Law Commons^™

Regulation And The Geography Of Inequality, Ganesh Sitaraman, Christopher Serkin, Morgan Ricks

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

We live in an era of widening geographic inequality. Around the country, the spread between economically and culturally thriving places and those that are struggling has been increasing. "Superstar" cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Atlanta continue to attract talent and grow, while the economies of other cities and rural areas are left behind. Troublingly, escalating geographic inequality in the United States has arrived hand in hand with serious economic, social, and political problems. Areas that are left behind have not only failed to keep up with their thriving peers; in many ways, they have stagnated and seen …

Protecting Pregnancy, Jennifer B. Shinall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Laws to assist pregnant women in the workplace are gaining legislative momentum, both at the state and federal levels. Last year alone, four such laws went into effect at the state level, and federal legislation advanced farther than ever before in the House of Representatives. Four types of legislative protections for pregnant workers currently exist-pregnancy accommodation laws, pregnancy transfer laws, paid family leave laws, and state disability insurance programs but very little is known about how each type of legislation performs relative to the others. This Essay provides empirical insight into this question, which is important for setting legislative priorities. …

The Future Of Supreme Court Reform, Ganesh Sitaraman, Daniel Epps

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

For a brief moment in the fall of 2020, structural reform of the Supreme Court seemed like a tangible possibility. After the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September, some prominent Democratic politicians and liberal commentators warmed to the idea of expanding the Court to respond to Republicans’ rush to confirm a nominee before the election, despite their refusal four years prior to confirm Judge Merrick Garland on the ground that it was an election year. Though Democratic candidate Joe Biden won the Presidency in November, Democrats lost seats in the House and have a majority in the Senate …

Risk-Risk Tradeoffs For Mass Shootings And International Terrorism, W. Kip Viscusi, Rachel Dalafave

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article elicits information about risk perceptions and risk–risk tradeoffs for mass shootings and international terrorist attacks. These prominent public risks are similar in many respects in that both involve traumatic injuries. One might expect that the risk–risk tradeoff rate would be 1.0 unless other attributes of these risks are pertinent. Estimates based on an original survey structured to test rates of tradeoff between deaths from these risks indicate that respondents consistently place a premium on reducing mass shooting risks, as compared to risks of international terrorism. The average premium is relatively stable even after accounting for the effect of …

Extending Trade Law Precedent, Jeffrey Kucik, Sergio Puig

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Precedent is celebrated as a fundamental feature of dense legal systems as it creates predictability, builds coherence, and enhances the authority of courts and tribunals. But, in international adjudication, precedent can also affect interstate cooperation and ultimately the legitimacy of international organizations. Wary of clashing with state interests, most international dispute settlement systems are designed so that rulings do not set obligatory precedent.

This Article describes the role of precedent in the Appellate Body (AB) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to explain how precedent can affect compliance with the decisions of international courts and tribunals (ICs). This Article makes …

European Union Law As Foreign Law, Lior Zemer, Sharon Pardo

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The importance and significance of comparative sources to the development of Israeli jurisprudence is expressed in local legislation and rulings. The impact of foreign law on the development of Israeli law has been analyzed and vindicated in numerous studies in the local legal literature. These studies typically focus on the two most prominent legal systems—-common law (the Anglo-American system) and civil law (the Continental system). The historical reasons for this are clear, emanating from the fact that Israel’s legal system is based on these legal regimes and is amended in the spirit of changes made to them. Over the years, …

Competing Claims: The Developing Role Of International Law And Unilateral Challenges To Maritime Claims In The South China Sea, Kevin Leddy

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Chinese military and economic expansion have led to a commensurate decrease in the ability of neighboring countries to object to excessive maritime claims in the South China Sea. The existing framework of international law under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea provides an anchoring point for coastal states' legal claims to the region, but it does not adequately address the complicated diplomacy challenges created by unilateral military action and unique geographical issues, such as artificial islands. Gradual acquiescence to maritime claims that do not comply with international law results from these conditions. Once these boundaries are …

Democracy On A Shoestring, Joshua S. Sellers, Roger Michalski

Vanderbilt Law Review

Democracy requires money. Voters must be registered, voting rolls updated, election dates advertised, voting technology purchased and tested, poll workers trained, ballots designed, votes counted and verified, and on and on. Despite the importance of election expenditures, we have a shamefully inadequate amount of information about how much our elections cost. This Article, based on a novel and painstakingly hand-coded dataset, provides much needed information on election expenditures across multiple years from four states: California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida. These states, given their unique characteristics, provide a compelling sample set.

