Rachel Browning’s Legal Blog

     Gov. David Paterson, of New York, yesterday announced a controversial order, in which he directed all state agencies to provide the same rights and recognition to same-sex couples in New York who are married legally elsewhere as they do to different-sex married couples.  Conservative critics of course denounced the directive as overreaching and “out [...]

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According to a recent posting on the website of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), the Department of Labor (DOL) has instituted a new procedure for weeding out wrongful denials of PERM Labor applications.  The DOL has been conducting a review of these denied PERM Labor cases (now on appeal) and checking each appealed case [...]

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The Diversity Visa Lottery Program is a system by which the State Department makes available 50,000 immigrant visas through a lottery to people who come from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. The State Department’s National Visa Center holds the lottery every year, and chooses winners randomly from all qualified entries. [...]

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Two questions I get asked a lot as an immigration attorney are: what are a permanent resident’s (green card holder’s) options regarding travel outside the U.S. and how does travel abroad (for lengthy periods of time) affect their status as permanent residents?  Often, because the process of obtaining a green card in the U.S. can [...]

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On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling that certain multi-national corporations could be sued in U.S. court under the Alien Tort Statute for “aiding and abetting” the former apartheid government of South Africa. Actually, it was hardly what I’d call a “ruling.” The Court just said that it couldn’t hear the [...]

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