Law Commons^™

Emerging Standards In Supreme Court Double Jeopardy Analysis, Clifford R. Ennico

Vanderbilt Law Review

The purposes of this Recent Development are as follows: to identify and evaluate recent modifications in the Court's double jeopardy analysis, to propose that the Court's 1977 Term double jeopardy standards dilute the double jeopardy protection previously afforded to criminal defendants, and to suggest that the Court should permit a broader scope of appellate review in double jeopardy cases.

The American Law Institute's Proposed Federal Securities Code, Editor In Chief

Vanderbilt Law Review

This issue of the Law Review represents Part Two of the symposium on the Proposed Federal Securities Code. This issue contains articles on federal-state relations under the Code; the impact of the Code on the Trust Indenture Act of 1939; the extraterritorial reach of the Code; and the effect of the Code on civil litigation. It is hoped that these articles will continue the fine work begun by Part One of the symposium, providing our readers with a thorough analysis of these additional sections of the Code and presenting recommendations for constructive changes to be considered in the final process …

Corporate Directors' Liability For Resisting A Tender Offer: Proposed Substantive And Procedural Modifications Of Existing State Fiduciary Standards, Oby T. Brewer, Iii

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Note will review recent decisions applying state law fiduciary standards and will propose procedural and substantive modifications to existing standards. The proposed modifications will compel target directors to recognize and fulfill fiduciary obligations when faced with a decision whether or not to resist a tender offer.

Essays On Problems And Prospects In Southern Legal History, Kermit L. Hall

Vanderbilt Law Review

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., once urged historians to study the law because it offered a magic mirror whose reflections divulged fundamental social values.' Holmes' plea on behalf of the utility of legal history has relevance for southerners intrigued by the possibility of their historical distinctiveness. Without a basis of comparison, however, the search for southern exceptionality becomes a quest after the arcane. As C. Vann Woodward observed,southern history ought to tell all Americans, not southerners alone,something about their common pasts. Woodward argued that attaining this goal was entirely feasible, since certain aspects of the southern past, such as slavery …

Law And Disorder In Nineteenth-Century Kentucky, Robert M. Ireland

Vanderbilt Law Review

Nineteenth-century Kentuckians responded paradoxically to their criminal justice system. Although they complained constantly about the inadequacies of their constabulary, they refused to appropriate funds necessary to establish more efficient police forces. And while they carped continually about the ineffectiveness and ineptitude of prosecutors, the slowness and timidity of judges, the permissiveness of juries, and the leniency of governors, they also expressed equal concern about the rights of the accused and the convicted. By their ambivalence, nineteenth-century Kentuckians reflected an internal conflict that historically has characterized the response of Americans to the problem of crime. A free and dynamic society inevitably …

Southern Violence-Regional Problem Or National Nemesis?: Legal Attitudes Toward Southern Homicide In Historical Perspective, Richard M. Brown

Vanderbilt Law Review

Both inside and outside the South, was the law a cause of the high incidence of homicide, or was it an effect? It was probably more effect than cause, for despite the anti-homicide rigor of its supreme court, on the whole the incidence of killing in Alabama seems to have been no lower than elsewhere in the South. Thus, the conservative Alabama court apparently failed to stem not only the legal trend of the Americanization of the common law of homicide but also the trend of blood-letting in Alabama. In one way this is not surprising, for after all, the …

Comment: The Texas Bar In The Nineteenth Century, Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau

Vanderbilt Law Review

Maxwell H. Bloomfield's Article, "The Texas Bar in the Nineteenth Century," presents an ingenious collage of information derived from more or less standard kinds of secondary works, interspersed with excerpts from the diary of a Texas lawyer and the brotherly correspondence of another, and highlighted with statistical data from the manuscript censuses of 1850, 1860, and 1900.Although the evidence centers on Galveston, the careers of William Pitt Ballinger and Alfred Howell, and the Texas Bar Association movement, Professor Bloomfield's skill in creating a series of vignettes leaves us with impressions of the entire bar for fifty years of what was …

Race, Property Rights, And The Economic Consequences Of Reconstruction: A Case Study, Robert J. Haws, Michael V. Namorato

Vanderbilt Law Review

In assessing the problems of race and debtor relief in Mississippi during Reconstruction, it is clear that, on the local level, the Lafayette County court system, as represented by the Lafayette county court, effectively carried out an institutional framework established by the Mississippi legislature and the Mississippi Supreme Court in which the freedman was denied any meaningful role and/or opportunity in the economic environment of the community.In doing so, the county court system, by allegedly protecting the rights of private property, helped stifle the economic recovery of Lafayette County and, inferentially, the State as a whole. Moreover, by quickly acting …

Book Review -- Federal Courts In The Early Republic, Randall Bridwell

Vanderbilt Law Review

FEDERAL COURTS IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC: KENTUCKY 1789-1816.

By Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau.

Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978. Pp. ix, 234. $16.50.

