Law Commons^™

Covid's Constitutional Conundrum: Assessing Individual Rights In Public Health Emergencies, James G. Hodge Jr., Jennifer L. Piatt, Emily Carey, Hanna N. Reinke

Tennessee Law Review

Considerable legal challenges alleging infringements of constitutional rights have arisen against governments imposing social distancing or other restrictive measures to quell the COVID-19 pandemic. Courts assess these claims largely under two approaches. Consistent with constitutional re-balancing, judges weigh the application of rights against governments' compelling interests to protect public health and safety in emergencies. Alternatively, a minority of courts temporarily set aside existing rights to effectuate emergency responses. Both approaches insufficiently account for the flexible nature of rights and freedoms in exigencies pursuant to the Constitution's cohesive design. In public health emergencies, courts should engage in guided assessments focused on …

Avoiding The Great Divide: Assuring Court Technology Lightens The Load Of Low-Income Litigants Post-Covid-19, Katherine L.W. Norton

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Annual Index Volume 88

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Contents

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Simultaneity Puzzle: Lawyers Working At Multiple Law Firms, Paul R. Tremblay

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Legal Research Just In Time: A New Approach To Integrating Legal Research Into The Law School Curriculum, Denitsa R. Mavrova Heinrich, Tammy Pettinato Oltz

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Joking, Exaggerating Or Contracting?, William A. Drennan

Tennessee Law Review

We love the funny, and that's no exaggeration. In a joke, a duck is the funniest animal, you'll get more laughs in a red room than a blue room, 103 characters is the optimal length for a joke, and we know all this statistically because scholarly researchers often study humor. Litigators, courts, and commentators also focus on the funny when deciding whether promissory language created a binding contract. They frequently debate and decide enforceability based on whether a party was joking.

This Article asserts, for the first time, that in many of these cases the focus should be on whether …

The Economic And Efficiency Benefits Of Expanding The § 25d Investment Tax Credit, Kelsey Morgan

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Property Rights And Involuntary Contracting, Taorui Guan

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Redesigning Restorative Justice For Criminal Justice Reform, Matthew D. Kim

Tennessee Law Review

Considering the racial disparities in the criminal justice system and the pressing need for reform, this article presents the optimal design for restorative justice that is capable of drawing the necessary public support to transform the criminal justice system. Restorative justice is a growing alternative to the criminal justice system designed to allow offenders, victims, and members of the community resolve crimes without resorting to the criminal justice system. Public support for restorative justice programs is vital to their success, and many programs fail because of inconsistent public support. As such, proponents of restorative justice emphasize the need to "start …

The Modest Impact Of The Modern Confrontation Clause, Jeffrey Bellin, Diana Bibb

Tennessee Law Review

The Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause grants criminal defendants the right "to be confronted with the witnesses against" them. A strict reading of this text would transform the criminal justice landscape by prohibiting the prosecution's use of hearsay at trial. But until recently, the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Clause was closer to the opposite. By tying the confrontation right to traditional hearsay exceptions, the Court's longstanding precedents granted prosecutors broad freedom to use out-of-court statements to convict criminal defendants.

The Supreme Court's 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington was supposed to change all that. By severing the link between the …

Preserving The Fruits Of Labor: Impediments To University Inventor Mobility, Brenda M. Simon

Tennessee Law Review

Academic inventors must overcome numerous obstacles when they seek to leave their parent universities. The results of their work are often intertwined in what I call "innovation-essential components," which are important aspects of the. innovative process that create strong ties to the parent university, such as data, patents, trade secrets, grants, contracts, materials, and other agreements and restrictions. Innovation-essential components effectively bind university inventors to their parent institutions, making departure unworkable without the university's approval. Universities sometimes further complicate inventor mobility by entering into unlawful agreements with other academic institutions in their efforts to prevent inventor movement or by engaging …

"Assault Weapon" Lethality, E. Gregory Wallace

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Gen Z Juror, Leslie Y. Garfield Tenzer

Tennessee Law Review

The Magna Carta drafters did not contemplate Facebook, Twitter, or texting when they formalized the jury system, a system that remains mostly unchanged 800 years after its inception. Those primed for jury duty over the coming decades have grown up with a cell phone in their hand and news at their fingertips. It is unreasonable to expect Gen Zers to meet the "radio-silence" mandate of jury duty. As smartphones become the de facto method of communication, courts, legislatures, and scholars offer prohibitions, admonitions, and increased punishment to curtail juror misconduct. These reforms, however, do little to prevent the kind of …

Rethinking Libel For The Twenty-First Century, Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Little Child Shall Lead Them: Juvenile Justice, Aging Out, And The First Step Act, Jalila Jefferson-Bullock

