Law Commons^™

Bringing Predictability To The Chaos Of Punitive Damages, W. Kip Viscusi, Benjamin J. Mcmichael

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Punitive damages remain unique in the American legal system. Awarded in the civil context with none of the protections offered in criminal law, courts levy punitive damages to punish and deter. The Supreme Court of the United States has clearly stated that courts may only seek to achieve these two goals when imposing punitive damages. A closer reading of the Court's punitive damages jurisprudence, however, reveals another goal that has largely been ignored: predictability. Unlike punishment and deterrence, predictability is not a purpose for which to award punitive damages. Instead, the Court requires that, when awarded, the level of punitive …

Balance Requirements For Standards Development Organizations: A Historical, Legal And Institutional Assessment, Justus Baron, Jorge L. Contreras, Pierre Larouche

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Most technical standards-development organizations (SDOs) have adopted internal policies embodying “due process” criteria such as openness, balance of interests, consensus decision making and appeals. These requirements arise from numerous sources including antitrust law, international trade law, public procurement requirements and institutional norms. Yet balance criteria lack a generally-accepted definition and the manner in which they are implemented varies, sometimes dramatically, among SDOs. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the principle that SDOs should ensure a balance of interests among their stakeholders, including in the development of intellectual property rights policies. This article explores the origins and meaning of …

Asylum Under Attack: Restoring Asylum Protections In The United States, Lindsay M. Harris

Journal Articles

The U.S. asylum system has endured four years of systematic attack. The Trump Administration attempted to dismantle the United States’ system to protect asylum seekers through changes to case law, executive orders, presidential proclamations, internal agency guidance and sweeping regulatory changes, among other measures. The system largely ground to a halt after the Trump Administration co-opted the coronavirus public health crisis to effectively close the southern border to asylum seekers with its March 2020 Centers for Disease Control order. This catastrophic order was not even the last in a long line of the Trump Administration’s efforts since assuming power to …

Improving The Legal And Regulatory Framework Of Restraint And Seclusion In D.C. Public Schools, James Gallagher

Upper Level Writing Requirement Research Papers

No abstract provided.

Getting Real About Procedure: Changing How We Think, Write And Teach About American Civil Procedure, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Unconstitutional Police, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

Most Fourth Amendment cases arise under a basic fact pattern. Police decide to do something--say, stop and frisk a suspect. They find some crime--say, a gun or drugs--they arrest the suspect, and the suspect is subsequently charged with a crime. The suspect--who is all too often Black--becomes a defendant and challenges the police officers' initial decision as unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. The defendant seeks to suppress the evidence against them or perhaps to recover damages for serious injuries under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The courts subsequently constitutionalize the police officers' initial decision with little or no scrutiny. Effectively, the …

Practical Abolition: Universal Representation As An Alternative To Immigration Detention, Matthew Boaz

Scholarly Articles

A federally funded universal representation program can serve as a practical first step toward the abolition of immigration detention and the other harsh enforcement mechanisms that are utilized today. While abolition is typically an ideology espoused by a small subsection of the general population, its purpose can be achieved through a less partisan and broader reaching ideal -- fiscal efficiency and responsibility. By demonstrating that the provision of counsel and other wrap around services is significantly less costly than immigration detention, while also showing that providing counsel and wrap around services is an extremely effective way to ensure compliance, this …

Kangaroo Courts, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

All Faculty Scholarship

Kangaroo courts are seemingly everywhere and nowhere. Legal actors often use this term to describe substandard and defective tribunals across various areas of American law. Yet there are few scholarly treatments of this evocative term. Without embracing this specific description, Professor Alexandra Natapoff’s Criminal Municipal Courts provides vivid insights into a rarely explored world of administration that has many of the trappings of kangaroo courts. Natapoff catalogs how municipal courts — also referred to as “town,” “summary,” “justice,” “mayor,” and “police” courts — are sometimes replete with conflicts of interests, shockingly staffed with nonlawyer judges, and often flouting standard criminal …

