Jurisprudence Commons^™

Nonparty Jurisdiction, Aaron D. Simowitz, Linda J. Silberman

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The Supreme Court's recent decisions on personal jurisdiction, including its 2021 decision in Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court, have all focused on the adjudication of plenary claims. In seven years, the Court has decided six major cases on personal jurisdiction in that context. However, these precedents also appear to guide lower courts in areas outside the traditional focus of personal jurisdiction doctrine but where personal jurisdiction is nonetheless necessary. For example, a court must have personal jurisdiction over a nonparty witness in order to compel the witness to testify or to produce documents. A court must …

European Union Law As Foreign Law, Lior Zemer, Sharon Pardo

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The importance and significance of comparative sources to the development of Israeli jurisprudence is expressed in local legislation and rulings. The impact of foreign law on the development of Israeli law has been analyzed and vindicated in numerous studies in the local legal literature. These studies typically focus on the two most prominent legal systems—-common law (the Anglo-American system) and civil law (the Continental system). The historical reasons for this are clear, emanating from the fact that Israel’s legal system is based on these legal regimes and is amended in the spirit of changes made to them. Over the years, …

The Image Of European Union Law In Bilateral Relations, Sharon Pardo, Lior Zemer

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The impact of foreign law on the development of national laws has been analyzed and vindicated in numerous studies in comparative legal literature. These studies typically focus on the two most prominent legal systems--common law (the Anglo-American system) and civil law (the Continental system). The historical reasons for this are clear, emanating from the fact that the world's legal systems are based on these legal regimes and are amended in the spirit of changes made to them. Over the years, however, with the many effects of legal and economic globalization, legal systems have become a diverse mosaic which has appropriated …

An Administrative Jurisprudence: The Rule Of Law In The Administrative State, Kevin M. Stack

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Essay offers a specification of the rule of law's demands of administrative law and government inspired by Professor Peter L. Strauss's scholarship. It identifies five principles'authorization, notice, justification, coherence, and procedural fairness which provide a framework for an account of the rule of law's demands of administrative governance. Together these principles have intriguing results for the evaluation of administrative law. On the one hand, they reveal rule-of-law foundations for some contested positions, such as a restrictive view of the President's power to direct subordinate officials and giving weight to an agency's determination of the scope of its own authority. …

Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel Before "Powell V. Alabama": Lessons From History For The Future Of The Right To Counsel, Sara Mayeux

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In the first Part of this Essay, I outline the common law agency rule that precluded reversal of a judgment on the basis of counsel negligence. While this rule was developed in civil litigation, state judges also applied it in criminal appeals. In many states, judges continued to apply the rule strictly through the 1920S or even later.35 However, from the 188os through the 1920s, some state judges moved toward a more flexible application of the rule in criminal cases. Though judges still recited the traditional rule that counsel negligence could not be grounds for a new trial, they now …

From Berne To Beijing: A Critical Perspective, David Lange

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Remarking on the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances at the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law's Symposium, From Berne to Beijing, Professor Lange expressed general misgivings about exercising the Treaty Power in ways that alter the nature of US copyright law and impinge on other constitutional rights. This edited version of those Remarks explains Professor Lange's preference for legislation grounded squarely in the traditional jurisprudence of the Copyright Clause, the First Amendment, and the public domain, and his preference for contracting around established expectations rather than reworking default rules through treaties. It continues by exploring the particular costs associated …

Jurisdictional Standards (And Rules), Adam L. Muchmore

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Article uses the jurisprudential dichotomy between two opposing types of legal requirements--"rules" and "standards"--to examine extraterritorial regulation by the United States. It argues that there is natural push toward standards in extraterritorial regulation because numerous institutional actors either see standards as the best option in extraterritorial regulation or accept standards as a second-best option when their first choice (a rule favorable to their interests or their worldview) is not feasible.

The Article explores several reasons for this push toward standards, including: statutory text, statutory interpretation theories, the nonbinary nature of the domestic/foreign characterization, the tendency of extraterritorial regulation to …

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 …

An Empirical Assessment Of Climate Change In The Courts: A New Jurisprudence Or Business As Usual?, J.B. Ruhl, David L. Markell

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

While legal scholarship seeking to assess the impact of litigation on the direction of climate change policy is abundant and growing in leaps and bounds, to date it has relied on and examined only small, isolated pieces of the vast litigation landscape. Without a complete picture of what has and has not been within the sweep of climate change litigation, it is difficult to offer a robust evaluation of the past, present, and future of climate change jurisprudence. Based on a comprehensive empirical study of the status of all (201) climate change litigation matters filed through 2010, this Article is …

Emotional Common Sense As Constitutional Law, Terry A. Maroney

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In Gonzales v. Carhart the Supreme Court invoked post-abortion regret to justify a ban on a particular abortion procedure. The Court was proudly folk-psychological, representing its observations about women's emotional experiences as "self-evident." That such observations could drive critical legal determinations was, apparently, even more self-evident, as it received no mention at all. Far from being sui generis, Carhart reflects a previously unidentified norm permeating constitutional jurisprudence: reliance on what this Article coins "emotional common sense." Emotional common sense is what one unreflectively thinks she knows about the emotions. A species of common sense, it seems obvious and universal to …

Mr. Sunstein's Neighborhood: Won't You Be Our Co-Author?, Tracey E. George, Paul H. Edelman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In Six Degrees of Cass Sunstein: Collaboration Networks in Legal Scholarship (11 Green Bag 2d 19 (2007)) we began the study of the collaboration network in legal academia. We concluded that the central figure in the network was Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School and proceeded to catalogue all of his myriad co-authors (so-called Sunstein 1's) and their co-authors (Sunstein 2's). In this small note we update that catalogue as of August 2008 and take the opportunity to reflect on this project and its methodology.

