Law Commons^™

Changing The Costs: A Rational Choice Perspective On African Americans' Healthcare Consumption Decisions, Nicole Langston

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This paper makes the case for racial disparities in the consumption of healthcare and advocates for a large-scale cost-benefit change for healthcare practitioners and the African American community to ensure efficient consumption of healthcare by African American patients. Part I explores the history of African Americans and the healthcare system, arguing the history of this interaction fuels many of the present-day decisions not to consume healthcare.

Part II explores the current racial differences in healthcare treatment and outcomes for African Americans in order to lay the framework for racially disparate treatment in America's healthcare system.

Part III of this paper …

How Much Is That Lawsuit In The Window? Pricing Legal Claims, Maya Steinitz

Vanderbilt Law Review

Assessing the value of legal claims is the sixty-four thousand dollar question (no pun intended) of civil litigation. Clients, as every litigator knows, often come into their attorneys' offices with a belief that they know how much their claim is worth. The attorney is then asked to validate that number. Alternately, clients can come to their attorneys with a grievance-I have been injured, a counter-party breached its contract with me, I have been fired, our rainforest has been devastated by a mining company-and ask the attorney for an assessment of how much their grievance might be worth. Contingency lawyers, who …

Understanding Causation In Private Securities Lawsuits: Building On Amgen, James D. Cox

Vanderbilt Law Review

The securities antifraud provision is a bastard. It has no indisputable parentage; its existence is attributed to a federal statute, but its features are borrowed from state law, a body of law that the enacting Congress presumably believed was inadequate.' Why would Congress borrow from state law that it considered deficient? Even though the antifraud provision has come of age largely through judicial construction similar to the laudatory process that underlies our common law, critics attack the antifraud provision like no comparable common-law development. To many scholars, private antifraud suits are not viewed as a net benefit, but as a …

Setting Attorneys' Fees In Securities Class Actions: An Empirical As, Lynn A. Baker, Michael A. Perino, Charles Silver

Vanderbilt Law Review

n 1995, Congress overrode President Bill Clinton's veto and enacted the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act ("PSLRA"), a key purpose of which was to put securities class actions under the control of institutional investors with large financial stakes in the outcome of the litigation.' The theory behind this policy, set out in a famous article by Professors Elliot Weiss and John Beckerman, was simple: self-interest should encourage investors with large stakes to run class actions in ways that maximize recoveries for all investors. These investors should naturally want to hire good lawyers, incentivize them properly, monitor their actions, and reject …

The Fraud-On-The-Market Tort, John C.P. Goldberg, Benjamin C. Zipursky

Vanderbilt Law Review

It is commonplace to observe that there are differences between private 10b-5 actions and common-law actions for deceit, notwithstanding that both travel under the name of "fraud."' It is equally commonplace to suppose that these differences primarily reflect the need to adapt law that was first developed in a world of face-to-face transactions to the modern reality of large-scale, impersonal markets. The poster children for the transition from common-law fraud to securities fraud are, first, the Supreme Court's adoption in Basic, Inc. v. Levinson of the fraud-on-the-market doctrine and, second, the related emergence of securities fraud class actions. Amidst this …

What Should We Do About Multijurisdictional Litigation In M&A Deals?, Randall S. Thomas

Vanderbilt Law Review

Companies and their investors have been battling over the value of representative shareholder litigation since at least the 1940s. Investors argue that managerial agency costs are high and that class actions and derivative suits are key shareholder monitoring mechanisms that they can deploy to keep managers in line. Companies, on the other hand, believe that the plaintiffs' bar drives representative litigation claims, as agency costs in contingency fee suits make the lawyer the real party in interest. Over the past several decades, there have been numerous skirmishes between these two sets of actors, manifesting themselves, for example, in congressional debates …

Screening Legal Claims Based On Third-Party Litigation Finance Agreements And Other Signals Of Quality, Michael Abramowicz, Omer Alper

Vanderbilt Law Review

The advent of third-party litigation finance introduces a new gatekeeper to the legal process. Before deciding to lend money to a plaintiff, a litigation finance company will conduct at least some review and make an assessment of the quality of the case.' Since litigation finance loans are generally nonrecourse, a litigation finance company is likely to refuse to loan money to plaintiffs with the weakest cases. Such voluntary claim screening may improve social welfare by reducing the incidence of frivolous claims. But the volume of frivolous claims may still be higher than it would be in a world without third-party …

