Law Commons^™

Opting Out Among Women With Elite Education, Joni Hersch

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Whether highly educated women are exiting the labor force to care for their children has generated a great deal of media attention, even though academic studies find little evidence of opting out. This paper shows that female graduates of elite institutions have lower labor market involvement than their counterparts from less selective institutions. Although elite graduates are more likely to earn advanced degrees, marry at later ages, and have higher expected earnings, there is little difference in labor market activity by college selectivity among women without children and women who are not married. But the presence of children is associated …

A Dilemma Of Doctrinal Design: Rights, Identity And The Work-Family Conflict, Lauren Sudeall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This symposium article suggests that with regard to the work-family conflict, we may have exhausted doctrine’s potential in setting a constitutional foundation for women to be treated as equals in the workplace and requiring that they not be discriminated against in the event that they decide to start a family. For purposes of this piece, those accomplishments constitute the first phase or “first generation” of progress. This article is concerned with how doctrine relates to “second generation” issues arising from the work-family conflict: how to balance work and family once some initial level of equality has been achieved; how to …

Reclaiming Equality To Reframe Indigent Defense Reform, Lauren Sudeall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Equal access to resources is fundamental to meaningful legal representation, yet for decades, equality arguments have been ignored in litigating indigent defense reform. At a time when underfunded indigent defense systems across the country are failing to provide indigent defendants with adequate representation, the question of resources is even more critical. Traditionally, advocates seeking indigent defense reform have relied on Sixth Amendment arguments to protect the rights of indigents in this context; however, the Sixth Amendment approach suffers from a number of shortcomings that have made it a poor tool for systemic reform, including its exclusive focus on attorney performance …

Is High-Altitude Mountaineering Russian Roulette?, Edward K. Cheng

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Whether the nature of the risks associated with climbing high-altitude (8000 m) peaks is in some sense “controllable” is a longstanding debate in the mountaineering community. Well-known mountaineers David Roberts and Ed Viesturs explore this issue in their recent memoirs. Roberts views the primary risks as “ objective ” or uncontrollable, whereas Viesturs maintains that experience and attention to safety can make a significant difference. This study sheds light on the Roberts-Viesturs debate using a comprehensive dataset of climbing on Nepalese Himalayan peaks. To test whether the data is consistent with a constant failure rate model (Roberts) or a decreasing …

Statutory Interpretation From The Inside--An Empirical Study Of Congressional Drafting, Delegation, And The Canons: Part I, Lisa Schultz Bressman, Abbe R. Gluck

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

What role should the realities of the legislative drafting process play in the theories and doctrines of statutory interpretation and administrative law? The ongoing debates frequently turn on empirical assumptions about how Congress drafts and what interpretive rules Congress knows, but there has been almost no testing of whether any of these assumptions reflect legislative reality. We have attempted to fill that void. This is the first of two Articles reporting the results of the most extensive empirical study to date — a survey of 137 congressional counsels drawn from both parties, both chambers of Congress and spanning multiple committees …

Seeking Genomic Knowledge: The Case For Clinical Restraint, Ellen Wright Clayton, Wylie Burke, Susan Brown Trinidad

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Genome sequencing technology provides new and promising tests for clinical practice, including whole genome sequencing, which measures an individual's complete DNA sequence, and whole exome sequencing, which measures the DNA for all genes coding for proteins. These technologies make it possible to test for multiple genes in a single test, which increases the efficiency of genetic testing. However, they can also produce large amounts of information that cannot be interpreted or is of limited clinical utility. This additional information could be distracting for patients and clinicians, and contribute to unnecessary healthcare costs. The potential for genomic sequencing to improve care …

The Exclusionary Rule: Is It On Its Way Out? Should It Be?, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This symposium, comprising six articles in addition to this one, was triggered by a spate of Supreme Court opinions occurring over the last seven years, all of which raise the two questions in the title to this article (which is also the title of the symposium). Since 1974, when United States v. Calandra definitively established deterrence as the primary objective of the suppression remedy, the Court has nibbled away at the exclusionary rule from a number of different directions. But the Court's decisions in Hudson v. Michigan (2006), Herring v. United States (2009), and Davis v. United States (2011) reveal …

