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Articles 1 - 30 of 50
Full-Text Articles in Law
Discounting Dilemmas: Editors' Introduction, W. Kip Viscusi
Discounting Dilemmas: Editors' Introduction, W. Kip Viscusi
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Two developments pose dilemmas for well established discounting techniques: (1) The extremely long time horizons associated with recently prominent environmental policy problems, such as climate change and nuclear waste storage, have made it important to take seriously both benefits to future generations and extreme uncertainties in projecting the returns to policies and future well being. (2) Findings in the burgeoning field of behavioral economics have made it clear that individuals routinely depart significantly from rational prescriptions when making choices over time, thus undermining a bulwark of the discounting approach. These two sets of dilemmas are addressed in a series of …
Why The Filed Rate Doctrine Should Not Imply Blanket Judicial Deference To Regulatory Agencies, Jim Rossi
Why The Filed Rate Doctrine Should Not Imply Blanket Judicial Deference To Regulatory Agencies, Jim Rossi
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The filed rate doctrine is a venerable doctrine of public utility regulation. Federal courts applying the doctrine frequently defer to the regulatory agency and refuse to consider the merits of alleged violations of antitrust, tort or contract claims where resolution would require a departure from a filed rate. For over a century, the filed rate doctrine has served many important purposes. However, with increased attention to market-based approaches to electric power, natural gas and telecommunications regulation, there is reason to question both the doctrine's continued applicability and usefulness. This short essay argues that, as regulators implement competitive markets in utility …
An Originalism For Foreign Affairs, Ingrid Wuerth
An Originalism For Foreign Affairs, Ingrid Wuerth
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Legal scholarship on foreign affairs frequently focuses on the Constitution's text and original meaning, but generally does not fully engage debates about originalism as a method of modern constitutional interpretation. For its part, much of the scholarship defending originalism as a methodology has said little explicitly about foreign affairs. This short symposium contribution describes three contemporary normative arguments in favor of originalism - those advanced by Randy Barnett, Keith Whittington, and John McGinnis and Michael Rappaport - and then considers their application to foreign affairs. It concludes that these arguments are at best underdeveloped and at worst weak when it …
Review Of Crafting The Overseer's Image By William E. Wiethoff, Daniel J. Sharfstein
Review Of Crafting The Overseer's Image By William E. Wiethoff, Daniel J. Sharfstein
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Wherever slaves worked on plantations in the antebellum South, overseers were hired to supervise and discipline them. Crops, soil types, and topographies varied greatly across the region, but professional slave drivers were fixtures of the landscape from the colonial era to the Civil War. Their ubiquity pleased few people, slave or free. Accounts of their sadism, sexual violence, and general coarseness and stupidity are not limited to slave narratives and abolitionist tracts; gripes and horror stories fill the public and private writings of plantation owners, too. Harriet Beecher Stowe was hardly taking literary license when she made slave owner Simon …
Public Pension Funds As Shareholder Activists: A Comment On Choi And Fisch, Randall Thomas
Public Pension Funds As Shareholder Activists: A Comment On Choi And Fisch, Randall Thomas
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Climate Change: The China Problem, Michael P. Vandenbergh
Climate Change: The China Problem, Michael P. Vandenbergh
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The central problem confronting climate change scholars and policymakers is how to create incentives for China and the United States to make prompt, large emissions reductions. China recently surpassed the United States as the largest greenhouse gas emitter, and its projected future emissions far outstrip those of any other nation. Although the United States has been the largest emitter for years, China's emissions have enabled critics in the United States to argue that domestic reductions will be ineffective and will transfer jobs to China. These two aspects of the China Problem, Chinese emissions and their influence on the political process …
Climate Change: The Equity Problem, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Brooke A. Ackerly
Climate Change: The Equity Problem, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Brooke A. Ackerly
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
A substantial proportion of the United States population is at or below the poverty level, yet many of the greenhouse gas emissions reduction measures proposed or adopted to date will increase the costs of energy, motor vehicles, and other consumer goods. This essay suggests that although scholarship and policymaking to date have focused on the disproportionate impact of these increased costs on the low-income population, the costs will have two important additional effects. First, the anticipated costs will generate political opposition from social justice groups, reducing the likelihood that aggressive measures will be adopted. Second, to the extent aggressive measures …
Individual Carbon Emissions: The Low-Hanging Fruit, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Jack Barkenbus, Jonathan Gilligan
Individual Carbon Emissions: The Low-Hanging Fruit, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Jack Barkenbus, Jonathan Gilligan
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The individual and household sector generates roughly 30 to 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and is a potential source of prompt and large emissions reductions. Yet the assumption that only extensive government regulation will generate substantial reductions from the sector is a barrier to change, particularly in a political environment hostile to regulation. This Article demonstrates that prompt and large reductions can be achieved without relying predominantly on regulatory measures. The Article identifies seven "low-hanging fruit:" actions that have the potential to achieve large reductions at less than half the cost of the leading current federal legislation, require …