Fee Shifting And The Free Market, Jonathan T. Molot

Vanderbilt Law Review

It is uncontroversial that litigation is too expensive. Controversy abounds, however, over who is to blame and what is to be done about the problem. Plaintiffs and defendants each accuse the other of pursuing weak or meritless litigation positions that inflict needless expense. This Article suggests that regardless of who is correct-and who is more often at fault-the same set of solutions may be available to assuage the problem. The Article embraces a combination of procedural reforms and market mechanisms designed to improve matters for both sides and to make it less likely that a party with a meritorious litigation …

The Chilling Effect And The Problem Of Private Action, Monica Youn

Vanderbilt Law Review

A First Amendment chilling effect occurs when a governmental action creates a consequence that deters an individual from exercising expressive rights. But in some cases, the chilling effect does not stem directly from the governmental action, but instead from intervening private actions. For example, the mandatory disclosure of campaign contributions may "chill" contributors, due to the potential threat of retaliatory acts by private actors, such as criticism, protests, boycotts, threats, or violence. Is there a point at which the chilling effect is attributable to that private reaction, rather than to the challenged governmental action? And should we distinguish between chilling …

Be A Liar Or You're Fired! First Amendment Protection For Public Employees Who Object To Their Employer's Criminal Demands, Keane A. Barger

Vanderbilt Law Review

Public perception of the Roberts Court has been defined, to a significant degree, by its First Amendment jurisprudence. Defending free speech has been hailed as one of the Court's "signature projects." However, as some commentators have noted, once one looks beyond the high-profile cases, the Roberts Court has been decidedly less pro- speech. Recent Supreme Court rulings have not looked kindly upon free speech claims raised by students, humanitarian organizations, and, most pertinent for this Note, public employees. The apparent disparity between the treatment of corporate and financial interests, on the one hand, and the interests of labor, students, and …

Your Right To Look Like An Ugly Criminal: Resolving The Circuit Split Over Mug Shots And The Freedom Of Information Act, Cameron T. Norris

Vanderbilt Law Review

Mug shots occupy a seemingly indelible place in American popular culture. Embarrassing booking photos of celebrities like Lindsay Lohan,' Mel Gibson, and Robert Downey, Jr. are plastered on televisions and tabloids across the country. Local newspapers feature the most recent mug shots from the nearby jail, and mug shot websites are increasingly common. Perhaps our fascination with these images stems from the same impulse driving the popularity of reality television: seeing real people in bad situations makes us feel better about our own lives.

Copyright Freeconomics, John M. Newman

Vanderbilt Law Review

Innovation has wreaked creative destruction on traditional content platforms. During the decade following Napster's rise and fall, industry organizations launched litigation campaigns to combat the dramatic downward pricing pressure created by the advent of zero-price, copyright-infringing content. These campaigns attracted a torrent of debate among scholars and stakeholders regarding the proper scope and role of copyright law-but this ongoing debate has missed the forest for the trees. Industry organizations have abandoned litigation efforts, and many copyright owners now compete directly with infringing products by offering legitimate content at a price of $0.00. This sea change has ushered in an era …

Seeing Through The Murky Vial: Does The Fda Have The Authority To Stop Compounding Pharmacies From Pirate Manufacturing?, Michael Snow

Vanderbilt Law Review

In late 2012 and early 2013, tainted steroid shots from the New England Compounding Center ("NECC") caused fifty-five deaths and 745 cases of fungal meningitis in twenty states.' On October 1, 2012, the Food and Drug Administration ("FDA") inspected NECC and found vials of steroids filled with enough floating contamination to be visible to the human eye. These NECC steroid shots were distributed primarily to treat back pain, but the patients who received them were injected with foreign matter containing the deadly fungi Exserohilum rostratum or Aspergillus fumigatus. The earliest reported death from fungal meningitis caused by NECC was seventy-eight-year-old …

Duty In The Litigation-Investment Agreement: The Choice Between Tort And Contract Norms When The Deal Breaks Down, Anthony J. Sebok, W. Bradley Wendel

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article begins by describing the market for investment in commercial litigationA Litigation-investment transactions share features of existing economic relationships, such as commercial lending, liability insurance, contingent fee-financed representation, and venture capital, but none of these existing practices furnishes a suitable analogy for regulating litigation investment. Like third-party insurance, litigation investment is a way to manage the risk associated with litigation while bringing to bear the particular subject matter expertise of a risk-neutral institutional actor. Insurance companies and litigation investors may be systematically in a better position to reduce the risk of litigation, either through risk pooling or information-cost advantages. …

The Fourth Amendment's National Security Exception: Its History And Limits, L. Rush Atkinson

Vanderbilt Law Review

Since 2001, federal prosecutors have indicted and convicted hundreds of defendants for terrorism, espionage, and other national security crimes.' And for every prosecution, there are dozens of investigations into foreign threats that never result in a trial. Between 2001 and 2010, for example, the federal government obtained 16,306 foreign intelligence warrants in the course of its security operations. Between 2004 and 2011, the Federal Bureau of Investigations ("FBI") issued 119,192 National Security Letters for records deemed to be pertinent to national security investigations.

