Law Commons^™

Free Speech For Me But Not For Airbnb”: Restricting Hate-Group Activity In Public Accommodations, Sabrina Apple -- J.D. Candidate, 2024

Vanderbilt Law Review

As digital services grow increasingly indispensable to modern life, courts grow inundated with novel claims of entitlement against these platforms. As narrow, formalistic interpretations of Title II permit industry leaders to sidestep equal access obligations, misinformed interpretations of First Amendment protections allow violent speech and conduct to parade uninhibited. Within the mistreatment of these two established doctrines lies a critical distinction: the former is in desperate need of modernization to fulfill its original intent, and the latter is in desperate need of restoration for the same ends. This climate creates conditions ripe for doctrinal upheaval. This Note considers how the …

Eavesdropping: The Forgotten Public Nuisance In The Age Of Alexa, Julia Keller

Vanderbilt Law Review

Always-listening devices have sparked new concerns about privacy while evading regulation, but a potential solution has existed for hundreds of years: public nuisance.

Public nuisance has been stretched to serve as a basis of liability for some of the most prominent cases of modern mass-tort litigation, such as suits against opioid and tobacco manufacturers for creating products that endanger public health. While targeting conduct that arguably interferes with a right common to the public, this use of public nuisance extends far beyond the original understanding of the doctrine. Public nuisance has not been applied, however, to another prominent contemporary issue: …

Against Political Theory In Constitutional Interpretation, Christopher S. Havasy, Joshua C. Macey, Brian Richardson

Vanderbilt Law Review

Judges and academics have long relied on the work of a small number of Enlightenment political theorists-—particularly Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone—-to discern meaning from vague and ambiguous constitutional provisions. This Essay cautions that Enlightenment political theory should rarely, if ever, be cited as an authoritative source of constitutional meaning. There are three principal problems with constitutional interpretation based on eighteenth-century political theory. First, Enlightenment thinkers developed distinct and incompatible theories about how to structure a republican form of government. That makes it difficult to decide which among the conflicting theories should possess constitutional significance. Second, the Framers did not write …

Exponential Growth Bias And The Law: Why Do We Save Too Little, Borrow Too Much, And Fail To React On Time To Deadly Pandemics And Climate Change?, Doron Teichman, Professor Of Law, Eyal Zamir, Professor Of Commercial Law

Vanderbilt Law Review

Many human decisions, ranging from the taking of loans with compound interest to fighting deadly pandemics, involve phenomena that entail exponential growth. Yet a wide and robust body of empirical studies demonstrates that people systematically underestimate exponential growth.

This phenomenon, dubbed the exponential growth bias (“EGB”), has been documented in numerous contexts and across different populations, using both experimental and observational methods.

Despite its centrality to human decisionmaking, legal scholarship has thus far failed to account for the EGB. This Article presents the first comprehensive study of the EGB and the law. Incorporating the EGB into legal analysis sheds a …

Nondelegation In The States, Benjamin Silver

Vanderbilt Law Review

American public law is on the precipice of a nondelegation revival. Yet scholars have largely ignored the greatest wellspring of American nondelegation law: that of the states. As a result, the nondelegation literature is badly in need of a broad and deep examination of state nondelegation. This Article takes up that task by describing the kaleidoscope of contexts in which states apply the nondelegation doctrine. Significantly, state nondelegation reaches deep into public law and covers far more than the legislature-to-agency delegations that preoccupy the discussion at the federal level. This Article analyzes this mess of state nondelegation jurisprudence, arguing that …

Plaintiff Cities, Sarah L. Swan

Vanderbilt Law Review

When cities are involved in litigation, it is most often as defendants. However, in the last few decades, cities have emerged as aggressive plaintiffs, bringing forward hundreds of mass-tort style claims. From suing gun manufacturers for the scourge of gun violence, to bringing actions against banks for the consequences of the subprime mortgage crisis, to initiating claims against pharmaceutical companies for opioid-related deaths and injuries, plaintiff cities are using litigation to pursue the perpetrators of the social harms that have devastated their constituents and their communities. Many courts and commentators have criticized these plaintiff city claims on numerous grounds. They …

Aging Injunctions And The Legacy Of Institutional Reform Litigation, Jason Parkin

Vanderbilt Law Review

Institutional reform litigation has been an enduring feature of the American legal system since the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. The resulting injunctions have transformed countless bureaucracies notorious for resisting change, including public school systems, housing authorities, social services agencies, correctional facilities, and police departments. But these injunctions face an uncertain future. The Supreme Court has held that institutional reform injunctions must be easier to terminate than all other injunctions issued by the federal courts. Some institutional reform injunctions go unenforced or are forgotten entirely. Others expire due to sunset provisions. At the same time, doctrinal …

