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2003

Vanderbilt University Law School

Articles 1 - 30 of 40

Full-Text Articles in Law

The Economics Of Post-September 11 Financial Aid To Airlines, Margaret M. Blair Jan 2003

The Economics Of Post-September 11 Financial Aid To Airlines, Margaret M. Blair

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article considers the economic and policy merits of the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act, passed by Congress and signed into law in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The Act provided immediate cash relief to airlines to compensate them for losses resulting from the federal ground stop order during the first four days after the attack, as well as established the Air Transportation Stabilization Board to consider further federal financial assistance such as loan guarantees to airlines hurt by the actual terrorist events and the threat of future such events. During the year …

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Is The Endangered Species Act Ecopragmatic?, J.B. Ruhl Jan 2003

Is The Endangered Species Act Ecopragmatic?, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The Article evaluates the Endangered Species Act using Dan Farber's theory of eco-pragmatism. Eco-pragmatism employs environmental baselines, a moderated precautionary principle, and adaptive management to mediate environmental policy issues. I conclude that the ESA reflects some of these attributes, but does not coherently assemble a truly eco-pragmatic framework.

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Locking In Capital: What Corporate Law Achieved For Business Organizers In The Nineteenth Century, Margaret M. Blair Jan 2003

Locking In Capital: What Corporate Law Achieved For Business Organizers In The Nineteenth Century, Margaret M. Blair

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article argues that corporate status became popular in the nineteenth century as a way to organize production because of the unique manner in which incorporation permitted organizers to lock in financial capital. Unlike participants in a partnership, shareholders in an incorporated enterprise could not extract capital from the firm without explicit approval of a board of directors charged with representing the interests of the incorporated entity, even when that interest might sometimes conflict with the interests of individual shareholders. While this ability to lock in capital has occasionally led to abuses, the ability to commit capital generally helped promote …

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The Dangers Of Deference: International Claim Settlement By The President, Ingrid Wuerth Jan 2003

The Dangers Of Deference: International Claim Settlement By The President, Ingrid Wuerth

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

During the final months of the Clinton administration, the State Department entered into a trio of unprecedented international agreements with France (the "French Agreement"), Germany (the "German Agreement"), and Austria (the "Austrian Agreement"). These "sole" executive agreements, designed to resolve litigation pending in the U.S. courts that arose out of World War II and the Holocaust, were made without Senate ratification(as required for a treaty) or congressional authorization (as in a congressional- executive agreement). Although executive branch settlement of claims without Senate or congressional approval has a long history, these executive agreements mark an important departure from prior practice by …

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Changing Scientific Evidence, Edward K. Cheng Jan 2003

Changing Scientific Evidence, Edward K. Cheng

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A number of high-profile toxic tort cases, such as silicone breast implants, have followed a familiar and disturbing path: Early studies suggest a link between a suspected substance and a particular illness. Based on these initial studies, lawsuits are brought and juries award large judgments to various plaintiffs. Then later, more comprehensive studies find no evidence of a causal link. How should the legal system cope with this problem in which new scientific evidence calls into question previous findings of liability? These erroneous judgments seriously harm social welfare and legitimacy. Beneficial products are needlessly discontinued or are made more expensive, …

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A Jurisprudence Of Dangerousness, Christopher Slobogin Jan 2003

A Jurisprudence Of Dangerousness, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article addresses the state's police power authority to deprive people of liberty based on predictions of antisocial behavior. Most conspicuously exercised against so-called "sexual predators," this authority purportedly justifies a wide array of other state interventions as well, ranging from police stops to executions. Yet there still is no general theory of preventive detention. This article is a preliminary effort in that regard. The article first surveys the various objections to preventive detention: the unreliability objection; the punishment-in-disguise objection; the legality objection; and the dehumanization objection. None of these objections justifies a complete prohibition on the state's power to …

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Rethinking Legally Relevant Mental Disorder, Christopher Slobogin Jan 2003

