The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (Judge Newman wrote the opinion, with Judges Feinberg and Raggi) today vacated and remanded for further proceedings a district court ruling that permitted the U.S. government to bar a prominent Muslim scholar from entering the United States in 2004 on grounds that he had contributed to a charity that had terrorism connections. The decision was in American Academy v. Napolitano. The scholar, Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss academic, had landed a job as a professor at Notre Dame, but the Bush administration denied his visa based on evidence that from 1998 to 2002, Ramadan donated money to a Swiss-based charity which the Treasury Department later categorized as a “terrorist organization.” The Second Circuit vacated and remanded the case to allow Ramadan to establish that he did not know that it was a “terrorist organization.”
Importantly, the Second Circuit found that the doctrine of consular nonreviewability -- that consular officer visa decisions were not reviewable in a court of law -- did not apply and, citing Kleindienst v.Mandel, that some review of the discretionary judgment was in order when First Amendment claims were made.
For the NY Times story on the case, click here.
As an serious aside, has anyone noticed that it appears that the Second Circuit will have been court which sent the first African American (Thurgood Marshall) and the first Latino (Sonia Sotmayor) to the Supreme Court?