A Regulatory Theory Of Legal Claims, Maria J. Glover

Vanderbilt Law Review

Procedural law in the United States seeks to achieve three interrelated goals in our system of litigation: efficient processes that achieve "substantive justice" and deter wrongdoing, accurate outcomes, and meaningful access to the courts. For years, however, procedural debate, particularly in the context of due process rights in class actions, has been redirected toward more conceptual questions about the nature of legal claims-are they more appropriately conceptualized as individual property or as collective goods? At stake is the extent to which relevant procedures will protect the right of individual claimants to exercise control over their claims. Those with individualistic conceptions …

Redundant Public-Private Enforcement, Zachary D. Clopton

Vanderbilt Law Review

Redundancy is a four-letter word. According to courts and scholars, redundant litigation is costly, unfair, and confounding. Modern civil procedure has a (nearly) maximalist preference for centralization, and various rules seek to limit duplicative suits within and across court systems. This seemingly dominant view stands in marked contrast to the reality of the modern regulatory state. Redundant public-private enforcement, in which public and private actors have overlapping authority to enforce the law, is ubiquitous. Redundant enforcement also is noticeably underrepresented in the substantial literature on private and public enforcement, which typically treats government agencies and private attorneys general as substitutes …

Your Right To Look Like An Ugly Criminal: Resolving The Circuit Split Over Mug Shots And The Freedom Of Information Act, Cameron T. Norris

Vanderbilt Law Review

Mug shots occupy a seemingly indelible place in American popular culture. Embarrassing booking photos of celebrities like Lindsay Lohan,' Mel Gibson, and Robert Downey, Jr. are plastered on televisions and tabloids across the country. Local newspapers feature the most recent mug shots from the nearby jail, and mug shot websites are increasingly common. Perhaps our fascination with these images stems from the same impulse driving the popularity of reality television: seeing real people in bad situations makes us feel better about our own lives.

Dual Standards For Third-Party Intervenors: Distinguishing Between Public-Law And Private-Law Intervention, Justin P. Gunter

Vanderbilt Law Review

Courts stand as the final arbiters of many important and controversial issues in the United States. While it is the province of the judicial branch to hear "cases" and "controversies" that impact the immediate parties to a suit, many modern suits impact unrepresented parties and thus have policy implications. To describe this phenomenon, scholars use the terms "private law" and "public law." As public law gained greater prominence, commentators began to realize the need to revise the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to facilitate this type of litigation. Historically, unrepresented parties who were affected by a suit could use the …

Is There A Moral Justification For Redressing Historical Injustices?, Katrina M. Wyman

Vanderbilt Law Review

In recent years, there have been lively popular and academic debates in the United States and elsewhere about whether injustices committed decades or even centuries ago should be redressed through official apologies, commissions of inquiry, reparations, and restitution. In the American context, the historical injustices for which redress has been pursued, and in some cases granted, include the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the Holocaust, and the mistreatment of Native Americans. Recently, the most prominent debate in the United States has been about whether federal and state governments and corporations should pay reparations to African Americans for …

Help At Your Fingertips: A Twenty-First Century Response To The Pro Se Phenomenon, Van Wormer, Nina Ingwer

Vanderbilt Law Review

In July 2001, Aventis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. fired Susan Hudock, an award-winning sales representative suffering from shingles. Angered and frustrated, Ms. Hudock retained an attorney and filed suit against her former employer, alleging that the company violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to make "reasonable accommodations" that would enable her to perform certain job-related functions. After incurring over $18,000 in legal fees over two years and with no end in sight, Ms. Hudock decided to take a drastic step: she fired her attorney and proceeded with her case pro se.

Despite being warned by her former attorney that she …

The Outer Limits Of Gang Injunctions, Scott E. Atkinson

Vanderbilt Law Review

Almost a decade ago, the California Supreme Court endorsed the use of public nuisance injunctions as a means to control street gangs. Public nuisance injunctions against gangs ("gang injunctions"), which result from civil suits filed by district or city attorneys, prohibit the nuisance conduct within a prescribed geographical area, focusing on the "turf' claimed by the gang. In People ex rel. Gallo v. Acuna, the California Supreme Court upheld an injunction against thirty-eight named members of a San Jose gang in a four square block area where none of the gang members lived. The court described the neighborhood as "an …

Tendencies Versus Boundaries: Levels Of Generality In Behavioral Law And Economics, Gregory Mitchell

Vanderbilt Law Review

When evidence on the truth or falsity of a proposition is ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations, psychologists warn about "biased assimilation" of the evidence to support pre-existing theories, beliefs, and attitudes. Therefore, when a skeptic about the public policy implications of psychological research examines the complex mix of evidence on human rationality, he may find much to support his skepticism about the use of psychology to reform the law. Likewise, an optimist about the public policy contributions of psychology may find within this same body of evidence much to bolster his optimistic view that psychological research can be used …