Despite these numbers, security investigations and prosecutions proceed on uncertain constitutional footing. The rights of terrorism suspects …

Frizzly Studies: Negotiating The Invisible Lines Of Race, Daniel J. Sharfstein

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In 1927 a Radcliffe graduate student named Caroline Bond Day began researching her anthropology master’s thesis on mixed-race families in the United States. The subject had personal resonance for Day, who was a fixture of colored society in Atlanta and had a complexion that defied easy categorization. To gather data for her thesis, she wrote to dozens of men and women in her large circle of friends, among them civil rights leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois, John Hope, and Walter White. She asked for exhaustive genealogies, with estimates of blood proportions— Negro, white, Indian—for each ancestor. She …

Trends In Environmental Law Scholarship 2008-2012, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Linda K. Breggin, Jacob P. Byl, Lynsey R. Gaudioso, Seamus T. Kelly

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published by the Environmental Law Institute's (ELI's) Environmental Law Reporter in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School. ELPAR provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of the best ideas about environmental law and policy from the legal academic literature. As part of the article selection process each year, Vanderbilt University Law School students assemble and review the environmental law articles published during the previous academic year. In this Article, we draw on the results of the ELPAR article selection process to report on trends in environmental legal scholarship for academic …

The Environmental Cost Of Misinformation: Why The Recommendation To Use Warm Water For Handwashing Is Problematic, Amanda R. Carrico, Micajah Spoden, Kenneth A. Wallston, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Multiple government and health organizations recommend the use of warm or hot water in publications designed to educate the public on best practices for washing one’s hands. This is despite research suggesting that the use of an elevated water temperature does not improve handwashing efficacy, but can cause hand irritation. There is reason to believe that the perception that warm or hot water is more effective at cleaning one’s hands is pervasive, and may be one factor that is driving up unnecessary energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. We examine handwashing practices and beliefs about water temperature using a survey …

Opting Out Among Women With Elite Education, Joni Hersch

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Whether highly educated women are exiting the labor force to care for their children has generated a great deal of media attention, even though academic studies find little evidence of opting out. This paper shows that female graduates of elite institutions have lower labor market involvement than their counterparts from less selective institutions. Although elite graduates are more likely to earn advanced degrees, marry at later ages, and have higher expected earnings, there is little difference in labor market activity by college selectivity among women without children and women who are not married. But the presence of children is associated …

The Market For Preclusion In Merger Litigation, Sean J. Griffith, Alexandra D. Lahav

Vanderbilt Law Review

Delaware dominates the corporate law market.' More than half of all public companies and over sixty percent of the Fortune 500 are incorporated in Delaware. These companies are subject to Delaware's corporate law regardless of where their businesses are physically located. Although academics continue to debate whether it is good or bad, they have long agreed that Delaware's dominance is a result of its law and its judiciary. As a corollary, it was widely understood that Delaware courts decided most cases involving Delaware corporations. The discovery that litigation involving these corporations very often takes place outside of Delaware therefore came …

Not-So-Sweet Sixteen: When Minor Convictions Have Major Consequences Under Career Offender Guidelines, Andrew Tunnard

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Note looks beyond the circuit split to the larger juvenile justice issues implicated by these sentencing practices. Part II provides a brief overview of the juvenile justice system, juvenile transfer statutes, and the Guidelines. Part III explores the interpretive issues that have led to this circuit split. Part IV explains why resolving this circuit split requires more than choosing one side, and expands the discussion by analyzing the impact of recent judicial and scientific trends on the treatment of juvenile offenders in the adult system. Part V proposes that convictions occurring before the age of eighteen should not be …

A Gap In The Affordable Care Act: Will Tax Credits Be Available For Insurance Purchased Through Federal Exchanges?, Amy E. Sanders

Vanderbilt Law Review

Millions of Americans rest assured that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act' ("ACA") provides tax credits for health insurance to individuals earning 100-400% of the federal poverty line. The tax credits will be accessible through state insurance exchanges, also known as Marketplaces, which are government- regulated organizations designed to create more competition in the health insurance industry. But a gap in the unwieldy, two-thousand- plus-page statute-either a scrivener's error or an overlooked loophole-is raising questions about whether citizens in certain states are eligible for the tax credits. This "quirk" could be a serious blow to an already contentious healthcare-reform …

