Law Commons^™

In Memoriam: Professor Harold G. Maier, Journal Editor

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Professor Harold Maier founded the student-edited Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law in 1967 and served as its faculty adviser until his retirement in 2005. He was appointed the David Daniels Allen Distinguished Professor of Law in 1988. He was a co-author of Public International Law in a Nutshell (with Thomas Buergenthal, West Publishing) and dozens of journal articles and book chapters, some written in German, which he spoke fluently. Hired in 1965 to develop Vanderbilt's international law program, Maier sought to establish a program to train students interested in an international legal practice and to enable scholarship in international legal …

Navigating The Minefield Of Trade Secrets Protection In China, Daniel C.K. Chow

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Many Multinational Companies (MNCs) now consider trade secrets to be the most important intellectual property right in China, ahead of patents, trademarks, and copyrights. While trade secrets have become more valuable than ever as a business asset in China, many MNCs also find that the protection of trade secrets in China is full of pitfalls and traps. Unlike in the case of patents, trademarks, and copyrights, China has no unified law governing trade secrets, but has disjointed provisions scattered throughout various laws. The pitfalls are also created by a high evidentiary burden in proving a theft of a trade secret …

Anarchy, Order, And Trade: A Structuralist Account Of Why A Global Commercial Legal Order Is Emerging, Bryan H. Druzin

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

While still fragmented, the world is witnessing the emergence of a global commercial legal order independent of any one national legal system. This process is unfolding both on the macrolevel of state actors as well as on the microlevel of private individuals and organizations. On the macrolevel, the sources of this legal order are complex international agreements; on the microlevel, private contracts employing commercial customary practices and arbitration are driving this process forward. Yet there is no comparable evolution occurring (in any substantial sense) in noncommercial areas of law such as criminal, tort, or family law. There is an overall …

Judging Leaders Who Facilitate Crimes By A Foreign Army: International Courts Differ On A Novel Legal Issue, Mugambi Jouet

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In one of the most significant cases in the history of international criminal law, Prosecutor v. Perisic, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) effectively addressed an issue of first impression: may a military or political leader be convicted for knowingly facilitating crimes by another state's army? The influential tribunal answered this question in the negative--knowledge that the recipients of military assistance are perpetrating crimes is essentially irrelevant absent evidence that the facilitator specifically intended that crimes occur. The ICTY Appeals Chamber thus acquitted Serbian General Momilo Peridid, who had been convicted at trial of knowingly aiding and …

Gimme Shelter: International Political Asylum In The Information Age, Jacob Stafford

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

On June 5, 2013, an article in the Guardian revealed highly classified information about surveillance operations being performed by the United States National Security Administration (NSA). The source of this information was a former NSA contractor named Edward Snowden. After arriving in Moscow on June 23, Snowden spent the next forty days in the transit area of Sheremetyevo International Airport in a bizarre state of geopolitical purgatory. Eventually, Russia granted Snowden temporary asylum for one year, followed by a three-year residency permit. This Note uses Snowden's circumstance to consider the current state of international political asylum within the context of …

Getting Off The Mommy Track: An International Model Law Solution To The Global Maternity Discrimination Crisis, Caraline Rickard

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Women's roles in workplaces around the globe have been growing steadily for the past half-century. Yet, in everything from pay to advancement, workplace gender discrimination persists, much of it based on women's unique role as child bearers. Of the countless domestic and international efforts to address maternity discrimination, none has been completely successful. Drawing from the history of maternity leave legislation and the examples of domestic and international regimes, this Note proposes a unique solution to an international problem: an international model law. The Global Maternity Protection Act model law proposed here provides global protection for a global problem and …

Foreign Direct Investment In The United States And Canada: Fractured Neoliberalism And The Regulatory Imperative, Gil Lan

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Although both Canada and the United States review foreign investment for national security concerns, Canada also requires that the investment be of "net benefit" to Canada. Recent investments by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) have prompted the suggestion that the United States should also adopt a net benefit or economic test. This Article argues that the United States should not adopt the Canadian approach. The Canadian approach attempts to screen out foreign public entities and requires that they act in a "commercial" manner. This approach is based on two assumptions. First, it assumes that one can segregate …

The United Nations Water Courses Convention On The Dawn Of Entry Into Force, Ryan B. Stoa

