Law Commons^™

Photocopies, Patents, And Knowledge Transfer: "The Uneasy Case" Of Justice Breyer's Patentable Subject Matter Jurisprudence, Dmitry Karshtedt

Vanderbilt Law Review

One aspect of Justice Stephen Breyer's discomfort with patents, as expressed in his opinion for the Supreme Court in Mayo v. Prometheus and his dissent from the order dismissing certiorari in LabCorp v. Metabolite, is strikingly similar to one of his critiques of copyright law in The Uneasy Case for Copyright, a well-known article he wrote as Professor Breyer more than forty-five years ago. In The Uneasy Case, Breyer argued that the burdens on duplication of technical articles imposed by copyright law restrict the flow of information and prevent scientists from enjoying spillover benefits of published research. His patent opinions …

Standing On The Edge: Standing Doctrine And The Injury Requirement At The Borders Of Establishment Clause Jurisprudence, Mary A. Myers

Vanderbilt Law Review

The very first line of the Bill of Rights provides that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." This line, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, was motivated by the history of religious persecution that drove thousands of adherents of minority faiths in Europe to the New World to seek refuge to practice their own faith, free from the compulsion of state-established religion. The Establishment Clause remains relevant today, and the U.S. Supreme Court has been active in hearing cases involving it. For purposes of determining standing-that is, whether an individual or organization meets certain constitutional …

Jacksonian Jurisprudence And The Obscurity Of Justice John Catron, Austin Allen

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article argues that Justice Catron's acceptance of the general premises of the Court's Jacksonian jurisprudence accounts for his obscurity. Part One demonstrates that Catron articulated a similar framework while serving on the Tennessee Supreme Court. Part Two illustrates his continued support for that framework after he moved to the U.S. Supreme Court. Part Three, however, demonstrates that, although he embraced much of the Taney Court's jurisprudence, Catron did not move in lockstep with his colleagues. Indeed, the elements he emphasized within that framework-namely, support for state sovereignty and equality as well as an aversion to judicial policymaking-led him to …

Reconciling Consent Searches And Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence: Incorporating Privacy Into The Test For Valid Consent Searches, David J. Housholder

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Fourth Amendment states: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Perhaps the most significant exception to the requirements of the Fourth Amendment is the consent search, which requires no warrant, exigent circumstances, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion.

Some scholars have suggested that the Supreme Court's voluntariness standard for determining consensual searches misperceives …

Damaged Goods: Why, In Light Of The Supreme Court's Recent Punitive Damages Jurisprudence, Congress Must Amend The Federal Rules Of Evidence, Michael S. Vitale

Vanderbilt Law Review

Since the 1980s, a wide range of courts and commentators have expressed concern over large punitive damages awards handed out by civil juries against a wide array of tortfeasors. A late 2001 study revealed that from 1985 to 2001, eight multi-billion dollar punitive damages awards were granted, with four of them being handed down in the years 1999 to 2001 alone.' Not surprisingly, all but one of these verdicts were handed down against large corporations. Among the current members of the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens in particular has regularly noted the especially dangerous tendency the current punitive …

The Unclear "Clear And Unmistakable" Standard: Why Arbitrators, Not Courts, Should Determine Whether A Securities Investor's Claim Is Arbitrable, Guy Nelson

Vanderbilt Law Review

When an individual investor opens an account with a securities broker, the customer often must sign a standard-form contract as a precondition of conducting business with the broker. This non- negotiable contract, referred to as a Customer Agreement, generally contains an arbitration clause under which the parties agree to submit any future disputes to arbitration conducted by one of the securities industry's self-regulatory organizations ("SROs"). Proceedings initiated under the broad and inclusive arbitration clause are subject to the arbitration guidelines established by the SROs, a group which includes all the major stock exchanges. Virtually all brokers are members of an …

Reciprocity, Utility, And The Law Of Aggression, Anita Bernstein

Vanderbilt Law Review

The themes of incursion and boundary-crossing unite disparate legal domains. Wherever human beings cross paths and share space, law or law-like traditions develop to regulate this terrain by distinguishing permitted from proscribed intrusion.' Crimes and torts, regulation and liability, claims and defenses to claims, private law and public law all use a variety of measures--punishments, administrative rules, equitable remedies, professional discipline, and informal or extralegal sanctions-to condemn undue aggression. Concern about aggression may be found in the law of every jurisdiction in the United States.