Rethinking Legally Relevant Mental Disorder, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The law insists on maintaining mental disorder as a predicate for a wide array of legal provisions, in both the criminal justice system and the civil law. Among adults, only a person with a "mental disease or defect" can escape conviction for an intentional, unjustified crime on grounds of cognitive or volitional impairment.' Only people with "mental illness" or "mental disorder" may be subjected to indeterminate preventive commitment based on dangerousness. Under the laws of many states, only people with a mental disorder are prevented from making decisions about treatment, criminal charges, wills, contracts, and a host of other important …

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The Poverty Exception To The Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin Jan 2003

The Poverty Exception To The Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This essay, written for the Sixth Annual LatCrit conference, explores the subterranean motifs of current rules regulating searches and seizures by the police. More specifically, it investigates whether and to what extent alienage, race and poverty influence the warrant and individualized suspicion rules purportedly governing police investigation. The essay begins by showing that, contrary to the assertion of other conference participants, Supreme Court doctrine has not created a "Mexican exception" to the Fourth Amendment (as distinguished from an "illegal alien" exception, which does seem to exist). The main focus of the article, however, is an examination of whether the Court's …

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The Structure Of Expertise In Criminal Cases, Christopher Slobogin Jan 2003

The Structure Of Expertise In Criminal Cases, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This essay, part of a two-issue symposium on the implications of Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals and its progeny, is built around three propositions about expert testimony and criminal cases. First, the "Daubert trilogy's" focus on verifiability as the threshold for expert testimony pushes the criminal justice system away from the notion that knowledge is socially constructed and toward a positivist epistemology that assumes we can know things objectively. Second, in the long run, that development will be good for prosecutors and bad for criminal defendants, given the different types of expertise on which they rely. Third, the consequence of …

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Toward Taping, Christopher Slobogin Jan 2003

Toward Taping, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Numerous authors, from all points on the political spectrum, have advocated that police interrogations be taped. But police rarely record custodial questioning, at least in full, and only a handful of courts have found this failure objectionable. This commentary outlines three different constitutional grounds for mandating that such recording become a routine practice. To set up the constitutional argument, the article first outlines why taping is needed despite the elaborate rules that now govern interrogation. Put simply, the reasoning is as follows: the Miranda regime has failed, voluntariness should once again be the focal point of interrogation regulation, and taping …

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What Atkins Could Mean For People With Mental Illness, Christopher Slobogin Jan 2003

What Atkins Could Mean For People With Mental Illness, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article, written for a symposium on Atkins v. Virginia - the Supreme Court decision that prohibited execution of people with mental retardation - argues that people with severe mental illness must now also be protected from imposition of the death penalty. In labeling execution of people with mental retardation cruel and unusual, the Atkins majority stressed that mentally retarded people who kill are less blameworthy and less deterrable than the average murderer, an assertion that can also be made about people with severe mental illness. As it had in previous eighth amendment cases, however, the Court also relied heavily …

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Integrity And Reflection, Suzanna Sherry Jan 2003

Integrity And Reflection, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Professor Waldron and Professor Michelman have presented us with two interesting, but very different, views on what procedural components might contribute to the integrity of lawmaking. I will focus on a different aspect of legislative integrity: legislation reflection. "Reflection" has two meanings, and in this context they are direct opposites. A legislature can be reflective as a mirror is reflective: It can be a reflection of its constituents and therefore a relatively direct agent of popular sovereignty. But reflective can also mean thoughtful and deliberative; a legislature that is reflective in this sense "reflects" or deliberates to reach its own …

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Judges Of Character, Suzanna Sherry Jan 2003

Judges Of Character, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

For forty years, legal academics have been lost in a wilderness born of the countermajoritarian difficulty. Despite a two-century pedigree, we are still arguing about the legitimacy of judicial review and asking whether it is a curse or a blessing. Many of our most prominent constitutional scholars are mired in attempts to constrain judicial review so as to reconcile it with their idealized vision of a constitutional regime grounded in pure majoritarianism. None has succeeded. The few scholars who have attempted to move beyond the countermajoritarian difficulty face a different problem. As one scholar has argued, "[i]t takes a theory …

