Law Commons^™

Agency Independence After Pcaob, Kevin M. Stack

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Separation of powers has a new endeavor. The PCAOB decision makes the validity of good-cause removal protections depend on the separation of adjudicative from policymaking and enforcement functions within the agency. At a minimum, within independent agencies, it preserves the second layer of removal protection only for dedicated adjudicators. But its logic extends further. In PCAOB, the demand for political supervision over rulemaking and enforcement trumped Congress's choice to preserve the independence of officials who perform those roles and also adjudicate. In that way, PCAOB reversed the consistent constitutional validation of good-cause removal protections for those who engage in adjudication. …

Bringing It All Back Home: Establishing A Coherent Constitutional Framework For The Re-Regulation Of Homeschooling, Timothy B. Waddell

Vanderbilt Law Review

Bobby and Esther Riddle, the Supreme Court of West Virginia conceded, "did an excellent job" teaching their children, Jill and Tim- possibly better than the public schools could do."' Like many fundamentalist parents, the Riddles believed the Bible required them personally to teach their children, protect them from heresy and worldly influence, and resist government intrusions that could imperil their eternal salvation. Moreover, they believed they had constitutional rights to do so. Jill and Tim Riddle studied the same subjects as public schoolchildren, but their studies were interwoven with religious lessons based upon their parents' idiosyncratic view of Christian doctrine. …

"Brady" Obligations, Criminal Sanctions, And Solutions In A New Era Of Scrutiny, Andrew Smith

Vanderbilt Law Review

Six days after terrorist attacks shook New York City and Washington, D.C., the FBI raided an apartment complex in a suburb of Detroit and apprehended three North African men.1 Among the men's possessions were hand-drawn sketches potentially detailing targets for terrorist attacks abroad. Four men were charged with providing material support for terrorism and document fraud and were brought to trial two years later. Richard Convertino, an assistant United States attorney with a strong track record in the DOJ, was tapped to prosecute the case and won convictions against three of the four defendants. Attorney General John Ashcroft personally and …

The Search For Due Process In Civil Commitment Hearings: How Procedural Realities Have Altered Substantive Standards, Christyne E. Ferris

Vanderbilt Law Review

The civil commitment of mentally ill individuals presents the legal system with an intractable question: When should the law deprive someone of the fundamental right to liberty based on a prediction of future dangerousness? Advocates of both increased and decreased levels of civil commitment offer compelling case studies to help resolve the question. The former point to high profile events like the Virginia Tech shooting, in which mandatory incapacitation of the perpetrator at the first sign of mental illness could have prevented a senseless tragedy. The latter highlight the lives of individuals like Kenneth Donaldson, whose father had him committed …

Rethinking The Substantive Due Process Right To Privacy: Grounding Privacy In The Fourth Amendment, Mary H. Wimberly

Vanderbilt Law Review

Little in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court has spurred as much controversy as the Court's recognition of a constitutional right to privacy. While implicitly acknowledging that such a right is not listed in the text of the Constitution, in Griswold v. Connecticut the Court found that the right existed in the "penumbras" of the amendments to the Constitution.' According to the Court, the right to privacy was present in "emanations" from the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. This reasoning was notoriously extended to abortion in Roe v. Wade. In order to invalidate state regulation of abortion, the Roe …

The Outer Limits Of Gang Injunctions, Scott E. Atkinson

Vanderbilt Law Review

Almost a decade ago, the California Supreme Court endorsed the use of public nuisance injunctions as a means to control street gangs. Public nuisance injunctions against gangs ("gang injunctions"), which result from civil suits filed by district or city attorneys, prohibit the nuisance conduct within a prescribed geographical area, focusing on the "turf' claimed by the gang. In People ex rel. Gallo v. Acuna, the California Supreme Court upheld an injunction against thirty-eight named members of a San Jose gang in a four square block area where none of the gang members lived. The court described the neighborhood as "an …

