Law Commons^™

The Modern Trial And Evidence Law: Has The "Rambling Altercation" Become A Pedantic Joust?, Daniel D. Blinka

Georgia Law Review

This Article places the relationship between evidence
rules and the modern trial in a historical context. The
trial's foundation is in popular culture-lay witnesses
testifying before a lay jury. Eighteenth-century trials were
a "rambling altercation" between the defendant and his
accusers-unruly (literally), unstructured, very brief, and
less concerned with the "truth"than a socially acceptable
judgment. The modern trial's emergence in the nineteenth
century coincided with the professionalization of law, the
active involvement of lawyers as advocates, and the
sprouting of evidence rules to regulate both lawyers and
lay juries. Nonetheless, evidence law accommodated
prevailing lay culture in order to foster …

Searching For Truth In The American Law Of Evidence And Proof, D. Michael Risinger

Georgia Law Review

The ideology of the trial process puts discovery of truth
at center stage. This is made clear by the language of
Federal Rule of Evidence 102, upon which New Georgia
Rule of Evidence 24-1-1 is obviously based. Both of these
rules make the ascertainment of truth one of the two goals
of the trial (just determination being the other). However,
the term "truth" has been used in many ways in many
different contexts and traditions. What notion of truth did
the drafters have in mind?
This Article answers that question by reference to what
has come to be known as …

Genetic Privacy & The Fourth Amendment: Unregulated Surreptitious Dna Harvesting, Albert E. Scherr

Georgia Law Review

Genetic privacy and police practices have come to the
fore in the criminal justice system. Case law and stories
in the media document that police are surreptitiously
harvesting the out-of-body DNA of putative suspects.
Some sources even indicate that surreptitious data
banking may also be in its infancy. Surreptitious
harvesting of out-of-body DNA by the police is currently
unregulated by the Fourth Amendment. The few courts
that have addressed the issue find that the police are free
to harvest DNA abandoned by a putative suspect in a
public place. Little in the nascent surreptitious harvesting
case law suggests that surreptitious …

Table Of Contents

Georgia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Stemming The Federal Tort Fountain: Why Federal Courts Should Maintain Implied Certification Limitations On Qui Tam Suits Against Nonclaimant Defendants, Dennis O. Vann Jr.

Georgia Law Review

Qui tam suits in the health-care industry increasingly
target pharmaceutical and medical-device manufacturers
rather than the medical providers who directly make
claims to federal health-insurance programs. These suits
commonly argue that the manufacturer induced the
provider to falsely certify compliance with federal and
state antifraud laws, such as the Anti-Kickback Statute.
This Note shows that suits based on such "implied
certification"of adherence to laws should not be permitted
under the Federal False Claims Act unless the
non submitting defendant is first convicted of providing a
kickback. First, this Note analyzes recent amendments to
the Anti-Kickback Statute in the Affordable Care …

Jurisdictional Sequencing, Alan M. Trammell

Georgia Law Review

The Supreme Court has begun to grapple with the
problems presented by the doctrine of jurisdictional
sequencing-the decision of certain issues, and even the
dismissal of cases, before a federal court has verified its
subject matter jurisdiction. Recent jurisprudence has
created confusion as to what, if anything, a federal court
may do before it verifies subject matter jurisdiction.
Moreover, scholars and courts have struggled to discern
an underlying rationale for jurisdictional sequencing, and
no theory has been able to explain the case law fully or
offer a satisfying normative defense of the doctrine.

This Article develops a theory of jurisdictional …

Defying Conventional Wisdom: The Case For Private Antitrust Enforcement, Joshua P. Davis, Robert H. Lande

Georgia Law Review

The conventional wisdom is that private antitrust enforcement lacks any value. Indeed, skepticism of private enforcement has been so great that its critics make contradictory claims. The first major line of criticism is that private enforcement achieves too little-it does not even minimally compensate the actual victims of antitrust violations and does not significantly deter those violations. A second line of criticism contends that private enforcement achieves too much-providing excessive compensation, often to the wrong parties, and producing overdeterrence. This Article undertakes the first ever systematic evaluation of these claims. Building upon original empirical work and theoretical inquiry by the …

Killers Shouldn't Inherit From Their Victims-Or Should They?, Carla Spivack

Georgia Law Review

This Article questions, for the first time, the equitable and policy basis of Slayer Rules, the rules that bar killers from inheriting from those they kill. It shows that killings that involve inheritance usually occur as a result of domestic abuse or severe mental illness, and argues that, because the legal and social service systems offer little help to those trapped in abusive relationships or those disabled by mental illness, it is not justifiable for those systems to deprive the killer of an inheritance when he or she takes the only means of escape available.