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (Watercourses Convention) entered into force in August 2014. Despite overwhelming support when signed in 1997, the ratification process has been slow. As a binding treaty, the Watercourses Convention provides hope that its provisions will articulate legal principles of transboundary water management capable of promoting cooperation and regional agreements. Despite entry into force, however, global support for the Watercourses Convention is weak, concurrent efforts to develop treaty regimes governing water resources create competition for resources and may obscure understandings of international water law, and the foundational principles …

The Rise Of Speed Deportation And The Role Of Discretion, Shoba S. Wadhia

Faculty Scholarship

In 2013, the majority of people deported never saw a courtroom or immigration judge. Instead, they were quickly removed by the Department of Homeland Security via one of several procedures collectively referred to as “speed deportation.” The policy goals of speed deportation are economic; these processes save government resources from being spent on procedural safeguards such as a trial attorney, immigration judge, and a fundamentally fair hearing. Higher deportation numbers may also benefit the image the government seeks to portray to policymakers who support amplified immigration enforcement. However, the human consequences of speed deportation are significant and can result in …

Insights From Canada For American Constitutional Federalism, Stephen F. Ross

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 132 S. Ct. 2566 (2012), has again focused widespread public attention on the Court as an arbiter of the balance of power between the federal government and the states. The topic of the proper role a nation's highest court in this respect has been important and controversial throughout not only American, but also Canadian history, raising questions of constitutional theory for a federalist republic: What justifies unelected judges interfering with the ordinary political process with regard to federalism questions? Can courts create judicially manageable doctrines to police …

Probable Cause And Reasonable Suspicion: Totality Tests Or Rigid Rules?, Kit Kinports

Faculty Scholarship

This piece argues that the Supreme Court's April 2014 decision in Navarette v. Calfornia, like last Term's opinion in Florida v. Harris, deviates from longstanding Supreme Court precedent treating probable cause and reasonable suspicion as totality-of-the-circumstances tests. Instead, these two recent rulings essentially rely on rigid rules to define probable cause and reasonable suspicion. The article criticizes the Court for selectively endorsing bright-line tests that favor the prosecution, and argues that both decisions generate rules that oversimplify and therefore tend to be overinclusive.

The Role Of Comparative Law In Shaping Corporate Statutory Reforms, Marco Ventoruzzo

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay discusses how comparative law played and plays a role in the statutory development of corporate laws. The influence of laws of other systems on the development of statutory law is common, explicit, and represents a tradition that accompanied legal reforms since the very beginning of the development of legislation.

Focusing on modern corporate law, I argue (but the argument could be extended to many other legal fields) that it is necessary to distinguish two basic ways in which comparative law influences legal reforms in one particular jurisdiction. The first one is through regulatory competition among different systems. In …

Why So Contrived? Fourth Amendment Balancing, Per Se Rules, And Dna Databases After Maryland V. King, David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

In Maryland v. King, 133 S. Ct. 1958 (2013), the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the constitutionality of routine collection and storage of DNA samples and profiles from arrestees. In doing so, it stepped outside the usual framework that treats warrantless searches as per se unconstitutional unless they fall within specified exceptions to the warrant and probable cause requirements. Instead, the Court balanced various individual and state interests. Yet, as regards the state interests, the Court confined this direct balancing analysis to the perceived value of using DNA to inform certain pretrial decisions. Oddly, it avoided relying directly on DNA’s …

Comparative Law Study And Analysis Of National Legislation Relating To Crimes Against Humanity And Extraterritorial Jurisdiction, Arturo J. Carrillo, Annalise Nelson

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This report has three main objectives. The first is to conduct a rigorous quantitative survey of national legislation worldwide to determine the extent to which States have prohibited crimes against humanity (CAH) under domestic law. The second is to engage in a limited but illustrative qualitative analysis of CAH laws where they do exist. And finally, for those States identified as having per se CAH legislation, this report seeks to establish the extent to which it is paired with the extraterritorial jurisdiction provisions necessary to make the CAH norms most effective.

