Law Commons^™

Genetic Testing For Susceptability To Disease From Exposure To Toxic Chemicals: Implications For Public And Worker Health Policies, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

The Environmental Genome Program intends to identify "susceptibility genes" that would indicate if a person is more vulnerable to cancer or other disease as a result of exposure to certain chemicals in the workplace, the environment, foods, or other products. Research findings and the capability to test persons for such genes are likely to impugn and challenge health policies and regulatory programs that do not take genetic susceptibility into account when conferring health benefits and restricting chemical exposures. This article focuses on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and discusses four options available to this agency for protecting genetically …

Gp Corporatisation: Lessons Learned From The U.S. Experience, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

To benefit from the US experience of corporetissuon. Australia must focus on the clinical advantages rather than the financial windfalls

Reciprocity, Utility, And The Law Of Aggression, Anita Bernstein

Vanderbilt Law Review

The themes of incursion and boundary-crossing unite disparate legal domains. Wherever human beings cross paths and share space, law or law-like traditions develop to regulate this terrain by distinguishing permitted from proscribed intrusion.' Crimes and torts, regulation and liability, claims and defenses to claims, private law and public law all use a variety of measures--punishments, administrative rules, equitable remedies, professional discipline, and informal or extralegal sanctions-to condemn undue aggression. Concern about aggression may be found in the law of every jurisdiction in the United States.

Within American law, an extra increment of aggression can amount to the only difference between …

Stalking Secret Law: What Predicts Publication In The United States Courts Of Appeals, Deborah J. Merritt, James J. Brudney

Vanderbilt Law Review

For more than a quarter century, the United States Courts of Appeals have maintained two bodies of law. One is published, widely disseminated, and fully precedential. The other, now encompassing nearly 80% of all dispositions on the merits,' is unpublished, erratically distributed, and rarely precedential. What distinguishes these two sets of cases? Is it possible to predict why judges publish opinions in some cases while resolving others through unpublished opinions, memoranda, or judgment orders?

Each court has formal rules governing the publication of opinions, but those standards fail to account for variations in publication. Despite substantial overlap among circuit rules, …

Policing The Police: Clarifying The Test For Holding The Government Liable Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 And The State-Created Danger Theory, Jeremy D. Kernodle

Vanderbilt Law Review

On October 20, 1980, as Barbara Piotrowski left a donut shop, a man hired by her ex-boyfriend to kill her shot her four times in the chest. Within twenty-four hours, the Houston Police Department ("HPD") arrested the gunman and his driver and obtained heir confessions. Piotrowski's millionaire ex-boyfriend moved to England and was never arrested nor brought to trial.

Fifteen years later, Piotrowski sued the City of Houston under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for depriving her of her constitutional right to life and liberty and equal protection. She based her lawsuit primarily on information that a month before the shooting, …

Specific Crime Vs. Criminal Ways: Criminal Conduct And Responsibility In Rule 3e1.1, Matthew Richardson

Vanderbilt Law Review

The United States Sentencing Commission ("Sentencing Commission") drafted Rule 3E1.1 with an inherent ambiguity, one that concerns both the Rule's purpose and design. Rule 3E1.1 allows for a reduction in sentence if a criminal "accepts responsibility" for his offense.' As result of the Rule's ambiguous language, prior tensions in interpretation of its meaning have spilled over into the current debate over sentence reductions.

The inherent ambiguity results from the Rule's genesis. The Sentencing Commission enacted the Rule with the purpose of increasing predictability in sentencing by reducing judicial discretion. Before the enactment of the Rule, mitigating and aggravating circumstances allowed …

Table Of Contents - Issue 1

Journal of Dispute Resolution

No abstract provided.

Revised Uniform Arbitration Act: Modernizing, Revising, And Clarifying Arbitration Law, The, Timothy J. Heinsz

Journal of Dispute Resolution

From the outset of the Drafting Committee's deliberations, two issues came to the fore: federal preemption and adhesion contracts.23 The complexity of both matters presented substantial challenges to the Drafting Committee. The Drafting Committee needed to reach early agreement on an approach to preemption and adhesion, which affect so many areas covered by state arbitration law

To Litigate Or Arbitrate - No Matter - The Credit Card Industry Is Deciding For You, Johanna Harrington

Journal of Dispute Resolution

This Comment posits that consumers lose their legal protections in the credit industry when arbitration policies are favored over consumer credit protection policies. Part II will examine the language of credit card arbitration clauses including a discussion of the circumstances under which a credit card holder might bring a claim. Part III will discuss barriers to challenging the arbitration provisions. Part IV will summarize how the courts have addressed mandatory arbitration clauses in credit cards. Part V will examine traditional consumer credit protection laws, specifically whether the Truth-in-Lending Act is able to protect consumers from mandatory arbitration clauses. Finally, Part …

