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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Emotionally Intelligent Judge, Terry A. Maroney Jan 2013

The Emotionally Intelligent Judge, Terry A. Maroney

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Judges, like all of us, have been acculturated to an ideal of dispassion. But judges experience emotion on a regular basis. Judicial emotion must be managed competently. The psychology of emotion regulation can help judges learn to prepare realistically for, and respond thoughtfully to, the emotions they are bound to feel. This short piece, written for a judicial audience, synthesizes research that can help judges accept, analyze, and shape the emotional aspects of their work.


Treating Juveniles Like Juveniles: Getting Rid Of Transfer And Expanded Adult Court Jurisdiction, Christopher Slobogin Jan 2013

Treating Juveniles Like Juveniles: Getting Rid Of Transfer And Expanded Adult Court Jurisdiction, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The number of juveniles transferred to adult court has skyrocketed in the past two decades and has only recently begun to level off. This symposium article argues that, because it wastes resources, damages juveniles, and decreases public safety, transfer should be abolished. It also argues that the diminished culpability rationale that has had much-deserved success at eliminating the juvenile death penalty and mandatory life without parole for juveniles is not likely to have a major impact on the much more prevalent practices of transferring mid- and older-adolescents to adult court and expanding adult court jurisdiction to adolescents; neither the law …


Translating The Values Of Clinical Pedagogy Across Generations, Alistair E. Newbern Jan 2013

Translating The Values Of Clinical Pedagogy Across Generations, Alistair E. Newbern

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Clinical teaching is a Baby Boomer. After an extended infancy, it came of age in the 1960s. It challenged the entrenched isolation and aloofness of law school by questioning the very methods by which law is taught. Channeling the Boomers' cultural tenets of dismantling hierarchy, fostering collaboration, and advocating for social change, it shook off legal academia's suit and tie and rolled up its sleeves, bringing the community into the classroom and putting the university to work. These Boomer-era values are reflected in clinical teaching's enduring core principles of non-directive teaching, reflective practice, close and immediate supervision, learning from experience, …


Climate Change Meets The Law Of The Horse, J.B. Ruhl, James Salzman Jan 2013

Climate Change Meets The Law Of The Horse, J.B. Ruhl, James Salzman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The climate change policy debate has only recently turned its full attention to adaptation - how to address the impacts of climate change we have already begun to experience and that will likely increase over time. Legal scholars have in turn begun to explore how the many different fields of law will and should respond. During this nascent period, one overarching question has gone unexamined: how will the legal system as a whole organize around climate change adaptation? Will a new distinct field of climate change adaptation law and policy emerge, or will legal institutions simply work away at the …


Should New Zealand Adopt Say On Pay?, Randall Thomas, Susan Watson Jan 2013

Should New Zealand Adopt Say On Pay?, Randall Thomas, Susan Watson

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Carrots & Sticks: How Vcs Induce Entrepreneurial Teams To Sell Startups, Brian Broughman, Jesse Fried Jan 2013

Carrots & Sticks: How Vcs Induce Entrepreneurial Teams To Sell Startups, Brian Broughman, Jesse Fried

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Venture capitalists (VCs) usually exit their investments in a startup via a trade sale. But the entrepreneurial team – the startup’s founder, other executives, and common shareholders – may resist a trade sale. Such resistance is likely to be particularly intense when the sale price is low relative to VCs’ liquidation preferences. Using a hand-collected dataset of Silicon Valley firms, we investigate how VCs overcome such resistance. We find, in our sample, that VCs give bribes (carrots) to the entrepreneurial team in 45% of trade sales; in these sales, carrots total an average of 9% of deal value. The overt …


Policing Public Companies: An Empirical Examination Of The Enforcement Landscape And The Role Played By State Securities Regulators, Amanda Rose, Larry J. Leblanc Jan 2013

Policing Public Companies: An Empirical Examination Of The Enforcement Landscape And The Role Played By State Securities Regulators, Amanda Rose, Larry J. Leblanc

