Useful Latin Legal Phrases

• Ignorantia legis neminem excusat. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
• Per stirpes. By the roots. (Intestate successions system that passes deceased heirs' share down the family tree.)
• Ultra vires. Outside power. (unauthorized and therefore illegal.)

Professor Susan Pollvogt's tips for legal essay questions

1. When reading prompts/packets, read the law before the facts, to enhance issue spotting.
2. For application sentences, use rule statements, and replace the general terms with specific facts.
1. (If you get the comment "too conclusory" on your test, you are probably not structuring your application statements correctly.)
3. Professors' answer sheets (point sheets) contain statements that get a certain number of points if included. Every statement on the point sheet is a rule statement, application statement, or conclusion statement.

Colorado Law

Property

• Adverse possession
• Concurrent ownership
• Authority: C.R.S. § 38-31-101
• Presumption:
• Usually tenancy in common
• For transfer to two fiduciaries, joint tenancy
• Joint tenancy
• Creation: "jointly," "joint tenancy," "JTWROS" Joint tenant with right of survivorship
• In real property: only for natural persons, unless it's to fiduciaries
• Destruction: A person can unilaterally make his share "in common," but if there are two or more remaining joint tenants, their in common share will be joint among themselves.
• Unities:
• Equality of interest presumed but not required
• Unities of interest required except where modified by this statute

Torts

• Landowner's liability
• Authority: C.R.S. § 13-21-115
• Trespassers: willful and deliberate
• Licensees:
• Reasonable care for known dangers created by landowners
• Reasonable care for known unusual dangers
• Invitees:
• Reasonable care in protecting against dangers that reasonably should be known
• For agricultural or vacant land: reasonable care for known dangers

Scope of 14th Amendment

• Federal Rights Only
• Slaughterhouse Cases
• Miller, S. Ct. 1873
• Facts: To fight cholera outbreaks, New Orleans passed a law giving monopoly on slaughterhouse activities to the company Crescent City. Slaughterhouses sued for their 14 amendment "privileges and immunities."
• Holding: The "privileges and immunities" clause only covers Federally-guaranteed rights, not state-guaranteed rights.
• Only State Actors
• Civil Rights Cases (1883) (only state actors)
• All state actors (incorporation)
• Incorporated provisions
• Unincorporated provisions
• 3rd Amendment (quartering)
• 5th Amend. Grand jury clause
• 7th Amendment (jury trial)
• 8th Amendment, all except "cruel and unusual"