Clarifying The Intent Of Congress: Are The Federal Arbitration Act's Venue Provisions Permissive Or Mandatory - Cortez Byrd Chips, Inc. V. Bill Harbert Construction Co., Darynne L. O'Neal

Journal of Dispute Resolution

Some circuits have taken the position that the venue provisions are mandatory, thus limiting venue for motions to confirm, vacate, or modify arbitration awards to the district where the award was made. Other circuits, however, have adopted the contrary position that the venue provisions are permissive, allowing such motions to be brought either in the district where the arbitration award was made or in any district that is proper under the general venue statute. This Casenote explores the split among the circuits on the nature of the FAA's venue provisions. Cortez Byrd Chips, Inc. v. Bill Harbert Construction Co. addressed …

Prior Issue Index To Volumes 1990-2000

Journal of Dispute Resolution

No abstract provided.

Table Of Leading Comments-Authors Prior Issue Index To Volumes 1990-2000

Journal of Dispute Resolution

No abstract provided.

Table Of Leading Notes -Authors Prior Issue Index To Volumes 1990-2000

Journal of Dispute Resolution

No abstract provided.

Student Projects Prior Issue Index To Volumes 1990-2000

Journal of Dispute Resolution

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews - Authors/Casebook Case Studies Prior Issue Index To Volumes 1990-2000

Journal of Dispute Resolution

No abstract provided.

Table Of Symposia Prior Issue Index To Volumes 1990-2000

Journal of Dispute Resolution

No abstract provided.

Testing Poor Pregnant Women For Cocaine: Physicians As Police Investigators, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In 1989, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall surmised that “declaring a war on illegal drugs is good public policy . . . [but] the first, and worst, casualty of war will be the precious liberties of our citizens.” The same year, in the midst of President George Bush's “war on drugs,” the Medical University of South Carolina initiated a program to screen selected pregnant patients for cocaine and to provide positive test results to the police. At a time of high public concern about “cocaine babies,” this program seemed reasonable to the university and local public officials. Drug-screening programs in …

The Limits Of State Laws To Protect Genetic Information, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore characterized the DNA code as a secret code like that of the Nazis. In his words, “with the completion of the Human Genome, we are on the verge of cracking another enemy's secret code. When we intercept and decipher the coded messages that cancer sends from cell to cell, we will turn the tide, and win the war against cancer.” Gore was expanding the metaphor of the war on cancer, and commandeering the DNA code in the service of that metaphor. At about the same time, then president Bill Clinton called the DNA …

Rape, Murder, And Formalism: What Happens If We Define Mistake Of Law?, Gerald F. Leonard

Faculty Scholarship

The criminal law maxim "ignorance of the law is no excuse" represents a broad doctrine of strict liability in an area of law that usually insists on a culpable state of mind as a prerequisite for liability. For that reason, many scholars have attacked the harsh mistake-of-law rules as incompatible with basic principles of culpability. Other scholars have come to the defense of the maxim, and courts have adhered to it quite strongly even as the list of exceptions to the maxim has slowly grown. Oddly enough, however, this debate has proceeded without a definition of mistake of law. Distinguishing …

Quality Control, Enterprise Liability, And Disintermediation In Managed Care, John V. Jacobi, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

The authors examine the potential of enterprise liability for managed care organizations in light of current health-care finance realities. They conclude that, despite the recent trend toward more loosely structured managed care organizations, such as disintermediated or patient-directed plans, plan-based enterprise liability best serves the goal of reducing medical injury by permitting a focus on entities with sufficient scope to translate liability pressure into support for systemic risk-reduction measures. Advancing plan-based enterprise liability in an era of disengaged managed care organizations will require an extension of tort liability to firms with little control but much influence over their business partners.

