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The state may not pursue policies that undermine federal law, a justice wrote.

SESSIONS STAY OUT OF OUR LAWS
NOAH BERGER / AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
Protesting a speech delivered by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in Sacramento on Wednesday.

Thomas Fuller reported from Sacramento and Vivian Yee from New York.

Suit Against California Relies on a Court Case Won by Obama in 2012

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Professor Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, said history was repeating itself, but flipped.
"The suit is modeled on the Obama administration's successful challenge to Arizona," he said. But he added that "some of the key considerations are flipped."
In the Arizona case, conservatives argued that states had wide sovereignty required letting them play a leading role in controlling immigration within their borders. But Mr. Sessions, a longtime conservative himself, disallowed that logic in his speech on Wednesday. "Immigration law is the province of the federal government," he said.
Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservative jurist who died in 2016, took a different view of the Arizona case. In an impassioned partial dissent, he wrote that "it is easy to lose sight of the states' traditional role in regulating immigration — and to overlook their sovereign prerogative to do so."
There is no doubt that the California lawsuit is at odds with some of the Trump administration's usual positions. "It's a braver assertion on a number of levels," Professor Vladeck said, "not the least of which is the aggressive assertion of federal supremacy."
Cristina Rodriguez, a professor at Yale Law School, said she detected political parallels between the two cases.
"Both administrations claim that the state laws at issue impermissibly interfere with the executive branch's ability to enforce the immigration laws," she said. "And both involve statutes clearly designed to take on visible and politically powerful local officials whose vision of immigration policy conflicts with the president's and his supporters'."
In a news conference on Wednesday, Xavier Becerra, the California attorney general, said he was ready for the fight. The state's laws, he said, were "fully constitutional and provide for the safety and welfare of all our people."
"California is in the business of public safety," he said. "We are not in the business of deportations."
The Justice Department challenge targets three of California's so-called sanctuary laws. One restricts employers from cooperating with immigration officials; another prohibits local law enforcement officials from telling federal ones when undocumented immigrants are to be released from state custody. A third requires state officials to inspect some facilities that house people detained on behalf of the federal government.
Jennifer Chacon, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said the state laws had been carefully written to avoid direct conflicts with federal immigration law. "I think it is clear that California deliberately tried to draft laws that involved core exercises of state police power in a way that did not run afoul of federal law," she said.
Each state law presents different legal questions and varying answers depending on how directly the state laws conflict with federal ones. More generally, though, courts will take account of the Supreme Court's decision in the Arizona case, which called for cooperation rather than conflict.
"Consultation between federal and state officials is an important feature of the immigration system," Justice Kennedy wrote in the court's decision in the Arizona case.
Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, has said that consultation is fine but that federal officials should not use California's resources to pursue undocumented Californians. "We will not be commandeered," he said recently. He added, "may do so on its own."
"They are free to use their own considerable resources to enforce federal immigration law in California," he said in October in signing one of the challenged laws.
The Supreme Court has said that the federal government cannot commandeer state resources to achieve federal objectives. In his speech on Wednesday, Mr. Sessions denied that anything like that was afoot.
"So let me say, to what you might hear from the lawless open borders radicals," he said, "we are not asking California, Oakland or anyone else to enforce immigration law."
"We are simply asking California and other sanctuary jurisdictions to stop actively obstructing federal law enforcement," he added.
But Professor Rodriguez said the commandeering issue was a substantial one. "To the extent the Trump administration's claims against California would effectively compel state and local officials to enforce states and localities to participate in immigration enforcement," she said, "there could be an unconstitutional commandeering."
Professor Spiro said that California may have the upper hand in the suit's early stages, as the issue makes its way to liberal judges on the federal district courts.
The Trump administration has not fared well in federal courts in California in other cases concerning immigration, including ones challenging President Trump's efforts to ban travel from predominantly Muslim countries and to rescind a program protecting some 700,000 young unauthorized immigrants from deportation.
But the ultimate fate of the suit, presumably before the Supreme Court, likely in 2022, is viewed with optimism. Justice Kennedy said he hoped that conflicts over immigration policy would be worked out through reasoned debate rather than lawsuits involving immigrant power to regulate immigration," he wrote. "The sound exercise of national power over immigration depends on the nation's meeting its responsibility to base its laws on a political will informed by searching, thoughtful, rational civic discourse."

Investigating Sexual Misconduct Accusations, Arizona State Suspends a Physicist

By KENNETH CHANG
Arizona State University has suspended Lawrence M. Krauss, a prominent theoretical physicist, while the university investigates accusations of sexual misconduct over a decade.
"In an effort to avoid further disruption to the normal course of business as the university continues to gather facts about the allegations, Krauss has been placed on paid leave and is prohibited from being on campus for the duration of the review," the university said in a statement released on Tuesday.
Last month, BuzzFeed reported that several women have accused Dr. Krauss of inappropriate behavior including groping women and making sexist jokes.
The university said it would not release any additional details until its investigation is complete.
Dr. Krauss, a professor in the university's School of Earth and Space Exploration, is director of Arizona State's Origins Project, a multidisciplinary research effort to tackle questions about the universe and complex systems like cancer. He wrote "The Physics of Star Trek" in 1995. He later became one of the leaders of the so-called "skeptics" movement that espouses science over religion. He has also written essays and Op-Ed articles that were published in The Times.
Michael Crow, president of Arizona State, told The State Press, an independent student newspaper, that the university had received no complaints of harassment against Dr. Krauss. The university started the investigation after being contacted by BuzzFeed.
Dr. Krauss moved to Arizona State from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio in 2008.
CAROLYN KASTER / ASSOCIATED PRESS
On Wednesday afternoon, Dr. Krauss posted a lengthy rebuttal to the BuzzFeed article. He said many of the incidents reported by BuzzFeed were based on unsubstantiated rumors and others were distorted and inaccurate.
"Has my language or demeanor sometimes made others feel uncomfortable?" Dr. Krauss wrote. "Clearly yes, and for that I sincerely apologize. Nevertheless, the BuzzFeed article effectively paints a false picture of me and my relationships with others through anonymous hearsay and a web of often vague innuendo."
The university is not the only one to take action against Dr. Krauss. The American Physical Society and other organizations have withdrawn invitations to Dr. Krauss for upcoming talks. The Center for Inquiry, an organization that promotes secularism, suspended its association with Dr. Krauss on Monday.
On Tuesday, Dr. Krauss resigned from the Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which is best known for its Doomsday Clock that represents that danger of atomic war and other calamities to the planet. In his resignation statement, he said that he resigned from the board because he did not want to distract from the organization's work.
Additionally, a conference scheduled for next month to mark the 10th anniversary of the Origins Project has been canceled. "What we hope to do is reschedule it for another time," Dr. Krauss said in an interview on Wednesday.