The End Of Deportation, Angélica Cházaro

Articles

This Article introduces to legal scholarship a new horizon for pro-immigrant scholarship and advocacy: deportation abolition. The ever-present threat of deportation shapes the daily lives of noncitizens. Instead of aiming for a pathway to citizenship, most noncitizens must now contend with dodging the many pathways to banishment. Despite growing threats to immigrant survival, most pro-immigrant scholarship and advocacy that aims to reduce migrant suffering assumes deportation as inevitable. The focus remains on improving individual outcomes by aligning the process of deportation with due process and the rule of law. But considered from the point of view of those facing deportation, …

Second-Trimester Abortion Dangertalk, Greer Donley, Jill Wieber Lens

Articles

Abortion rights are more vulnerable now than they have been in decades. This Article focuses specifically on the most assailable subset of those rights: the right to a pre-viability, second-trimester abortion. Building on Carhart v. Gonzales, where the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on a safe and effective second-trimester abortion procedure, states have passed new second-trimester abortion restrictions that rely heavily on the woman-protective rationale—the idea that the restrictions will benefit women. These newer second-trimester abortion restrictions include bans on the Dilation & Evacuation (D&E) procedure, bans on disability-selective abortions, and mandatory perinatal hospice and palliative care counseling …

Due Process In Antitrust Enforcement: Normative And Comparative Perspectives, Christopher S. Yoo, Yong Huang, Thomas Fetzer, Shan Jiang

All Faculty Scholarship

Due process in antitrust enforcement has significant implications for better professional and accurate enforcement decisions. Not only can due process spur economic growth, raise government credibility, and limit the abuse of powers according to law, it also promotes competitive reforms in monopolized sectors and curbs corruption. Jurisdictions learn from the best practices in the investigation process, decisionmaking process, and the announcement and judicial review of antitrust enforcement decisions. By comparing the enforcement policies of China, the European Union, and the United States, this article calls for better disclosure of evidence, participation of legal counsel, and protection of the procedural and …

The Right To Contest Ai, Margot E. Kaminski, Jennifer M. Urban

Publications

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to make important decisions, from university admissions selections to loan determinations to the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. These uses of AI raise a host of concerns about discrimination, accuracy, fairness, and accountability.

In the United States, recent proposals for regulating AI focus largely on ex ante and systemic governance. This Article argues instead—or really, in addition—for an individual right to contest AI decisions, modeled on due process but adapted for the digital age. The European Union, in fact, recognizes such a right, and a growing number of institutions around the world now call for …

Mdl Revolution, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Abbe Gluck

Scholarly Works

Over the past 50 years, multidistrict litigation (MDL) has quietly revolutionized civil procedure. MDLs include the largest tort cases in U.S. history, but without the authority of the class-action rule, MDL judges—who formally have only pretrial jurisdiction over individual cases—have resorted to extraordinary procedural exceptionalism to settle cases on a national scale. Substantive state laws, personal jurisdiction, transparency, impartiality, reviewability, federalism, and adequate representation must all yield if doing so fulfills that one goal.

Somehow, until now, this has remained below the surface to everyone but MDL insiders. Thanks to the sprawling MDL over the opioid crisis—and unprecedented opposition to …

Presumed Punishable: Sentencing On The Streets And The Need To Protect Black Lives Through A Reinvigoration Of The Presumption Of Innocence, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, there has been a renewed focus on protecting Black people in America from excessive police violence. While the images of George Floyd were shocking to the public, that level of extreme violence and disregard for life has been a common aspect of the lives of Black Americans throughout history. In America, Black people are "pre­sumed punishable." Due to the historical and persistent biases against Black people, Black people find themselves subject to false assumptions about their criminality and presumptions that they are deserving of punishment. This stands …

Facilitating Money Judgment Enforcement Between Canada And The United States, Paul George

Faculty Scholarship

The United States has attempted for years to create a more efficient enforcement regime for foreign-country judgments, both by treaty and statute. Long negotiations succeeded in July 2019, when the Hague Conference on Private International Law (with U.S. participants, including the Uniform Law Commission) promulgated the new Hague Judgments Convention which harmonizes judgment recognition standards but leaves the domestication process to the enforcing jurisdiction. In August 2019, the Uniform Law Commission took a significant step to fill that gap, though limited to Canadian judgments. The Uniform Registration of Canadian Money Judgments Act provides a registration process similar to that for …