Within American law, an extra increment of aggression can amount to the only difference between …

Jural Districting: Selecting Impartial Juries Through Community Representation, Kim Forde-Mazrui

Vanderbilt Law Review

Court reformers continue to debate over efforts to select juries more diverse than are typically achieved through existing procedures. Controversial proposals advocate race-conscious methods for selecting diverse juries. Such efforts, however well-intentioned, face constitutional difficulties under the Equal Protection Clause, which appears to preclude any use of race in selecting juries. The challenge thus presented by the Court's equal protection jurisprudence is whether jury selection procedures can be designed that effectively enhance the representative character of juries without violating constitutional norms.

Professor Forde-Mazrui offers a novel insight for resolving this challenge. Analogizing juries to legislatures, he applies electoral districting principles …

Progressive Era Race Relations Cases In Their "Traditional" Context, Mark V. Tushnet

Vanderbilt Law Review

The pioneering African-American historian Rayford Logan called the early years of the Progressive era the "nadir" of race relations in the United States. Historians and political scientists who study the Supreme Court generally agree that Supreme Court decisions are rarely substantially out of line with the kind of sustained national consensus regarding race relations that Logan described. Professors Bernstein and Karman point to popular culture, including the roaring success of D.W. Griffith's epic Birth of a Nation attacking Reconstruction and defending the Ku Klux Klan, and elite opinion such as the flourishing of scientific racism to demonstrate that there was …

From Premodern To Modern American Jurisprudence: The Onset Of Positivism, Stephen M. Feldman

Vanderbilt Law Review

What distinguished premodern from modern American jurisprudence? Whereas most commentators agree that the transition from premodernism to modernism occurred around the Civil War,' recent writings reveal dissension regarding the nature of antebellum and postbellum jurisprudence. In a wonderfully detailed study of Christopher Columbus Langdell, his jurisprudence, and his case method of teaching, William P. LaPiana argues that a defining feature of Langdell's postbellum legal science was a positivism that contrasted with a natural law orientation characteristic of the earlier antebellum jurisprudence. In a provocative critical essay, Robert W. Gordon argues to the contrary: LaPiana's emphasis on natural law during the …

Formal Neutrality In The Warren And Rehnquist Courts: Illusions Of Similarity, Rebecca L. Brown

Vanderbilt Law Review

I read recently that if one compares the genetic structure of humans to that of dogs, one finds that ninety-six percent of the DNA in the two species is identical. That is a lot of common ground. Yet it may not be enough to draw meaningful conclusions about the sameness of the two creatures. Without suggesting that either of the two Courts discussed in her Article is a "dog," I do think it is fair to say that Professor Sherry has perhaps underestimated the relative importance of the divergent four percent.

Professor Sherry argues that in the defining areas of …

Judgment, Philippe Nonet

Vanderbilt Law Review

To judge, in Latin judicare, is to say the law, jus dicere, whence juris-dictio.

The above sentence is a possible answer to the question: what is judging? It spells out what the word "to judge" says, by recalling the history from which the word originates. Why would anyone ask this question? How helpful is such an answer?

Everyone knows what it is to judge. Only on the ground of such self-evidence could there be that unabating debate on the ' justification" of particular judgments, which is the day to day business of lawyering. Only because the question can be passed …

Lamb's Chapel V. Center Moriches Union Free School District, 113 S. Ct. 2141 (1993), John E. Burgess

Vanderbilt Law Review

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution provides the primary foundation for the protection of several individual rights, including free speech and religious autonomy.' At times, how- ever, efforts to protect these rights appear to conflict with competing restraints on state action. The drafters of the First Amendment's Religion Clauses, for example, sought to guarantee religious freedom while maintaining a separation between church and state. The goal or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances."

Rereading "The Federal Courts": Revising The Domain Of Federal Courts Jurisprudence At The End Of The Twentieth Century, Judith Resnik

Vanderbilt Law Review

A first enterprise in understanding and reframing Federal Courts jurisprudence is to locate, descriptively, "the Federal Courts." This activity-identifying the topic-may seem too obvious for comment, but I hope to show its utility. One must start with a bit of history, going back to the "beginning" of this body of jurisprudence. The relevant date is 1928, when Felix Frankfurter and James Landis, who began this conversation, published their book, The Business of the Supreme Court: A Study in the Federal Judicial System. Three years later, in 1931, Felix Frankfurter, then joined by Wilber G. Katz (and later by Harry Shulman), …

