Law Commons^™

Too Stubborn To Care For: The Impacts Of Discrimination On Patient Noncompliance, Alice Abrokwa

Vanderbilt Law Review

The role of implicit racial biases in police interactions with people of color has garnered increased public attention and scholarly examination over time, but implicit racial bias in the healthcare context can be as deadly, particularly when it intersects with ableism and sexism. Researchers have found that medical providers are more likely to consider Black patients “noncompliant,” meaning the patient has not adhered to recommended treatment, even without evidence Black patients are less compliant than other patients. Being labeled noncompliant can have grave health consequences; providers are less likely to treat pain aggressively when they consider a patient noncompliant and, …

Tackling Bias In Sport: Recognizing The Impact Of Identities, Meg Hancock --Assoc. Prof.

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Studies suggest participation in organized sports--from childhood to adulthood--promotes positive physical, social, emotional, and intellectual benefits that impact individuals and their communities over a lifetime. Sports participation in early childhood and adolescence also leads to higher self-esteem, greater wage-earning potential, lower health costs, reduced chronic disease, and lower levels of depression. In adulthood, participating in sports provides social connection, personal enjoyment, and improved health. In US society, sports are often viewed as a popular, viable, and sustainable avenue for social mobility. While the benefits of sports participation are unequivocal, the visibility and influence of star athletes, along with the way …

The Federal Government's Role In Local Policing, Farhang Heydari, Barry Friedman, Rachel Harmon

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

For far too long, the federal government has failed to exercise its constitutional authority to mitigate the harms imposed by local policing. Absent federal intervention, though, some harmful aspects of policing will not be addressed effectively, or at all. States and localities often lack the necessary capacity and expertise to change policing, and many states and localities lack the will. This Article argues for federal intervention and describes what that intervention should look like.

The Article begins by describing three paradigmatic areas of local policing that require federal intervention to create real change: excessive use offorce, racial discrimination, and the …

(E)Racing Speech In School, Francesca I. Procaccini

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Speech on race and racism in our nation’s public schools is under attack for partisan gain. The Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment teaches a lot about the wisdom and legality of laws that chill such speech in the classroom. But more importantly, a First Amendment analysis of these laws reveals profound insights about the health and meaning of our free speech doctrine.

Through a First Amendment analysis of “anti-critical race theory” laws, this essay illuminates the first principles of free speech law. Specifically, it shows that the First Amendment offers little refuge to teachers or parents looking to …

Title Ix Vs. Ncaa: A Gameplan For Championship Equity, Leigh E. Friestedt

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

In 1972, Congress enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments Act (Title IX) to prohibit sex-based discrimination in “any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” While the original legislation did not stipulate “athletics,” Title IX has had a profound impact on intercollegiate sports by expanding the athletic opportunities for women as a covered “program or activity.” However, fifty years after the enactment of Title IX, there are still significant disparities between men’s and women’s intercollegiate athletics, most notably at the high-profile National College Athletics Association (NCAA or Association) Championships.

In 2021, the NCAA hosted the men’s and women’s …

The Perils Of Asian-American Erasure, Matthew P. Shaw

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Affirmative action, particularly its most well-known variant, race-conscious college admissions practices, has long occupied a precarious position in constitutional jurisprudence of equal protection and statutory antidiscrimination law. As a policy matter, affirmative action practices are necessary to reduce the impact of durable structural barriers to opportunity that have been imposed on members of identifiable racial groups because of their race. Legally, they’re on far less secure footing.

As a constitutional matter, these measures have been summarily divorced from any reparative purpose since the “diversity rationale” emerged from Regents of the University of California v. Bakke as the only compelling interest …

Felony Financial Disenfranchisement, Neel U. Sukhatme, Alexander Billy, Gaurav Bagwe

Vanderbilt Law Review

Individuals with prior felony convictions often must complete all terms of their sentence before they regain voter eligibility. Many jurisdictions include legal-financial obligations (“LFOs”)-—fines, fees, and/or restitution stemming from convictions-—in the terms of the sentence. Twenty-eight states, governing over 182 million Americans, either directly or indirectly tie LFO repayment to voting privileges, a practice we call felony financial disenfranchisement.

