Professor Angela Banks Discusses Arizona's Immigration Reform Legislation
Immigration reform is one of the most controversial issues of our time. Immigration legislation passed by the Arizona state legislature in 2010 has sparked intense national debate. The federal government has filed a constitutional challenge to the new Arizona law. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments in the case in November 2010. On April 11, the appellate court let stand a lower court decision blocking the most contentious parts of the law from going into effect. Lawyers advocating for the state of Arizona have vowed to appeal the ruling. This constitutional challenge may eventually wind up in the United States Supreme Court.
In this video, William & Mary Law School Professor Angela Banks discusses some of the constitutional issues at stake in the constitutional debate over the Arizona legislation.
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Angela Banks joined the faculty in 2007. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she served on the Harvard Law Review and the Harvard International Law Journal. Prior to law school Professor Banks studied at the University of Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies as a Marshall Scholar, where she earned a Master of Letters in Sociology.
Prior to joining the faculty, Professor Banks was the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow for Law Teaching at Harvard Law School. She has also served as a legal advisor to Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald at the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal; as an associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, DC; and as a law clerk for Judge Carlos F. Lucero of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Professor Banks received her B.A. in sociology, summa cum laude, from Spelman College.