We Can Do Better: Anti-Homeless Ordinances As Violations Of State Substantive Due Process Law, Andrew J. Liese

Vanderbilt Law Review

In September of 2004, a group of local business owners and professionals in Nashville, Tennessee, together with the Nashville Downtown Partnership, a local downtown improvement organization, submitted a plan to the Metro Council that proposed making it illegal to panhandle in the busiest areas of the city. Advocates of the proposed legislation argued that panhandlers "harass tourists and customers and make the city less appealing." Opponents viewed the proposal as nothing more than an attempt to force the homeless out of the city. The Nashville plan is patterned after the measures that several major American cities-including Philadelphia, Denver, and Seattle-have …

Reconceptualizing Due Process In Juvenile Justice: Contributions From Law And Social Science, Christopher Slobogin, Mark R. Fondacaro, Tricia Cross

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article challenges the accepted wisdom, at least since the Supreme Court's decision in Gault, that procedures in juvenile delinquency court should mimic the adult criminal process. The legal basis for this challenge is Gault itself, as well as the other Supreme Court cases that triggered the juvenile justice revolution of the past decades, for all of these cases relied on the due process clause, not the provisions of the Constitution that form the foundation for adult criminal procedure. That means that the central goal in juvenile justice is fundamental fairness, which does not have to be congruent with the …

Rethinking Place Of Business As Choice Of Law In Class Action Lawsuits, Allison M. Gruenwald

Vanderbilt Law Review

In the past century, businesses have come to operate on a national and often global level. In the past century, the United States has seen an enormous nationalization and even globalization of business. As a result, the actions of a single company increasingly have the potential to affect people far beyond the boundaries of that company's home state. When one or a few companies injure large numbers of consumers across the country, aggregate litigation (namely the class action lawsuit) becomes an especially attractive remedy. Aggregating claims allows plaintiffs to save time and money and may also enable them to present …

Rethinking Place Of Business As Choice Of Law In Class Action Lawsuits, Allison M. Gruenwald

Vanderbilt Law Review

In the past century, businesses have come to operate on a national and often global level. In the past century, the United States has seen an enormous nationalization and even globalization of business. As a result, the actions of a single company increasingly have the potential to affect people far beyond the boundaries of that company's home state. When one or a few companies injure large numbers of consumers across the country, aggregate litigation (namely the class action lawsuit) becomes an especially attractive remedy. Aggregating claims allows plaintiffs to save time and money and may also enable them to present …

Taking Miranda's Pulse, William T. Pizzi, Morris B. Hoffman

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Supreme Court decided five Miranda1 cases in 2003-2004, making this one of the most active fifteen-month periods for the law of self-incrimination since the controversial case was decided in 1966. In this Article, we consider three of those five cases-Chavez v. Martinez, Missouri v. Seibert and United States v. Patane-along with the blockbuster decision four years ago in Dickerson v. United States. in an attempt to decipher what, if anything, this remarkable level of activity teaches us about the direction of the Court's self-incrimination jurisprudence. In the end, while these cases, like those before them, may not entirely clarify …

Certifying Mandatory Punitive Damages Classes In A Post-Ortiz And State Farm World, Aileen L. Nagy

Vanderbilt Law Review

Punitive damages are a civil penalty "aimed at deterrence and retribution" that further the state's interest in punishing unlawful conduct.' They are meant to "sting" and should be imposed proportionally according to the "egregiousness of the harm and the wealth of the transgressor." While compensatory damages are intended to compensate plaintiffs for their concrete losses, punitive damages use the plaintiff as an instrument for "visiting [] punishment upon [the] extreme tortious misdeeds" of defendants. As such, it is well settled that no individual plaintiff is entitled to punitive damages; however, "it is equally true that no transgressor is entitled to …

Business Litigation And Cyberspace: Will Cyber Courts Prove An Effective Tool For Luring High-Tech Business Into Forum States?, Jacob A. Sommer

Vanderbilt Law Review

From beginning to end businesses are wed to the law. The life of a corporation typically begins with the filing of articles of incorporation with the secretary of state' and ends with either a merger into another corporation or dissolution. At every point in a corporation's life cycle, the American legal system places its imprimatur on the corporation's activities and governance. Inevitably, because of the sophisticated nature of business and frequent encounters with the law, businesses become engaged in their fair share of litigation and must resort to the judicial system for resolution.