A Feather On One Side, A Brick On The Other: Tilting The Scale Against Males Accused Of Sexual Assault In Campus Disciplinary Proceedings, Barclay S. Hendrix

Georgia Law Review

On April 4, 2011, the Department of Education's Office
of Civil Rights issued a "Dear Colleague" letter regarding
Title JX's applicability to sexual violence on college
campuses. This letter was sent to every college or
university receiving federal funding and instructed
recipients on how to meet their legal obligations. Some of
the most important changes in the letter pertained to how
schools must conduct their grievance procedures in
adjudicatingsexual assault claims. First, the 2011 letter
requires that schools use a preponderance of the evidence
standard to determine the accused's guilty or innocence.

Second, the letter strongly discourages schools from
allowing …

War Of The Words: Why False Statements Should Be Guaranteed First Amendment Protection, Virginia R. Priddy

Georgia Law Review

In Haley v. State, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld
the conviction of Andrew Scott Haley for making a false
statement. Haley created a username and posted videos to
the Internet in which he claimed to have committed a
series of murders, goading his audience to try to solve the
"mysteries." Haley was convicted under a Georgia statute
that proscribes the making of a false statement within the
jurisdiction of an agency or department of state of Georgia.
After discussing the historical legal and philosophical
underpinnings of the First Amendment right to free
speech, this Note argues that the Georgia statute …

The Degrading Character Rule In American Criminal Trials, Paul S. Milich

Georgia Law Review

The rule prohibiting evidence of the accused's bad
character is steadily degrading as courts and legislatures
expand existing exceptions and add new ones. In Georgia,

we saw the rule almost disappear as trial courts blithely
admitted a defendant's past crimes to prove his or her
"bent of mind" to commit the crime charged. This Article
examines why the character rule is losing ground.
The thesis is that a rule requiring as much careful
balancing as the character rule needs a clear, strong
justification to hold its own when faced with competing
claims to admit the evidence in the search for …

Much Ado About Nothing: How The Securities Sro State Actor Circuit Split Has Been Misinterpreted And What It Means For Due Process At Finra, Jerrod M. Lukacs

Georgia Law Review

Traditionally, the U.S. securities exchanges were self-
regulated, governing trading, setting rules, and carrying
out disciplinary procedures against member trader-
brokers. In the past five decades, however, the SEC has
divested the exchanges of their regulatory authority,
transferring it to independent, private bodies.
Concomitantly, the SEC's ability to control the rule-
making and enforcement powers of these private bodies
has increased. Recently, this process culminated in the
creation of FINRA, a monopolized, private self-regulatory
organization (SRO) under comprehensive SEC control
responsible for regulating the entire U.S. secondary
securities market. The SEC's ever-growing control over
securities SROs has called into question …

A Reliance Approach To Precedent, Hillel Y. Levin

Georgia Law Review

Why and when should courts presumptively defer to their
own past precedents? The doctrine of precedent lies at the
core of American jurisprudence and legal practice, but the
source of its normative force remains unclear.
Consequently, its application is confused and contested.
In this Article, I argue that precedent matters because
and to the extent that it generates reliance interests on the
part of the public. Although I am not the first to suggest
that reliance is the foundational justification for deference
to precedent, this Article represents the first sustained effort
to defend the reliance approach in deontological terms and …

Table Of Contents

Georgia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Georgia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Collapsing Suspect Class With Suspect Classification: Why Strict Scrutiny Is Too Strict And Maybe Not Strict Enough, Sonu Bedi

Georgia Law Review

While scholarly work often analyzes the nature and scope
of the Court's tiers of scrutiny approach to enforcing
equality, this Article examines the underlying theory of
equal protection. This Article mounts a challenge to the
theory of higher scrutiny, and, in particular,strict scrutiny.
It seeks to analyze two questions: (1) What principles trigger
heightened scrutiny? and (2) Why does the Court need to
subject laws that discriminate on the basis of race to strict
scrutiny? The first question concerns the underlying theory
of equal protection doctrine: the "what" of higher scrutiny.
Scholarly work that seeks to answer this question rightly …