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Multiple different securities law enforcers can pursue U.S. public companies for the same misconduct. These enforcers include a variety of federal agencies, class action attorneys, and derivative litigation attorneys, as well as fifty separate state regulators. Scholars and policy makers have increasingly questioned whether the benefits of this multienforcer approach are worth the costs, or whether a more coordinated and streamlined securities enforcement regime might lead to efficiency gains. How serious are these concerns? And what role do state regulators play in the enforcement mix? Whereas the enforcement efforts of the Securities and Exchange Commission and class action lawyers have …


Putting Exclusionary Zoning In Its Place: Affordable Housing And Geographical Scale, Christopher Serkin, Leslie Wellington Jan 2013

Putting Exclusionary Zoning In Its Place: Affordable Housing And Geographical Scale, Christopher Serkin, Leslie Wellington

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The term “exclusionary zoning” typically describes a particular phenomenon: suburban large-lot zoning that reduces the supply of developable land and drives up housing prices. But exclusionary zoning in its modern form also occurs both within the urban core and region-wide. Exclusionary zoning at the sub-local and regional scales results in property values that fully capitalize the benefits of living in higher-wage regions, and the value of local public goods (like high-quality schools). Lower-income households then cannot meaningfully access those advantages, even if every municipality accommodates its fair share of regional need. The long-standing focus of exclusionary zoning on the content …


Federal Preemption And Immigrants' Rights, Karla M. Mckanders Jan 2013

Federal Preemption And Immigrants' Rights, Karla M. Mckanders

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Recently, immigration scholars have focused on the relationship between federal, state, and local governments in regulating immigration to the exclusion of civil rights issues. States and localities assert that they should be able to use their Tenth Amendment police powers to regulate unauthorized immigrants within their borders, while the federal government claims exclusivity in the area of immigration law and policy. In the middle of this debate, there is the question of whether states abrogate individual civil rights and civil liberties when exercising their police powers to regulate immigration. This article takes a detailed look at these complex issues of …


Enforcing Effective Assistance After Martinez, Nancy J. King Jan 2013

Enforcing Effective Assistance After Martinez, Nancy J. King

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Essay argues that the Court’s effort to expand habeas review of ineffective assistance of counsel claims in Martinez v. Ryan will make little difference in either the enforcement of the right to the effective assistance of counsel or the provision of competent representation in state criminal cases. Drawing upon statistics about habeas litigation and emerging case law, the Essay first explains why Martinez is not likely to lead to more federal habeas grants of relief. It then presents new empirical information about state postconviction review (cases filed, counsel, hearings, and relief rates), post-Martinez decisions, and anecdotal reports from the …


The Supreme Court And The Alien Tort Statute: Kiobel V. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., Ingrid W. Brunk Jan 2013

The Supreme Court And The Alien Tort Statute: Kiobel V. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., Ingrid W. Brunk

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Alien Tort Statute litigation has generated a growing number of questions about the the scope of statute, but in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. the Supreme Court finally answered one of them: the presumption against extraterritoriality applies to the statute. Going forward, courts may apply a robust version of the presumption, effectively ending ATS litigation as we currently know it. Or, they may not. The Court’s citations to Morrison v. Nat’l Austl. Bank Ltd. suggest the former; some language in the various opinions suggests the latter. This article explores these uncertainties and also discusses additional factors that may be …


What Should We Do About Multijurisdictional Litigation In M&A Deals?, Randall Thomas Jan 2013

What Should We Do About Multijurisdictional Litigation In M&A Deals?, Randall Thomas

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Many M&A transactions attract shareholder litigation challenging the fairness of the economic terms of the deal for the target shareholders. Since the end of the financial crisis, however, there has been a documented increase in the number of jurisdictions in which each individual transaction is attacked. Why has this upsurge in multi-jurisdictional litigation occurred? How significant are its real costs and benefits? And what should we do about it, if anything? This Article first summarizes what we know about these questions and then offers its own viewpoint on how best to respond to multi-jurisdictional litigation. On the one side, the …


Plea Bargains That Waive Claims Of Ineffective Assistance - Waiving Padilla And Fry, Nancy J. King Jan 2013