Climate Change And Consumption, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Douglas A. Kysar
Climate Change And Consumption, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Douglas A. Kysar
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
To achieve the level of greenhouse gas emissions reductions called for by climate change experts, officials and policy analysts may need to develop an unfamiliar category of regulated entity: the consumer. Although industrial, manufacturing, retail, and service sector firms undoubtedly will remain the focus of climate change policy in the near term, individuals and households exert a greenhouse footprint that seems simply too large for policymakers to ignore in the long term. This paper, written as a foreword for the Environmental Law Reporter's symposium issue, "Climate Change and Consumption," emerges from an interdisciplinary conference of the same title held at …
"Carhart", Constitutional Rights, And The Psychology Of Regret, Chris Guthrie
"Carhart", Constitutional Rights, And The Psychology Of Regret, Chris Guthrie
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In "Gonzales v. Carhart", the Supreme Court upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. In so doing, the Court used the prospect of regret to justify limiting choice. Relying on empirical evidence documenting the four ways in which regret actually operates, this Article argues that the Court's analysis reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the psychology of regret. By exposing the Court's misunderstanding of this emotion, this article seeks to minimize the most significant risk posed by the Carhart decision: that states will use the prospect of regret to justify additional constraints not only on the abortion right but also on other …
From Judge To Justice: Social Background Theory And The Supreme Court, Tracey E. George
From Judge To Justice: Social Background Theory And The Supreme Court, Tracey E. George
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The Roberts Court Justices already have revealed many differences from one another, but they also share a (possibly) significant commonality: Presidents promoted all of them to the U.S. Supreme Court from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. This means, of course, that they initially learned how to be judges while serving on a circuit court. How might the Justices' common route to the Court affect their actions on it? Social background theory hypothesizes that prior experience influences subsequent behavior such as voting, opinion writing, and coalition formation. This Article empirically analyzes promotion to the Supreme Court and examines the implications of …
The Myth Of The Generalist Judge, Edward K. Cheng
The Myth Of The Generalist Judge, Edward K. Cheng
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Conventional judicial wisdom assumes and indeed celebrates the ideal of the generalist judge, but do judges really believe in it? This Article empirically tests this question by examining opinion assignments in the federal courts of appeals from 1995-2005. It reveals that opinion specialization is a regular part of circuit court practice, and that a significant number of judges specialize in specific subject areas. The Article then assesses the desirability of opinion specialization. Far from being a mere loophole, opinion specialization turns out to be an important development in judicial practice that promises to increase judicial expertise without incurring many of …
Corporations And The Market For Law, Erin O'Connor
Corporations And The Market For Law, Erin O'Connor
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The state competition for corporate law has long been studied as a distinct phenomenon. Under the traditional view, corporations are subject to a unique choice-of-law rule, the internal affairs doctrine (IAD). This rule is explained as a historical accident, or by the special logistics of the corporate contract. The resulting market for corporate law appears to have special characteristics, particularly including the dominance by the single state of Delaware. This paper challenges the traditional view. It shows that the corporate law market is best understood as a special application of the general market for law. Any differences are matters of …
Rules And Institutions In Developing A Law Market: Views From The United States And Europe, Erin O'Connor
Rules And Institutions In Developing A Law Market: Views From The United States And Europe, Erin O'Connor
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Developments in European choice of law seem to offer the United States a tantalizing opportunity for escape from the chaos of state-by-state choice-of-law rules. Specifically, the Rome Regulations provide the sort of uniform choice-of-law rules that have eluded the United States. Also, decisions of the European Court of Justice that permit firms to adopt homecountry rules in some situationss eem to facilitatejuds&ctionalc hoice by pivate parties. This top-down ordering ofchoice-of-lawniles contrasts with the seemingly chaotic and decentalized system that pievails in the United States. However, decentralized Amencan-style federalism might have something to offer Europe because choice of law in the …
"The Threes": Re-Imagining Supreme Court Decisionmaking, Tracey E. George, Chris Guthrie
"The Threes": Re-Imagining Supreme Court Decisionmaking, Tracey E. George, Chris Guthrie
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In this Essay--the first in a series of essays designed to reimagine the Supreme Court--we argue that Congress should authorize the Court to adopt, in whole or part, panel decision making... With respect to the prospect of different Court outcomes, we demonstrate empirically in this Essay that the vast majority of cases decided during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries--including "Grutter", "Roe", and "Bush v. Gore" --would have come out the same way if the Court had decided them in panels rather than as a full Court.
