Law Commons^™

Thinking Of Environmental Law As A Complex Adaptive System: How To Clean Up The Environment By Making A Mess Of Environmental Law, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article is the fourth in my series of articles exploring the application of complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory to legal systems. It applies the model built in the three prior installments (in the Duke, Vanderbilt, and UC-Davis law reviews) to the specific context of environmental law. The work describes the subject matter of environmental law as a CAS and explains why environmental law thus must "think like a complex adaptive system" in order to accomplish its objectives.

Psychology, Economics, And Settlement: A New Look At The Role Of The Lawyer, Chris Guthrie, Russell Korobkin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Law and economics models of litigation settlement, based on the behavioral assumptions of rational choice theory, ignore the many psychological reasons that settlement negotiations can fail, yet they accurately predict that vast majority of lawsuits will settle short of formal adjudication. What explains this? We present experimental data that suggests lawyers might evaluate the settlement vs. adjudication decision from a perspective more closely akin to "rational choice theory" than will non-lawyers and, consequently, increase the observed level of settlement. We then evaluate whether the hypothesized difference between lawyers and non-lawyers is likely to lead to more efficient dispute resolution, concluding …

The Benefits And Costs Of Regulatory Reforms For Superfund, W. Kip Viscusi, James T. Hamilton

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The current policy approach used in the Superfund program is a peculiar halfway house. EPA devotes substantial effort to identifying chemicals at a site and ascertaining their potential risks. It also assesses the costs of a range of remedies in considerable detail. However, many key elements are missing in the agency's analyses. There is no explicit consideration of the size of the population at risk. Risks to a single individual have the same weight as risks to a large exposed population. Actual and hypothetical exposures to chemicals receive equal weight so that risks to a person who, in the future, …

Jaffee V. Redmond: Towards Recognition Of A Federal Counselor-Battered Woman Privilege, Michael Bressman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Part I of this Article reviews the Jaffee decision.' Part II discusses the meaning of the Supreme Court's opinion, focusing on the Court's analysis of the important interests at stake in recognizing the asserted testimonial privilege. In Part II, this Article argues that the Court followed the intent of Congress in crafting a psychotherapist- patient privilege. Furthermore, the extension of the privilege to cover confidential communications made to social workers indicates that there is room for further development of the privilege. In Part III, the Article argues that Jaffee provides the foundation for recognition of a counselor-battered woman privilege in …

Deceit, Pretext, And Trickery: Investigative Lies By The Police, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article has been a preliminary effort at identifying those limitations in connection with one specific type of lie-investigative lies, or lies told to people in an effort to gather evidence against them. The extrapolation of Bok's analysis developed in this Article suggests that once an individual has been identified as a suspect through the public proxy of a judge, noncoercive deception in the investigative setting is often permissible. On the other hand, in the absence of such an identification, or when deception leads the dupe to believe he has no choice but to provide the soughtafter evidence, investigative lying …

Technologically-Assisted Physical Surveillance: The American Bar Association's Tentative Draft Standards, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

As the name implies, the American Bar Association's Tentative Draft Standards Concerning Technologically-Assisted Physical Surveillance is a work in progress...Final approval by the ABA hierarchy is still some time away, so feedback could have an impact. Indeed, it is anticipated that the content of at least some of the standards will change prior to their submission to the House of Delegates...The work of the Task Force on Technology and Law Enforcement has persuasively demonstrated that some regulatory structure governing the use of physical surveillance technology is necessary. This work provides a model for future attempts to establish guidelines for other …

All The Supreme Court Really Needs To Know It Learned From The Warren Court, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

It is accepted wisdom among constitutional law scholars that the Supreme Court is now considerably more conservative than it was during the tenure of Chief Justice Earl Warren. In this Article, I hope to suggest that the conventional wisdom is at least partly wrong. In Part I, I suggest that many of the current Court's so-called conservative cases and doctrines are direct descendants of Warren Court cases and doctrines. Although my attribution of similarity is new, the description of the cases and doctrines themselves is entirely unoriginal. Indeed, the history of the two sets of cases-of the Warren Court and …

