Law Commons^™

Practitioners' Perception Of Court-Connected Mediation In Five Regions: An Empirical Study, Shahla F. Ali

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Courts throughout the world face the challenge of designing court mediation programs to provide opportunities for party-directed reconciliation on the one hand, while ensuring access to formal legal channels on the other. In some jurisdictions, mandated programs require initial attempts at mediation, while in others, voluntary programs encourage party-selected participation. This Article explores the attitudes and perceptions of eighty-three practitioners implementing court mediation programs in five regions in order to understand the dynamics, challenges, and lessons learned from the perspectives of those directly engaged in the work of administering, representing, and mediating civil claims. Given the highly contextual nature of …

Fairness, Legitimacy, And Selection Decisions In International Criminal Law, Jonathan Hafetz

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The selection of situations and cases remains one of the most vexing challenges facing the International Criminal Court (ICC) and other international criminal tribunals. Since Nuremberg, international criminal law (ICL) has experienced significant progress in developing procedural safeguards designed to protect the fair trial rights of the accused. But it continues to lag in the fairness of its selection decisions as measured against the norm of equal application of law, whether in the disproportionate focus on certain regions (as with the ICC's focus on Africa), the application of criminal responsibility only to one side of a conflict, or the continued …

Access, Progress, And Fairness:Rethinking Exclusivity In Copyright, Nicolas Suzor

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

This Article provides a detailed critique of the incentives-access binary in copyright discourse. Mainstream copyright theory generally accepts that copyright is a balance between providing incentives to authors to invest in the production of cultural works and enhancing the dissemination of those works to the public. This Article argues that dominant copyright theory obscures the possibility of developing a model of copyright that is able to support authors without necessarily limiting access to creative works. The abundance that the Internet allows suggests that increasing access to cultural works to enhance learning, sharing, and creative play should be a fundamental goal …

A Normalized Scoring Model For Law School Competitions, Edward K. Cheng, Scott J. Farmer

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Although the focus in this Article is moot court scoring, one can envision many other instances of law school assessment in which such a normalization problem arises. Law review competitions also involve different sets of graders, whose subjective determinations must be reasonably commensurate to make fair comparisons. Even more intriguing, although presenting a more complicated problem, law school grades suffer the same normalization concern. Courses feature material with different degrees of difficulty, attract different pools of students, and are taught by different instructors. Yet, class rank and graduation honors are ultimately calculated under the assumption that all grades are commensurate. …

Lost In Translation: International Criminal Tribunals And The Legal Implications Of Interpreted Testimony, Joshua Karton

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

When courtroom interpreters translate a witness's testimony, errors are not just possible, they are inherent to the process. Moreover, the occurrence of such errors is not merely a technical problem; errors can infringe on the rights of defendants or even lead to verdicts based on faulty findings of fact. International criminal proceedings, which are necessarily multilinguistic, are both particularly susceptible to interpretation errors and sensitive to questions of procedural fairness. This Article surveys the history and mechanics of courtroom interpretation, explains the inherent indeterminacy of translated language, and describes the other sources of inaccuracy in interpreted testimony. It then assesses …

Toward Fundamental Fairness In The Kangaroo Courtroom: The Due Process Case Against Statutes Presumptively Closing Juvenile Proceedings, Stephen E. Oestreicher Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

Today's juvenile courtroom functions quite differently than did its 1899 Chicago ancestor. During every decade since the 1960s, the juvenile court system has undergone a number of fundamental, structural changes. The most recent of these "mega change[s]" came during the 1990s, when a number of states abandoned their existing presumptive closure statutes and mandated that juvenile delinquency proceedings be held in the open for the press and the public to see.

The policy reviews of this development have been mixed. Some commentators criticize the recent trend, asserting that open proceedings enervate the juvenile system's ultimate goal of rehabilitating wayward youths. …

Foreword: Is Justice Just Us?, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This is a review of JUSTICE, LIABILITY AND BLAME, by Paul Robinson and John Darley. The book is a summary of 18 studies which surveyed lay subjects about their attitudes toward various aspects of criminal law doctrine, including the act requirement for attempt, omission liability, accomplice liability, the felony-murder role, and the intoxication and insanity defenses. In virtually every study, the authors found that the subjects disagreed with the Model Penal Code's position, the common law's position, or both. The authors contend that results of surveys such as theirs should play a significant role in designing criminal doctrine, both because …

Comment: The Future Of Behavioral Economic Analysis Of Law, Jennifer Arlen

Vanderbilt Law Review

Behavioral economic analysis of law presents an important challenge to conventional law and economics, strengthened in part by the fact that conventional law and economics is itself a behavioral approach to law. Indeed, conventional law and economics can be viewed as the first widely-adopted behavioral approach to law. A central contribution of Ronald Coase's pathbreaking article was the claim that one cannot determine the effect of a law by simply looking at the law itself--at the conduct the law requires. Instead, one must determine how people will respond to the law.' Legal rules, he argued, do not dictate behavior-they simply …

No Hablo Ingles: Court Interpretation As A Major Obstacle To Fairness For Non-English Speaking Defendants, Michael B. Shulman

Vanderbilt Law Review

A Cuban man was convicted on drug charges for uttering the words above. He used the words in response to a request for a loan and, given the dialect of the speaker and the context of the statement, they can properly be translated as "[m]an, I don't even have ten cents." Instead, the court interpreter mistakenly translated them as, "[m]an, I don't even have ten kilos."' This case demonstrates the influence the court interpreter can have on the outcome of a case. As extraordinary as this situation may appear, however, it is not an isolated incident. Rather, what is unusual …

Contribution, Claim Reduction,And Individual Treble Damage Responsibility: Which Path To Reform Of Antitrust Remedies?, Edward D. Cavanagh

Vanderbilt Law Review

Antitrust violations traditionally have been viewed as statutory torts,' yet tort principles of damage allocation, including contribution and claim reduction, have not been extended by analogy in the federal courts to antitrust cases. Moreover, the principle of joint and several liability, made applicable to antitrust conspirators by judicial fiat some eighty years ago, has gone largely unchallenged. While the federal antitrust laws are nearly a century old, the damage allocation debate is of recent vintage, emerging in the wake of the Electrical Equipment Cases, when the private treble damage remedy came into its own.

The recent emergence of contribution and …

Contribution Among Antitrust Defendants, Jane G. Parks

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Recent Development argues that no single federal common law rule of contribution exists and that federal securities law decisions provide the best analogy from which to imply a right of contribution under the antitrust laws. Thus, the Recent Development proposes that the Supreme Court should fashion a rule permitting contribution among antitrust defendants.

Forward: A Symposium On Restitution, John P. Dawson

Vanderbilt Law Review

The editors of the Vanderbilt Law Review deserve praise for arranging this symposium on the neglected subject of Restitution, a great and growing area of our private law whose literature is extra-ordinarily meager. Partly because of this neglect by legal scholars,the practicing profession as a whole remains unaware of the range and variety of restitutionary remedies and the possibilities they offer for solving problems that are otherwise intractable. The volume of restitution cases reported in current advance sheets shows that courts and lawyers are learning to make use of restitution remedies, but the subject still inspires hesitation and diffidence, for …