In what we believe to be a completely novel approach …

Why Supervise Banks? The Foundations Of The American Monetary Settlement, Lev Menand

Vanderbilt Law Review

Administrative agencies are generally designed to operate at arm’s length, making rules and adjudicating cases. But the banking agencies are different: they are designed to supervise. They work cooperatively with banks and their remedial powers are so extensive they rarely use them. Oversight proceeds through informal, confidential dialogue.

Today, supervision is under threat: banks oppose it, the banking agencies restrict it, and scholars misconstrue it. Recently, the critique has turned legal. Supervision’s skeptics draw on a uniform, flattened view of administrative law to argue that supervision is inconsistent with norms of due process and transparency. These arguments erode the intellectual …

The Quick (Spending) And The Dead: The Agency Costs Of Forever Philanthropy, Brian Galle

Vanderbilt Law Review

American philanthropic institutions control upwards of a trillion dollars of wealth. Because contributions to these entities are deductible from both income and estate taxes, and the entities’ earnings are tax-free, that trillion dollars is heavily underwritten by contemporary taxpayers. Law offers little assurance that those who pay will be those who benefit. To the contrary, since these subsidies become more valuable the longer charitable assets are left unspent, the law strongly encourages philanthropies to save rather than spend, even in situations of great current need. Other legal rules further encourage grantmaking institutions to strive to exist “in perpetuity.”

This Essay …

Creditors, Keepers: Passive Retention Of Estate Property And The Automatic Stay, Caitlin M. Mcauliffe

Vanderbilt Law Review

The automatic stay provision is one of the most important provisions in the Bankruptcy Code. Until recently, however, it has remained unclear if passive retention of property of the bankruptcy estate must be immediately turned over to the debtor under the automatic stay provision. The Supreme Court decided in City of Chicago v. Fulton that passive retention does not violate the automatic stay, saving creditors from the consequences of retaining estate property. The debate about the stay, however, is far from over. Many circuit courts were already concerned about the policy issues deriving from the City of Chicago maintaining possession …

The Loudest Voice At The Supreme Court: The Solicitor General’S Dominance Of Amicus Oral Argument, Darcy Covert, Annie J. Wang

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Solicitor General (“SG”) is often called the “Tenth Justice,” a title that captures his unique relationship with the Supreme Court and his independence from the executive branch. No phenomenon better reflects this relationship than the Court’s practice of permitting amici to participate in oral argument. Although amicus oral argument is nominally available to all litigants, the modern Court grants this privilege almost exclusively to the SG. Scholars and Court watchers have long argued that this practice is justified because the SG uses it to pursue the rule of law and an objective sense of “justice.”

This Article challenges that …

Advisory Opinions And The Problem Of Legal Authority, Christian R. Burset

Vanderbilt Law Review

The prohibition against advisory opinions is fundamental to our understanding of federal judicial power, but we have misunderstood its origins. Discussions of the doctrine begin not with a constitutional text or even a court case, but a letter in which the Jay Court rejected President Washington’s request for legal advice. Courts and scholars have offered a variety of explanations for the Jay Court’s behavior. But they all depict the earliest Justices as responding to uniquely American concerns about advisory opinions.

This Article offers a different explanation. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, it shows that judges throughout the anglophone world—not …

The Shadows Of Litigation Finance, Suneal Bedi, William C. Marra

Vanderbilt Law Review

Litigation finance is quickly becoming a centerpiece of our legal system. Once a dispute arises, litigants may seek money from third-party financiers to pay their legal bills or monetize their claims, and in turn those financiers receive a portion of any case proceeds. Yet policymakers are struggling with how to evaluate and regulate litigation finance. There are two problems. The first is an awareness problem. Some commentators consider litigation finance “likely the most important development in civil justice of our time,” but others have hardly heard of it. As a result, many policymakers do not quite understand what litigation finance …

Reconstructing State Republics, Francesca L. Procaccini

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Our national political dysfunction is rooted in constitutionally dysfunctional states. States today are devolving into modern aristocracies through laws that depress popular control, entwine wealth and power, and insulate incumbents from democratic oversight and accountability. These unrepublican states corrupt the entire United States. It is for this reason that the Constitution obligates the United States to restore ailing states to their full republican strength. But how? For all its attention to process, the Constitution is silent on how the United States may exercise its sweeping Article IV power to “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of …

The Sec's Shareholder Proposal: Creating A Corporate Public Square, Randall S. Thomas, James Cox

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In this Article, we take advantage of this Symposium's goals to think broadly about the future of Rule 14a-8 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the shareholder proposal rule. We set forth a vision for the rule to address boardroom insularity by likening the shareholder proposal rule as the public square for shareholders. The existence of such a forum would redound to the benefit of investors, officers, and boards of directors as a fount of current and usefuil information about their investors' and stakeholders' concerns.

