ARTICLE II AND ANTIDISCRIMINATION NORMS

• Published in: Michigan law review Vol. 118; no. 1; pp. 47 - 115
• Main Author: Huq, Aziz Z.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ann Arbor Michigan Law Review Association 01.10.2019
• Subjects: Administrative discretion; Analysis; Bans; Concentration camps; Constitutional law; Discrimination; Emigration and immigration law; Executive power; Fitzgerald, F Scott (1896-1940); Functionalism (Social sciences); History; Immigration policy; Japanese Americans; Joint products; Jurisprudence; Law and legislation; Laws, regulations and rules; Muslims; Political aspects; Prevention; Race discrimination; Reconciliation; Religious discrimination; Remedies; Supreme Court decisions; Travel; Trump, Donald J; U.S. states; World War II; UNITED STATES; Hawaii; United States > US
• ISSN: 0026-2234; 1939-8557
• DOI: 10.36644/mlr.118.1.article

The Supreme Court's opinion in Trump v. Hawaii validated a prohibition on entry to the United States from several Muslim-majority countries and at the same time repudiated a longstanding precedent associated with the Japanese American internment of World War II. This Article closely analyzes the relationship of these twin rulings. It uses their dichotomous valences as a lens on the legal scope for discriminatory action by the federal executive. Parsing the various ways in which the internment of the 1940s and the 2017 exclusion order can be reconciledy the Article identifies a tension between the Court's two holdings in Trump v. Hawaii. Contrary to the Court's apparent assumption, the internment cannot easily be rejected if the 2017 travel ban is embraced. There is no analytically defensible and practicably tractable boundary between the two. Recognizing this disjunction and explaining why the Court's effort to separate past from present practice cannot prevail, I argue, reveals what might be called an "Article II discretion to discriminate." By identifying and mapping this form of executive discretion, the Article offers a critique of the Court's recent construction of executive power in light of historical precedent and consequentialist justifications. It further illuminates downstream distributive and regulatory consequences of executive power in the context of ongoing judicial constriction of Article II discretion over regulatory choices.