The Delaware Business Trust Act Failure As The New Corporate Law, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

The Internet transcends boundaries and time, reduces and shifts the cost of receiving and disseminating information. It poses unusual pressures of change on the common law. Internet jurisprudence demonstrates the vitality of the common law, yet highlighted its limitations. The Article describes how the common law addresses Internet issues and the relationship of judicial cases and congressional actions. The Article praises common law system of "muddling through," evolving piecemeal, addressing particular conflicts, not always uniformly nor predictably. This is lawmaking for the risk-averse, reducing the risk and cost of correcting big mistakes. The price: higher learning costs and fewer clear, …

Outrelativizing Relativism: A Liberal Defense Of The Universality Of International Human Rights, Robert D. Sloane

Faculty Scholarship

This Article seeks to provide a new framework, rooted in classical liberalism, for understanding and defending the universality of international human rights. After reviewing the philosophical and historical development of the idea of universality, I argue in Part II that none of the traditional justifications for conceiving of international human rights as universal succeed. Cultural pluralism therefore must be accepted as a descriptive truth. But to acknowledge the cultural contingency of values as a descriptive claim does not, by itself, undermine the normative claim that human rights are, or should be, universal. Instead, it points to the need to justify …

Is International Bankruptcy Possible?, Frederick Tung

Faculty Scholarship

Although international business firms proliferate, there is no international bankruptcy system. Instead, bankruptcy law remains a matter for individual states. The failure of a multinational firm therefore raises difficult questions of conflict and cooperation among national bankruptcy laws. In the discourse over the appropriate design for an international bankruptcy system, universalism has long held sway as the dominant idea, embraced nearly universally by bankruptcy scholars. Universalism offers a simple and elegant blueprint for international bankruptcy. Under universalism, the bankruptcy regime of the debtor firm's home country would govern worldwide, enjoying global reach to treat all of the debtor's assets and …

The Future Of Southeast Asia: Challenges Of Child Sex Slavery And Trafficking In Cambodia, Benjamin Perrin, Shuvaloy Majumdar, Nicholas Gafuik, Stephanie Andrews

All Faculty Publications

The Cambodia Project: During 2000-2001, The Future Group launched its inaugural project in Southeast Asia to address child sex slavery and trafficking. For nearly one-hundred days, a deployment team of four worked with local organizations in Cambodia to implement new ideas to help the children affected by this crisis of international proportions. Initially, The Future Group had planned to work to implement five projects in Cambodia. After just three weeks, the deployment team was significantly ahead of schedule and began to actively identify new areas to pursue. Critical areas of need at local centres were addressed and projects that increased …

The Prime Minister's Police? Commissioner Hughes' Apec Report, W. Wesley Pue

All Faculty Publications

On 31 July 2001, a distinguished Canadian jurist reported on matters of unusual significance. Sitting as a Member of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP (CPC), Mr. Justice E.N. Hughes dealt with matters that go to the heart of liberal democracy. Any investigation of alleged police misconduct is important, of course, to a country that wishes to be governed in accordance with fundamental principles of the rule of law. This is so even in the seemingly most inconsequential instances. Important principles are involved even where "small" matters are concerned. The matters before Commissioner Hughes on this occasion however …

Making And Breaking Rank: Some Thoughts On Recent Canadian Law School Surveys, Margot Young

All Faculty Publications

The recent emergence of various surveys evaluating Canadian law schools has introduced greater notions of rank among these law schools. Three different types of law school surveys can be identified. Collectively and individually, these surveys threaten a number of normative goals for legal education: humanistic professionalism, pluralistic legal education and diversity. While it is important to acknowledge the need for accountability, it is essential, as well, that legal educators think carefully about what values and perspectives ought to underpin such evaluation.

The Globalization Of Public Health: The First 100 Years Of International Health Diplomacy, David P. Fidler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Global threats to public health in the 19th century sparked the development of international health diplomacy. Many international regimes on public health issues were created between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. The present article analyses the global risks in this field and the international legal responses to them between 1851 and 1951, and explores the lessons from the first century of international health diplomacy of relevance to contemporary efforts to deal with the globalization of public health.

Are We Buyers Or Hosts? A Memetic Approach To The First Amendment, Jeffrey E. Stake

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The First Amendment is often analyzed using the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas. Making use of memetic analysis, this article suggests that ideas should not be treated as inert products that we choose but as living things that sometimes exert some influence over their environment. Some of the ideas are more adept at surviving than others, and the ones that survive will not necessarily be good for humans. To account for the ability of some memes to replicate dangerously, the First Amendment should be read to allow governments to punish a speaker who advocates or threatens physical injury (other …

Endangered Species Information: Access And Control, Robert L. Fischman, Vicky J. Meretsky

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Carter, Reagan, And Khomeini: Presidential Transitions And International Law, Nancy Amoury Combs

UC Law Journal

Although lame-duck Presidents frequently push through partisan domestic laws and policies during the waning hours of their administrations, they usually steer clear of significant or controversial international issues; or, at the least, they seek their successors' concurrence as to the course to pursue. This Article examines one of those very rare instances in which a lame-duck President was able and chose, during the final hours of his Administration, to bind the United States to significant international commitments without the concurrence of the President-elect. President Carter's final year in office was dominated by his efforts to secure the release of the …