We therefore rethink the mission of Rule 14a-8. In doing so, we explore whether …

Completing The Quantum Of Evidence, Edward K. Cheng, Brooke Bowerman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In "Evidentiary Irony and the Incomplete Rule of Completeness," Professors Daniel Capra and Liesa Richter comprehensively catalog the many shortcomings in current Federal Rule of Evidence 106 and craft a compelling reform proposal. Their proposal admirably solves the identified problems, keeps the rule reasonably succinct, and furthers the accuracy and fairness goals of the rules of evidence. In this Response, we focus on Capra & Richter's proposal to formally recognize a "trumping" power in Rule 106, which would allow an adverse party to offer a completing statement even if it would be "otherwise inadmissible under the rule against hearsay."

We Need A Cole Memorandum For Magic Mushrooms, Robert A. Mikos

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In fall 2020, as the nation elected Joe Biden to be our Forty-Sixth President, Oregon voters also passed a noteworthy new drug law reform. Known as Measure 109, Oregon’s path-breaking law legalizes the use of psilocybin, a hallucinogenic substance found in magic mushrooms. Measure 109 is designed to unlock the therapeutic potential of psilocybin, which advocates tout as an effective and safe treatment for depression and other psychological conditions.

Given the burgeoning interest in psychedelics, many people are excited to see how Oregon’s psilocybin experiment pans out. But at this point, it remains unclear whether the experiment will even get …

Preventive Justice: How Algorithms Parole Boards, And Limiting Retributivism Could End Mass Incarceration, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A number of states use statistically derived algorithms to provide estimates of the risk of reoffending. In theory, these risk assessment instruments could bring significant benefits. Fewer people of all ethnicities would be put in jail prior to trial and in prison after conviction, the duration of sentences would be reduced for low-risk offenders, and treatment resources would be more efficiently allocated. As a result, the capital outlays for prisons and jails would be substantially reduced. The public would continue to be protected from the most dangerous individuals, while lower-risk individuals would be less subject to the criminogenic effects of …

Make Hay While The Sun Shines: Private Equity And The False Claims Act, Gregory F. Maczko

Vanderbilt Law Review

For years, the federal government has used the False Claims Act to police fraud in the healthcare industry. Every year, the Department of Justice recovers billions of dollars from healthcare companies for their False Claims Act violations, both penalizing wrongdoers and providing incentives for whistleblowers to come forward. Over the past decade, however, private equity activity within the healthcare industry has increased significantly, presenting questions as to how the False Claims Act applies when a private equity firm’s portfolio company is accused of wrongdoing. This Note analyzes the ambiguity in how different courts have previously applied the False Claims Act …

Efficient Ethical Principles For Making Fatal Choices, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Resource allocations of all kinds inevitably encounter financial constraints, making it infeasible to make financially unbounded commitments. Such resource constraints arise in almost all health and safety risk contexts, which has led to a regulatory oversight process to ascertain whether the expected benefits of major regulations outweigh the costs. The economic approach to monetizing health and safety risks is well established and is based on the value of a statistical life (“VSL”). Government agencies use these values reflecting attitudes toward small changes in risk to monetize the largest benefit component of regulations--that dealing with mortality risks. This procedure consequently bases …

Convincing Conservatives: Private Sector Action Can Bolster Support For Climate Change Mitigation In The United States, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Ash Gillis, Kaitlin T. Raimi, Alex Maki, Ken Wallston

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Finding routes to inspire political conservatives’ support for climate change mitigation is crucial in the United States. In an experiment with U.S. participants, we found that conservatives and moderates are more supportive of climate change mitigation when exposed to information about mitigation actions taken by the private sector. These results suggest that the private sector initiatives may be a way to bolster support for climate action across the U.S. political spectrum. We also tested for downstream spillover effects and found mixed results: Compared to reading about government regulations to mitigate climate change, reading about private sector climate actions led to …