Plea Bargains That Waive Claims Of Ineffective Assistance - Waiving Padilla And Fry, Nancy J. King

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This essay addresses the growing use and enforcement of terms in plea agreements by which a defendant waives his right to attack his plea agreement on the basis of constitutionally deficient representation during negotiations leading to the agreement. Contrary to other commentators and some courts, I argue that the Constitution does not forbid the enforcement of such a waiver, and review steps a judge may have to take in order to ensure that a defendant’s express waiver of the right to effective representation during plea bargaining is knowing and voluntary. I also argue that although the Constitution does not prohibit …


Plain Packaging And The Trips Agreement: A Response To Professors Davison, Mitchell And Voon, Daniel J. Gervais Jan 2013

Plain Packaging And The Trips Agreement: A Response To Professors Davison, Mitchell And Voon, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The issue of plain packaging is at the very core of the intersection between trade law, intellectual property and public health. Unlike the issue of export of generic pharmaceuticals, which was addressed in the World Trade Organization by the adoption of a specific Declaration and notification system, it seems that plain packaging will be addressed by the WTO Dispute-Settlement Body. A report prepared by the author in 2010 discussing the intellectual property aspects of plain packaging was critiqued by Professors Davison, Mitchell and Voon in several publications and submissions, including a recent book. In this article, the author responds to …


A Normalized Scoring Model For Law School Competitions, Edward K. Cheng, Scott J. Farmer Jan 2013

A Normalized Scoring Model For Law School Competitions, Edward K. Cheng, Scott J. Farmer

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Although the focus in this Article is moot court scoring, one can envision many other instances of law school assessment in which such a normalization problem arises. Law review competitions also involve different sets of graders, whose subjective determinations must be reasonably commensurate to make fair comparisons. Even more intriguing, although presenting a more complicated problem, law school grades suffer the same normalization concern. Courses feature material with different degrees of difficulty, attract different pools of students, and are taught by different instructors. Yet, class rank and graduation honors are ultimately calculated under the assumption that all grades are commensurate. …


The Derivative Right, Or Why Copyright Law Protects Foxes Better Than Hedgehogs, Daniel J. Gervais Jan 2013

The Derivative Right, Or Why Copyright Law Protects Foxes Better Than Hedgehogs, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The derivative right is at the very core of copyright theory. What can and cannot be reused to create a new work impacts freedom of expression but also impacts the value of the markets for works and their various “derivatives.” The derivative right includes forms of derivation and adaptation, such as making a movie from a novel or translating a book. It also covers what this Article refers to as penumbral derivatives, which the US Copyright Act captures using the phrase “based upon” with respect to preexisting works. This leads to indeterminacy about the scope of the derivative right, which …


Private Environmental Governance, Michael P. Vandenbergh Jan 2013

Private Environmental Governance, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Environmental law has quietly transformed from a positive law field deeply rooted in administrative law to one that is also heavily rooted in private law and private governance. After two decades (1970-1990) of remarkable activity, more than two decades have now passed without a major federal environmental statute (1991-2012). Whether the appropriate next step is expansion or contraction, reforms to the federal statutory framework have stalled. Federal regulatory activity and state and local measures have filled some of the gap, but private governance efforts – the pursuit of public ends through private standards, monitoring, enforcement, and dispute resolution – now …


Altering Attention In Adjudication, Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey J. Rachinski, Andrew J. Wistrich Jan 2013

Altering Attention In Adjudication, Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey J. Rachinski, Andrew J. Wistrich

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Judges decide complex cases in rapid succession but are limited by cognitive constraints. Consequently judges cannot allocate equal attention to every aspect of a case. Case outcomes might thus depend on which aspects of a case are particularly salient to the judge. Put simply, a judge focusing on one aspect of a case might reach a different outcome than a judge focusing on another. In this Article, we report the results of a series of studies exploring various ways in which directing judicial attention can shape judicial outcomes. In the first study, we show that judges impose shorter sentences when …


Putting Desert In Its Place, Christopher Slobogin, Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein Jan 2013