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The Secret History Of Race In The United States, Daniel J. Sharfstein Jan 2003

The Secret History Of Race In The United States, Daniel J. Sharfstein

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

"Spencer v. Looney" was one of dozens of cases decided in the eras of slavery and segregation that hinged on the question of whether a plaintiff or defendant was white or black. During the past decade, legal historians have begun to excavate these bygone disputes, which involved wills, marriage and divorce, transportation, immigration and naturalization, and libel and slander. With few exceptions, two goals have motivated recent scholarship: proving that race is a social construction and showing how courts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped build America's racial infrastructure. This Essay presents a more complex picture of race …

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Myth Of Ownership / Myth Of Government, Jeffrey Schoenblum Jan 2003

Myth Of Ownership / Myth Of Government, Jeffrey Schoenblum

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Indisputably, the lives of all individuals, now and throughout history, have not been commensurate in every respect. No individual has the most of everything at all times - net worth, love, happiness, security, companionship, fame, food, land, grandchildren, or whatever else he or she values.1 Nevertheless, a utopian strain in intellectual thought, emanating as the Enlightenment afterglow,2 continues to place its faith in the public construction of an ersatz equality that has never existed naturally.3 The Myth of Ownership, a recent book by two New York University law/philosophy professors, Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, is a striking exemplar of this …

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I Come Not To Praise The Corporate Income Tax, But To Save It, Herwig J. Schlunk Jan 2003

I Come Not To Praise The Corporate Income Tax, But To Save It, Herwig J. Schlunk

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article began with a search for a theoretical underpinning that could explain the structure of the current corporate income tax regime, and found such underpinning lacking. It proposed an alternative underpinning for a "corporate" income tax based on the theory of the firm. The basic idea is that every firm generates incremental economic returns that would not be achieved but for its organizational structure as a firm. Thus, a sovereign could rationally choose to confiscate a portion of such returns, since it has made such returns possible (by enacting legislation that recognizes firms, etc.). (Whether or not a sovereign …

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Equitable Apportionment Of Ecosystem Services: New Water Law For A New Water Age, J.B. Ruhl Jan 2003

Equitable Apportionment Of Ecosystem Services: New Water Law For A New Water Age, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article examines the interstate water controversy between Florida, Georgia, and Alabama regarding allocation of water in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin (ACF). The three states have been unable after 20 years of negotiation to resolve conflicts between urbanization in Atlanta, commercial uses in Alabama, and ecological protection in Florida. This article proposes that, were the states to seek apportionment of water by the Supreme Court under the Court's doctrine of equitable apportionment, the ecosystem services flowing within the ACF should be an integral allocation factor in deciding the flow regime Georgia and Alabama must ensure enters the Florida portion of …

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The Integrationist Alternative To The Insanity Defense: Reflections On The Exculpatory Scope Of Mental Illness In The Wake Of The Andrea Yates Trial, Christopher Slobogin Jan 2003

The Integrationist Alternative To The Insanity Defense: Reflections On The Exculpatory Scope Of Mental Illness In The Wake Of The Andrea Yates Trial, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

On June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates took the lives of her five children by drowning them, one by one, in a bathtub. At her trial on capital murder charges nine months later, she pleaded insanity. Despite very credible evidence that she had long suffered from serious mental disorder, a Texas jury convicted Yates of murder and sentenced her to life in prison. Her tragic and controversial case led many to question whether the so-called "M'Naghten" test for insanity, which forms the basis for the insanity defense in Texas, adequately defines the exculpatory effect of mental disorder. This article is based …

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The Unmaking Of A Precedent, Suzanna Sherry Jan 2003

The Unmaking Of A Precedent, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