Reviewed by Randall Bridwell

Reason Of Slavery: Understanding The Judicial Role In The Peculiar Institution (Part One), Robert B. Jones

Vanderbilt Law Review

This brief survey has superficially touched upon the most prominent works of the historiography of slavery and has ignored the large mass of work on subjects such as slavery in the various states, slave rebellions, slave reminiscences, and the anti-slavery crusade. With the exception of the Civil War, perhaps more has been written about slavery than any other aspect of southern history. Despite the great amount of scholarship devoted to the study of slavery, however, there has been, as Keir Nash points out, little scholarly work done on the legal history of slavery. One hopes this gap will be bridged …

The Tennessee County Courts Under The North Carolina And Territorial Governments: The Davidson County Court Of Pleas And Quarter Sessions, 1783-1796, As A Case Study, Theodore Brown Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Note will attempt to provide the framework for a more extended institutional examination of the post-revolutionary courts that functioned in the counties of western-most North Carolina and,beginning in 1790, the Territory South of the River Ohio before their organization into the new state of Tennessee in June 1796. The Note initially will set forth the jurisdiction and the regulatory authority of the county courts of pleas and quarter sessions under the North Carolina and territorial governments, will describe the jurisdiction and authority of the courts' individual justices, and will examine the role of the petit jury in exercising a …

The Texas Bar In The Nineteenth Century, Maxwell Bloomfield

Vanderbilt Law Review

As the twentieth century approached, bar leaders increasingly complained that the open bar, like the open range, had outlived its usefulness. In 1899 the Texas Bar Association began a vigorous lobbying effort for more restrictive regulation of attorneys. The state legislature responded four years later with a bill that required all future bar candidates to take a standardized written examination.The results of this new approach were immediate and gratifying to those who clamored for a more exclusive profession. While approximately four hundred candidates had applied for, and obtained, a license between August 1, 1896, and August 1, 1897, only ninety …

Comment: Race, Property Rights, And The Economic Consequences Of Reconstruction, Robert B. Jones

Vanderbilt Law Review

Professors Haws and Namorato are to be praised for their pioneer work in studying the operation of a county court system in the Reconstruction era. They break new historical ground in this effort that has the potential for greatly contributing to the study of the legal history of the South. More scholars must engage in this endeavor if the field of legal history is to reach its full maturity. While their efforts are to be complimented it must be pointed out, however, that they generally fail to make their case in this Article. They do not show a significant link …

St. George Tucker, John Marshall,And Constitutionalism In The Post-Revolutionary South, Charles T. Cullen

Vanderbilt Law Review

A study of Marshall's early career suggests several reasons for constitutionalism fundamentally different from that of Tucker, a constitutionalism that became law in the early Republic because of Marshall's position on the Supreme Court. The writings and careers of southern constitutionalists like Tucker also merit further study in order to fully appreciate the growing divergence between the views originally expressed by him and those embraced by the nationalists, who decreased in number in the South after Marshall's time. Finally, we should develop a better understanding of the influence of southerners on the formation of legal and constitutional systems in other …

Foreword, James W. Ely, Terry Calvani

Vanderbilt Law Review

In the hope of giving some direction for a regional approach to the legal past of the South, Vanderbilt Law School, with the generous assistance of the University Research Council, sponsored a two-day Symposium on this important topic in the spring of 1978 and invited leading scholars to participate. Principal papers by Richard Maxwell Brown, Maxwell H. Bloomfield, Robert M. Ireland, A. E. Keir Nash, and Robert J. Haws and Michael V. Namorato discussed diverse aspects of southern legal history.

Comment: Southern Violence-Regional Problem Or National Nemesis?: Legal Attitudes Toward Southern Homicide In Historical Perspective, Dennis R. Nolan

Vanderbilt Law Review

The preceding pages should indicate that Southern Violence is a disappointment to those of us whose expectations had been raised by Professor Brown's earlier works and to those who are interested in his stated topic. It is a thoroughly unfocused, loose collection of facts and incidents that will interest only those with a curiosity about Alabama's Chief Justice Stone or the Texas law of self-defense. The paper does contain several seeds of thought that might,if given adequate attention, grow into testable hypotheses. Those hypotheses will be hard to evaluate, but they are of immense importance because they concern the fundamental …

Justice On The Tennessee Frontier: The Williamson County Circuit Court 1810-1820, Cornelia A. Clark

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Note examines the history of one early nineteenth-century circuit court and the caliber of its bench and bar. To analyze the workings of that court, this Note applies the analytical framework adopted by Friedman, Blume, and other historians to the raw data provided by a study of the Williamson County Circuit Court records. In each of several substantive areas for which the court's records provide information, the Note first considers Friedman's generalizations about nineteenth-century law and then interprets the Williamson County data in the light of those generalizations and the results of other case studies. This Note proceeds on …

Reason Of Slavery: Understanding The Judicial Role In The Peculiar Institution, A. E. Keir Nash

Vanderbilt Law Review

The results most relevant to the concerns of this Article are of course the effects upon how we judge the judges-for almost always we are sufficiently Whiggish to attempt such a judgment, either explicitly or implicitly. At times the consequence of so summing can be to imagine that one catches the judicial conscience by asking questions phrased as Sentence D's query, whether the judges"collaborated" in a system of racial oppression. When we put the question this way, two unfortunate things happen. First, we create a verbal and historical muddle, for if anything ought to be clear by now it is …

Comment: Law And Disorder In Nineteenth-Century Kentucky, Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau

Vanderbilt Law Review

Robert M. Ireland's Article, "Law and Disorder in Nineteenth-Century Kentucky," centers on the state constitutional conventions of 1849 and 1890-1891, spiced with newspaper accounts, statutes,court cases, and legislative records. He has said that his Article presents a preliminary overview of some of the principal problems of the criminal justice system of nineteenth-century Kentucky. I hope this means he intends to continue his study so that soon we can expect a full examination of the criminal justice system in that state. I also hope that other scholars then will be inspired by his example to examine other contemporary state criminal justice …