Putting Desert In Its Place, Christopher Slobogin, Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Based on an impressive array of studies, Paul Robinson and his coauthors have developed a new theory of criminal justice, which they call empirical desert. The theory asserts that, because people are more likely to be compliant with a legal regime that is perceived to be morally credible, a criminal justice system that tracks empirically derived lay views about how much punishment is deserved is the most efficient way of achieving utilitarian goals, or at least is as efficient at crime prevention as a system that focuses solely on deterrence and incapacitation. This Article describes seven original studies that test …


Federal Preemption And Clean Energy Floors, Jim Rossi, Thomas Hutton Jan 2013

Federal Preemption And Clean Energy Floors, Jim Rossi, Thomas Hutton

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Federal policies regarding renewable and clean energy often lack clear definition, are incomplete, and are scattered across multiple statutes and agencies. Yet at the same time, recent decisions of both federal agencies and courts have attributed a preemptive effect to federal statutes that threatens to hobble innovation in renewable and clean energy policy by subnational regulators. One consequence of this approach is that most significant policies promoting clean and renewable energy are channeled toward subsidies from the federal fisc, rather than diverse policies undertaken independently by state governments or regional customers and suppliers. This Article argues that, contrary to many …


Rehnquist And Panvasive Searches, Christopher Slobogin Jan 2013

Rehnquist And Panvasive Searches, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In the history of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist may have been the least friendly justice toward the view that the Fourth Amendment should be read expansively. Even he, however, might have interpreted the amendment to place more restrictions on modern law enforcement techniques than current caselaw does. Relying on a 1974 article authored by Rehnquist, this essay, written for a symposium on Rehnquist and the Fourth Amendment, describes his views on the types of requirements the Fourth Amendment imposes on the police, how decriminalization can protect privacy, and most importantly, why Rehnquist might have been willing to regulate surveillance …


Liberty's Safety Net, Suzanna Sherry Jan 2013

Liberty's Safety Net, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

I am honored and humbled by the breadth and depth of the responses to my essay on judicial activism, including Richard Epstein's very generous introduction. Each of the contributors has packed a tremendous amount of insight and information into an impossibly limited number of words, and the comments will be extremely useful as I go forward with the project of turning the original essay into a book. My essay might be characterized as a rhetorical call to arms, an undifferentiated embrace of judicial activism. Three of the commentators provide very helpful substantive support for the call to arms, and two …


Information Asymmetries In Consumer Credit Markets: Evidence From Payday Lending, Paige Marta Skiba, Will Dobbie Jan 2013

Information Asymmetries In Consumer Credit Markets: Evidence From Payday Lending, Paige Marta Skiba, Will Dobbie

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Information asymmetries are prominent in theory but difficult to estimate. This paper exploits discontinuities in loan eligibility to test for moral hazard and adverse selection in the payday loan market. Regression discontinuity and regression kink approaches suggest that payday borrowers are less likely to default on larger loans. A $50 larger payday loan leads to a 17 to 33 percent drop in the probability of default. Conversely, there is economically and statistically significant adverse selection into larger payday loans when loan eligibility is held constant. Payday borrowers who choose a $50 larger loan are 16 to 47 percent more likely …


The Problematic Case Of Clearinghouses In Complex Markets, Yesha Yadav Jan 2013

The Problematic Case Of Clearinghouses In Complex Markets, Yesha Yadav

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article challenges the academic and policy consensus that clearinghouses adequately mitigate the risks of trading credit derivatives. The Article advances two arguments. First, scholars have devoted little attention to the risks posed by underlying assets (e.g. a mortgage loan) that the credit derivative references and the impact that these have on the clearinghouse. Credit derivatives enable the economic risk of debt to be separated from the legal rights attaching to that debt. This separation impacts the clearinghouse profoundly. As a contract party to each trade it processes, the clearinghouse can be saddled with economic risk of underlying debt without …


