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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Exclusionary Rule In The Age Of Blue Data, Andrew G. Ferguson Mar 2019

The Exclusionary Rule In The Age Of Blue Data, Andrew G. Ferguson

Vanderbilt Law Review

In Herring v. United States, Chief Justice John Roberts reframed the Supreme Court's understanding of the exclusionary rule: "As laid out in our cases, the exclusionary rule serves to deter deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring or systemic negligence." The open question remains: How can defendants demonstrate sufficient recurring or systemic negligence to warrant exclusion? The Supreme Court has never answered the question, although the absence of systemic or recurring problems has figured prominently in two recent exclusionary rule decisions. Without the ability to document recurring failures or patterns of police misconduct, courts can dismiss …


Beyond The Witness: Bringing A Process Perspective, Edward K. Cheng, G. Alexander Nunn Jan 2019

Beyond The Witness: Bringing A Process Perspective, Edward K. Cheng, G. Alexander Nunn

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

For centuries, the foundation of the Anglo-American trial has been the witness.' Witnesses report on their personal observations, provide opinions of character, offer scientific explanations, and in the case of parties, narrate their own story. Indeed, even for documentary and other physical evidence, witnesses often provide the conduit through which such evidence reaches the factfinder. Documentary or physical evidence rarely stands on its own. The law of evidence has thus unsurprisingly focused on-or perhaps obsessed over-witnesses. The hearsay rule and the Confrontation Clause demand that declarants be available witnesses at trial so that they may be subject to cross-examination.' Expert …


Confidences Worth Keeping: Rebalancing Legitimate Interests In Litigants' Private Information In An Era Of Open-Access Courts, Jeffrey W. Sheehan Jan 2019

Confidences Worth Keeping: Rebalancing Legitimate Interests In Litigants' Private Information In An Era Of Open-Access Courts, Jeffrey W. Sheehan

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The ideal of the public trial in open court continues to guide decisions about public access to courts and their records, even as cases are increasingly decided "on the papers." This is still the case when those "papers" take the form of electronic documents that can be uploaded, downloaded, copied, and distributed by anyone with an internet connection. A series of opinions from the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reinforcing this ideal of public access to court records and unsealing district court filings offers an opening to reconsider core values that must inform our treatment of private …