Law Commons^™

The Lead Plaintiff Provisions Of The Pslra After A Decade, Or "Look What's Happened To My Baby", Elliott J. Weiss

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 1995, my colleague John Beckerman and I had an experience shared by very few legal academics. We mailed the galley proofs of an article that we had written to the staff of a Senate Committee and then saw the Committee, the Senate, and the full Congress enact into law a bill that included all of the recommendations in our article. The article was Let the Money Do the Monitoring: How Institutional Investors Can Reduce Agency Costs in Securities Class Actions; the law was the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 ("PSLRA"). The relevant provisions of the PSLRA, now …

Barring Too Much: An Argument In Favor Of Interpreting The Immigration And Nationality Act Section 101(A)(42) To Include A Duress Exception, Nicole Lerescu

Vanderbilt Law Review

The asylum system is in disarray. The United States is unable to guarantee that every asylum seeker will receive a fair and impartial hearing. Although media attention recently has focused on the asylum system's procedural flaws, unjust statutory interpretations also work against those seeking refuge in the United States. This Note focuses on one particular example within this commonly criticized area of the law: the prevailing interpretation of section 101(a)(42) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to bar those who have persecuted others under duress from attaining refugee status.

It is intuitively appealing that a system of laws should hold …

Prosecution Discovery In The U.S.: A Balancing Perspective, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In R. v. Stinchcombe, the Supreme Court of Canada held that the Crown has a legal duty to disclose all relevant information, exculpatory and inculpatory, to a defendant charged with an indictable offence. Left undiscussed by the decision, and by Canadian decisional and statutory law generally, is the scope of discovery against the defence. A description and analysis of the American experience in this regard may be of interest to Canadian practitioners and academics.

Prior to the middle of this century, defence attorneys and prosecutors in the United States depended on preliminary hearings and informal exchanges to obtain information about …

Truth In Judging: Supreme Court Opinions As Legislative Drafting, Ray Forrester

Vanderbilt Law Review

The first thesis this Article postulates is that the history of food and drug regulation during the past twenty centuries has been the history of the development of analytical chemistry, not the history of the development of law and regulation. Statutory law during this period has remained relatively static, while general understanding of analytical chemistry has leapt ahead with unparalleled achievement. Increased scientific enlightenment, largely achieved through analytical chemistry, has produced every important advance in food and drug regulation. Indeed, the overwhelming success of the field of analytical chemistry has created entire scientific disciplines as well as improvement in government …

Legal Research--Computer Retrieval Of Statutory Law And Decisional Law, David T. Moody

Vanderbilt Law Review

Legal research presently involves a considerable amount of any lawyer's time and efforts largely because it is a slow and tedious process. Searching for a pertinent legal point can prove to be time-consuming and often fruitless. Moreover, it is here that chance plays one of its largest roles in the law.' An important legal point may exist,yet the researcher may fail to find it although he exercises a great degree of diligence. All lawyers must recognize this problem and the fact that it is becoming more acute with the passage of time. Something needs to be done to facilitate legal …

Tennessee Law And The Sales Article Of The Uniform Commercial Code, W. Harold Bigham

Vanderbilt Law Review

Although much of the interest engendered by the Uniform Commercial Code has centered around Article 9--Secured Transactions,and although Article 9 has been described as the heart of the Code, Article 2--Sales--is half again as long, is in many ways more iconoclastic,' and has precipitated perhaps more criticism than any of the other articles of the Code. Article 2 contains some innovations which are, at least upon initial impression, startling departures from traditional concepts of sales law, and it is therefore not surprising that there has been a spate of legal literature published on various aspects of this article. Since limitations …

Stability And Change In Constitutional Law, Jerre S. Williams

Vanderbilt Law Review

This characterization of the role of the United States Constitution by the great Chief Justice one hundred and forty-four years ago accurately sets the scene for a consideration of stability and change in constitutional law. To have viewed the United States Constitution as a code would have been contrary to the entire common-law tradition out of which it grew. Instead, as this quotation reveals, it has never been seen as establishing a set, unchangeable meaning. The history of constitutional interpretation in the United States reveals that Pound's famous dictum, "law must be stable and yet it cannot standstill," is not …

Remarks On The Theory Of Appellate Decision And The Rules Or Canons About How Statutes Are To Be Construed, Karl N. Llewellyn

Vanderbilt Law Review

If a statute is to make sense, it must be read in the light of some assumed purpose. A statute merely declaring a rule, with no purpose or objective, is nonsense. If a statute is to be merged into a going system of law, moreover, the court must do the merging, and must in so doing take account of the policy of the statute-or else substitute its own version of such policy. Creative re- shaping of the net result is thus inevitable. But the policy of a statute is of two wholly different kinds-each kind somewhat limited in effect by …

The Interpretation Of Statutes In Modern British Law, W. Friedmann

Vanderbilt Law Review

Mr. Justice Frankfurter recently said that the number of cases coming before the Supreme Court of the United States which were not based on statutes was "reduced almost to zero." This growth of statutory as against pure case law is, of course, not confined to the United States. It inevitably accompanies the social welfare state and the increase in government which every modern industrial society has experienced and which two world wars, with their need for the total mobilization of resources, have further stimulated. Apart from these sociological factors which affect states with the most different legal systems, it is …

The Tennessee Law Of Arrest, Rollin M. Perkins

Vanderbilt Law Review

The many sections in the Tennessee Code' dealing with arrest constitute an incomplete codification of the common law of this subject modified by some important changes. This statutory material leaves the common law in full force wherever it is either silent on the particular point or merely restates the preexisting rule. Those sections which produce results different from those found under the unwritten law leave the latter in the realm of matters having historical interest only, as far as the law of this state is concerned. The purpose of this undertaking is to depict the present law of Tennessee on …