Proponents of felony financial disenfranchisement posit that returning citizens must satisfy the financial obligations stemming from convictions to restore themselves as community equals. Moralism aside, others claim low rates of electoral participation among those with felony convictions imply such disenfranchisement is …

Time To Slapp Back: Advocating Against The Adverse Civil Liberties Implications Of Litigation That Undermines Public Participation, Jennifer Safstrom

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Defamation law is a catchall term encompassing civil claims for reputational harm to an individual, including slander and libel. Defamation claims originated in English common law and have since evolved within the American legal system. Scholars have characterized the law of defamation as “a forest of complexities, overgrown with anomalies, inconsistencies, and perverse rigidities” and as a “‘fog of fictions, inferences, and presumptions.’” Amid these inherent variations and complexities of defamation law and litigation — including the largely state-specific nature of tort law development — emerges a disturbing trend across jurisdictions. In the modern era, defamation claims have been used …

Confronting The Racial Pay Gap, Stephanie Bornstein

Vanderbilt Law Review

For several decades, a small body of legal scholarship has addressed the gender pay gap, which compares the median full-time earnings of women and men. More recently, legal scholars have begun to address the racial wealth gap, which measures racial disparities in family economic security and wealth accumulation. Yet a crucial component of both the gender pay gap and the racial wealth gap remains unaddressed in the legal literature: the pay gap between the earnings of White workers and workers of color. Today, all women average eighty-two cents to each dollar men earn, but Black and Latinx workers average only …

Delegalization, Lauren Sudeall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The lack of resources available to assist low-income litigants as they navigate the legal system has been widely documented. In the civil context- where a majority of cases involve eviction, debt collection, and family matters--various solutions have been offered to address the problem. These include expanding the civil right to counsel; increasing funding for civil legal aid; providing for greater availability and accessibility of self-help services; adopting a more flexible approach to the provision of legal services (including, for example, unbundled and limited legal services options); scaling back unauthorized-practice-of-law regulation and allowing for higher utilization of other service providers; and …

Racial Capitalism In The Civil Courts, Lauren Sudeall, Tonya L. Brito, Kathryn A. Sabbeth, Jessica K. Steinberg

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Essay explores how civil courts function as sites of racial capitalism. The racial capitalism conceptual framework posits that capitalism requires racial inequality and relies on racialized systems of expropriation to produce capital. While often associated with traditional economic systems, racial capitalism applies equally to nonmarket settings, including civil courts.

The lens of racial capitalism enriches access to justice scholarship by explaining how and why state civil courts subordinate racialized groups and individuals. Civil cases are often framed as voluntary disputes among private parties, yet many racially and economically marginalized litigants enter the civil legal system involuntarily, and the state …

And A Public Defender For All, Sara Mayeux

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The Senate confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court last week means that she is soon to be the first Supreme Court justice with prior experience as a federal public defender. This is historic in its own right, though it is not quite as surprising on closer inspection, since the institution of the federal public defender — in its currently prevailing organizational particulars, anyway — dates back only to the 1970s. Still, given that several of the justices previously worked as federal prosecutors, Jackson’s confirmation injects a welcome measure of professional balance to the lineup. Moreover, Jackson can …

Deliberately Indifferent: Institutional Liability For Further Harassment In Student-On-Student Title Ix Cases, Jacob R. Goodman

Vanderbilt Law Review

Sexual harassment is an unfortunate problem far too many have experienced. Universities and other educational institutions owe a duty, both legal and moral, to protect students from sexual harassment, and in turn to allow students to receive the full benefits of their education. But a circuit split has limited students' ability to hold educational institutions liable. This circuit split results in the absurd scenario where an individual must experience sexual harassment more than one time to hold their educational institution liable. This Note attempts to fix that by proposing Title IX (the law governing sexual harassment at educational institutions) adopt …

Grey State, Blue City: Defending Local Control Against Confederate “Historical Preservation”, Sage Snider

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Confederate monuments have become lightning rods across the American landscape. While these ubiquitous symbols have spread Lost Cause propaganda for over one hundred years, they have also instigated unprecedented protest and violence since the 2015 Charleston massacre, 2017 Charlottesville rally, and 2020 George Floyd murder. In response, southern state legislatures have passed preemptory “statue statutes,” laws that obstruct left-leaning cities from removing Confederate monuments. This Note compares the political and legal strategies cities and citizens have used to overcome these legal barriers, both in opposition to individual monuments and statue statutes themselves. Using Tennessee’s Historical Commission waiver process as a …

Big Brother Is Scanning: The Widespread Implementation Of Alpr Technology In America’S Police Forces, Yash Dattani

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) are an increasingly popular tool in police departments across the United States. At its core, ALPR technology functions in a relatively simple manner. The technology has two major components: the actual scanners, which record license plates, and the databases which collect, compile, and analyze this information for officers to access at the click of a button. Although this technology first came to the United States in 1998 as a form of rudimentary border security, its purpose and capabilities have rapidly grown. Now, in 2022, ALPR has evolved into a frighteningly powerful piece of technology, potentially …

Honoring The Public Trust: Curbing The Bane Of Physician Sexual Misconduct, Rebecca H. Allensworth, K. S. Sindhu, Et Al.