The Algebra Of Pluralism: Subjective Experience As A Constitutional Variable, Barbara J. Flagg

Vanderbilt Law Review

Adzan Bedonie is a Navajo woman who speaks no English, holds tightly to traditional Navajo beliefs, and lives in a one-room hogan on the wrong side of the line drawn by a federal court to partition Navajo and Hopi lands.' The law that mandates her relocation and thus threatens to sever what for her is a spiritual connection to the land on which she lives offers a potential escape route: Congress provided for a limited number of life estates for older individuals subject to relocation. But Adzan Bedonie, like most elderly Navajo, has not applied for a life estate, because …

Theories Of Poetry, Theories Of Law, Lawrence Joseph

Vanderbilt Law Review

I write poetry." Also, since 1976, when I was admitted to practice before a state bar, I have served as a law clerk for a justice of a state supreme court, practiced, and mostly taught law. About the time that I began law school, while I was writing poems that would appear in my first book, an extraordinary change in jurisprudence began to occur, one which focused on legal language as something more than a medium for conveying singular meaning. This legal theory has become as important as any since legal realism. Because I also have written essays and re- …

The Jurisprudence Of Genetics, Rochelle C. Dreyfuss, Dorothy Nelkin

Vanderbilt Law Review

In recent years, genetic research has ascended the list of national research priorities. From among the many weighty claims on the fisc, Congress has chosen to provide significant federal support for the Human Genome Initiative, a project aimed at mapping the complete set of genetic instructions that form the structure of inherited attributes. Geneticists anticipate that the project will disclose important new in- formation on human development and disease. Some go further. One influential scientist remarked that this work is "the ultimate answer to the commandment 'Know thyself.' ""

The decision to fund this Initiative, the largest biology project in …

Medicaid, State Cost-Containment Measures, And Section 1983 Provider Actions Under "Wilder V. Virginia Hospital Association", Michael D. Daneker

Vanderbilt Law Review

After the Civil War, Congress enacted a statutory private right of action to ensure the protection of an individual's federal civil rights." This right of action, now codified at Title 42, Section 1983 of the United States Code, creates liability for anyone who, acting under a state law, program, or policy, infringes on an individual's federal rights. Although the authors of Section 1983 intended the statute to serve primarily as a mechanism for the protection of federal constitutional rights, the United States Supreme Court has recognized that Section 1983 is a valid tool for enforcing a wide variety of statutorily …

Not So Cold An Eye: Richard Posner's Pragmatism, Jason S. Johnston

Vanderbilt Law Review

Over the past twenty odd years, Judge Richard Posner has established himself as one of the most creative and influential thinkers in the history of American law. His work divides into two parts: the prejudicial corpus, which is devoted almost entirely to the comprehensive economic analysis of law,' and the postjudicial corpus, which treats issues involving what may be called the theory of judging and courts--that is, the normative theory of how judges should decide cases and how courts should be organized. This division is rough and wavering, for Posner's work prior to his appointment to the federal bench often …

Chief Justice Taft At The Helm, Alpheus T. Mason

Vanderbilt Law Review

The office of Chief Justice carries scant inherent powers. The Chief Justice manages the docket, presents the cases in conference, and guides the discussion. When in the majority, he assigns the writing of opinions. Whatever influence he exerts in the exercise of these prerogatives rests less on formal authority than on elusive personal characteristics. Charles Evans Hughes, who had served as Associate Justice from 1910 to 1916 and later had been able to observe Taft's role in the Court over a period of seven years, considered the Chief Justice "the most important judicial officer in the world." His actual power, …

Book Review, Allison L. Scafuri

Vanderbilt Law Review

The intellectual force in this scientifically and technologically oriented century, as Gatland and Dempster indicate, resides with men who have renaissance minds that can ably embrace scientific as well as societal propositions, reason anew and reach unique and far-reaching conclusions beyond the realm of current thought. To date, the intellectual strength of the lawyer has been his pervading understanding of problems from every societal view. This test can remain valid; however, the province of the legal "skill-elite group"must range far beyond his traditional social science touchstones into decidedly esoteric scientific subjects. The horizon of jurisprudence now embraces the mechanical universe …

Book Review, W. N. Ethridge, Jr. Honorable

Vanderbilt Law Review

The consummation of Llewellyn's particular interest in the craft of appellate judging was his classic The Common Law Tradition: Deciding Appeals, which he completed in 1960. After reading it,no appellate judge could decide a case or write an opinion without being affected to some extent by Llewellyn's method and criteria. He conceived of law as the product of a rational process. The traditional dichotomy of reason and experience are reconcilable by development of legal methods in a rational framework. This technique clarifies and supports the sociological jurisprudence of Holmes, Cardozo, and Brandeis.

