Law Commons^™

A (Partial And Principled) Defense Of Sentences Of Life Imprisonment, Mirko Bagaric, Jennifer Svilar

Cleveland State Law Review

There has been more than a five-fold increase in the number of life sentences in the United States over the past four decades. One in seven prisoners in the United States is serving a life (or virtual) life sentence. This amounts to over 200,000 prisoners. The increase has occurred against the backdrop of near universal condemnation by scholars and public policy advocates – many of whom are now advocating for the abolition of life sentences. Arguments that life sentences are not an effective deterrent or means of protecting the community have some merit. Yet, we argue that in a limited …

Anti-Modalities, David E. Pozen, Adam M. Samaha

Michigan Law Review

Constitutional argument runs on the rails of “modalities.” These are the accepted categories of reasoning used to make claims about the content of supreme law. Some of the modalities, such as ethical and prudential arguments, seem strikingly open ended at first sight. Their contours come into clearer view, however, when we attend to the kinds of claims that are not made by constitutional interpreters—the analytical and rhetorical moves that are familiar in debates over public policy and political morality but are considered out of bounds in debates over constitutional meaning. In this Article, we seek to identify the “anti-modalities” of …

States Empowering Plaintiff Cities, Eli Savit

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Across the country, cities are becoming major players in plaintiff’s-side litigation. With increasing frequency, cities, counties, and other municipalities are filing lawsuits to vindicate the public interest. Cities’ aggressive use of lawsuits, however, has been met with some skepticism from both scholars and states. At times, states have taken action—both legislative and via litigation—to preempt city-initiated suits.

This Article contends that states should welcome city-initiated public-interest lawsuits. Such litigation, this Article demonstrates, vindicates the principles of local control that cities exist to facilitate. What is more, a motivated plaintiff city can accomplish public-policy goals that are important not just to …

Community Participation In Development, George K. Foster

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

A remarkable series of legal reforms and private innovations has given municipalities, indigenous peoples, and other local groups vital opportunities to influence development projects and secure economic benefits. This Article demonstrates the existence of this global trend and offers a model for explaining how and why it has manifested, as well as why--despite impressive gains--many communities still lack what they would consider sufficient influence or benefits. First, the Article argues that all of the formal rights and powers that local interests have secured in recent years result from pressure by communities and their supporters and are designed to address specific …

Alternatives To March-In Rights, David S. Bloch

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The Bayh-Dole Act is an inspired piece of legislation. But its "march-in" provisions are too often a source of confusion and fear for private-sector companies that want to do business with the US government--despite the fact that the government has never exercised its march-in rights. Are there alternatives to march-in rights that would effectively serve the government's public policy needs while eliminating this perceived threat to private intellectual property rights? This Article describes march-in rights in theory and practice, and then weighs several alternatives to traditional Bayh-Dole march-in rights.

Employment At Will And Public Policy, Frank J. Cavico

Akron Law Review

The purposes of this article are to examine the current public policy case law, commentary, and related statutes, to explain and interpret in detail this significant area of employment law, and to propose a just principle to govern the discharge aspect of the employment relation.

Environmental Deliberative Democracy And The Search For Administrative Legitimacy: A Legal, Positivism Approach, Michael Ray Harris

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The failure of regulatory systems over the past two decades to lessen the environment degradation associated with modern human economic output has begun to undermine the legitimacy of environmental lawmaking in the United States and around the world. Recent scholarship suggests that reversal of this trend will require a breach of the environmental administrative apparatus by democratization of a particular kind, namely the inclusion of greater public discourse within the context of regulatory decision-making. This Article examines this claim through the lens of modern legal positivism. Legal positivism provides the tools necessary to test for and identify the specfic structural …

A Primer On The Theory, Practice, And Pedagogy Underpinning A School Of Thought On Law And Business, James E. Holloway

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Recent policyless and lawless business decisions have prompted the judiciary and legislature to erode managerial discretion and judgment. This Article is a primer on the theoretical, practical, and pedagogical requirements for a legal-managerial school of thought to measure the business losses created by these judicial and legislative responses. A legal-managerial school must provide a theoretical evaluation of law and public policy, a practical integration of legal analysis and business methodology, and a pedagogical expansion of legal thinking to include business information. This Article initiates the debate on how a legal-managerial school of thought can further the study, practice, and teaching …

The Logic Of Reciprocity: Trust, Collective Action, And Law, Dan M. Kahan

Michigan Law Review

The Logic of Collective Action has for decades supplied the logic of public-policy analysis. In this pioneering application of public choice theory, Mancur Olson elegantly punctured the premise - shared by a variety of political theories - that individuals can be expected to act consistently with the interest of the groups to which they belong. Absent externally imposed incentives, wealth-maximizing individuals, he argued, will rarely find it in their interest to contribute to goods that benefit the group as a whole, but rather will "free ride" on the contributions that other group members make. As a result, too few individuals …

The Professional Professor, Kent D. Syverud

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Welcome to the Vanderbilt Law School and to this happy occasion in which we reflect on the life and career of Jonathan Charney. I say this is a "happy" occasion deliberately. There have been two months and a lot of tears since Jonathan died, and I know for many people here including me the loss is still deeply felt in expected and unexpected ways. But we are celebrating today, and we should be happy as we reflect on the extraordinary career and accomplishments and life of Jonathan Charney.