The Marriage Of The False Claims Act And The Freedom Of Information Act: Parasitic Potential Or Positive Synergy?, James R. Moncus, Iii

Vanderbilt Law Review

The qui tam provisions of the False Claims Act ("FCA" or "the Act") allow private citizens to prosecute fraud on the government's behalf. There are at least three primary justifications for such provisions: (1) the need to provide private incentives to expose fraudulent conduct, (2) the Justice Department's unwillingness to aggressively prosecute fraud, and (3) the limited enforcement resources available to the federal government. The FCA contains a jurisdictional bar that provides that no court shall have jurisdiction over a qui tam FCA action if the information on which the action is based has been publicly disclosed. Ostensibly, this jurisdictional …

Opting Out Of Regulation: A Public Choice Analysis Of Contractual Choice Of Law, Erin A. O'Hara

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article uses public choice theory to analyze the function of choice-of-law clauses in contracts. Choice-of-law clauses are now quite common and are increasingly enforced, especially with the proliferation of international and Internet transactions. Because these clauses can be used by parties to avoid regulation, academics are now vigorously debating the extent to which this contractual opt out should be permitted. The Article presents a positive political theory of the interplay of legislative action and the enforcement of choice of law. It demonstrates that the important normative debate over choice of law is somewhat misguided because both sides fail to …

Public Choice And The Future Of Public-Choice-Influenced Legal Scholarship, David A. Skeel, Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

By many yardsticks, public choice is the single most successful transplant from the world of economics to legal scholarship., As with other law-and-economics scholarship, critics have attacked its assumptions, its methodology, and its conclusions. But nearly everyone concedes the power of at least some of the insights of public choice, and many of its terms, including "public choice" itself, have become common coinage in the legal literature, even among those who would never overtly rely on law-and-economics perspectives in their work.

Although both Maxwell Stearns's collection of readings and commentary, Public Choice and Public Law, and much of this Review …

Public Choice, Public Opinion, And The Fuller Court, Jonathan R. Macey

Vanderbilt Law Review

Everyone has his own, personal view about what role the United States Supreme Court should play in American political life. Conservatives of the Robert Bork variety prefer that supreme court justices treat congressional enactments with great deference and respect.' Liberals of the Laurence Tribe persuasion like judges to take an active role in ensuring certain individual rights, such as the right to abortion, while giving Congress latitude to regulate in the sphere of economic rights. Libertarians of the Bernard Siegan orientation strenuously deny the difference between economic liberties and other sorts of human rights and would have judges actively protect …

Federalism's Future In The Global Village, Barry Friedman

Vanderbilt Law Review

The world we live in is becoming smaller. Although no doubt people have been saying that since at least the travels of Marco Polo, Columbus, and Vespucci, events appear to be moving with startling rapidity. Global trade, global travel, global communication-all are bringing us together in ways that even twenty years ago we hardly could imagine. The words "globalization" and "internationalization" are heard frequently now, and in many new and different contexts. In contrast to the globalization phenomenon, we are accustomed to thinking about American federalism largely in domestic terms. The primary arena in which the debate about the role …

The Corporate Practice Of Medicine Doctrine: An Anachronism In The Modern Health Care Industry, Jeffrey F. Chase-Lubitz

Vanderbilt Law Review

Corporations, in the form of small, doctor-owned, proprietary hospitals and community or charity nonprofit hospitals, have pervaded the provision of health care services for many years. Recently, however, private, for-profit corporations increasingly have entered the health care field. One industry expert predicts that by the mid-1990s, ten national firms will provide fifty percent of the nation's medical care. Nationwide hospital chains, nonexistent twenty years ago, now own or manage twelve percent of the nation's hospitals. The proliferation of health maintenance organizations, freestanding emergency centers,' and other proprietary health care delivery systems exemplify the increased commercialization of medicine. Indeed, many young …

The Right Of Publicity: Commercial Exploitation Of The Associative Value Of Personality, Sheldon W. Halpern

Vanderbilt Law Review

For more than thirty years, dispute and confusion have marked the emergence and development of the so-called "right of publicity,"' a right that is concerned with the use of attributes of a generally identifiable person to enhance the commercial value of an enterprise. A dense, complex array of cases, accompanied by and analyzed in an even denser array of commentary, has been the vehicle for adumbrating the emergent right. Battle lines are drawn over whether the creature emerging from the fermenting ooze of modern mass communications is a species of "property" or a purely personal "privacy" interest."Everywhere one finds the …