Rfra-Vote Gambling: Why Paulsen Is Wrong, As Usual, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Supreme Court currents are no less treacherous to navigators than are river currents-and, as Michael Paulsen himself has previously pointed out, RFRA shares more than a linguistic resonance with a river.1 Unfortunately, this time Paulsen has let himself be fooled by the prevailing political winds into believing that there will be smooth sailing for his favorite statute despite the swirling eddies ahead. He is altogether too confident of a favorable result. Although I have no wagers, public or private (and I am shocked-shocked!-to find gambling in this establishment) on the outcome of Boeme v. Flores, I want to use my …

Using And Misusing History, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Since Alfred Kelly coined the term "law-office history" in 1965, been added-except ever-multiplying examples-to the perennial about how lawyers and legal academics use history. Laura Kalman's ing new book about legal scholarship is thus a welcome contribution field. Kalman begins by tracing the history of legal scholarship since The central conundrum the realists and their successors bequeathed liberals"-those who trust the courts to implement large-scale was how to keep their faith after the death of Earl Warren attacks from both the Left and Right.

Development Of An Early Identification And Response Model Of Malpractice Prevention, Ellen Wright Clayton, Gerald B. Hickson, James W. Pichert, Charles F. Federspiel

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The dramatic rise in the incidence of malpractice claims over the past thirty years has revealed several problems with the U.S. system of medical dispute resolution. First, the sudden and unexpected increase in claims has created an insurance crisis wherein various medical specialists have had difficulty obtaining affordable insurance coverage. One such crisis occurred in Florida in the mid-1980's, when an inability of many physicians to procure medical malpractice coverage caused some to limit or curtail their practice. This resulted in access problems for the public. This phenomenon has disproportionately befallen physicians practicing obstetric medicine. Second, besides contributing to periodic …

Law And Biology: Toward An Integrated Model Of Human Behavior, Owen D. Jones

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

As first year law students unhappily discover, the meaning of "law" is frustratingly protean, shifting by usage and user. Depending on whom you ask, law is a system of rules, a body of precedents, a legislative enactment, a collection of norms, a process by which social goals are pursued, or some dynamic mixture of these. Law's principal purpose is to define and protect individual rights, to ensure public order, to resolve disputes, to redistribute wealth, to dispense justice, to prevent or compensate for injury, to optimize economic efficiency, or perhaps to do something else. And yet one thing is irreducibly …

Evolutionary Analysis In Law: An Introduction And Application To Child Abuse, Owen D. Jones

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

For contemporary biologists, behavior - like physical form - evolves. Although evolutionary processes do not dictate behavior in any inflexible sense, they nonetheless contribute significantly to the prevalence of various behavioral predispositions that, in turn, tend to yield observable patterns of behavior within every known species.

This Article explores the implications for law of evolved behavioral predispositions in humans, urging both caution and optimism.

Part I of the Article provides A Primer in Law-Relevant Evolutionary Biology, assuming no prior knowledge in the subject. Part II coins the term evolutionary analysis in law and proposes a model for conducting it. That …

From Cash Crop To Cash Cow, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The 1990s have witnessed a blizzard of anti­smoking efforts. Hillary Clinton and a variety of supporters of the Clinton health care plan urged dramatically higher cigarette taxes to pay for expanded health insurance efforts. And many state and local governments have imposed smoking restrictions or have undertaken antismoking ad campaigns. Those antismoking efforts recently culminated with a pro­ posed $368.5 billion settlement to address many liability and regulatory issues. The focal point of the bargain was the settlement of a series of lawsuits filed by the states against cigarette companies to recoup smoking-related Medicaid costs. Several state attorney generals composed …

The Arrow Of The Law In Modern Administrative States: Using Complexity Theory To Reveal The Diminishing Returns And Increasing Risks The Burgeoning Of Law Poses To Society, J.B. Ruhl, Harold J. Ruhl Jr.

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article is the third in my series of articles exploring the application of complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory to legal systems. Building on the model outlined in the first two installments (in the Duke and Vanderbilt law reviews), this work examines the "arrow" or direction of the legal system in the context of the administrative state. Drawing from diverse work such as Burke's study of history's nonlinearity and Tainter's classic study of the collapse of complex civilizations, we argue that the administrative state is becoming too resource intensive and burdened by a proliferation of rules.

