The Constitutionality of Arizona SB 1070 and Other State Immigration Laws
Edward L. Barrett Jr. Chair of Law, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law, and Director of Clinical Legal Education at the University of California Davis School of Law
Regents' Professor, Milton O. Riepe Chair in Constitutional Law, and Dean Emerita, The University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law
Dean & Ralph W. Bilby Professor of Law, The University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law
ACS is pleased to distribute “The Constitutionality of Arizona SB 1070 and Other State Immigration Laws,” an Issue Brief by University of Arizona Rogers College of Law Professors Gabriel J. Chin, Toni M. Massaro and Marc L. Miller.
In their Issue Brief, Professors Chin, Massaro and Miller discuss the debate over the highly publicized Arizona SB 1070 and similar state laws that seek to address the significant policy challenges posed by undocumented immigration by attempting to achieve “attrition through enforcement.” In particular, the Issue Brief addresses the question of whether such state laws are preempted by federal law and argues that the “mirror image” theory underlying these new state criminal laws, which contends that so long as state laws mirror federal law they are constitutional, reflects a basic categorical error: the difference between the power to arrest on one hand, and the power to legislate and punish, on the other.
The Issue Brief also illuminates the question of to what extent SB 1070 and similar state laws permit racial profiling, and concludes that such profiling “is not merely incipient in the statute (and proposed copycats in Florida, Michigan, Rhode Island and South Carolina), it is expressly authorized.”
Read the full Issue Brief here: The Constitutionality of Arizona SB 1070 and Other State Immigration Laws