Tennessee Law Review

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

Illegal Exactions, Renee Burbank

Tennessee Law Review

Illegal exactions, or unlawful exactions, are an amorphous category of government activities with two unifying characteristics: (1) the government acts in its sovereign capacity but beyond its authority, and (2) its action enriches the government at a person's or organization's expense. The law of illegal exactions has developed through infrequent clusters of cases over 150 years, without substantial academic evaluation or discourse. The case law, thus, often lacks theoretical coherence. Lacking a single defining framework to use, courts have borrowed from torts, Fifth Amendment takings, and due process claims to define the scope of illegal exactions. Although it is an …

Contents

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reframing Taxigration, Jacqueline Lainez Flanagan

Tennessee Law Review

Tax compliance by undocumented immigrant workers could and should be the architectural centerpiece of immigration reform. Analyzing this premise using broad economic frameworks and examining corresponding mechanisms in U.S. tax and immigration systems, this article seeks to reframe "taxigration" to signify tax filing as a threshold condition to legalization.

"Taxigration" was originally coined by immigration practitioners to signal the intersection between immigration and tax law, most often when individuals in the midst of legalization proceedings file tax returns to supplement their immigration petitions. Conversely, unauthorized workers with no viable path toward legalization must adhere to a tax filing mandate, facilitated …

Righteous Indignation: Prosecutorial Misconduct, Brady, And The Cognitive Limits Of Self-Policing, Jonathan Harwell, Marshall Jensen, Sarah Heath Olesiuk, Sally B. Seraphin

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Ethics And Evidence Too Hot To Handle, Douglas R. Richmond

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Alternative Venture Capital: The New Unicorn Investors, Anat Alon-Beck

Tennessee Law Review

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has promulgated new rules designed to harmonize and improve the "patchwork" exempt offering framework, protect investors and facilitate capital formation. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that the fiduciary responsibility provisions of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 do not prohibit fiduciaries of 401(k) and other individual account plans from investing in, and undertaking exposure to, private equity investments. These policies address the concern that retail investors are missing out on investment opportunities, due to fewer listed firms and initial public offerings, the greater role of the private market in raising …

Fixed Intentions: Wills, Living Wills, And End-Of-Life Decision-Making, Jane B. Baron

Tennessee Law Review

Contemporary trusts and estates law is built on the premise that individuals can and should have fixed intentions with respect to the disposition of their property at death. These intentions can and should be fixed in a written document, and that document can and should be fixed against other outside evidence of intention. Experience with end-of-life health care decision-making gives reason to question these premises. In the health care context, intentions have proven to be fluid, and the documents purporting to record individuals' wishes have often proved unreliable.

This Article examines the implications for wills of the literature on end-of-life …

Information Age Technology, Industrial Age Laws, Elizabeth Winston

Tennessee Law Review

The United States patent system was born during the Industrial Age at a time where the focus was on promoting innovation in machines and tangible means of changing the world. With the dawn of the Information Age, innovation is increasingly intangible. The Industrial Age laws, as currently interpreted, are not well-suited for the changing and evolving technological world. Information Age innovators face challenges at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, through the judicial system and at the United States International Trade Commission. It is time for a change in the system to reflect the realities of modern technology. Adequate …

Contents

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Origination Clause's Missing Piece, Chris Land

Tennessee Law Review

The Origination Clause is nearly constitutional surplusage today. The scope of the Clause has been limited by the U.S. Supreme Court to a very narrow class of revenue legislation that emerges from the U.S. House of Representatives.

This Article, for the first time, analyzes historical evidence that the U.S. Supreme Court has defined the constitutional scope of 'Bills for raising Revenue" and the concomitant reach of the Clause in a manner that fails to account for Revolutionary-era British revenue legislation. Four of the five bills passed by the British Parliament which contributed to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, i.e., …

Author Index

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Availability's Law, Ido Kilovaty

Tennessee Law Review

Cybersecurity incidents affecting the availability of computers, networks, and data are on the rise. Distributed denial-of-service and ransomware attacks can bring down critical systems and databases, making them unavailable when most needed, potentially affecting every individual, industry, sector, and branch of government. This Article critically evaluates cybersecurity law's gap in addressing the growing threat of availability attacks to information technology systems. While cybersecurity law is defined as the legal framework that "promotes the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of public and private information, systems, and networks ... ." this Article argues that cybersecurity law is overwhelmingly concerned with confidentiality and integrity, …

Contents

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Contested Edges Of Internal Affairs, Mohsen Manesh

Tennessee Law Review

Because of the internal affairs doctrine, the tiny state of Delaware plays a unique and outsized role as the nation's preeminent regulator of corporate governance. But two recent developments have raised new questions about the precise scope of the doctrine and, consequently, Delaware's lucrative regulatory domain. Specifically, in a four-month span in late 2018, (i) California enacted the nation's first law mandating board gender diversity for all public corporations headquartered in California, and (ii) the Delaware Court of Chancery in Sciabacucchi v. Salzberg invalidated a corporate charter provision purporting to regulate shareholder rights arising under federal securities law.

These two …