Letter from the Editor-in-chief

• Publication year: 2019

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia

I am pleased to introduce the second issue of the AILA Law Journal, a partnership of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and Fastcase. Our inaugural issue was published in spring 2019 and met with great praise in response to rich writing on a diversity of topics that remain relevant today, among them travel ban waivers, INTERPOL, "extraordinary ability" visas, and asylum. Last June, the editorial board of the AILA Law Journal kicked off the inaugural issue with a toast at the annual AILA conference (see picture below).

Our second issue is no less dynamic than the first, featuring first-rate articles from our editorial board members, among them Geoff Hoffman, Rebecca Sharpless, and Becki Young.

Geoff Hoffman covers the litigation story in the wake of Pereira v. Sessions, a case handed down by the Supreme Court in June 2018, which in an 8-1 decision found that a charging document known as a "Notice to Appear" that lacks the time or date for a court hearing is not a Notice to Appear. Hoffman's piece provides a real-time treatise for attorneys litigating Pereira before the immigration courts, Board of Immigration Appeals, and federal courts.

Rebecca Sharpless and Elizabeth Montano provide an in-depth analysis of the "modified" categorical approach, a tool used by adjudicators when analyzing criminal statutes that list more than one crime. There is no better expert than Sharpless to walk the reader through the recent litigation landscape. In the next article, Linus Chan and Caleb Harrison offer the argument that federal immigration law undermines state criminal justice systems by eroding or eliminating key rehabilitative features of state criminal justice systems. Indeed, our second issue is a rich source for material on the intersection of immigration and criminal law.

Becki Young provides readers with a...