Law Commons^™

Brown V. Hanson, 2007 Sd 134, 743 N.W. 2d 677, Cameron Banko

Water Law Review

No abstract provided.

Davis V. Agua Sierra Res., L.L.C., 174 P.3d 298 (Ariz. Ct. App. 2008), Jeff Mcgaughran

Water Law Review

No abstract provided.

Nicoll V. Rudnick, 72 Cal. Rptr. 3d 879 (Cal. Ct. App. 2008), Kathleen Brady

Water Law Review

No abstract provided.

Harrington V. Water Res. Dep't, 171 P.3d 1001 (Or. Ct. App. 2007), Kurt Kropp

Water Law Review

No abstract provided.

W. Water, L.L.C. V. Olds, No. 20060527, 2008 Wl 465540 (Utah 2008), Susan Summers

Water Law Review

No abstract provided.

Vol. 11, No. 2: Full Issue, Water Law Review

Water Law Review

No abstract provided.

Watch, Listen, And Learn, Kathleen Elliott Vinson

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

Technology impacts education - the way faculty teach and students learn. For example, faculty members utilize technology in the classroom to engage students and assess their understanding. Some examples of technological tools professors use in class include audience response system (clickers). Outside of the classroom, technology supplements classroom instruction without time and space constraints. For instance, professors record podcasts to review material and critique student memoranda. This article discusses some of the technology tools utilized by faculty and students.

Sharing The American Dream: Towards Formalizing The Status Of Long-Term Resident Undocumented Children In The United States, Ragini Shah

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

The legal status of the estimated 1.8 million undocumented young persons currently in the United States is a pressing issue that must be addressed by lawyers and policymakers in the near future. These young people arrived in the United States at a very young age yet do not have, and cannot obtain, lawful immigration status. This article examines their complex position and advocates statutory reforms that better account for their unique developmental and cultural attachments to the United States. This article surveys the history of U.S. immigration policies in relation to undocumented youth as well as current reform proposals to …

Responding To The Time-Based Failures Of The Criminal Law Through A Criminal Sunset Amendment, Richard E. Myers Ii

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Prairie Waters: Aurora, Colorado's Water Recycling Plant, Steven Earl

Water Law Review

No abstract provided.

Government Data Mining And The Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The government's ability to obtain and analyze recorded information about its citizens through the process known as data mining has expanded enormously over the past decade. Although the best-known government data mining operation (Total Information Awareness, more recently dubbed Terrorism Information Awareness) supposedly no longer exists, large-scale data mining by federal agencies devoted to enforcing criminal and counter-terrorism laws has continued unabated. This paper addresses three puzzles about data mining. First, when data mining is undertaken by the government, does it implicate the Fourth Amendment? Second, does the analysis change when data mining is undertaken by private entities which then …

A Near Term Retrospective On The Al-Dujail Trial & The Death Of Saddam Hussein, Michael A. Newton

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti died at the hands of Iraqi officials at dawn on December 30, 2006, following a tumultuous fourteen month trial3 for crimes committed against the citizens of a relatively obscure Iraqi village known as al-Dujail.4 Maintaining his façade of disdain when the verdict and sentence were announced on November 5, 2006, Saddam entered the courtroom with an arrogant strut and refused to stand until the guards made him do so to hear the judge’s opinion.5 When Saddam interrupted the reading of the verdict, Judge Ra’ouf Rasheed Abdel Rahman turned down the volume of his microphone and spoke over …

Making Copyright Whole: A Principled Approach To Copyright Exceptions And Limitations, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article suggests a path to develop a principled conceptualization for copyright of limitations and exceptions at the international level. The paper argues that, normatively, copyright has always sought to reflect a balance between protection and access. It demonstrates that this balance was present to the minds of the negotiators of the 1886 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and may have been somewhat overlooked in revisions of the Convention. It was ultimately replaced by a three-step test designed to restrict the ability of individual legislators to create limitations and exceptions. The article also considers the …

Chief Judges: The Limits Of Attitudinal Theory And Possible Paradox Of Managerial Judging, Tracey E. George, Albert H. Yoon

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Chief judges wield power. Among other things, they control judicial assignments, circulate petitions to their colleagues, and manage internal requests and disputes. When exercising this power, do chiefs seek to serve as impartial court administrators or do they attempt to manufacture case outcomes that reflect their political beliefs? Because chiefs exercise their power almost entirely outside public view, no one knows. No one sees the chief judge change the composition of a panel before it is announced or delay consideration of a petition for en banc review or favor the requests of some colleagues while ignoring those of others. Chiefs …