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 …

A Summary Of Why We Need More Judicial Activism, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Too much of a good thing can be bad, and democracy is no exception. In the United States, the antidote to what the drafters of the Constitution called “the excess of democracy” is judicial review. Lately, however, judicial review has come under fire. Many on both sides of the political aisle accuse the Supreme Court of being overly activist and insufficiently deferential to the elected representatives of the people. I argue in this essay that criticizing the Court for its activism is exactly backwards: We need more judicial activism, not less. Courts engaging in judicial review are bound to err …

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 …

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 …

Preemption Under The Controlled Substances Act, Robert A. Mikos

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

States are conducting increasingly bold experiments with their marijuana laws, but questions linger over their authority to deviate from the federal Controlled Substances Act. The CSA bans marijuana outright, and commentators have assumed that Congress sought to preempt all state laws that might somehow conflict with the CSA. Under the preemption rule now in vogue, state marijuana reforms are preempted if they either require someone to violate the CSA or, more controversially, if they pose an obstacle to Congress’s objective of eradicating marijuana. Seeking to avoid such conflicts, government officials have scuttled a number of important state marijuana reforms. This …

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 …

Book Review: Burden Of Proof: A Review Of Math On Trial, Paul H. Edelman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In Math on Trial, Leila Schneps and Coralie Col­ mez write about the abuse of mathematical argu­ ments in criminal trials and how these flawed arguments "have sent innocent people to prison" (p. ix). Indeed, people "saw their lives ripped apart by simple mathematical errors." The purpose of focusing on these errors, despite mathematics' "relatively rare use in trials" (p. x), is "that many of the common mathematical fallacies that pervade the public sphere are perfectly represented by these trials. Thus they serve as ideal illustrations of these errors and of the drastic consequences that faulty reasoning has on real …

The Role Of Courts In "Making" Law In Japan: The Communitarian Conservatism Of Japanese Judges, John O. Haley

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Professor Haley is an outstanding international and comparative law scholars, widely credited with having popularized Japanese legal studies in the United States. In 1969, Haley received a fellowship from the University of Washington and was in one of the first classes to graduate from the Asian Law Program, now, the Asian Law Center. After working for several years in law firms in Japan, he joined the law faculty at the University of Washington, where he remained for nearly twenty-six years during which time he directed the Asian and Comparative Law Program. In June 2012, Professor Haley was awarded The Order …

Inferring Desire, Jessica A. Clarke

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In the course of debates over same-sex marriage, many scholars have proposed new legal definitions of sexual orientation to better account for the role of relationships in constituting identities. But these discussions have overlooked a large body of case law in which courts are already applying this model of sexual orientation, with inequitable results.

This Article examines a set of fifteen years of sexual harassment decisions in which courts have endeavored to determine the sexual orientations of alleged harassers. Under federal law, sexual harassment is actionable because it is a subspecies of sex discrimination. A man who makes unwanted sexual …

Community Control Over Camera Surveillance: A Response To Bennett Capers's "Crime, Surveillance, And Communities", Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Professor Capers's article helps stimulate thinking about the way in which community views and individual rights interact. In my view, where police propose to conduct surveillance of groups, as occurs with camera surveillance (including the newly developing drone camera systems)', the affected group should be heavily involved in the authorization process. If the surveillance is authorized, care must be taken to ensure that all members of the group are equally affected by it unless and until individualized suspicion, proportionate to the intrusion, develops. That formula ensures that the interests of both the collective and the individual are protected.