Corporate Personhood And The Corporate Persona, Margaret M. Blair Jan 2013

Corporate Personhood And The Corporate Persona, Margaret M. Blair

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Citizens United v. FEC that restrictions on corporate political speech were unconstitutional because of the First Amendment rights granted corporations as a result of their status as "persons" under the law. Following this decision, debate has been rekindled among legal scholars about the meaning of "corporate personhood." This debate is not new. Over the past two centuries, scholars have considered what corporate personhood means and entails. This debate has resulted in numerous theories about corporate personhood that have come into and out of favor over the years, including the "artificial person" theory, …


Plain Packaging And The Interpretation Of The Trips Agreement, Daniel J. Gervais, Susy Frankel Jan 2013

Plain Packaging And The Interpretation Of The Trips Agreement, Daniel J. Gervais, Susy Frankel

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Plain packaging of cigarettes as a way of reducing tobacco consumption and its related health costs and effects raises a number of international trade law issues. The plain packaging measures adopted in Australia impose strict format requirements on word trademarks (such as Marlboro or Camel) and ban the use of figurative marks (colors, logos, etc.). As a result, questions have been raised as to plain packaging’s compatibility with the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement).

WTO members can validly take measures to protect and promote public health, but in doing so they …


The First Year Of "Say On Pay" Under Dodd-Frank: An Empirical Analysis And Look Forward, Randall Thomas, James F. Cotter, Alan R. Palmiter Jan 2013

The First Year Of "Say On Pay" Under Dodd-Frank: An Empirical Analysis And Look Forward, Randall Thomas, James F. Cotter, Alan R. Palmiter

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Using voting data from the first year of say-on-pay votes under Dodd- Frank, we look at the patterns of shareholder voting in advisory votes on exec- utive pay. Consistent with the more limited say-on-pay voting before Dodd- Frank, we find that shareholders in the first year under Dodd-Frank generally gave broad support to management pay packages. But not all pay packages received strong shareholder support. At some companies, management suf- fered the embarrassment of failed say-on-pay votes-that is, less than fifty per- cent of their company's shareholders voted in favor of the proposal. In particular, we find that poorly performing …


Simplicial Complexes Obtained From Qualitative Probability Orders, Paul H. Edelman, Tatiana Gvozdeva, Arkadii Slinko Jan 2013

Simplicial Complexes Obtained From Qualitative Probability Orders, Paul H. Edelman, Tatiana Gvozdeva, Arkadii Slinko

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The goal of this paper is to introduce a new class of simplicial complexes that naturally generalize the threshold complexes. These will be derived from qualitative probability orders on subsets of a finite set that generalize subset orders induced by probability measures. We show that this new class strictly contains the threshold complexes and is strictly contained in the shifted complexes. We conjecture that this class of complexes is exactly the set of strongly acyclic complexes, a class that has previously appeared in the context of cooperative games. Beyond the results themselves, this new class of complexes allows us to …


Making Money: Leverage And Private Sector Money Creation, Margaret M. Blair Jan 2013

Making Money: Leverage And Private Sector Money Creation, Margaret M. Blair

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-2009, practitioners and theorists in law, finance, and economics are rethinking our theories about how the financial sector influences the real economy. In particular, they are reexamining the linkages among financial innovation, supply of credit and money, monetary policy, bubbles, financial stability, and economic growth. One of the key issues that is being reconsidered is the dynamics of how banks and other financial institutions drive credit creation and credit allocation, and how these factors, in turn affect the performance of the macroeconomy. In this article, I argue that, by providing an alternative …


Reconceptualizing The Burden Of Proof, Edward K. Cheng Jan 2013

Reconceptualizing The Burden Of Proof, Edward K. Cheng

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The preponderance standard is conventionally described as an absolute probability threshold of 0.5. This Essay argues that this absolute characterization of the burden of proof is wrong. Rather than focusing on an absolute threshold, the Essay reconceptualizes the preponderance standard as a probability ratio and shows how doing so eliminates many of the classical problems associated with probabilistic theories of evidence. Using probability ratios eliminates the so-called Conjunction Paradox, and developing the ratio tests under a Bayesian perspective further explains the Blue Bus problem and other puzzles surrounding statistical evidence. By harmonizing probabilistic theories of proof with recent critiques advocating …