State Power To Define Jurisdiction, Samuel P. Jordan, Christopher K. Bader

Georgia Law Review

States should have broader authority to decline
jurisdiction over federal claims. The normative
considerations supporting this doctrine of "reverse
abstention" have been developed in previous work. But
what of the Constitution? The traditional reading,
reflected in existing precedent, asserts that the Supremacy
Clause, Article III, and perhaps Article I operate together
to create an inflexible obligation for state courts to hear
federal claims. This reading is misguided. The
Supremacy Clause contains no jurisdictional obligation of
its own force, but only gives supreme effect to other validly
enacted federal laws. And no other clause provides the
authority to impose such an …

The Curious Case Of Differing Literary Emphases: The Contrast Between The Use Of Scientific Publications At Pretrial Daubert Hearings And At Trial, Ronald L. Carlson

Georgia Law Review

An expert's testimony at a pretrial Daubert hearing is
frequently supported by professional writings. Technical
literature is employed by litigants to buttress controversial
scientific theories and research. By way of example, a
plaintiff's attorney may urge that an alleged toxic
substance caused his or her client's cancer. The objective
in providing the court with learned texts and articles is to
convince the trial judge to admit expert opinions that
support causation. This Article reports appellate opinions
that strongly encourage production of professional
writings in the pretrial context. Indeed, in several cases
the absence of published research resulted in defeat of …

Safe Haven No Longer: The Role Of Georgia Courts And Private Probation Companies In Sustaining A De Facto Debtors' Prison System, Sarah D. Bellacicco

Georgia Law Review

Georgia was specifically established as a colony for debtors-a haven where they could be safe from imprisonment. It is a haven no longer. Georgia courts are regularly imprisoning people for failing to pay debts, often through probation revocation of probationers who have failed to pay a fine or fee imposed as a condition of probation. Some of these probationers are on probation solely because they could not pay a fine on the day of sentencing, a practice which greatly increases the amount they owe due to the additional probation fees imposed. In Bearden v. Georgia, the Supreme Court held that …

Textualism And Obstacle Preemption, John D. Ohlendorf

Georgia Law Review

Commentators, both on the bench and in the academy,
have perceived an inconsistency between the Supreme
Court's trend, in recent decades, towards an increasingly
formalist approach to statutory interpretation and the
Court's continued willingness to find state laws preempted
as "obstacles to the accomplishment and execution of the
full purposes and objectives of Congress'"--so-called
"obstacle preemption." This Article argues that by giving
the meaning contextually implied in a statutory text
ordinary, operative legal force, we can justify most of the
current scope of obstacle preemption based solely on
theoretical moves textualism already is committed to
making.
The Article first sketches …

Martinizingtitle I Of The Americans With Disabilities Act, Nicole B. Porter

Georgia Law Review

Prior to the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, relatively
few cases proceeded past the initial inquiry of whether the
plaintiff was covered by the ADA. Consequently, the scope
of an employer's obligation to provide a reasonable
accommodation to an individual with a disability remains
under-developed and under-theorized. Now that the
Amendments have made it easier for plaintiffs to prove
that they have a disability under the ADA, we can expect
to see more courts struggling with many difficult
reasonable accommodation issues. The current case law is
chaotic, providing little guidance to employers and courts
in determining whether an accommodation is …

Foreword, Ray Persons

Georgia Law Review

Thank you to the Georgia Law Review and the University of
Georgia School of Law for inviting me to discuss evidence reform
in the State of Georgia. As a trial lawyer, it is both an honor-and
a daunting task-to address such a distinguished group of
evidence scholars as have gathered here today.
More than 150 years ago, the author of Georgia's first evidence
code, Judge David Irwin, began with a simple principle: "The
object of all legal investigation is the discovery of truth."2 If that is
so, and I believe that it is, then an evidence code is a lens …

The Withering Away Of Evidence Law: Notes On Theory And Practice, Robert P. Burns

Georgia Law Review

The plausibility of evidentiary regimes depends on more
basic understandings of the nature of the trial. 'Tough-
minded" evidence scholars may sometimes be reluctant to
concede the importance of more "tender-minded"
normative inquiries into the trial. Some implicit ideals of
evidence law, such as factual accuracy, are relatively
constant among theories of the trial, while others, such as
materiality, are significantly affected by the choice among
competing theories. This Article identifies the dominant
theory of the trial and then suggests an alternative. It
then offers a number of grounds for further relaxing the
exclusionary force of evidence law and for …