Ethical And Aggressive Appellate Advocacy: The Decision To Petition For Certiorari In Criminal Cases, J. Thomas Sullivan

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past six decades, United States Supreme Court decisions have dramatically reshaped the criminal justice process to provide significant protections for defendants charged in federal and state proceedings, reflecting a remarkable expansion of due process and specific constitutional guarantees. For criminal defendants seeking relief based on recognition of new rules of constitutional criminal procedure, application of existing rules or precedent to novel factual scenarios, or in some cases, enforcement of existing precedent, obtaining relief requires further action on the Court’s part. In those situations, the Court’s exercise of its certiorari jurisdiction is the exclusive remedy offering an avenue for …

Claim Preclusion And The Problem Of Fictional Consent, Lindsey Simon

Scholarly Works

The doctrine of claim preclusion promotes fairness and finality by preventing parties from raising claims that already were (or could have been) raised in a prior proceeding. This strict consequence can be imposed only when the litigant received minimal due process protections in the initial proceeding, including notice and direct or indirect participation.

Modern litigation has caused a new problem. In some cases, a party may be precluded from ever raising a claim on the grounds of “fictional consent” to a prior court’s decisionmaking authority. Litigation devices have expanded the potential reach of judgments through aggregation and broad jurisdictional grants, …

Civil Procedure And Economic Inequality, Maureen Carroll

Articles

How well do procedural doctrines attend to present-day economic inequality? This Essay examines that question through the lens of three doctrinal areas: the “irreparable harm” prong of the preliminary injunction standard, the requirement that discovery must be proportional to the needs of the case, and the due process rights of class members in actions for injunctive relief. It concludes that in each of those areas, courts and commentators could do more to take economic inequality into account.

Reproductive Health Care Exceptionalism And The Pandemic, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Detention By Any Other Name, Sandra G. Mayson

All Faculty Scholarship

An unaffordable bail requirement has precisely the same effect as an order of pretrial detention: the accused person is jailed pending trial. It follows as a logical matter that an order requiring an unaffordable bail bond as a condition of release should be subject to the same substantive and procedural protections as an order denying bail altogether. Yet this has not been the practice.

This Article lays out the logical and legal case for the proposition that an order that functionally imposes detention must be treated as an order of detention. It addresses counterarguments and complexities, including both empirical and …

Boots And Bail On The Ground: Assessing The Implementation Of Misdemeanor Bail Reforms In Georgia, Andrea Woods, Sandra G. Mayson, Lauren Sudeall, Guthrie Armstrong, Anthony Potts

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article presents a mixed-methods study of misdemeanor bail practice across Georgia in the wake of reform. We observed bail hearings and interviewed system actors in a representative sample of fifty-five counties to assess the extent to which pretrial practice conforms to legal standards clarified in Senate Bill 407 and Walker v. Calhoun. We also analyzed jail population data published by county jails and by the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. We found that a handful of counties have made promising headway in adhering to law and best practices, but that the majority have some distance to go. Most …

Criminalizing Coercive Control Within The Limits Of Due Process, Erin L. Sheley

Faculty Scholarship

The sociological literature on domestic abuse shows that it is more complex than a series of physical assaults. Abusers use “coercive control” to subjugate their partners through a web of threats, humiliation, isolation, and demands. The presence of coercive control is highly predictive of future physical violence and is, in and of itself, also a violation of the victim’s liberty and dignity. In response to these new understandings the United Kingdom has recently criminalized nonviolent coercive control, making it illegal to, on two or more occasions, cause “serious alarm or distress” to an intimate partner that has a “substantial effect” …

Making Litigating Citizenship More Fair, Ming H. Chen

Publications

No abstract provided.