Sunstein1s And 2s, Tracey E. George, Paul H. Edelman
Sunstein1s And 2s, Tracey E. George, Paul H. Edelman
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In Six Degrees of Cass Sunstein: Collaboration Networks in Legal Scholarship, we began the study of the legal academy's collaboration network. When mathematicians discuss the nature of collaboration in their field they focus on the most influential collaborator in the discipline-- Paul Erdos, the peripatetic Hungarian mathematician who authored over 1500 papers with over 450 different collaborators before his death in 1996. They introduced the concept of the Erdos Number, which is the number of degrees of separation between a mathematician and Erdos.
Skin Color Discrimination And Immigrant Pay, Joni Hersch
Skin Color Discrimination And Immigrant Pay, Joni Hersch
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In "Profiling the New Immigrant Worker: The Effects of Skin Color and Height," (Journal of Labor Economics 2008), I present strong evidence of a wage penalty to darker skin color among new legal immigrants to the United States. Immigrants with the lightest skin color earn on average 17 percent higher wages than comparable immigrants with the darkest skin color, taking into account Hispanic ethnicity, race, country of birth, education, English language proficiency, family background, and occupation in the source country. This current paper demonstrates that the penalty to darker skin color is not a spurious consequence of omitted variables bias. …
"The Threes": Re-Imagining Supreme Court Decisionmaking, Chris Guthrie, Tracey E. George
"The Threes": Re-Imagining Supreme Court Decisionmaking, Chris Guthrie, Tracey E. George
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In this Essay--the first in a series of essays designed to reimagine the Supreme Court--we argue that Congress should authorize the Court to adopt, in whole or part, panel decision making... With respect to the prospect of different Court outcomes, we demonstrate empirically in this Essay that the vast majority of cases decided during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries--including "Grutter", "Roe", and "Bush v. Gore" --would have come out the same way if the Court had decided them in panels rather than as a full Court.
Overruling Erie: Nationwide Class Actions And National Common Law, Suzanna Sherry
Overruling Erie: Nationwide Class Actions And National Common Law, Suzanna Sherry
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In this essay, part of a symposium on the Class Action Fairness Act, I argue that CAFA should be read as having overruled Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins as applied to the nationwide class actions that fall within CAFA's jurisdictional grant. In the principal paper on which this essay comments, Linda Silberman suggests that Congress should overrule Klaxon v. Stentor Electric Mfg. Co. That suggestion, I propose, amounts to swimming halfway across a river. One of Congress's stated goals in enacting CAFA was to restore the intent of the founding generation. Examining the history and purposes of both diversity jurisdiction …
The Enablement Pendulum Swings Back, Sean B. Seymore
The Enablement Pendulum Swings Back, Sean B. Seymore
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Possibly in response to criticisms that the U.S. patent system affords too much legal protection to patent owners, the courts have begun to chip away at patent rights. Curiously enough, the Supreme Court has heard a relatively large number of patent cases over its last three terms, which suggests to several commentators and members of the patent bar that the Court is unhappy with the Federal Circuit's stewardship of the patent system and has, among other things, invited the court to rethink its approach to modulating patent rights. And it appears that the Federal Circuit has accepted the invitation. In …
Agriculture And Ecosystem Services: Strategies For State And Local Governments, J.B. Ruhl
Agriculture And Ecosystem Services: Strategies For State And Local Governments, J.B. Ruhl
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Agriculture has long been the Rubik's Cube of environmental policy. Although agriculture is a leading cause of pollution and other environmental harms, it has been resistant to regulation and remarkably successful at requiring payment to do the right thing. This article focuses on hints of movement in a new direction for agriculture, arising out of a merger between the age-old practice of paying farmers to do what is right, the fear of losing agricultural lands to suburban development, the rising fiscal burdens to state and local jurisdictions presented by new suburban development, and the new understanding that farms may hold …
Climate Change And The Endangered Species Act: Building Bridges To The No-Analog Future, J.B. Ruhl
Climate Change And The Endangered Species Act: Building Bridges To The No-Analog Future, J.B. Ruhl
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This Article examines the challenges global climate change presents for the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and its primary administrative agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Climate change will reshuffle ecological systems in ways that will defy prediction using existing knowledge and models, posing threats to species through primary and secondary ecological effects and the effects of human adaptation to climate change. Even assuming global-wide regulation of greenhouse gas emissions eventually yields a more stable climate variation regime, it will differ from the recent historical regime and many species will not survive the transition regardless of human interventions using …
Farms And Ecosystem Services, J.B. Ruhl
Farms And Ecosystem Services, J.B. Ruhl
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Over the past decade two themes have emerged as organizing principles in natural resources policy. One, ecosystem management, builds a framework for landscape–level decision making (Christensen et al. 1996). The other, ecosystem services, opens a new dimension for thinking about what we hope to achieve through ecosystem management (Daily 1997; Costanza et al. 1997). The convergence of these two themes has become a driving force behind the concept of agricultural multifunctionality, the idea that farms can have multiple outputs—not just commodities—and thus can contribute to several societal objectives simultaneously (Jordan et al. 2007; OECD 2001).
