well-organized, and unswervingly committed to realizing social justice on both the national and eventually international stages. 

Put someone who can run a real due-process-oriented court system in charge of the EOIR mess and let ‘er rip. You can cement your legacy to American Justice by achieving EOIR’s once noble, now discarded, vision that many of us who once served there established to guide our actions: “Through teamwork and innovation, be the world’s best tribunals guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.”

With my very best wishes for your continued success,

Your former DOJ colleague from decades past,

Paul 

 

A LIFE WELL LIVED: R.I.P. JUDGE PATRICIA WALD 1928 – 2019 — “The truth is that life does change and the law must adapt to that inevitability.” — Rev. Bob Jones Once Called Her An “instrument of the devil.” — Can It Get Any Better Than That?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/patricia-wald-pathbreaking-federal-judge-who-became-chief-of-dc-circuit-dies-at-90/2019/01/12/6ab03904-1688-11e9-803c-4ef28312c8b9_story.html

Patricia Wald, pathbreaking federal judge who became chief of D.C. Circuit, dies at 90


President Barack Obama awards Judge Patricia Wald the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. (Evan Vucci/AP)

January 12 at 12:10 PM

Shortly before she graduated from Yale Law School in 1951, Patricia Wald secured a job interview with a white-shoe firm in Manhattan. The hiring partner was impressed with her credentials — she was one of two women on the law review — but lamented her timing.

“It’s really a shame,” she recalled the man saying. “If only you could have been here last week.” A woman had been hired then, she was told, and it would be a long time before the firm considered bringing another on board.

Gradually, working nights and weekends while raising five children, she built a career in Washington as an authority on bail reform and family law. Working for a pro bono legal services group and an early public-interest law firm, she won cases that broadened protections for society’s most vulnerable, including indigent women and children with special needs.

She became an assistant attorney general under President Jimmy Carter, who in 1979 appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — often described as the country’s most important bench after the U.S. Supreme Court. She was the first woman to serve on the D.C. Circuit and was its chief judge from 1986 to 1991. Later, she was a member of the United Nations tribunal on war crimes and genocide in the former Yugoslavia.

Judge Wald, whom Barack Obama called “one of the most respected appellate judges of her generation” when he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, died Jan. 12 at her home in Washington. She was 90.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said a son, Douglas Wald.


Judge Patricia Wald in 1999. (Michael Williamson/The Washington Post)
More than 800 opinions

On the D.C. Circuit, Judge Wald served on three-member panels that decided some of the most complicated legal disputes on the federal docket. She wrote more than 800 opinions during her tenure — many on technical matters involving separation of powers, administrative law and the environment — and she counted herself among the more liberal jurists, viewing the law as a tool to achieve social progress.

At the time, demonstrators regularly gathered outside the South African Embassy to shame the apartheid regime and outside the Nicaraguan and Soviet embassies to call attention to human rights violations. (The case was brought by conservative activists protesting Nicaragua’s radical left-wing Sandinista regime and the treatment of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov.)

Writing for the majority, Judge Robert H. Bork cited the obligation of the United States to uphold the “dignity” of foreign governments. Judge Wald responded that the ruling “gouges out an enormously important category of political speech from First Amendment protection.”

Judge Wald played a small role in a long-running, high-profile case involving the Justice Department’s effort to break up the software giant Microsoft on the grounds of anti-competitive practices.

She dissented in 1998, when the court ruled that the company had not violated a consent decree regarding Microsoft’s bundling of its Internet browser with its Windows 95 operating system. She concurred with the government’s argument that bundling gave the software company’s browser an unfair advantage and could be financially harmful to competitors. (Microsoft and the Justice Department reached a settlement in 2002.)

In 1997, she delivered a unanimous opinion in a case growing out of a corruption probe involving Mike Espy, who served as agriculture secretary under President Bill Clinton and was accused of accepting illegal gifts. In her opinion, one of the most cited executive-privilege cases since the Watergate era, Judge Wald broadened the scope of executive privilege to include the president’s senior advisers while noting that it was “not absolute” and could not be claimed in all circumstances.

In a speech at Yale in 1988, she likened judges on the appeals court to “monks or conjugal partners locked into a compulsory and often uneasy collegiality. . . . I constantly watch my colleagues in an effort to discern what it takes to be a good appellate judge: alertness, sensitivity to the needs of the system and one’s colleagues, raw energy, unselfishness, a healthy sense of history, some humility, a lively interest in the world outside the courthouse and what makes it tick.”

Summer jobs at the factory

Patricia Ann McGowan was born in the factory town of Torrington, Conn., on Sept. 16, 1928. She was 2 when her father, whom she called an alcoholic, abandoned the family. Her mother raised her with the help of relatives. They all worked at Torrington Co., which produced sewing and surgical needles and, during World War II, ball bearings.