Reconceptualizing Hybrid Rights, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

In landmark decisions on religious liberty and same-sex marriage, and many other cases as well, the Supreme Court has placed its imprimatur on so called “hybrid rights.” These rights spring from the interaction of two or more constitutional clauses, none of which alone suffices to give rise to the operative protection. Controversy surrounds hybrid rights in part because there exists no judicial account of their justifiability. To be sure, some scholarly treatments suggest that these rights emanate from the “structures” or “penumbras” of the Constitution. But critics respond that hybrid rights lack legitimacy for that very reason because structural and …

Regulating Impartiality In Agency Adjudication, Kent H. Barnett

Scholarly Works

Which should prevail—the Take Care Clause of Article II or the Due Process Clause? To Justice Breyer’s chagrin, the majorities in Lucia v. SEC and Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB expressly declined to resolve whether the U.S. Constitution condones SEC administrative law judges’ and other similarly situated agency adjudicators’ current statutory protection from at-will removal. The crux of the problem is that, on one hand, senior officials may use at-will removal to pressure agency adjudicators and thereby potentially imperil the impartiality that due process requires. On the other hand, Article II limits Congress’s ability to cocoon executive officers, including potentially …

Secret Conviction Programs, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Judges and juries across the country are convicting criminal defendants based on secret evidence. Although defendants have sought access to the details of this evidence—the results of computer programs and their underlying algorithms and source codes—judges have generally denied their requests. Instead, judges have prioritized the business interests of the for-profit companies that developed these “conviction programs” and which could lose market share if the secret algorithms and source codes on which the programs are based were exposed. This decision has jeopardized criminal defendants’ constitutional rights.

Bridging The Gap Between Immigration Detainment And Parental Rights: A Constitutional Consideration Of Migrant Children Separation, Kelsey Burge

Northern Illinois Law Review Supplement

Federal immigration law does not completely comport with state family law because some federal legislation, such as the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), requires states to initiate parental custody proceedings due to children being separated from their parents for a statutorily defined period, even when parents are detained in immigration centers with very uncertain timelines. Parental custody proceedings involve factors that each state has authority to enact evaluating parental fitness; however, the factors may be implicitly or explicitly biased toward migrant parents, resulting in migrant parental custody being terminated unfairly. While Trump's zero-tolerance policy enacted in 2018 sparked outrage …

The Due Process And Other Constitutional Rights Of Foreign States, Ingrid W. Brunk

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The rights offoreign states under the US. Constitution are becoming more important as the actions offoreign states andforeign state-owned enterprises expand in scope and the legislative protections to which they are entitled contract. Conventional wisdom and lower court cases hold that foreign states are outside our constitutional order and that they are protected neither by separation ofpowers nor by due process. As a matter ofpolicy, however, it makes little sense to afford litigation-related constitutional protections to foreign corporations and individuals but to deny categorically such protections to foreign states. Careful analysis shows that the conventional wisdom and lower court cases …

Due Process In International Antitrust Enforcement: An Idea Whose Time Has Come, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The past year has witnessed an upsurge of international interest in due process in antitrust enforcement, reflected in two new comparative studies and International Competition Network’s (ICN’s) May 2019 adoption of its Recommended Practices for Investigative Process and Framework for Competition Agency Procedures and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Competition Committee’s discussion of the Draft Recommendation on Transparency and Procedural Fairness in Competition Law Enforcement in June 2019. This article reviews those developments, traces key differences among them, and looks ahead to what comes next.

The Right To Migrate: A Human Rights Response To Immigration Restrictionism In Argentina, David C. Baluarte

Scholarly Articles

Within days of President Donald Trump’s 2017 Executive Orders on border security and immigration enforcement, President Mauricio Macri of Argentina issued a Decree to address what he declared was an urgent problem of immigrant criminality. The timing of the two Presidents’ actions triggered concerns that U.S.-style restrictionist immigration regulation was spreading to South America, a continent that has taken progressive steps towards recognizing the human rights of migrants in recent years. Until Macri’s 2017 Decree, Argentina was considered a leader in this regard, with its 2004 immigration law that boldly codified a “right to migrate” and included robust substantive and …