Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform by Jaya Ramji‐Nogales, Andrew Ian Schoenholtz and Philip G. Schrag
| Date | 01 July 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2010.00814-1.x |
| Published date | 01 July 2010 |
| Author | Mike Sanderson |
REVIEWS
Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Andrew Ian Schoen holtz and Philip G. Schrag, Refugee Rou lett e:
Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform,NewYork: New
York University Press, 2009, 335 pp, hb d25.99.
It is not often that one has the oppor tunity to review an academic work which has
been so widely trailed in both academic literature and the popular press (eg Julia
Preston‘BigDisparities in Judging of Asylum Cases’NewYorkTime s, 31May 2007)
as Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform by Jaya
Ramji-Nogales, Andrew Schoenholtz and Philip Schrag, all professors of law in
the UnitedStates.Initially featuredin a special issue of the StanfordLaw Review,the
¢ndings of the so-cal led‘refugeeroulette’study were then picked up by numerous
academic and lay journals, including some national newspapers. In fact, I cannot
recall another occasion where an academic work has been so widely trailed, at least
in my own area of refugee and asylum law. There is good reason for this. The
study concerns one ‘big idea’ which, importantly, is accessible to both lawyers
and laymen without any special jurisprudential or philosophical introduction:
the right to have like cases treated a like. Although in this context the authors re fer
to the distinctlyAmerican constitutional formulations of ‘equal protection’ and
‘due process’ (perhaps they are indicating the possible routes of a constitutional
challenge?) even this is probably unnecessary: the principle at stake is a simple
fairness of the type which is basic to the social organisation of every human
society (although perhaps not to Christian ethics: cf Jesus’s parable of the grape
pickers in Matthew 20: 1^16). Following a comprehensive (and, one imagines,
extremely time-consuming) statistical survey of decision-making a¡ecting the
claims to refugee status of asylum-seekers in the United States, the authors have
shown (convincingly, I think) that such claims are dealt with in a very ‘unalike’
fashion indeed.
Indeed, the numbers in this respect are truly eye-popping. Whereas the mean
average approval rates of applicationsmade by Chinese asylum-seekers atregional
asylum o⁄ce C were 72 per cent during the period under review (¢nancial year
1999 to end of ¢nancial year 2005) it was only 15 per cent in asylum o⁄ce H.
(Statistics for approval rates in regional asylum o⁄ces were provided to the
authors by the US Department of Homeland Security only after having been
‘anonymised’. The eight regional asylum o⁄ces in New York, Newark, Arling-
ton, Miami, Houston, Chicago, San Francisco and Anaheim are each represented
in the study by a letter between A and H.) Further, while in o⁄ce C only 7 per
cent of individual adjudication o⁄cers had grant rates which deviated by more
than 50 per cent from the mean grant rate (the standard by which the authors
de¢ne an‘outlier’) in o⁄ce H more than 60 percent of o⁄cers deviated fromthe
mean grant rate by morethan 50 per cent. So, i naddition to the striking disparity
in grant rates among regional asylum o⁄ces there is a marked disparity among
the grant rates of individual asylum o⁄cers within the most restrictive o⁄ces.
r2010The Authors. Journal Compilation r2010The Modern Law ReviewLimited.
Published by BlackwellPublishing, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
(2010)73(4) 679^696
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