How far can you stretch precedent before it breaks? The 2002 Term suggests that some Justices seem to think that treating precedent like silly putty is preferable to acknowledging that it might be in need of revision. But obvious inconsistencies in the application of precedent are a strong indication of underlying doctrinal problems. In this article, I suggest that the majority's misuse of precedent in Nevada Department of Human Resources v Hibbs' should lead us to question the soundness of the Supreme Court's previous cases defining the limits of Congress's authority under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. But the …

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Prospect Theory, Risk Preference, And The Law, Chris Guthrie Jan 2003

Prospect Theory, Risk Preference, And The Law, Chris Guthrie

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

To understand how people behave in an uncertain world - and to make viable recommendations about how the law should try to shape that behavior - legal scholars must employ a model or theory of decision making. Only with an understanding of how people are likely to respond to legal rules can legal scholars, judges, legislators, and regulators craft rules that are likely to encourage desirable behavior and discourage undesirable behavior. Rather than rely on rational choice theory, behavioral law and economics scholars (or legal decision theorists) have turned to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's "prospect theory" to inform their …

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Mozart And The Red Queen: The Problem Of Regulatory Accretion In The Administrative State, J.B. Ruhl, James Salzman Jan 2003

Mozart And The Red Queen: The Problem Of Regulatory Accretion In The Administrative State, J.B. Ruhl, James Salzman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Since the New Deal, and even before, regulatory law has grown relentlessly ever more massive, detailed, and encompassing. The sentiment, "there's too much law", surely rings true on a daily basis to both practitioners and regulated parties, but there is remarkably little scholarship delving beneath this glib cliche. Scholarly elaborations on "optimal precision" and "mud and crystals" explore the design of individual regulations, and are valuable in that sense, but they do not examine the systemic implications of regulatory accretion. As easy as it is to find quips in the literature decrying the accumulation of "too many rules", one searches …

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Proposal For A Model State Watershed Management Act, J.B. Ruhl, C.L. Lant, Steven E. Kraft, Leslie A. Duram Jan 2003

Proposal For A Model State Watershed Management Act, J.B. Ruhl, C.L. Lant, Steven E. Kraft, Leslie A. Duram

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

During the Montana Constitutional Convention of 1889, John Wesley Powell, envisioning a landscape of watershed commonwealths, proposed that Montana adopt watersheds as the boundaries of its counties. The idea did not catch on. Over time, the power of local governments to regulate land use has grown immensely, but the misfit between their political boundaries and environmental policy problem sheds has persisted. As our understanding of ecosystem dynamics improves, however, natural resources management policy is gravitating, once again, to the watershed as an appropriate unit of governance. Many federal and state natural resource management initiatives have come on line in the …

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Beyond Goldwasser: Ex Post Judicial Enforcement In Deregulated Markets, Jim Rossi Jan 2003

Beyond Goldwasser: Ex Post Judicial Enforcement In Deregulated Markets, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Regulatory agencies are increasingly adopting ex ante rules to set market access terms and conditions for network industries. At the same time, in industries such as telecommunications and electric power transmission and distribution, antitrust laws play an important role in defining the terms and conditions of market access. Courts may have an important ex post enforcement role to play in the enforcement of the antitrust laws. In this Essay, I address the filed rate doctrine - a legal principle that determines when courts, rather than regulatory agencies, may serve as a standard-setter for or arbiter of market terms, independent of …

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Lowering The Filed Tariff Shield: Judicial Enforcement For A Deregulatory Era, Jim Rossi Jan 2003

Lowering The Filed Tariff Shield: Judicial Enforcement For A Deregulatory Era, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The filed tariff doctrine, fashioned by courts to protect consumers from rate discrimination, has strayed from its origins. Instead of protecting consumers, the doctrine has evolved into a shield for regulated firms against common law and antitrust claims that reinforce market norms. In the ideal world, Congress would expand the jurisdiction of regulatory agencies to allow them to penalize private misconduct. However, since that has not always happened, the filed tariff doctrine has encouraged private firms to expend resources in using the regulator as a strategy to immunize conduct from antitrust and common law antitrust claims. This Article assesses how …

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A View From The Trenches, Michael A. Newton Jan 2003