Law's Complexity: A Primer, J.B. Ruhl
Law's Complexity: A Primer, J.B. Ruhl
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The legal system. It rolls easily off the tongues of lawyers like a single word - the legal system - as if we all know what it means. But what is the legal system? How does it behave? What are its boundaries? What is its input and output? How will it look in one year? In ten years? How should we use it to make change in some other aspect of social life? Why do answers to these questions make the legal system seem so complex? Would assembling a cogent, descriptively accurate theory of what makes the legal system complex …
The New Role For Assurance Services In Global Commerce, Margaret M. Blair
The New Role For Assurance Services In Global Commerce, Margaret M. Blair
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In this Article we examine the rapid emergence and expansion of a private-sector compliance and enforcement infrastructure that we believe increasingly may be providing a substitute for public and legal regulatory infrastructure in global commerce, especially in developing countries where rule of law is weak and court systems are absent or inadequate. This infrastructure is provided by a proliferation of performance codes and standards, and a rapidly growing global army of privately trained and authorized inspectors and certifiers that we call the "third party assurance industry. " The growth in the third party assurance business has been phenomenal in the …
Medellin: The New, New Formalism?, Ingrid Wuerth
Medellin: The New, New Formalism?, Ingrid Wuerth
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The Supreme Court's 2008 decision in Medellin v. Texas appears to represent a formalist turn in the Court's approach to foreign relations cases. The opinion emphasizes text as the key to treaty interpretation and it stresses the importance of the Constitution's specific law-making procedures. But the opinion does not deliver on its formalist promises. Emphasis on treaty text is undermined by the Court's insistence that the text reflects the intentions of the U.S. treaty makers, a questionable proposition with respect to the issue of domestic implementation raised by the case, and one that will raises serious interpretative difficulties down the …
Adjusting The Value Of A Statistical Life For Age And Cohort Effects, W. Kip Viscusi, Joseph E. Aldy
Adjusting The Value Of A Statistical Life For Age And Cohort Effects, W. Kip Viscusi, Joseph E. Aldy
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
To resolve the theoretical ambiguity in the effect of age on the value of statistical life (VSL), this article uses a novel, age-dependent fatal risk measure to estimate age-specific hedonic wage regressions. VSL exhibits an inverted-U shaped relationship with age. In the year 2000 cross-section, workers' VSL rises from $3.7 million (ages 18-24), to $9.7 million (35-44), and declines to $3.4 million (55-62). Controlling for birth-year cohort effects in a minimum distance estimator yields a peak VSL of $7.8 million at age 46, and flattens the VSL-age relationship. The value of statistical life-year also follows an inverted-U shape with age.
Estimating Discount Rates For Environmental Quality From Utility-Based Choice Experiments, W. Kip Viscusi
Estimating Discount Rates For Environmental Quality From Utility-Based Choice Experiments, W. Kip Viscusi
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
We estimate rates of time preference using a utility-based choice experiment administered to a nationally representative sample of 2,914 respondents. For the full sample, the rate of time preference is very high for immediate benefits and drops off substantially thereafter, which is inconsistent with exponential discounting but consistent with hyperbolic discounting. Estimates of the hyperbolic discounting parameter range from 0.48 to 0.61. Visitors to water bodies have low rates of discount but exhibit hyperbolic discounting, whereas those who do not visit have consistently high rates of discount and low valuations of water quality.
Experts, Mental States, And Acts, Christopher Slobogin
Experts, Mental States, And Acts, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This article, written for a symposium on "Guilt v. Guiltiness: Are the Right Rules for Trying Factual Innocence Inevitably the Wrong Rules for Trying Culpability?," argues that the definition of expertise in the criminal justice system, derived in the federal courts and in most states from Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Co., should vary depending on whether the issue involved is past mental state or past conduct. While expert psychological testimony about past acts ought to be based on scientifically verifiable assertions, expert psychological testimony about subjective mental states relevant to criminal responsibility need not meet the same threshold. This …
Democracy Uncaged, Suzanna Sherry
Democracy Uncaged, Suzanna Sherry
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Sanford Levinson calls for a new constitutional convention in Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It). This review explains how Levinson overstates the Constitution's defects and understates the risks of submitting it to a constitutional convention for revision. It exposes the hidden biases in Levinson's analysis and defends the counter-majoritarian aspects of the Constitution that Levinson criticizes.