Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: To be granted asylum in the United States under current immigration law, one must meet the requirements that such person must be outside of its country of origin, experience past persecution or have well-founded fear of future persecution, and such persecution must be on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

In Xiaodong Li v. Gonzales, the Fifth Circuit faced a difficult question whether Chinese government's investigation and prosecution of Mr. Li’s "illegal" religious activities constitute persecution on account of religion. For organizing unregistered house church and holding underground Christian gatherings, Mr. Li, a Chinese Christian, was arrested, beaten, detained, deprived of his job, forced to clean public toilets without pay and faced prosecution with potentially years of imprisonment. The court originally ruled against Mr. Li but later vacated the decision after the administrative branch withdrew its petition to the Board of Immigration Appeals under heavy protest from several religious groups and human rights advocacy organizations.

Although Fifth Circuits vacated its earlier decision based on procedural reasons, the troubling question whether certain government activities constitute legitimate investigation and prosecution rather than persecutions on protected grounds remain. This article will argue that the Fifth Circuit should have ruled in favor of Mr. Li on the substantive issue whether the government’s investigation and prosecution constitute persecution on account of religion and how the court could have seize the opportunity to set rule on differentiating legitimate prosecution from religious persecution for future asylum cases.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Using survey data, we examine the impact of Bush administration's strategies, particularly the appointment of Alberto Gonzales to the Attorney General post, in garnering Latino support.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In recent years, several valuable analyses of the roles of U.S. Supreme Court clerks have furthered political science’s understanding of these important quasi-judicial actors. This paper applies the institutional insights provided by these works to a case study of the controversial fourth section of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007). The study considers whether both the theory and content of this section were largely the work of one of the crop of clerks who worked for the Justice during the October ’06 Term.
Justice Kennedy’s vote and his authorship of the majority opinion were unsurprising. However, the content of the controversial Section IV might be considered unexpected; its paternalistic approach to abortion rights is inconsistent with the otherwise libertarian arguments that he has employed in previous abortion cases (this part of the paper draws on my forthcoming book about Kennedy’s jurisprudence). I hypothesize that this might be explained by the presence, within the quartet of Kennedy’s clerks, of an individual who successfully wrote these particular views into the Justice’s opinion.
At the end of the day, the name on the opinion in Carhart is Kennedy’s. He bears the public burden of shouldering responsibility for the opinion’s content. However, recent studies have told us never to underestimate the importance of the men and women who clerk for members of the U.S. Supreme Court. In order to understand Section IV, might we have to accept that it is a good example of clerkish control?

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: The United States Supreme Court recently ruled that the Bush Administration’s “Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act” was constitutional. The Court’s ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart, upheld an abortion restriction for the very first time without an exemption to safeguard women’s health. This paper examines the rhetoric of the Court’s majority opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart and specifically investigates the constructs of Woman, Personhood, and Medicine to reveal an ideology of paternalism at the core of the opinion. This analysis demonstrates that the “Doctor Knows Best” paradigm endorsed through the rhetoric of Roe v. Wade continues to provide rhetorical warrants for the restriction of women’s reproductive rights. Ultimately, the lessons of this study inform our understandings of the contemporary abortion rights struggle, the role of the United States Supreme Court as a rhetorical institution, and the rhetorical history of gender and sex politics in the United States.