Chevron Is A Phoenix, Lisa Bressman, Kevin Stack

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Judicial deference to agency interpretations of their own statutes is a foundational principle of the administrative state. It recognizes that Congress has the need and desire to delegate the details of regulatory policy to agencies rather than specify those details or default to judicial determinations. It also recognizes that interpretation under regulatory statutes is intertwined with implementation of those statutes. Prior to the famous decision in Chevron, the Supreme Court had long regarded judicial deference as a foundational principle of administrative law. It grew up with the administrative state alongside other foundational administrative law principles. In Chevron, the Court gave …

A Fiduciary Judge's Guide To Awarding Fees In Class Actions, Brian T. Fitzpatrick

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

It is often said that judges act as fiduciaries for the absent class members in class action litigation. If we take this seriously, how then should judges award fees to the lawyers who represent these class members? The answer is to award fees the same way rational class members would want if they could do it on their own. In this Essay, I draw on economic models and data from the market for legal representation of sophisticated clients to describe what these fee practices should look like. Although more data from sophisticated clients is no doubt needed, what we do …

Classaction.Gov, Amanda M. Rose

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Essay proposes the creation of a federally run class action website and supporting administration (collectively, Classaction.gov) that would both operate a comprehensive research database on class actions and assume many of the notice and claims-processing functions performed by class action claims administrators today. Classaction.gov would bring long-demanded transparency to class actions and, through forces of legitimization and coordination, would substantially increase the rate of consumer participation in class action settlements. It also holds the key to mitigating other problems in class action practice, such as the inefficiencies and potential abuses associated with multiforum litigation, the limited success of the …

Supreme Court Reform And American Democracy, Ganesh Sitaraman, Daniel Epps

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In How to Save the Supreme Court, we identified the legitimacy challenge facing the Court, traced it to a set of structural flaws, and proposed novel reforms. Little more than a year later, the conversation around Supreme Court reform has only grown louder and more urgent. In this Essay, we continue that conversation by engaging with critics of our approach. The current crisis of the Supreme Court is, we argue, inextricable from the question of the Supreme Court’s proper role in our democracy. For those interested in reform, there are three distinct strategies for ensuring the Supreme Court maintains its …

Data Autonomy, Cesare Fracassi, William Magnuson

Vanderbilt Law Review

In recent years, “data privacy” has vaulted to the forefront of public attention. Scholars, policymakers, and the media have, nearly in unison, decried the lack of data privacy in the modern world. In response, they have put forth various proposals to remedy the situation, from the imposition of fiduciary obligations on technology platforms to the creation of rights to be forgotten for individuals. All these proposals, however, share one essential assumption: we must raise greater protective barriers around data. As a scholar of corporate finance and a scholar of corporate law, respectively, we find this assumption problematic. Data, after all, …

Presidential Control Of Elections, Lisa M. Manheim

Vanderbilt Law Review

In recent decades, presidents of both political parties have asserted increasingly aggressive forms of influence over the administrative state. During this same period, Congress has expanded the role that the federal government plays in election administration. The convergence of these two trends leads to a troubling but underexamined phenomenon: presidential control of elections. Relying on their official powers, presidents have the ability to affect the rules that govern elections, including elections meant to check and legitimize presidential powers in the first place. This self-serving arrangement heightens the risk of harms from political entrenchment and subordination of expertise. These harms, in …

Measuring Semantic Relatedness: A Proposal For A New Textual Tool, Katherine A. Cohen

Vanderbilt Law Review

Judicial decisions, statutes, constitutions, sentencing guidelines, and ERISA-related documents have at least one thing in common: at a molecular level, the laws are all composed of words. The scientific study of linguistics, particularly the field of semantics, analyzes what words mean and how they are connected with each other. And yet, thus far, the legal field has taken little notice of academic and technological breakthroughs in the field of linguistic semantics. This Note seeks to highlight the potential utility of linguistic semantic tools in interpreting legal texts. Specifically, applying algorithms to a free online lexical database allows anyone with a …

Deterring Algorithmic Manipulation, Gina-Gail S. Fletcher

Vanderbilt Law Review

Does the existing anti-manipulation framework effectively deter algorithmic manipulation? With the dual increase of algorithmic trading and the occurrence of “mini-flash crashes” in the market linked to manipulation, this question has become more pressing in recent years. In the past thirty years, the financial markets have undergone a sea change as technological advancements and innovations have fundamentally altered the structure and operation of the markets. Key to this change is the introduction and dominance of trading algorithms. Whereas initial algorithmic trading relied on preset electronic instructions to execute trading strategies, new technology is introducing artificially intelligent (“AI”) trading algorithms that …