Professor Chin Cited in Supreme Court Opinions in Immigration Case

Scholarship by Professor Gabriel "Jack" Chin is cited in both the majority and dissenting opinions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court in Chaidez v. United States on February 20.  In the case, the Court rejected the claim that the right of noncitizens to effective counsel regarding the immigration consequences of criminal conviction applied retroactively to convictions which were final before its 2010 ruling in Padilla v. Kentucky.  Padilla, which also cited Professor Chin, extended the Sixth Amendment right to effective counsel to include immigration consequences. 

Writing for a six-Justice majority in Chaidez, Justice Elena Kagan discussed Professor Chin's article, "Effective Assistance of Counsel and the Consequences of Guilty Pleas," co-authored with his former student Richard W. Holmes, Jr. of Fifth Third Bank and published in the Cornell Law Review in 2002.  Justice Kagan referred to the work as "the principal scholarly article on the subject" of deportation as a collateral consequence of criminal conviction, and noted that the article referred to the exclusion of advice about collateral consequences from the Sixth Amendment's scope as one of "the most widely recognized rules in American law."   In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor also cited the article, pointing out that Chin and Holmes were actually "quite critical of the rule," arguing that it was inconsistent with the Court's intent in Strickland v. Washington, which established standards for effectiveness of counsel under the Sixth Amendment.

Gabriel "Jack" Chin, who joined the King Hall faculty in 2011, is a prolific and much-cited criminal and immigration law scholar whose work has addressed many of the most pressing social issues of our time.

U.S. Supreme Court opinions: Chaidez v. United States

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