Meaning And Structure Of Law In Islam, Salah-Eldin Abdel-Wahab

Vanderbilt Law Review

There are many other reasons to believe that consideration of Islamic jurisprudence should prove amply rewarding in the comparative study of law. A legal system which still underlies the legal life and social conduct of some 400 million people (one sixth of the world population) cannot be ignored. The original solutions which it provides for problems of high complexity and its very advanced normative structure which consists entirely of works by jurists, not of government codes and statutes, are worthy of consideration.

What's Wrong With Baker V. Carr?, Robert Lancaster

Vanderbilt Law Review

The decision of the majority of the Supreme Court in Baker v. Carr, the recently decided Tennessee Reapportionment Case, may well turn out to be one of the landmark decisions of American jurisprudence. If by reason of apathetic acquiescence such a judicial intrusion is permitted to go unchallenged and undebated, our federal system of limited and constitutional government may be further weakened. Although the balance of power as between the states and the national government has shifted and this shift has been reflected in and furthered by judicial interpretation of our Constitution, it seems questionable that such a far-reaching and …

Book Reviews, Edward S. Mason, Stanley D. Rose, Reber Boult, Robert N. Covington

Vanderbilt Law Review

This volume, which brings together, with one exception, all of Stocking's papers relating to workable competition, is more than a random collection of essays. As he indicates in the preface, the papers had been conceived from the beginning as segments of a book, and they proceed to cover systematically the relation of the concept of workable competition to the major areas of antitrust policy.

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Sir Frederick Pollock was born in 1845 and died in 1937. Throughout this long life, his industry was apparently unflagging. His mark is clearly discernible in wide areas of English law. Every student of the …

Ethical Theory And Legal Philosophy, Stanley D. Rose

Vanderbilt Law Review

Jurisprudence and ethics, the author believes, represent distinct efforts to achieve values in society. However, because of their similar method, bases in fact, and testing by consequences, each has something to give the other. With this in mind, the article examines the work of contemporary writers in ethics, both to determine what exactly are their positions and to see what they might offer the student of jurisprudence.

Law And History, C. J. Friedrich

Vanderbilt Law Review

Law is frozen history. In an elementary sense, everything we study when we study law is the report of an event in history, and all history consists of such records or reports. It therefore cannot be my task to develop a sermon on the importance of historical records for the understanding of the law; the tie is too intimate and too obvious to need laboring." The work of Professor Maine on 'Ancient Law,'" wrote Professor T. W. Dwight in his Introduction to that book in the sixties of the last century, "is almost the only one in the English language …

Hickman V. Jencks, Edward W. Cleary

Vanderbilt Law Review

In recent years the Supreme Court of the United States has decided two cases with fundamental impact upon the status of the legal profession in the litigatory process. Although the two cases are intimately related, the opinion in the second did not mention the first, and the two decisions have never really been laid side by side.' It is proposed here to explore their mutual implications.

The Next Step: Uniform Rules For The Courts Of Appeals, Milton D. Green

Vanderbilt Law Review

The adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938 maybe regarded as one of the great landmarks of procedural reform in the United States. The many innovations and improvements over prior practice which were effected are well known. Not the least of these was the achievement of uniformity of procedure in all of the federal district courts of the United States, replacing the chaotic confusion which had existed under the Conformity Act.' Although the Federal Rules were addressed primarily to practice and procedure in the district courts, they also dealt with certain aspects of appellate practice. This was …

Studies In Legal Philosophy, William R. Anderson

Vanderbilt Law Review

The hazards of planning a symposium in the field of jurisprudence derive largely from the fact that the field is itself ill-defined; the legitimate "province of jurisprudence," to use Austin's phrase, has never been fully agreed upon. A historical approach seemed reasonably satisfactory, however, and what follows is a series of studies of some of the great figures in the history of legal philosophy. Happily, no one of our contributors was satisfied with simple exegesis or even with appraising matters of purely historical importance. Each study is an attempt to deal critically with a facet of its subject which is …