The Case Of The Speluncean Polluters: Six Themes Of Environmental Law, Policy, And Ethics, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Almost as soon as it was invented in the early 1970s, the United States' modern environmental law framework has been the subject of calls for reform. Six divergent reform approaches predominate that debate today, and behind each lies strongly held policy and ethical perspectives. Using the futuristic setting Lon Fuller created in his classic study of legal theory, The Case of the Speluncean Explorers, Professor J.B. Ruhl pits those environmental law approaches against each other as society finds itself on the day of reckoning for the environment in the year 4310 AD. The discovery many centuries earlier of a remarkable …

Thinking Of Mediation As A Complex Adaptive System, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article uses my work on complex adaptive systems to think about how litigation and mediation differ in terms of adaptive qualities, suggesting that mediation is indeed a more adaptive mode of dispute resolution in certain contexts.

Participation Run Amok: The Costs Of Mass Participation For Deliberative Agency Decisionmaking, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article addresses the implications of broad-based participatory reforms for administrative process, with a particular focus on how participation reveals itself in different political-theoretic models of agency governance. The first section of the Article explores participation's value to agency governance. The second section of the Article presents three models of agency governance - expertocratic, pluralist, and civic republican - and discusses participation's importance to each model. The Article then posits a distinction between ordinary and constitutive agency decision-making, and explores how participation affects each for the three distinct models of agency governance. The implications of mass participation are explored in …

Waivers, Flexibility, And Reviewability, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In this Comment, I shall explore the issue of reviewability, as discussed by Krent, in the context of one flexible approach to regulation-- express agency waiver of regulations. Part I of this Comment addresses the increased need for flexible solutions in the administrative context, such as waiver of rules, and provides some examples. Part II argues that, especially in the context of flexible regulatory approaches, Heckler v. Chaney, a key case for determining whether courts will review agency decisions, should not be given a reading that precludes review of agency inaction. It should be read to value consistency with program …

Interest Groups, Contracts And Interest Analysis, Erin O'Connor

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Interest analysis does not stand up well under economic analysis. Richard Posner has noted that the territorial approach to choice-of-law rules reflected in the First Restatement enabled states at least roughly to exercise their comparative regulatory advantages.' Moreover, a system of rules enables parties to better predict the outcomes of disputes. This better facilitates settlement than a standard as difficult to apply as interest analysis. Most fundamentally, trying to determine the interest of a state separate from the generally conflicting private interests of politicians, voters, and other elements of the political process is utterly foreign to contemporary public choice economics. …

The Economics Of Home Production, Joni Hersch

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The composition of the labor force has changed dramatically since 1960. In 1960, only one-third of the labor force participants were female. However, since the 1960s, the labor force rates of men have declined, from 83.3% to 75% as of 1995, while the participation rate for women has surged, from 37.7% in 1960 to 58.9% in 1995.1 The combination of rising labor force participation rates for women and falling rates for men has resulted in a work force that is approaching equal representation of each gender. However, the picture at home indicates a far greater gender stratification of work than …

Using State Inspection Statutes For Discovery In Federal Securities Fraud Actions, Randall Thomas, Kenneth J. Martin, Erin O'Connor

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

We propose that plaintiffs in securities fraud actions should use state inspections statutes to obtain discovery about potential securities fraud cases. First, we argue that the Private Securities Law Reform Act has substantially increased shareholders' difficulty in uncovering securities fraud. Next, we show that shareholders have an alternative method of investigating fraud: state inspections statutes. We then analyze cases filed under the Delaware inspection statute to examine the costs to plaintiffs of pursuing claims under this statute. We find that the statutory inspection process is a largely successful, although expensive and time-consuming, process. Nevertheless, potential plaintiffs could realize substantial benefits …

The 1996 Revised Florida Administrative Procedure Act: A Survey Of Major Provisions Affecting Florida Agencies, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In the spring of 1996, the Florida Legislature adopted a revised Administrative Procedure Act (APA),' the first massive overhaul of Florida's APA since its initial adoption over twenty years ago, in 1974. This Article examines the recent history of APA reform in Florida and surveys several provisions of the 1996 revised Florida APA that are likely to have a major effect on agency governance. Part II of this Article briefly reviews the recent history of regulatory reform in the state of Florida. Part III discusses an interesting innovation in Florida's 1996 APA revisions that governs agency waiver of rules and …