Rethinking Contract Practice And Law In Japan, John O. Haley

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article explores "the Japanese advantage" in the enforcement of ex ante contract commitments in comparison with the United States, arguing that ostensible convergence of Japanese and United States contract practice in on-going business relationships is based on very different assumptions and conditions. Writing in the early 1960s Takeyoshi KaWashima in Japan and Stewart Macaulay in the United States described prevailing views and practices related to business agreements. Their respective observations indicated a tendency in both countries to avoid formal, legally enforceable contacts. For over four decades scholars on both sides of the Pacific have tended view these observations as …

The Failure Of Breast Cancer Informed Consent Statutes, Rachael Anderson-Watts

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Informed consent is a common law concept rooted in the idea that "[e]very human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body."' Its aim is to ensure that each patient gets the information she needs to meaningfully consent to medical procedures. Coming of age in the 1970s alongside other important rights movements, informed consent purported to solve medicine's paternalism: doctors too often dictating treatments rather than discussing options. Combating medical paternalism seems a worthwhile goal, given abuses in the past century, but moreover to improve everyday physician-patient encounters. …

Public Pension Funds As Shareholder Activists: A Comment On Choi And Fisch, Randall Thomas

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The world of shareholder activism has expanded dramatically over the past twenty years so that it now contains a broad set of actors carrying on a wide range of activities. At one end of the spectrum, hedge fund activist shareholders have taken large investment positions in targeted companies and spent significant amounts of money lobbying aggressively for a host of structural changes at these corporations. At a more intermediate level of activism are the labor union pension funds. The union funds have been active, making innovative uses of the federal securities laws to get shareholder proposals on corporate ballots and …

The Neural Correlates Of Third-Party Punishment, Owen D. Jones, Joshua Buckholtz, Christopher L. Asplund, Paul E. Dux, David H. Zald, John C. Gore, Rene Marois

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article reports the discovery, from the first full-scale law and neuroscience experiment, of the brain activity underlying punishment decisions.

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity of subjects as they read hypothetical scenarios about harm-causing protagonists and then decided whether to punish and, if so, how much.

The key variables were: a) presence or absence of excusing, justifying, or otherwise mitigating factors (such as acting under duress); and b) harm severity (which ranged from a stolen CD to a rape/murder/torture combination).

Findings include:

(1) Analytic and emotional brain circuitries are jointly involved, yet quite separately …

The Legislative Median And Partisan Policy, Alan E. Wiseman, John R. Wright

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

We show that the median legislator in the US House is unambiguously closer to the majority party median than to the minority party median. An important implication of this finding is that the median legislator is predisposed to support the majority party's policy agenda. Thus, in the event that the majority party organization exerts no influence over the legislative process, and in the event that all policies then default to the legislative median, policy outcomes will still substantially favor the majority party over the minority. We demonstrate that the legislative median moves predictably toward the majority party in response to …

Recognizing Our Dangerous Gifts: Applying The Social Model To Individuals With Mental Illness, Rachel Anderson-Watts

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Our society and laws allow a space for a multitude of identities and forms of expression. Many kinds of differences are legally protected in various ways, such as differences in race, religion, and gender. Sometimes protection takes the form of requiring social institutions to adapt to the unique needs of certain individuals or groups. Rights for disabled individuals, as exemplified by the Americans with Disabilities Act, rest on the principle that impairment disables because the world is structured around an incompatible model of human ability; not because of a fundamental deficit within the individual. This conception, termed the social model …

The New Role For Assurance Services In Global Commerce, Margaret M. Blair

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In this Article we examine the rapid emergence and expansion of a private-sector compliance and enforcement infrastructure that we believe increasingly may be providing a substitute for public and legal regulatory infrastructure in global commerce, especially in developing countries where rule of law is weak and court systems are absent or inadequate. This infrastructure is provided by a proliferation of performance codes and standards, and a rapidly growing global army of privately trained and authorized inspectors and certifiers that we call the "third party assurance industry. " The growth in the third party assurance business has been phenomenal in the …