Against Proportional Punishment, Adam J. Kolber

Vanderbilt Law Review

Many criminal defendants are held in detention while they await trial. Though conditions in pretrial detention are much like those in prison, detention is technically not punishment. Since detainees are merely accused of crimes, they are presumed innocent.' Their detention is not intended to punish them, and so, the Supreme Court has said, it is not punishment at all. Rather, detention is a means of promoting public safety, reducing witness intimidation, and preventing people accused of crimes from fleeing before trial. Nevertheless, defendants who are convicted generally receive credit at sentencing for time served in pretrial detention. An offender who …

Governing The Anticommons In Aggregate Litigation, D. Theodore Rave

Vanderbilt Law Review

Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, more than ten thousand rescue and cleanup workers brought individual lawsuits against New York City for respiratory and other illnesses they developed after working in the ruins of the World Trade Center. After years of litigation, the parties put together a comprehensive settlement in 2010. The defendant agreed to pay a total of $625 million so long as 95% of the plaintiffs accepted the terms of the settlement. If 100% of the plaintiffs signed on, however, the defendant was willing to increase the total settlement amount to be shared among all the plaintiffs …

Hardly A Black-And-White Matter: Analyzing The Validity And Protection Of Single-Color Trademarks Within The Fashion Industry, Emilie Winckel

Vanderbilt Law Review

The fashion industry thrives because of the consuming public's desire to be affiliated with appealing brands. Some of these coveted brands are best identified by particular colors-for example, Tiffany & Co.'s blue, Hermes's orange, and Christian Louboutin's red. Others are internationally known for specific designs that incorporate color-such as Missoni's vibrant patterns. While these colors may be well- recognized symbols of specific brands, and thus deserving of trademark protection, designers rely on a broad and unrestricted array of colors in order to continue conjuring up the latest trends for each new season. Due to these often-competing interests inherent to the …

Foreign Affairs Federalism: A Revisionist Approach, Daniel Abebe, Aziz Z. Huq

Vanderbilt Law Review

In April 2010, the Arizona legislature enacted the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act. Commonly known as SB 1070, the law created a slate of new criminal offenses and arrest powers covering aliens within Arizona's borders. SB 1070 proved divisive. It inspired copycat legislation in several states, provoked sharp criticism from the legal academy, and-most relevant here- catalyzed a lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice seeking a preliminary injunction against the state law on the ground that it was preempted by federal law. Initially, the federal government's litigation prospects seemed dim. One term before SB 1070 reached …

A Dilemma Of Doctrinal Design: Rights, Identity And The Work-Family Conflict, Lauren Sudeall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This symposium article suggests that with regard to the work-family conflict, we may have exhausted doctrine’s potential in setting a constitutional foundation for women to be treated as equals in the workplace and requiring that they not be discriminated against in the event that they decide to start a family. For purposes of this piece, those accomplishments constitute the first phase or “first generation” of progress. This article is concerned with how doctrine relates to “second generation” issues arising from the work-family conflict: how to balance work and family once some initial level of equality has been achieved; how to …

Reclaiming Equality To Reframe Indigent Defense Reform, Lauren Sudeall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Equal access to resources is fundamental to meaningful legal representation, yet for decades, equality arguments have been ignored in litigating indigent defense reform. At a time when underfunded indigent defense systems across the country are failing to provide indigent defendants with adequate representation, the question of resources is even more critical. Traditionally, advocates seeking indigent defense reform have relied on Sixth Amendment arguments to protect the rights of indigents in this context; however, the Sixth Amendment approach suffers from a number of shortcomings that have made it a poor tool for systemic reform, including its exclusive focus on attorney performance …

Property: A Bundle Of Sticks Or A Tree?, Anna Di Robilant

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 1973 John Henry Merryman noted that property law is a largely unexplored field of comparative study.' According to Merryman, common lawyers and civilians have long viewed their respective property systems as radically different and hardly comparable. In Merryman's words, the civil law is a law of "ownership," while the common law is a law of "estate." Civil law systems conceive of property as ownership, as holistic dominion: exclusive, single, indivisible, and different in nature from lesser property interests. By contrast, property in the common law is pluralistic and fragmented, having at its core the estates system and the many …

Resolving The Alj Quandary, Kent Barnett

Vanderbilt Law Review

Federal administrative law judges ("ALJs") understand Euripides's irony all too well. They, along with Article I judges, are the demigods of federal adjudication. As both courts and ALJs have noted, the function of ALJs closely parallels that of Article III judges. ALJs hear evidence, decide factual issues, and apply legal principles in all formal administrative adjudications under the Administrative Procedure Act ("APA"). Indeed, they outnumber Article III judges and decide more than two hundred and fifty thousand cases each year. But they lack the defining characteristics of Article III deities.

Article III judges are installed under the Appointments Clause, enjoy …