Judicial Gatekeeping Of Suspect Evidence: Due Process And Evidentiary Rules In The Age Of Innocence, Keith A. Findley

Georgia Law Review

The growing number of wrongful convictions exposed
over the past two-and-a-half decades, and the research
that points to a few recurring types of flawed evidence in
those cases, raise questions about the effectiveness of the
rules of evidence and the constitutional admissibility
standards that are designed to guard against unreliable
evidence. Drawing on emerging empirical data, this
Article concludes that the system can and should be

adjusted to do a better job of guarding against undue
reliance on flawed evidence. The Article first considers the
role of reliability screening as a constitutional concern.
The wrongful convictions data identify what might …

The Epistemological Trend In The Evolution Of The Law Of Expert Testimony: A Scrutiny At Once Broader, Narrower, And Deeper, Edward J. Imwinkelried

Georgia Law Review

The thesis of this Article is that we are moving toward a
fundamentally epistemological approach to determining
the admissibility of expert testimony. The first part of the
Article notes that while many Frye jurisdictions exempted
soft science and nonscientific expertise, the Daubert line of
authority mandates that like an epistemologist, a trial
judge examine knowledge claims by any expert. The
second part addresses the question of the breadth of the
judge's analysis. The second part points out that under

the marketplace and general acceptance tests, courts
sometimes conducted a global analysis and inquired
generally whether the discipline itself was recognized …

A Tale Of Two Dauberts, Julie A. Seaman

Georgia Law Review

Under the Federal Rules of Evidence and Supreme
Court precedent, a single standard ostensibly governs the
admissibility of scientific and other expert evidence in
criminal and civil cases. Although Georgia has recently
become the forty-fourth state to adopt the Federal Rules of
Evidence, it has declined to adopt Daubert for criminal
cases and has retained the prior, more lenient, standard.
While many commentators view this approach as perverse,
this Article considers the possible virtues not only of
explicitly applying a separate rule to scientific evidence in
criminal cases but also of applying a less stringent rule to
such evidence. Based …

Constructive Upheaval: Railway Labor Executives'ass'n V. Gibbons And The "Choice Of Clause" Challenge To Traditions Of Statutory Construction, Jordan C. Seal

Georgia Law Review

When confronted with constitutional challenges to
Congress's legislative authority, courts must build their
analyses on an interpretation of the statute's language.
Such cases implicate principles of statutory construction
that lay the groundwork for the rulings that follow.
Throughout American judicial history, courts have
favored flexible interpretation to protect Congress's
enactments from constitutional attack. The Supreme
Court's decision in Railway Labor Executives' Association
v. Gibbons dramatically departed from that tradition,
suggesting instead that legislation should be categorized
as a particular type of law to ensure that Congress does
not overstep the boundaries of its enumerated powers.
Although its shift in perspective …

Table Of Contents

Georgia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Interagency Litigation And Article Iii, Joseph W. Mead

Georgia Law Review

Agencies of the United States often find themselves on
opposite sides of the "v. " in disputes ranging from alleged
unfair labor practices in federal agencies, to competing
statutory interpretations, to run-of-the mill squabbles over
money. Yet Article III's case-or-controversy requirement

includes--at a minimum-adverse parties and standing.
Courts have disagreed with one another over the extent to
which litigation between the sovereign and itself meets
Article III standards. Despite the volume of scholarship
on Article III standing, relatively little attention has been
paid to Article III's requirement of adverse parties in
general, or the justiciability of intrabranch litigation in
particular. …

The Problem With The Bureau Of Land Management's Delegation Of Wildlife Management In Wilderness, Lindsay S. Jones

Georgia Law Review

Congress passed the Wilderness Act of 1964 "to secure for
the American people of present and future generations the
benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness." When it
passed the Act, Congress preserved over 9 million acres of
federal lands; and since then, the National Wilderness
Preservation System has been expanded by more than 100
million acres. The Act requires the federal agencies to
manage the wilderness areas to preserve their wilderness
character and to leave the lands unimpaired for future
generations.
Wildlife is an integral part of what makes wilderness
worth preserving. Despite the vital role wildlife plays in …