Business, especially high-tech business, moves very quickly, …

A Search For The Best Idea: Balancing The Conflicting Provisions Of The Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, Joshua A. Wolfe

Vanderbilt Law Review

One issue that is consistently at the forefront of political debate in America is the educational system. The debate over education involves funding, accountability, and curriculum issues, among others. One education issue that does not receive as much attention as some of the more politically charged issues is special education.

The goal of the American public school system is to educate all children, but how should that goal be implemented with regard to learning-disabled children? How does the educational system meet the individualized needs of disabled students while ensuring that these students are not isolated from the rest of the …

Toward Fundamental Fairness In The Kangaroo Courtroom: The Due Process Case Against Statutes Presumptively Closing Juvenile Proceedings, Stephen E. Oestreicher Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

Today's juvenile courtroom functions quite differently than did its 1899 Chicago ancestor. During every decade since the 1960s, the juvenile court system has undergone a number of fundamental, structural changes. The most recent of these "mega change[s]" came during the 1990s, when a number of states abandoned their existing presumptive closure statutes and mandated that juvenile delinquency proceedings be held in the open for the press and the public to see.

The policy reviews of this development have been mixed. Some commentators criticize the recent trend, asserting that open proceedings enervate the juvenile system's ultimate goal of rehabilitating wayward youths. …

Policing The Police: Clarifying The Test For Holding The Government Liable Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 And The State-Created Danger Theory, Jeremy D. Kernodle

Vanderbilt Law Review

On October 20, 1980, as Barbara Piotrowski left a donut shop, a man hired by her ex-boyfriend to kill her shot her four times in the chest. Within twenty-four hours, the Houston Police Department ("HPD") arrested the gunman and his driver and obtained heir confessions. Piotrowski's millionaire ex-boyfriend moved to England and was never arrested nor brought to trial.

Fifteen years later, Piotrowski sued the City of Houston under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for depriving her of her constitutional right to life and liberty and equal protection. She based her lawsuit primarily on information that a month before the shooting, …

The Scattered Remains Of Sovereign Immunity For Foreign States After Republic Of Argentina V. Weltover,Inc., Sarah K. Schano

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The globalization of the United States economy in the latter half of the twentieth century has fostered greater interaction between the United States and foreign states and their instrumentalities. As a result, the likelihood of legal disputes arising between United States entities and foreign states has increased. Traditionally, foreign states have been immune from suit in United States courts. However, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), enacted in 1976, specifies instances in which United States courts may deny immunity to foreign states and exercise jurisdiction over them. Under one provision of the FSIA, a foreign state may forfeit its immunity …

Due Process Rights Of Parents And Children In International Child Abductions, Dorothy C. Daigle

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Rising divorce rates in recent years have led to increasingly frequent abductions of children by one parent away from the other parent. Often, abducting parents move the children to different jurisdictions in which the parents believe they can obtain a more favorable decision on custody. To remedy this problem, twenty-nine nations joined in 1980 to adopt the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. This Convention mandates the immediate return, upon request, of the abducted child to the state of habitual residence of the child. The Convention includes several limited exceptions to this mandate, applicable at the …

Renewing The Good Intentions Of Foster Care: Enforcement Of The Adoption Assistance And Child Welfare Act Of 1980 And The Substantive Due Process Right To Safety, Cristina C.-Y. Chou

Vanderbilt Law Review

Foster care. There are probably no two words in the English language that convey more of a sense of good intentions gone bad. Children enter foster care when their own parents fail them. Then they begin a state-sponsored journey through an over- land railroad of foster homes, some run by adults who truly want to help, and others run by scoundrels.'