The Unintended Cultural Consequences Of Public Policy: A Comment On The Symposium, Richard H. Pildes

Michigan Law Review

In this essay, I want to try to build on it in order to suggest forms a genuinely New Public Law scholarship might take. My aim is to embrace much of what New Public Law thought has urged: the marginality of common law doctrine or judicial decisionmaking; the need to attend to profound disaffections with the modem regulatory state; an acceptance of the complex, dynamic relationship of public policy and private understandings; a recognition that public values are constituted not only at the grandest levels of policy formation, but also in the myriad microscopic day-to-day experiences of policy. In my …

The Public Policy Exception To The Recognition Of Foreign Judgments, Jonathan H. Pittman

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Note examines the public policy exception to the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. The author first examines other grounds that a United States court can use to refuse to recognize a foreign judgment. An analysis of several cases construing the public policy exception follows. The author concludes with a suggested analysis for courts faced with the public policy exception.

The Corporate Practice Of Medicine Doctrine: An Anachronism In The Modern Health Care Industry, Jeffrey F. Chase-Lubitz

Vanderbilt Law Review

Corporations, in the form of small, doctor-owned, proprietary hospitals and community or charity nonprofit hospitals, have pervaded the provision of health care services for many years. Recently, however, private, for-profit corporations increasingly have entered the health care field. One industry expert predicts that by the mid-1990s, ten national firms will provide fifty percent of the nation's medical care. Nationwide hospital chains, nonexistent twenty years ago, now own or manage twelve percent of the nation's hospitals. The proliferation of health maintenance organizations, freestanding emergency centers,' and other proprietary health care delivery systems exemplify the increased commercialization of medicine. Indeed, many young …

New York: The Right To Discharge At-Will Employees Post Weiner, John V. Dember

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Antitrust Policy After Chicago, Herbert Hovenkamp

Michigan Law Review

This article begins with the premise that nothing - not even an intellectual structure as imposing as the Chicago School - lasts forever. In fact, a certain amount of stagnation is already apparent. Most of the creative intellectual work of the Chicago School has already been done - done very well, to be sure. The new work too often reveals the signs of excessive self-acceptance, particularly of quiet acquiescence in premises that ought to be controversial.

Today the cutting edge of antitrust scholarship is coming, not from protagonists of the Chicago School, but rather from its critics. The critics began …

Burdens Of Pleading And Proof In Discrimination Cases: Toward A Theory Of Procedural Justice, Robert Belton

Vanderbilt Law Review

If the national policy of eliminating discrimination is to be achieved, the courts--to whom the major responsibility for effectuating this goal is delegated--must establish a coherent framework for allocating the burdens of pleading and proof that provides "a sensible, orderly way to evaluate the evidence in light of common experience as it bears on the critical question of discrimination."' The purpose of this Article, therefore, is to propose such a coherent approach to the allocation of the burdens of pleading and proof in discrimination cases. Towards this end, part II of the Article examines the definitional and operational effect of …

The Decline Of The Rehabilitative Ideal In American Criminal Justice, Francis A. Allen

Cleveland State Law Review

At this point I am going to advance a proposition. It is an analytic proposition, not an empirical statement, and relates to what characteristics a society must possess in order to maintain a flourishing rehabilitative ideal. Then I shall try to test that proposition by looking at two very different societies in which the rehabilitative ideal flourished. Finally, I shall ask whether those conditions are satisfied in modem America. My proposition is in two parts. First, you cannot have a flourishing rehabilitative ideal unless the society as a whole has a strong faith in the malleability of human behavior and …

Graves: American Intergovernmental Relations: Their Origins, Historical Development, And Current Status, Joseph E. Kallenbach

Michigan Law Review

A Review of American Intergovernmental Relations: Their Origins, Historical Development, and Current Status. By W. Brooke Graves.

Torts In English And American Conflict Of Laws: The Role Of The Forum, S. I. Shuman, S. Prevezer

Michigan Law Review

''Private international law owes its existence to the fact that there are in the world a number of separate territorial systems of law that differ greatly from each other in the rules by which they regulate the various legal relations arising in daily life." Where the systems are those of member states of a federal union, there should be less difference in their laws than where they are those of sovereign nations divided by strong cultural, social and political barriers. Interstate conflicts and international conflicts are likely to give rise to somewhat different considerations and rules, and it is surely …

For H.R. Ii And S. Ii To Strengthen The Robinson-Patman Act And Amend The Antitrust Law Prohibiting Price Discrimination, Wright Patman M.C.

Vanderbilt Law Review

H. R. 11 and S. 11 are modest and simple legislative proposals.'They provide for no change in our antitrust laws prohibiting price discrimination except to limit somewhat the use of the "good faith" defense. The extent of this limitation goes no further than to assist the Act by providing that the "good faith" defense shall not operate as an absolute and complete bar to a proceeding by the Government against the practices of destructive price discrimination: In other words, those discriminations which would have the effect of substantially lessening competition and tending to create a monopoly may not be defended …

Patent Monopolies And Free Enterprise, Myron W. Watkins, George W. Stocking

Vanderbilt Law Review

Public policy has long recognized the intimate relation between a dynamic technology and a well-adjusted economy. Without experiment, industrial arts stagnate. Rightly understood, invention is synonymous with improvement in the industrial arts, and invention comes about only from experimenting. Not every inventor finds what he is looking for, true enough, or is looking for what he finds. But unless, consciously or unconsciously, he is seeking a new way to do something or a new "combination of matter" he will never discover anything.

To encourage experiment and thus foster technical improvment is the avowed purpose of the American patent system. The …

The Standard Of Care Owed By A Hospital To Its Patients, William J. Harbison

Vanderbilt Law Review

Despite the: great number of tort cases which have arisen between hospitals and their patients, comparatively little has been written upon the subject of the standard of care required of a hospital in its relationship with those who enter it for treatment. In this Note some of the types of problems arising out of this relationship will be examined.' Questions of substantive and procedural law will be treated together in order to present these problems more clearly.

Generally, public hospitals are excused from tort liability to their patients upon the ground of governmental immunity ; in most states charitable institutions …