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Vanderbilt University Law School

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

2005

Articles 31 - 47 of 47

Full-Text Articles in Law

Choice Of Law For Internet Transactions: The Uneasy Case For Online Consumer Protection, Erin O'Connor Jan 2005

Choice Of Law For Internet Transactions: The Uneasy Case For Online Consumer Protection, Erin O'Connor

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Essay explores the possibility that the market for online purchases fails to work as efficiently as it can because consumers lack trust in unknown vendors, and it argues that consumer distrust in unknown vendors can and often does take the form of categorical avoidance of other unknown vendors. This avoidance of unknown vendors as a class results from the fact that trust and distrust, as cognitive phenomena, are subject to the same biases and limitations as are other cognitive phenomena. Unknown vendors often are willing to incur some costs to signal their trustworthiness to individual consumers. Unless the other …

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The New Frontier Of State Constitutional Law, Jim Rossi, James A. Gardner Jan 2005

The New Frontier Of State Constitutional Law, Jim Rossi, James A. Gardner

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In the past decade, a new frontier of constitutional discourse has begun to emerge, adding a fresh perspective to state constitutional law. Instead of treating states as jurisdictional islands in a sea under reign of the federal government, this new approach sees states as co-equals among themselves and between them and the federal government in a collective enterprise of democratic self-governance. This Symposium, organized around the theme of Dual Enforcement of Constitutional Norms, provides the occasion for leading scholars on state constitutional law to take a fresh look at their subject by adopting a vantage point outside of the individualized …

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The Civilization Of The Criminal Law, Christopher Slobogin Jan 2005

The Civilization Of The Criminal Law, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article explores the jurisprudential and practical feasibility of a "preventive" regime of criminal justice. More specifically, it examines an updated version of the type of government intervention espoused four decades ago by thinkers such as Barbara Wooton, Sheldon Glueck, and Karl Menninger. These individuals, the first a criminologist, the latter two mental health professionals, envisioned a system that is triggered by an antisocial act but that pays no attention to desert or even to general deterrence. Rather, the sole goal of the system they proposed is individual prevention through assessments of dangerousness and the provision of treatment designed to …

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The Purpose Of Copyright Law In Canada, Daniel J. Gervais Jan 2005

The Purpose Of Copyright Law In Canada, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

IN THREE RECENT CASES, the Supreme Court of Canada provided several pieces of the Canadian copyright policy puzzle. We now know that the economic purpose of copyright law is instrumentalist in nature, namely, to ensure the orderly production and distribution of, and access to, works of art and intellect. The Court added that copyright can not enter carelessly into the private sphere of individual users. By targeting end-users in recent lawsuits, copyright holders have also found out that it is difficult to enforce a right that has not been properly internalized. After reviewing the Supreme Court trilogy of cases, the …

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Subpoenas And Privacy, Christopher Slobogin Jan 2005

Subpoenas And Privacy, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This symposium article, the first of two on regulation of government's efforts to obtain paper and digital records of our activities, analyzes the constitutional legitimacy of subpoenas. Whether issued by a grand jury or an administrative agency, subpoenas are extremely easy to enforce, merely requiring the government to demonstrate that the items sought pursuant to the subpoena are "relevant" to a investigation. Yet today subpoenas and pseudo-subpoenas are routinely used not only to obtain business records and the like, but also documents containing significant amounts of personal information about individuals, including medical, financial, and email records. Part I provides an …

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Transaction Surveillance By The Government, Christopher Slobogin Jan 2005

Transaction Surveillance By The Government, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This symposium article is the second of two on regulation of government efforts to obtain recorded information for criminal prosecutions. More specifically, it explores the scope and regulation of "transaction surveillance," which it defines as government attempts to access already existing records, either physically or through data banks, and government efforts to obtain, in real-time or otherwise, "catalogic data" (the identifying signals of a transaction, such as the address of an email recipient). Transaction surveillance is a potent way of discovering and making inferences about a person's activities, character and identity. Yet, despite a bewildering array of statutorily created authorization …

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Politics And Judgment, Suzanna Sherry Jan 2005

Politics And Judgment, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Two hundred years after its most famous invocation in Marbury v. Madison, judicial review has apparently lost its luster. Despite its global spread, it is in disrepute in its country of origin. The mainstream American academic attitude toward judicial review as practiced by the modern Supreme Court ranges from open hostility to a position similar to Winston Churchill's on democracy: It is the worst way to implement a Constitution, except for all the rest. This essay, part of a larger book project with Daniel Farber, provides one explanation of the source of the hostility, defends judicial review against its critics, …

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Empirical Measures Of Judicial Performance: An Introduction To The Symposium, Jim Rossi, Steven G. Gey Jan 2005

Empirical Measures Of Judicial Performance: An Introduction To The Symposium, Jim Rossi, Steven G. Gey

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Inspired by the burgeoning empirical literature on the judiciary, the editors of the Florida State University Law Review have solicited some papers from leading scholars and federal courts of appeals judges, asking them to address the topic of empirical measures of judicial performance. The papers in this "Symposium on Empirical Measures of Judicial Performance" address empirical measures of judicial performance from a variety of methodological perspectives, but as this Foreword suggests, they can roughly be organized around three basic themes. First, many of the papers critique the empirical enterprise itself and especially the tournament strategy for evaluating judges, although these …

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What Is Corporate Law's Place In Promoting Societal Welfare?: An Essay In Honor Of Professor William Klein, Randall Thomas Jan 2005

What Is Corporate Law's Place In Promoting Societal Welfare?: An Essay In Honor Of Professor William Klein, Randall Thomas