The purpose of foster care is to provide a temporary safe haven for children whose parents are unable to care for them. Unfortunately, however, the foster care system frequently fails to provide children with stable, secure care, and fails …

The Costs Of Incoherence: A Comment On Plain Meaning, West Virginia University Hospitals, Inc. V. Casey, And Due Process Of Statutory Interpretation, T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Theodore M. Shaw

Vanderbilt Law Review

Karl Llewellyn's classic article on the canons of statutory construction, which we rightly celebrate in this Symposium, is too clever by half. To the reader untutored in the scholarly literature on statutory interpretation, the "thrust but parry" pairing of the canons is a delightful demonstration of how legal argument is structured in a way guaranteed to maintain discretion in the judiciary and to keep lawyers in business. No case involving a statute is clear cut because the canons can lend support to either side. This means that no lawyer is without an argument, and a judge is free to do …

The Burden Of Proving Competence To Stand Trial: Due Process At The Limits Of Adversarial Justice, Benjamin J. Vernia

Vanderbilt Law Review

A defendant's mental competence to stand trial is a fundamental prerequisite to participation in our adversarial system of criminal justice, but proving that this requirement is satisfied presents unique challenges. While an incompetent defendant's inability to comprehend the nature of the proceedings or to assist his attorney challenges the very validity of the adversarial system, most jurisdictions rely on that same adversarial system to resolve questions of competence. These questions about the competence of the defendant and the legitimate scope of the adversarial system all arise in the context of the competency hearing procedure.

The burden of proof in competency …

The Ripple Effects Of Slaughter-House: A Critique Of A Negative Rights View Of The Constitution, Michael J. Gerhardt

Vanderbilt Law Review

Upon seeing Niagara Falls for the first time, Oscar Wilde reportedly remarked that it "would be more impressive if it flowed the other way." I have a similar reaction to a series of narrow Supreme Court interpretations of the fourteenth amendment, beginning with the Slaughter-House Cases, decided in 1872, and extending to the 1989 decisions in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services and DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services. In Slaughter-House the Court interpreted the privileges or immunities clause of the fourteenth amendment as merely protecting interests other federal laws already protected, while recently the Court interpreted the due …

The Constitutionality Of An Off-Dutysmoking Ban For Public Employees:Should The State Butt Out?, Elizabeth B. Thompson

Vanderbilt Law Review

During the past several years, restrictions imposed by states, cities,and municipalities on smoking in public areas have survived court challenges and become almost commonplace.' Likewise, both public and private employers have limited smoking in the workplace. A further restriction that seems to be emerging, however, is a refusal by both the state and a growing number of private employers to hire or to continue to employ smokers. These restrictions limit the employee's freedom to smoke not only in the workplace, but also after working hours and within the privacy of the worker's home.

This Note will address the constitutionality of …

The 'Mandatory' Nature Of The Hague Service Convention In The United States Is The Forum's Victory, Rita M. Alliss

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Note addresses the current United States approach to the Hague Convention on the Service Abroad of Judicial and Extrajudicial Documents in Civil or Commercial Matters. The Note recognizes a split in United States case law concerning whether strict compliance with the Hague Service Convention is required. While some United States courts focus on the scope of the Convention and United States due process concepts to avoid strict compliance, other courts, especially state courts, require strict compliance with the Convention under the supremacy clause of the United States Constitution. The author focuses on service on foreign state corporations by substituted …