She remembered working summers, as a teenager, at the factory, “up to my arms in ball-bearing grease.” The drudgery and her encounters with union activists sparked her interest in labor law.

In 1952, she married a Yale classmate, Robert L. Wald. After a stint clerking for a federal judge and working as an associate in a Washington law firm, she shifted her attention to her family for the next decade.

She did legal research projects on the side, collaborating with Daniel J. Freed, a Yale classmate and Justice Department lawyer, on “Bail in the United States — 1964,” a book credited with spurring the Bail Reform Act of 1966. That landmark legislation upended the bail system, which had left poor defendants little choice but to languish in jail before trial, by allowing defendants to be released without bond in certain noncapital cases. (The act was later watered down by preventive-detention laws.)

Judge Wald led a team that successfully argued in 1970 before the D.C. Circuit federal appeals court that the financial barrier was effectively an unconstitutional denial of access to the courts.

Judge Wald’s subsequent work for the Center for Law and Social Policy, a public-interest law firm, led to one of the first court decisions requiring that school districts provide an adequate education to the mentally and physically disabled.

Sen. Gordon J. Humphrey (R-N.H.), citing an article she had written on the legal rights of children to seek without parental approval medical and psychiatric attention in extreme cases, accused her of being “anti-family.” Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Bob Jones III, a fundamentalist preacher and president of Bob Jones University in South Carolina, called her an “instrument of the devil.”

Judge Wald liked to recall that a reporter approached her son Thomas, then in high school, for his reaction to his mother being called a minion of Lucifer. “Well, she burns the lamb chops,” Thomas replied, “but otherwise she’s okay.”

Her husband, who became a prominent Washington antitrust lawyer in private practice, died in 2010. Survivors include their children, Sarah Wald of Belmont, Mass., Douglas Wald of Bethesda, Md., Johanna Wald of Dedham, Mass., Frederica Wald of New York and Thomas Wald of Denver; 10 grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

Judge Wald was a former vice president of the American Law Institute, an organization of legal professionals. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, she participated in American Bar Association efforts to assist structural changes to the legal systems of former communist nations in Eastern Europe.

In 1999, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan named her one of 14 judges, from as many countries, to serve on the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague.

She sat for two years on the now-defunct criminal court and was on the panel of judges that in 2001 convicted former Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic, the first person found guilty of genocide by the tribunal. The tribunal sentenced Krstic to 46 years in prison for his role in the slaughter of thousands of Muslim men and boys near Srebrenica in 1995. An appeals court later reduced the sentence to 35 years.

Judge Wald brought what the New York Times called a refreshing lack of pomp to the tribunal, often running down documents herself, instead of dispatching clerks to fetch them, leaving her office door open for visitors and taking her meals in a canteen where judges were seldom spotted.

She sat on many blue-ribbon panels and commissions. But she said she took particular pride in her role in an appellate decision involving a Naval Academy honor student, Joseph Steffan, who had been expelled because he was openly gay.

Judge Wald was part of the three-judge panel that unanimously ruled in 1993 that the armed forces could not make sexual orientation the sole criterion for expulsion. The Justice Department then asked for a rehearing by the full D.C. Circuit court, which in a 7-to-3 ruling — with Judge Wald dissenting — rejected Steffan’s readmission.

“You always have a sad feeling when you write a dissent because it means you lost,” Judge Wald said in an interview with a D.C. Bar publication. “But you write them because you have faith that maybe they will play out at some time in the future, and because of the integrity you owe to yourself. There are times when you need to stand up and say, ‘I can’t be associated with this point of view.’ That was certainly the way I felt in the gay midshipman case.”

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I knew Judge Wald back in the Carter Administration when she was the Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs at the DOJ and I was the Deputy General Counsel of the “Legacy INS.” I was working for then General Counsel David Crosland, now Judge Crosland of the Baltimore Immigration Court. Part of my “portfolio” was the INS Legislative Program. Judge Wald’s “right hand man” on immigration legislation was my friend the late Jack Perkins who later went on to a distinguished career as a Senior Executive at EOIR.
I remember Judge Wald as wise, courteous, congenial, humane, practical, and supportive.  She was also a long-time friend of the late former EOIR Director Kevin D. Rooney who was then the Assistant Attorney General for Administration.
My favorite Judge Wald quote from this obit was the last one:
“You always have a sad feeling when you write a dissent because it means you lost,” Judge Wald said in an interview with a D.C. Bar publication. “But you write them because you have faith that maybe they will play out at some time in the future, and because of the integrity you owe to yourself. There are times when you need to stand up and say, ‘I can’t be associated with this point of view.’ That was certainly the way I felt in the gay midshipman case.”
Yup, I can certainly relate to that.
R.I.P. Judge Wald.
PWS
01-13-19