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 …

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 …

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 …

Disentangling Deregulatory Takings, Jim Rossi, Susan Ackerman-Rose

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Constitutional takings protections, such as those in the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, create a potential for state liability for changes in regulatory policy by governments. This Article critiques takings jurisprudence in the context of two infrastructure investment issues: the stranded cost problem facing United States utility industries, which has given rise to claims of compensation for deregulatory takings; and the development of standards to protect direct foreign investment in developing countries. In both contexts, traditional legal doctrines do not adequately provide for the type of remedy sought so courts are in need of standards to assist them …

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 …

The Future Of The World Health Organization: What Role For International Law?, David P. Fidler

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Article has tried to provide a comprehensive analysis of the role of international law in WHO's future. Whether WHO realizes it, international law has had and will continue to have effects on international health policy. In the future, WHO has a choice: It can continue to act as if international law plays no role in global public health or it can build the commitment and capacity needed to integrate international law into its endeavors and into the creation of global health jurisprudence. Building such commitment and capacity will not resurrect WHO to its past glories, but they may very …

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 …

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 Irish Abortion Debate: Substantive Rights And Affecting Commerce Jurisprudential Models, Anne M. Hilbert

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Note examines the balance of power between the European Community and its Member States through the window of the Irish abortion debate. The framework for that debate has been shaped largely by two judicial bodies: the Irish judiciary and the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the judicial arm of the European Community. The Irish judiciary has approached the abortion question through an analysis of the content of substantive individual rights protected by the Irish Constitution. The ECJ, on the other hand, has addressed abortion from the standpoint of the European Community's goal of uninhibited commerce between Member States. These …

Straightening The "Timber": Toward A New Paradigm Of International Law, Louis R. Beres

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Immanuel Kant once remarked: " Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made, nothing entirely straight can be built." Understood in terms of international law, this philosopher's wisdom points toward a far-reaching departure from traditional emphases on structures of global power and authority. Newly aware that structural alterations of international law are always epiphenomenal, ignoring root causes of international crimes in favor of their symptomatic expressions, we could craft from this departure a new and promising jurisprudence. Acknowledging that human transformations must lie at the heart of all world-order reform, we could build upon the knowledge …

Provisional Measures In The Inter-American Human Rights System: An Innovative Development In International Law, Jo M. Pasqualucci

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In this Article, Professor Pasqualucci examines the developing jurisprudence of provisional measures in the Inter-American human rights system. Through the adoption of provisional measures, a human rights court may order a state to protect persons who are in danger of imminent death or torture. The author first provides an overview of the Inter-American system of human rights. She then describes the historical background of the jurisprudence of provisional measures in the International Court of Justice and the European human rights system, which served as models for provisional measures in the developing Inter-American system. Finally, she analyzes the use of provisional …

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 …

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 …

Finance, Rules And The Indexation Of Brazilian Government Bonds, Mark J. Roe

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In roughly a dozen years, Brazil has created a sophisticated multi-billion dollar system of public debt in the midst of an unpredictable inflationary financial climate. During this time the government bonds were initially all indexed against inflation; the obligations were automatically periodically adjusted in accordance with price index changes. However, as shall be seen, the indexation of the bonds was not necessarily the cause of the expansion of the market for public debt.

The legal-economic mechanism of Brazilian indexation is not widely understood in the United States. The method used to calculate the index that provides the basis for readjusting …

Books Received, C. C. S.

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

ACCESS TO ENERGY: 2000 AND AFTER

By Melvin A. Conant

Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1979. Pp. 134.

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THE CHEYENNE WAY: CONFLICT AND CASE LAW IN PRIMITIVE JURISPRUDENCE

By K.N. Llewellyn and E. Adamson Hoebel Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press, 1978. Pp. 360.

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CHINESE LEGAL TRADITION UNDER THE MONGOLS: THE CODE OF 1291 AS RECONSTRUCTED

By Paul Heng-chao Ch'en.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Pp. 205.

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EUROPEAN CAPITAL MARKETS: TOWARDS A GENERAL THEORY OF INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT

By Bruno H. Solnik

Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1973. Pp. 114.

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MODERN INTERNATIONAL LAW

By R.C. Hingorani

Oceana: Dobbs …

Book Review, Igor I. Kavass

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The limited use of American case law in the Commonwealth countries should not be surprising. With the exception of English cases, the decisions of other Commonwealth countries receive the same indifferent treatment in all Commonwealth jurisdictions; the English courts studiously ignore the decisions of other Commonwealth countries. For that matter, American courts do not consult the case law of English and other Commonwealth countries all too frequently. Espinoza v. Farah Manufacturing Co. is a recent example in point. In that case, the Supreme Court was asked to interpret the meaning of the terms "nationality" and "national origin" as used. in …

The Jurisprudence Of Judge Hardy Cross Dillard, Charles E.M. Kolb

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The purpose of this article is to provide a critical assessment of Judge Dillard's performance during his tenure on the International Court of Justice. Much of this article will be "jurisprudential" in scope, endeavoring to examine developments in international legal theory and international organizations during the past two decades and to assess recent decisions written by the Court. The approach will in part be an institutional one, taking into consideration the ability of an individual member of the Court to shape decisional outcomes of an international body which must resolve contentious litigation and render advisory opinions within the structure of …

Case Comments, Journal Staff

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Sovereign Immunity and Act of State -- A Foreign Sovereign instituting Suit in a United States Court waives Immunity to a Set-off arising from an Act of that Sovereign

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International Law--Nuremburg Doctrine invoked in Domestic Court-Martial