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The Federation of State Medical Boards defines physician sexual misconduct as any "behavior that exploits the physician-patient relationship in a sexual way." Although several attempts have been made in recent years to clarify its incidence in the United States, physician sexual misconduct is almost certainly underreported. Physician sexual misconduct represents a severe and irreversible violation of the compact underlying the patient–physician relationship and can have far-reaching consequences on the lives of patients and their families. In addition, the credibility of and trust in physicians, both essential to the provision of medical care, could well erode in the eyes of the …

Duty And Diversity, Chris Brummer, Leo E. Strine, Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

In the wake of the brutal deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, lawmakers and corporate boards from Wall Street to the West Coast have introduced a slew of reforms aimed at increasing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) in corporations. Yet the reforms face difficulties ranging from possible constitutional challenges to critical limitations in their scale, scope, and degree of legal obligation and practical effects.

In this Article, we provide an old answer to the new questions facing DEI policy and offer the first close examination of how corporate law duties impel and facilitate corporate attention to diversity. Specifically, we …

Affirmative Action And The Leadership Pipeline, Joni Hersch

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Recent events have brought heightened attention to racial injustice in the United States, which includes among its legacies a dearth of Black people in influential positions that shape society. But at the same time that the United States has turned its attention to diversity in leadership positions, the already narrow pipeline for those from underrepresented groups is likely to narrow even further in the near future. Specifically, the pipeline to influential positions in society typically flows from an elite education. Race-conscious affirmative action in higher education admissions is currently permitted in order for universities to meet their compelling interest in …

The Right To Feast And Festivals, Juan C. Riofrio

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Festive behavior is a basic characteristic of human life, as evidenced from ancient times. Humans need to use ceremony and ritual in specific places and times to mark their triumphs, joys, and sorrows. However, some categories of individuals are harmed because they cannot celebrate the most important highlights of their lives through such festive feasts: prisoners, mariners at sea, soldiers on the frontlines, workers subject to the pressures of ungenerous employers, towns occupied by oppressive invaders, and impoverished individuals who cannot afford customary celebrations, among others. When feasts and festivals are restricted, societies lose well-being, communities lose identity, and individuals …

The Perfect Match: Solving The Due Process Problem Of Signature Matching With Federal Agency Regulation, Rachel Blumenstein

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Local election commissions in the United States disenfranchise Americans when they erroneously reject voters’ mail-in ballots for failed signature matches. Disenfranchisement is not only problematic because it is dangerous to the health of American democracy, but also because signature matching violates the procedural due process protections voters are entitled to when they exercise their right to vote. Furthermore, the practice of signature matching is one of many ballot access restrictions that disproportionately impact minority voters under the guise of voter fraud prevention. Expanding the Election Assistance Commission’s mandate to allow it to develop more accurate methods of ballot verification can …

Brown, Massive Resistance, And The Lawyer's View: A Nashville Story, Daniel Sharfstein

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Every grassroots story complicates what we already know, and the history of Cecil Sims and his world48 stands out in at least two important ways. First, Sims's work on issues relating to segregated education predates Brown. In the late 1940s, as Southern states responded to Supreme Court decisions desegregating graduate education, Sims assumed a central role in developing nominally race-neutral proposals that involved a series of complex transactions and legal forms. Just as the Civil Rights Movement began years before Brown and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Sims is emblematic of the segregated South's "long history" of resistance to civil rights. …

Let's Talk About Gender: Nonbinary Title Vii Plaintiffs Post-Bostock, Meredith R. Severtson

Vanderbilt Law Review

In Bostock v. Clayton County, the Supreme Court held that Title VII’s sex-discrimination prohibition applies to discrimination against gay and transgender employees. This decision, surprising from a conservative Court, has engendered a huge amount of commentary on both its substantive holding and its interpretive method. This Note addresses a single question arising from this discourse: After Bostock, how will courts address allegations of sex discrimination by plaintiffs whose gender identities exist outside of traditional sex and gender binaries? As this Note explores, some have argued that Bostock’s textualist logic precludes sex-discrimination claims by nonbinary plaintiffs. While such arguments fail to …