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This is a short essay on what should be the fundamental criterion used to evaluate corporate law. I argue that the overall goal of good corporate law should be to assist private parties to create wealth for themselves and the economy in a manner that does not inflict uncompensated negative externalities upon third parties. Private businesses that produce goods and services should be encouraged by the state because creating greater wealth is generally beneficial to society. Corporate law can act as a helpful precondition for faster economic growth by protecting the parties' expectations, encouraging savings and investment, reducing transaction costs, …

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Law And Behavioral Biology, Owen D. Jones, Timothy H. Goldsmith Jan 2005

Law And Behavioral Biology, Owen D. Jones, Timothy H. Goldsmith

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Society uses law to encourage people to behave differently than they would behave in the absence of law. This fundamental purpose makes law highly dependent on sound understandings of the multiple causes of human behavior. The better those understandings, the better law can achieve social goals with legal tools. In this Article, Professors Jones and Goldsmith argue that many long held understandings about where behavior comes from are rapidly obsolescing as a consequence of developments in the various fields constituting behavioral biology. By helping to refine law's understandings of behavior's causes, they argue, behavioral biology can help to improve law's …

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Constructing Reality: Social Science And Race Cases, Beverly I. Moran Jan 2005

Constructing Reality: Social Science And Race Cases, Beverly I. Moran

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education and Grutter v. Bollinger all demonstrate that law alone is not enough to make social change. Instead, lawyers interested in social change must understand the nature of the societies that they attempt to persuade and the language that leads judges to change their ways of thinking. In the early 21st century, the language of persuasion is often the language of social science.

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Waging War: Japan's Constitutional Constraints, John O. Haley Jan 2005

Waging War: Japan's Constitutional Constraints, John O. Haley

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Both electoral results and public opinion polls have long revealed what most observers have viewed as a paradox if not a contradiction. By significant majorities, the Japanese people appear to oppose any revision of article 9, but support the SDF and their deployment with legislative sanction. The seemingly antithetical aspects of these views can be reconciled if one accepts the proposition that the public is willing to allow an armed force but only within parameters that are still ill-defined. So long as article 9 remains, the government is constrained by the need for legislative approval and at least potential judicial …

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The Iraqi Special Tribunal: A Human Rights Perspective, Michael A. Newton Jan 2005

The Iraqi Special Tribunal: A Human Rights Perspective, Michael A. Newton

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The creation of the Iraqi Special Tribunal in December 2003 by Iraqi authorities who were at the time under the legal occupation of the Coalition Provisional Authority marked the emergence of a new form of internationalized domestic tribunals. The Iraqis succeeded in incorporating the full range of modern crimes into their domestic codes alongside some carefully selected domestic offenses, while amending domestic procedural law in some key ways to align the process with established international law related to the provision of full and fair trials. The subsequent investigations and the beginning of trial proceedings generated major debates about the legitimacy …

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The Futility Of Appeal: Disciplinary Insights Into The "Affirmance Effect" On The United States Courts Of Appeals, Chris Guthrie, Tracey E. George Jan 2005

The Futility Of Appeal: Disciplinary Insights Into The "Affirmance Effect" On The United States Courts Of Appeals, Chris Guthrie, Tracey E. George

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In contrast to the Supreme Court, which typically reverses the cases it hears, the United States Courts of Appeals almost always affirm the cases that they hear. We set out to explore this affirmance effect on the U.S. Courts of Appeal by using insights drawn from law and economics (i.e., selection theory), political science (i.e., attitudinal theory and new institutionalism), and cognitive psychology (i.e., heuristics and biases, including the status quo and omission biases).

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Letting Billions Slip Through Your Fingers: Empirical Evidence And Legal Implications Of The Failure Of Financial Institutions To Participate In Securities Class Action Settlements, Randall Thomas, James D. Cox Jan 2005

Letting Billions Slip Through Your Fingers: Empirical Evidence And Legal Implications Of The Failure Of Financial Institutions To Participate In Securities Class Action Settlements, Randall Thomas, James D. Cox

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article presents the results of an empirical investigation of the frequency with which financial institutions submit claims in settled securities class actions. We combine an empirical study of a large set of settlements with the results of a survey of institutional investors about their claims filing practices. Our sample for the first part of the analysis contains 118 settlements that were not included in our earlier study. We find that less than 30% of institutional investors with provable losses perfect their claims in these settlements. We then explore the possible explanations for this widespread failure. We suggest a wide …

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Toward A Common Law Of Ecosystem Services, J.B. Ruhl Jan 2005

Toward A Common Law Of Ecosystem Services, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article suggests ways in which the common law can integrate concepts of ecosystem services to fulfill pragmatic objectives of common law doctrine. Rather than requiring a radical departure from traditional common law doctrine as is often proposed in environmental literature on the common law, ecosystem services can fold seamlessly into existing common law principles as a source of new knowledge and changed circumstances.

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Dual Constitutions And Constitutional Duels: Separation Of Powers And State Implementation Of Federally Inspired Regulatory Programs And Standards, Jim Rossi Jan 2005

Dual Constitutions And Constitutional Duels: Separation Of Powers And State Implementation Of Federally Inspired Regulatory Programs And Standards, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Frequently, state-wide executive agencies and localities attempt to implement federally-inspired programs. Two predominant examples are cooperative federalism programs and incorporation of federal standards in state-specific law. Federally-inspired programs can bump into state constitutional restrictions on the allocation of powers, especially in states whose constitutional systems embrace stronger prohibitions on legislative delegation than the weak restrictions at the federal level, where national goals and standards are made. This Article addresses this tension between dual federal/state normative accounts of the constitutional allocation of powers in state implementation of federally-inspired programs. To the extent the predominant ways of resolving the tension come from …

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