Burdens Of Pleading And Proof In Discrimination Cases: Toward A Theory Of Procedural Justice, Robert Belton

Vanderbilt Law Review

If the national policy of eliminating discrimination is to be achieved, the courts--to whom the major responsibility for effectuating this goal is delegated--must establish a coherent framework for allocating the burdens of pleading and proof that provides "a sensible, orderly way to evaluate the evidence in light of common experience as it bears on the critical question of discrimination."' The purpose of this Article, therefore, is to propose such a coherent approach to the allocation of the burdens of pleading and proof in discrimination cases. Towards this end, part II of the Article examines the definitional and operational effect of …

Recent Publications, Journal Staff

Vanderbilt Law Review

Bakke, DeFunis, and Minority Admissions: The Quest for Equal Opportunity

By Allan P. Sindler.

Sindler describes the admissions programs at the Universities of Washington and California-Davis, and the respective experiences of Marco DeFunis and Allan Bakke that preceded their litigation. Then, documenting the disparity in academic qualifications between accepted minorities and rejected nonminorities, Sindler addresses the broad issue before the courts. Is the reservation of academic "places" for minorities an inherently two-track system, which operates as an illegal quota to exclude "better-qualified" applicants; or may a school utilize race as a basis for selection in order to fulfill other commitments …

Litigant Access Doctrine And The Burger Court, Tinsley E. Yarbrough

Vanderbilt Law Review

The decisions of potentially most far-reaching significance, however, are the Burger Court's pronouncements concerning the nature and application of the personal injury standard in the field of standing, the status of public action lawsuits, and the propriety of federal district court intervention in state judicial proceedings. This Article critically analyzes the Court's developing position in each of these areas and suggests that in each its doctrinal stance is conceptually weak, rarely serves the functions that it ostensibly was designed to perform, and is extremely vulnerable to capricious application.

Recent Developments In Attorneys' Fees, W. Perry Brandt, Pendleton C. Waugh, Richard C. Stark Special Project Editor

Vanderbilt Law Review

Special Project--

Recent Developments in Attorneys' Fees

In recent years, the subject of attorneys' fees has become the focal point of pressures to improve the accessibility of legal services for those unable to pay large fees. Courts, scholars, and special interest groups have examined in detail the relationship between fees and the ability to assert legal rights. This increased scrutiny has led to the elimination of minimum fee schedules, the criticism of and possible relaxation of restrictions on fee advertising, and the establishment of maximum contingent fee schedules by court rule. Private enforcement of newly enacted federal statutes against private …

Whither The Concept "Affected With A Public Interest"?, Sterry R. Waterman

Vanderbilt Law Review

We of the law and we who administer the law are challenged today more acutely than ever before. Many serious-minded people question whether the law is or can ever be an instrumentality of social justice.Many of our citizens believe that, irrespective of the precepts of the law,the administration of the law frequently has been used as a device to frustrate the legitimate aspirations of those seeking to participate as equals with other Americans in the benefits of American society. The inclusion of more and more activities as activities "affected with the public interest" is evidence that there are some who …

Commercial Treaties And International Trade Transactions In East-West Trade, Clive M. Schmitthoff

Vanderbilt Law Review

Operations of international trade law are transacted on two levels--that of public law and that of private law. This distinction is clearly drawn in the Report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations on "The Progressive Development of the Law of International Trade," a report which, it may be recalled, preceded the establishment of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCI-TRAL) in December 1966. That report limits its ambit to the "law of international trade," which is defined as "the body of rules governing commercial relationships of a private law nature involving different countries." The report excludes from …

Justice Joseph Story: A Study Of The Legal Philosophy Of A Jeffersonian Judge, Morgan D. Dowd

Vanderbilt Law Review

Few studies have sought to explicate the legal philosophy of Joseph Story despite his enormous reputation as scholar, Supreme Court justice and professor at the Harvard Law School. Worse still, there has been little critical analysis of nineteenth-century concepts and statements of the law.' The purpose of this essay, then, is to examine the validity of Story's legal theories and to evaluate his work as a major contributor to American public law. As a result of this study,it is hoped that progress can be made toward a greater understanding of the man, the justice, and his philosophy of law.

Trade Regulation -- 1961 Tennessee Survey (Ii), Leo I. Raskind

Vanderbilt Law Review

This field of law, not previously treated independently in the annual survey, is designated as Trade Regulation or alternatively as Government or Public Control of Business. In the limit, this body of doctrine is an amalgam of tort and contract principles bearing the impress of the equity practice. These distinct principles are now embodied in both state and federal statutes as the foundations of legal control over competitive commercial conduct. Their scope extends, with different emphasis, from public utility rate regulation to a variety of aspects of market structure and conduct in the unregulated sector of the economy. The principal …