Why am I passionate about this?
Sasha Issenberg has been a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, and editor, and teaches in the political science department at UCLA. He is the author of four books, on topics as varied as the global sushi business, medical tourism, and the science of political campaigns. The most recent tackles his most sweeping subject yet: the long and unlikely campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in the United States. One of his favorite discoveries in the decade he spent researching the book was that a movement that ended with a landmark Supreme Court decision had been catalyzed by a Honolulu activist’s public-relations stunt sprawling out of control twenty-five years earlier.
Sasha's book list on Supreme Court cases
Why did Sasha love this book?
The issue before the court in 1983’s Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha concerned one of the grandest principles of the American project, the separation of powers, but the facts of the case were all at a tragically human scale. Jagdish Chadha had come to the United States as a student, but when the INS determined he had overstayed his visa it was not clear what to do with him. Born in colonial Kenya to Indian parents and then moved to the United States, explains Craig, “he was not deportable but he had no visa, no papers of any kind to show prospective employers.” After Congress stepped in to intervene with the INS’s handling of Chadha’s case, using a fairly obscure mechanism known as the “legislative veto,” litigators working with Ralph Nader volunteered to represent him; they saw an avenue to pull back lawmakers’ ability to meddle with administration policy…
1 author picked Chadha as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In 1973 Jagdish Chadha found himself a man without a country, the victim of the decolonization of Kenya where, as a Kenyan of Indian descent, he was not allowed to return after having spent six years in the U.S. as a student. Barbara Hinkson Craig describes Chadha's effort to achieve legal residency in the U.S. and shows how it led to the Supreme Court decision to overrule the legislative veto, adjusting the balance of powers in the United States government.