Law Commons^™

Juror Questions During Trial: A Window Into Juror Thinking, Shari Seidman Diamond, Mary R. Rose, Beth Murphy, Sven Smith

Vanderbilt Law Review

The jury has undergone a dramatic transformation from its earliest incarnation when jurors acted as witnesses, investigators, and tribunal. In the modern American jury trial, the parties determine what jurors learn during the proceedings. Jurors of today, assigned the role of audience members until deliberations begin, typically speak in the courtroom only during jury selection and through their verdict at the end of the trial. In light of their enforced silence throughout the trial, jurors have no opportunity to clarify or check on their interpretation of the evidence and they provide few external indications about their thinking as the trial …

Sheldon Kennedy And A Canadian Tragedy Revisited, M. B. Preston

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

National Hockey League player Sheldon Kennedy's 1997 revelation that his award-winning junior hockey coach had molested him for years created a national outcry in Canada. It resulted in the appointment of a special commission and declarations from the United States and Canada that this must never happen again. However, Kennedy was not alone; child sexual exploitation occurs at the hands of youth coaches across geographic and class boundaries and across individual and team sports.

Youth sports organizations, including schools, have approached the human and legal issues presented by child sexual exploitation in numerous ways. This Note analyzes the differences between--and …

Clearing Away The Mist: Suggestions For Developing A Principled Veil Piercing Doctrine In China, Bradley C. Reed

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

It was less than thirty years ago that China stood economically isolated from the rest of the world. Times have certainly changed. Today China's economy is one of the fastest growing in the world, and Western businesses are inundating the country to access the abundance of cheap labor. Corporate activity is progressing, yet it was only twelve years ago that China enacted its first corporate law which officially recognized the concept of limited liability. And it was not until less than a year ago that China recognized one of the most important (and most often litigated) corporate law doctrines: piercing …

Offer-Of-Judgment Rules And Civil Litigation: An Empirical Study Of Automobile Insurance Litigation In The East, Albert Yoon, Tom Baker

Vanderbilt Law Review

Although their express purpose is to adjudicate disputes, courts by their institutional design encourage civil litigants to settle their differences without resorting to trial. Most civil systems impose filing fees, pleading requirements, and a highly formalized presentation of evidence; also, because of crowded civil dockets, courts typically require litigants to wait months, or even years, for their trial date.' For these reasons, and because of the increasing costs of legal representation, it is not surprising that the majority of litigants settle before trial. Notwithstanding these measures, federal courts and most state courts have an additional mechanism to encourage settlement, generally …

The Allocation Problem In Multiple-Claimant Representations, Paul H. Edelman, Richard A. Nagareda, Charles Silver

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Multiple-claimant representations-classa ctions and other group lawsuits-pose two principal-agent problems: Shirking (failure to maximize the aggregate recovery) and misallocation (distribution of the aggregate recovery other than according to the relative value of claims). Clients have dealt with these problems separately, using contingent percentage fees to motivate lawyers to maximize the aggregate recovery and monitoring devices (disclosure requirements, client control rights, and third-party review) to encourage appropriate allocations. The scholarly literature has proceeded on the premise that monitoring devices are needed to police misallocations, because the fee calculus cannot do the entire job. This paper shows that this premise is mistaken …