"White Men's Roads Through Black Men's Homes": Advancing Racial Equity Through Highway Reconstruction, Deborah N. Archer

Vanderbilt Law Review

Racial and economic segregation in urban communities is often understood as a natural consequence of poor choices by individuals. In reality, racially and economically segregated cities are the result of many factors, including the nation’s interstate highway system. In states around the country, highway construction displaced Black households and cut the heart and soul out of thriving Black communities as homes, churches, schools, and businesses were destroyed. In other communities, the highway system was a tool of a segregationist agenda, erecting a wall that separated White and Black communities and protected White people from Black migration. In these ways, construction …

Reconciling Risk And Equality, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

States have increasingly resorted to statistically-derived risk algorithms to determine when diversion from prison should occur, whether sentences should be enhanced, and the level of security and treatment a prisoner requires. The federal government has jumped on the bandwagon in a big way with the First Step Act, which mandated that a risk assessment instrument be developed to determine which prisoners can be released early on parole. Policymakers are turning to these algorithms because they are thought to be more accurate and less biased than judges and correctional officials, making them useful tools for reducing prison populations through identification of …

Litigating Citizenship, Cassandra B. Robertson, Irina D. Manta

Vanderbilt Law Review

By what standard of proof-—and by what procedures—-can the U.S. government challenge citizenship status? That question has taken on greater urgency in recent years. News reports discuss cases of individuals whose passports were suddenly denied, even after the government had previously recognized their citizenship for years or even decades. The government has also stepped up efforts to reevaluate the naturalization files of other citizens and has asked for funding to litigate more than a thousand denaturalization cases. Likewise, citizens have gotten swept up in immigration enforcement actions, and thousands of citizens have been erroneously detained or removed from the United …

Broken Records: Reconceptualizing Rational Basis Review To Address “Alternative Facts” In The Legislative Process, Joseph Landau

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 2016, North Carolina passed “HB2,” also known as the “bathroom ban”—a law prohibiting transgender individuals from accessing public restrooms corresponding to their gender identity—based on the unfounded fear that cisgender men posing as transgender women would assault women and girls in bathrooms. Around the same time, Alabama enacted a punishing immigration law in which sponsors distorted statistics regarding the undocumented population by using the terms “Latino/Hispanic” and “illegal immigrant” interchangeably. These laws are reflective of a larger pattern. In our increasingly polarized political climate, policymakers are affirmatively distorting legislative records and promoting dubious justifications for their policy goals—that is, …

Red Card On Wage Discrimination: Us Soccer Pay Disparity Highlights Inadequacy Of The Equal Pay Act, Hannah L.E. Masters

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

In the months leading up to its latest World Cup win, the US Women's National Team sued its parent organization over income inequality in US soccer. Statements from high-profile players, like Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan, contributed to a national conversation about the gender pay gap that exists not just in soccer but across many professions. The claims of the Women's Team should make for a perfect Equal Pay Act claim, but all signs point to a loss. Instead, the women are far more likely to succeed on their claim arising under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, despite …

Salary History And Pay Parity, Jennifer Safstrom

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Inquiries about a prospective applicant's salary history are controversial because of the role such inequities play in the broader gender pay equity debate. The use of prior salary to determine compensation can perpetuate pay discrimination for women, especially women of color, and lock them into cycles of underpayment when these inequities are carried over from job to job. Reliance on salary history perpetuates historical discrimination and is antithetical to the language and purpose of Title VII and the Equal Pay Act. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the legal reasoning relied upon to interpret these laws, especially …

States As Civil Rights Actors, Jennifer Safstrom

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A British politician, David Miliband, once said, "My advice is very simple: if you can win a small battle, it gives you confidence in the political process to take on bigger battles, and so it is very much a bottom-up grass-roots way of doing politics." While his perspective--of starting small and building up--is an often-used strategy used by advocates of all stripes, his quote does not give sufficient credence to the intrinsic value of these small battles. These efforts are an end unto themselves, as the smaller battles within each state are not just training to take on larger federal …

In Defense Of Human Rights, Karima Bennoune

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Article argues that international human rights law, and the human rights movement more generally, need more defenders than critics in the current international political environment. Groups ranging from academics to governments have taken stances critical of human rights, and this Article seeks to defend the rights framework from some of these while also arguing for the importance of human rights in today's world. Noting that the field of human rights is not beyond criticism, this Article embraces some of those criticisms. However, it suggests that human rights law specialists need to spend at least as much time defending human …