A View From The Trenches, Michael A. Newton

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

As a former armor officer, my roots are literally in the trenches. In sharing my figurative view from the trenches regarding the pursuit of justice, you should know that the pursuit of justice is the very core of our professional ethic among military lawyers. I was also privileged to serve as one of the foot soldiers within the ranks of the Department of State whose diplomatic focus revolved around the pursuit of personal accountability. My "view from the trenches" is therefore centered on a candid discussion of the pragmatic aspects of developing justice systems within the conditions and confines of …

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The Dimension Of The Supreme Court, Paul H. Edelman Jan 2003

The Dimension Of The Supreme Court, Paul H. Edelman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Lawrence Sirovich introduced two novel mathematical techniques to study patterns in recent Supreme Court decisions. One of these methods, information theory, has never been applied previously. The other method, singular value decomposition, is closely related to other methods that have previously been employed.

In this paper I give an explication of these two methods and evaluate their use in the context of understanding the Supreme Court. I conclude that information theory holds some promise for furthering our understanding but singular value decomposition, as applied by Sirovich, is …

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The Origins Of Felony Jury Sentencing In The United States, Nancy J. King Jan 2003

The Origins Of Felony Jury Sentencing In The United States, Nancy J. King

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

All of the states admitted to the Union by 1800 eventually abandoned capital punishment for most felonies in favor of discretionary terms of imprisonment. But of these states, only Virginia, Kentucky, and Georgia adopted jury sentencing. In 1786, Pennsylvania became the first state to adopt discretionary terms of hard labor and imprisonment as the primary punishment for felony offenses-delegating to judges the authority to select those terms. In 1796, Virginia opted for jury sentencing, while New York followed Pennsylvania's lead. After 1796, with both Pennsylvania's judge sentencing and Virginia's jury sentencing models to choose from, New Jersey and all of …

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Spiritual But Not Intellectual? The Protection Of Sacred Intangible Traditional Knowledge, Daniel J. Gervais Jan 2003

Spiritual But Not Intellectual? The Protection Of Sacred Intangible Traditional Knowledge, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The use of sacred aboriginal art is nothing new. It is fairly common to see dream catchers hanging from rear view mirrors in cars. In Australia, sacred aboriginal designs are often found on tea towels, rugs and restaurant placemats. In the United States, people routinely Commercialize Navajo rugs containing both sacred and profane designs with no connection to the Navajo nation. Millions of dollars of Indian crafts imported from Asia are sold in the United States each year. Another example is the taking of sacred Ami chants by the German rock group Enigma for its song Return to Innocence. Can …

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Fragmented Copyright, Fragmented Management: Proposals To Defrag Copyright Management, Daniel J. Gervais, Alana Maurushat Jan 2003

Fragmented Copyright, Fragmented Management: Proposals To Defrag Copyright Management, Daniel J. Gervais, Alana Maurushat

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The collective management of copyright in Canada was conceived as a solution to alleviate the problem of inefficiency of individual rights management. Creators could not license, collect and enforce copyright efficiently on an individual basis. Requiring users to obtain permission from individual copyright holders for the use of a work was equally inefficient. Collectives, therefore, emerged to facilitate the clearance of rights between creators and users. Even with the facilitation of collectives in the process, clearing rights remains an inherently difficult and convoluted process. This is especially so in the age of the Internet where clearing rights for multimedia products …

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Judicial Independence And The Ambiguity Of Article Iii Protections, Tracey E. George Jan 2003

Judicial Independence And The Ambiguity Of Article Iii Protections, Tracey E. George

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Is the federal judiciary truly an independent body? A quick glance at the Constitution would suggest the answer is yes. The Constitution provides for life tenure and a difficult removal process for federal judges that together, as the common wisdom goes, shield federal judges from the shifting winds of the more political branches and the public at large. The author of this essay argues, however, that on a closer examination of the protections provided for by the Constitution, judicial independence might be more mirage than truism. Threats to judicial independence arise not only externally through the actions of the other …

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