Medellin: The New, New Formalism?, Ingrid Wuerth

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court's 2008 decision in Medellin v. Texas appears to represent a formalist turn in the Court's approach to foreign relations cases. The opinion emphasizes text as the key to treaty interpretation and it stresses the importance of the Constitution's specific law-making procedures. But the opinion does not deliver on its formalist promises. Emphasis on treaty text is undermined by the Court's insistence that the text reflects the intentions of the U.S. treaty makers, a questionable proposition with respect to the issue of domestic implementation raised by the case, and one that will raises serious interpretative difficulties down the …

Experts, Mental States, And Acts, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article, written for a symposium on "Guilt v. Guiltiness: Are the Right Rules for Trying Factual Innocence Inevitably the Wrong Rules for Trying Culpability?," argues that the definition of expertise in the criminal justice system, derived in the federal courts and in most states from Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Co., should vary depending on whether the issue involved is past mental state or past conduct. While expert psychological testimony about past acts ought to be based on scientifically verifiable assertions, expert psychological testimony about subjective mental states relevant to criminal responsibility need not meet the same threshold. This …

Democracy Uncaged, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Sanford Levinson calls for a new constitutional convention in Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It). This review explains how Levinson overstates the Constitution's defects and understates the risks of submitting it to a constitutional convention for revision. It exposes the hidden biases in Levinson's analysis and defends the counter-majoritarian aspects of the Constitution that Levinson criticizes.

Farms And Ecosystem Services, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Over the past decade two themes have emerged as organizing principles in natural resources policy. One, ecosystem management, builds a framework for landscape–level decision making (Christensen et al. 1996). The other, ecosystem services, opens a new dimension for thinking about what we hope to achieve through ecosystem management (Daily 1997; Costanza et al. 1997). The convergence of these two themes has become a driving force behind the concept of agricultural multifunctionality, the idea that farms can have multiple outputs—not just commodities—and thus can contribute to several societal objectives simultaneously (Jordan et al. 2007; OECD 2001).

Corporations And The Market For Law, Erin O'Connor

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The state competition for corporate law has long been studied as a distinct phenomenon. Under the traditional view, corporations are subject to a unique choice-of-law rule, the internal affairs doctrine (IAD). This rule is explained as a historical accident, or by the special logistics of the corporate contract. The resulting market for corporate law appears to have special characteristics, particularly including the dominance by the single state of Delaware. This paper challenges the traditional view. It shows that the corporate law market is best understood as a special application of the general market for law. Any differences are matters of …

Rules And Institutions In Developing A Law Market: Views From The United States And Europe, Erin O'Connor

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Developments in European choice of law seem to offer the United States a tantalizing opportunity for escape from the chaos of state-by-state choice-of-law rules. Specifically, the Rome Regulations provide the sort of uniform choice-of-law rules that have eluded the United States. Also, decisions of the European Court of Justice that permit firms to adopt homecountry rules in some situationss eem to facilitatejuds&ctionalc hoice by pivate parties. This top-down ordering ofchoice-of-lawniles contrasts with the seemingly chaotic and decentalized system that pievails in the United States. However, decentralized Amencan-style federalism might have something to offer Europe because choice of law in the …

Capitalism And The Tax System: A Search For Social Justice, Beverly I. Moran

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

America is a country founded on ideas. The Enlightenment was one set of ideas that attended our birth and one Enlightenment belief as strong today as during the revolution is our faith in capitalism and the protection of private property. Yet, the United States tax system manages to violate fundamental capitalist principles as outlined in the extensive writings of Adam Smith - the father of capitalism. Comparing Smith's vision to the current United States tax system reveals many important inconsistencies, particularly the current penchant for simultaneously taxing wages while exempting (or delaying) taxes on wealth and wealth appreciation. The article …

Habeas Corpus And State Sentencing Reform: A Story Of Unintended Consequences, Nancy J. King, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article tells the story of how fundamental shifts in state sentencing policy collided with fundamental shifts in federal habeas policy to produce a tangled and costly doctrinal wreck. The conventional assumption is that state prisoners seeking habeas relief allege constitutional errors in their state court convictions and sentences. But almost 20 percent of federal habeas petitions filed by noncapital state prisoners do not challenge state court judgments. They instead attack administrative actions by state prison officials or parole boards, actions taken long after the petitioner's conviction and sentencing. Challenges to these administrative decisions create serious problems for federal habeas …

Reproductive Injustice: An Analysis Of Nicaragua's Complete Abortion Ban, Jocelyn E. Getgen

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.