Reflections On The House Of Labor, Lee Modjeska

Vanderbilt Law Review

Much has been said of the deteriorating condition and possible fall of the house of labor.' This Essay contains some idiosyncratic reflections on certain aspects of the situation. Contrary to the mainstream of thought, my suspicion, to use Justice Frankfurter's words, is that those"economic and social concerns that are the raison d'etre of unions"remain dominant in our society, that unionism may be inevitable if not indispensable, and that our days of relative labor calm may be ending.National labor policy repeatedly has recognized the reality of modern society, viewed against a long history of industrial unrest, that a union is essential …

Jurisdiction By Necessity: Examining One Proposal For Unbarring The Doors Of Our Courts, Tracy L. Troutman

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Although the usually proclaimed goals of the United States legal system are "fair play and justice," a person who is injured in some way, who feels that he has had his rights violated, or who seeks to enforce a business agreement, may not necessarily have a remedy in its judicial system. Often a court may claim it lacks power to hear a case because it does not have jurisdiction over the defendant or the subject matter of the suit. Another motive of a court for refusing to hear the case may be simply the necessity to clear its docket. One …

Case Digest, Law Review Staff

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Neither Private Refugee Assistance Agency Nor its Members have Standing to Contest U.S. Interdiction of Foreign Vessels on High Seas Carrying Undocumented Aliens Haitian Refugee Center v. Gracey, No. 85-5258, slip op. (D.C. Cir. Jan. 9, 1987).

Separation of Citizen Children from Illegal Alien Parents Should be Considered when Determining Extreme Hardship Deportation Proceedings -Cerillo-Perez v. INS, 55 U.S.L.W.2457 (9th Cir. 1987).

California State Court's Exercise of Personal Jurisdiction over Japanese Manufacturer to Indemnify Taiwanese Company is Unreasonable and Unfair in Violation of Due Process. Asahi Metal Industry Co. v. Superior Court of California, 107 S. Ct.1026 (1987).

Nondiscriminatory Ad …

Collection Of The Use Tax On Out-Of-State Mail-Order Sales, Paul J. Hartman

Vanderbilt Law Review

The states' inability to collect taxes on out-of-state mail-order sales constitutes a major fiscal problem. The federal government's Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations estimates that states are losing as much as 1.5 billion dollars each year in unpaid out-of-state mail-order purchase taxes.'

In addition to raising revenue, the compensating use tax serves two purposes: (1) The use tax helps local sellers to compete with retail dealers in other states who are subject to a lesser tax burden;and (2) the use tax avoids the likelihood of draining the taxing state's revenue by removing buyers' incentive or temptation to go bargain hunting …

Nonacquiescence: Outlaw Agencies, Imperial Courts, And The Perils Of Pluralism, Deborah Maranville

Vanderbilt Law Review

American history has witnessed recurrent conflict between the judiciary and the executive or legislative branches of our government.' The conflict generates heated passions perhaps because it involves both significant struggles for power and fundamental views about the rule of law. New opportunities for conflict have arisen as the number of administrative agencies has grown. In the last decade, administrative agencies and the courts have engaged in a continuing controversy over whether agencies must follow lower court precedents. Although the controversy has touched a number of agencies at least peripherally, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or Board) and the Social …

Case Digest, Law Review Staff

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS AND MEMBERS OF CLERGY OF VARIOUS DENOMINATIONS LACK STANDING TO CHALLENGE ADOPTION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS WITH THE VATICAN

--Americans United for Separation of Church and State v. Reagan, 786 F.2d 194 (3d Cir.1986)

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EVEN THOUGH PROCEEDINGS IN THE FOREIGN FORUM MAY TAKE MORE TIME AND MAY YIELD A SMALLER RECOVERY THAN PROCEEDING IN THE UNITED STATES FORUM, THE FOREIGN FORUM MAY BE CONSIDERED AN ADEQUATE FORUM FOR THE PURPOSES OF THE FORRUM NON CONVENIENS DOCTRINE

--De Melo v. Lederle Laboratories, 801 F.2d 1058 (8th Cir. 1986)

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ASSERTION OF PERSONAL JURISDICTION IN CALIFORNIA OVER AN …