Lunch Seminar - Razing Arizona: Critique of Immigration Enforcement Regimes

17 Feb 2011

• Intro
• Arizona's SB90
• Gov Ritter contemplated signing on to Secure Communities, which is a program that includes law enforcement sharing fingerprints with ICE
• Chris Newman (DU grad)
• World magazine calls a certain trend the "Arizonification of America"
• Arizona has emerged as a metaphor and shaper of the larger debate of America's identity crisis
• What's happening in Arizona raises a number of questions that go beyond headlines
• Who is the "we" of the US?
• What do we want to do, as a country, with those who are here illegally?
• One pole: Making them citizens
• The other pole: Deportation and even affirmative punishment (This is Arizona's stance, and a departure from past policy)
• What is the role of police and law enforcement in enforcing and shaping imm. law?
• What rights are sacrificed?
• What social movement will emerge to counter this rising nativist movement?
• My goal: A nationalist conception of America
• Tangent: a bill has been introduced to make AZ the only state in the country to outlaw day laborer centers
• Day laborers are the protagonists in this struggle.
• "The irony of day laborers is that they embody the American dream, and yet they are widely abused and despised in the name of the American dream." ~Author of Fast Food Nation
• First principles
• We're a nation of immigrants, with three groups of people
• Illegal immigrants
• Native Americans
• African Americans
• The point: immigration laws are mutable
• "Illegal immigrant" is a racist, deprecating term. Only actions are illegal
• The term originated in the law that restricted Chinese immigration
• We need to expand what is an appropriate notion of nationalism, for us
• Other countries have bloodlines
• American nationalism is "an imagined community"—common ideals
• We are a nation of unauthorized immigrants who have certain ideals, one of which is to eliminate borders
• (We like tearing down borders for commerce, but not for people)
• The good news: consensus that our immigration laws need reform
• The bad news: it's unlikely that we'll pass reform law soon
• There's a vacuum, and states have entered into it.
• There's a growth of a nativist movement, foreshadowing the tea party.
• There's concern about the inevitable emergence of a nonwhite majority.
• Three goals:
• Policy of attrition
• Laser fence at the border
• Limit to the number of people entering
• The other side of the debate
• Burdened by complexity
• How to regulate immigration?
• No rational discussion possible in DC
• Efforts like those of AZ have poisoned rational discussion
• There is an intersection of the "is" and the "ought" in law—of politics and legislation
• Alfredo Gutieras (from Arizona, founder of a firm)
• You don't want to become Arizonan—Arizona is becoming a word for hate and evil, for what Mississippi once was.
• Hate is contagious.
• Arizona
• Comes to be in 1848, when only White men were citizens
• Arizona was Confederate
• Mexicans were Mistisos, Indians, Mulatos... Not white
• People say "we hate illegal immigrants, not immigrants." Actually, Arizonans hate Mexicans, and have since the state's beginning.
• 1932 repatriation begins
• It's supposed to be aimed at immigrants
• Actually it's just aimed at Mexicans
• Historians say 30% of the people deported were citizens
• "Voluntary departure" is never voluntary. In '32 it was at the point of a gun. Now it's often for people who contract to leave after being in prison for months.
• Operation Wetback
• Forcing out Mexicans who had come in to help harvest vegetables
• Ended in an international scandal
• The program (brosero?) preceding it managed to bring in 4million people
• Question: "What part of illegal don't you understand?" Answer: "What part of complicit don't you understand?"
• The seller act (?) in the 60s, quotas from other countries were done away with, but
• Quotas were imposed on Mexicans/Western Hemisphere
• That created an artificial illegal immigrant crisis
• Operation gatekeeper: A set of operations, started in the Clinton administration, trying to stop Immigration from flowing through the normal routes, and t force it into the AZ desert—the idea being that no one would be crazy enough to cross the desert.
• What that proved, is that the govt never understood what propels immigration in this country, and don't undertand the connection between Mexicans on both sides of the border.
• Ronald Hampton (director of an institute; black, active in AZ politics)
• As a police officer, I found that you cannot protect a community that will not talk to you.
• I worked a foot beat in DC for 20 yrs
• To be successful in crime prevention, you need to have a relationship with the community
• "Secure communities" would have brought a lot of harm to Washington DC. That would have been a disaster, and we defeated it.
• You can't do your job if you're alienating the people you're trying to serve
• ICE-police collaboration damages the already-fragile relationship of trust at the core of the police's ability to protect the commnity.
• Janett Visgierra (from Mexico, in CO for 13 yrs; small business owner; impacted by immigration law)
• I'd like to continue talking about the relationship of the police and the community
• We just moved to Aurora, from Denver, for diversity
• Aurora
• has a lot of unjustified arrests
• We're trying to break the connection between police and immigration
• We're working with the police—they've showed us their curriculum for training, and they've admitted they don't have the training to play a role in immigration
• Also, they don't want to play a role in immigration
• These bills break up family and community unity, breaking trust with the police
• I'm currently in the process of deportation, even though I have three children born in the US, because of a simple traffic violation
• These laws put children and families at risk, and damage them psychologically
• People are afraid to talk to the police, to even go outside and run errands
• People blame immigrants
• I've been here 14 years and I've paid taxes, hired and trained Americans, and never received any public benefits. We give to communities, not take from them.
• We don't need any more anti-immigration laws here in Colorado
• Look at your own family tree—we're almost all immigrants!
• Immigration has always existed, and it's not going to stop because of laws.
• We need to all work together to fight common problems, not divide.
• Laws cost money.
• Questions and Answers
• Q: Have you dealt with White Nationalists [Look this up.]?
• A: White supremacy often does enter into the discussion in AZ. Known Neonazis have public marches there. Documented reports of racial profiling acknowledged and accepted even in Congress as a price of securing borders.

Old Common Law Pleadings

• Property
• Personal property
• Replevin: return
• Trover: damages
• Real property
• Ejectment: return of property
• Trespass: damages

• (Contracts)
• Assumpsit
• Debt (?)
• (Torts)
• Trespass
• Trespass on the case
• Conversion (over property)
• Trover (damages for wrongful taking)
• Replevin (creditor’s right for unlawful withholding)
• Nuisance (?)

Prominent Americans on the Finality of Judicial Review

Thomas Jefferson: Letter to Spenser Roane, Sept 6, 1819
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=2192
"My construction of the constitution is very different from that you quote. It is that each department is truly independent of the others, and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution in the cases submitted to its action; and especially, where it is to act ultimately and without appeal. I will explain myself by examples, which, having occurred while I was in office, are better known to me, and the principles which governed them."

Andrew Jackson: Veto of National Bank Bill
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=64
"It is maintained by the advocates of the bank that its constitutionality in all its features ought to be considered as settled by precedent and by the decision of the Supreme Court. To this conclusion I can not assent. Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority, and should not be regarded as deciding questions of constitutional power except where the acquiescence of the people and the States can be considered as well settled.... The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others."

Abraham Lincoln: First Inaugural Address
http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html
"I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government.... [T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."