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 …

A Pox On Both Your Houses, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

As Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins celebrates its 75th anniversary, it is becoming more apparent that it is on a collision course with itself. The Court keeps trying – and failing – to sort out the tensions within the Erie doctrine and between it and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The Court’s latest Erie decision, Shady Grove, was yet another attempt to separate substance from procedure and navigate the strait between the Rules of Decision Act and the Rules Enabling Act. It was a disaster, in large part because of the internal incoherence of the Erie doctrine itself and …

Don't Answer That!, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Forget hard cases: "bad" cases make bad law. DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Bauman, which never should have been filed in a California federal court, has the potential to make very bad law. It is a paradigmatic example of egregious forum shopping that stretches jurisdictional doctrines beyond their limits. And, like other acts of overreaching by overzealous plaintiffs’ attorneys,1 it is likely to come back to haunt not only these plaintiffs but other less manipulative plaintiffs in the future.

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 …

The Benefits Of Mortality Risk Reduction: Happiness Surveys Vs. The Value Of A Statistical Life, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A principal component of many benefit-cost analyses (BCAs) of health, safety, and environmental regulations is the valuation of the fatality risk effects of the underlying policy. Government agencies currently value these expected effects using estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL), that is, the tradeoff rate between money and very small risks of death. This measure corresponds to BCA's theoretically appropriate benefits measure, which is society's willingness to pay for the risk reduction. Here, I will review the VSL approach, compare it to suggested alternatives that use happiness measures of well-being, and address some of the misunderstandings that …

Res Ipsa Loquitur (Or Why The Other Essays Prove My Point), Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Patient Awareness And Approval For An Opt-Out Genomic Biorepository, Ellen Wright Clayton, Kyle B. Brothers, Matthew J. Westbrook, M. Francis Wright, John A. Myers, Daniel R. Morrison, Jennifer L. Madison, Jill M. Pulley

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Aim: In this study, we sought to assess patient awareness and perceptions of an opt-out biorepository. Materials & methods: We conducted exit interviews with adult patients and parents of pediatric patients having their blood drawn as part of their clinical care at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (TN, USA). Results: 32.9% of all patients and parents of pediatric patients report having heard of the opt-out biorepository, while 92.4% approve of this research effort based on a brief description. Awareness that leftover blood could be used for research increased among adult patients during the study period, from 34.3 to 50.0%. Conclusion: These …

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. …

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, …

The Presumption Of Patentability, Sean B. Seymore

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

When the Framers of the United States Constitution granted Congress the authority to create a patent system, they certainty did not envision a patent as an a priori entitlement. As it stands now, anyone who files a patent application on anything is entitled to a presumption of patentability. A patent examiner who seeks to challenge patentability faces the dual burden of building a prima facie case of unpatentability and carrying the ultimate burden of proof. Thus, from the outset, an applicant is in a very good position; but the examiner’s limited resources, time pressures, and production goals tip the scales …

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 …

State Enforcement Of National Policy: A Contextual Approach (With Evidence From The Securities Realm), Amanda Rose

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article addresses a topic of contemporary public policy significance: the optimal allocation of law enforcement authority in our federalist system. Proponents of competitive federalism have long argued that assigning concurrent enforcement authority to states and the federal government can lead to redundant expense, policy distortion, and a loss of democratic accountability. A growing literature responds to these claims, trumpeting the benefits of concurrent state-federal enforcement - most notably the potential for state regulators to remedy under-enforcement by captured federal agencies. Both bodies of scholarship are right, but also incomplete. What is missing from this rather polarized debate is a …

How Modern Choice Of Law Helped To Kill The Private Attorney General, Erin O'Connor

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

It is a great honor to be asked to deliver the second Annual Brainerd Currie Lecture at Mercer University School of Law. Brainerd Currie was an immensely influential law professor who is recognized as the leading scholar of conflict of laws in the twentieth century. Mercer has the distinction of being both Currie's law school alma mater as well as his first academic appointment, probably the two most significant intellectual influences on any scholar. More recently, Mercer has attracted other influential conflicts scholars and cheerleaders of the topic, including Dean Gary Simson, Larry Ribstein, Hal Lewis, and Bruce Posnak, among …