Our report concludes that the prevailing panorama of domestic …

Congress As A Catalyst Of Patent Reform At The Federal Circuit, Jonas Anderson

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is the dominant institution in patent law. The court’s control over patent law and policy has led to a host of academic proposals to shift power away from the court and towards other institutions, including the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and federal district courts. Surprisingly, however, academics have largely dismissed Congress as a potential institutional check on the Federal Circuit. Congress, it is felt, is too slow, too divided, and too beholden to special interests to effectively monitor changes in innovation and respond with appropriate reforms. …

Afterword: Conferring About The Conference, Jessica Silbey, Aaron Perzanowski, Marketa Trimble

Faculty Scholarship

We heard at the conference five rich papers, all addressing in one way or another the conference's theme: "ReCalibrating Copyright: Continuity, Contemporary Culture, and Change." Professor Craig Joyce, in his capacity as conference convener, asked us as Fellows, at the end of the day of presentations and discussions, how we thought the Presenters' papers spoke to each other and to the conference's focus.

Conclusion. The Migration Of Legal Ideas: Legislative Design And The Lawmaking Process, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This is the conclusion for an edited volume on legislative usage of foreign and international law, N. Lupo & L. Scaffardi, Legal Transplants and Parliaments: A Possible Dialogue Amongst Legislators? (2014). I assess the general turn in comparative law studies towards the behavior of elected officials, as well as the preference for increased formality in the use of foreign law. The essays in this book analyze the legal experiences of Brazil, Namibia, Australia, South Africa, Spain, the European Union, China, Canada, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Italy. Many of these countries (but not all, especially the U.S.) …

The Market In Unmatured Tort Claims: Twenty-Five Years Later, Stephen G. Marks

Faculty Scholarship

In an article in 1989 in the Virginia Law Review, Professor Robert Cooter argued for changes in the law that would facilitate the development of a market in unmatured tort claims. An unmatured tort claim is a potential claim that a potential victim has before any injury has occurred. Cooter proposed that potential victims have the right to sell their unmatured tort claims. That is, Cooter proposed that potential victims be allowed to sell their right to sue even before an accident or injury ever occurs. Even twenty-five years later, the proposal remains both bold and imaginative, and yet it …

Reviving Implied Confidentiality, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

The law of online relationships has a significant flaw-it regularly fails to account for the possibility of an implied confidence. The established doctrine of implied confidentiality is, without explanation, almost entirely absent from online jurisprudence in environments where it has traditionally been applied offline, such as with sensitive data sets and intimate social interactions.

Courts' abandonment of implied confidentiality in online environments should have been foreseen. The concept has not been developed enough to be consistently applied in environments such as the Internet that lack obvious physical or contextual cues of confidence. This absence is significant because implied confidentiality could …

The Ftc And The New Common Law Of Privacy, Daniel J. Solove, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

One of the great ironies about information privacy law is that the primary regulation of privacy in the United States has barely been studied in a scholarly way. Since the late 1990s, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been enforcing companies’ privacy policies through its authority to police unfair and deceptive trade practices. Despite over fifteen years of FTC enforcement, there is no meaningful body of judicial decisions to show for it. The cases have nearly all resulted in settlement agreements. Nevertheless, companies look to these agreements to guide their privacy practices. Thus, in practice, FTC privacy jurisprudence has become …

“Exploitation Creep” And Development: A Response To Janie Chuang, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

In her article Exploitation Creep and the Unmaking of Human Trafficking Law, Janie Chuang insightfully describes transformations in the discourse on trafficking as it shifted from sex trafficking to human trafficking, and as human trafficking came to be understood as forced labor, and now modern day slavery. With each of these transformations, the United States government, self-anointed “global sheriff” of anti-trafficking efforts, deepened its emphasis on a prosecution-oriented strategy focused on individual perpetrator accountability. As an alternative trajectory, Chuang identifies and convincingly argues for a labor-rights approach that takes into consideration the structural causes of exploitation in the labor market, …

Hiv, Violence Against Women, And Criminal Law Interventions, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

The growing calls for the “securitization of body and property,”[ii] documented by Jonathan Simon in his book Governing Through Crime, illustrates a deep tension in our understanding of the role of criminal law as a tool for societal transformation.[iii] For some, including communities of color, the criminal legal system is a place where inequality flourishes;[iv] for others, including those feminists who have support criminal law interventions, it has become a tool to realize equality.[v] The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, reauthorized in 2013 as an amendment to the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA),[vi] relies heavily on the criminal law to obtain …

The Ftc And Privacy And Security Duties For The Cloud, Daniel J. Solove, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Third-party data service providers, especially providers of cloud computing services, present unique and difficult privacy and data security challenges. While many companies that directly collect data from consumers are bound by the promises they make to individuals in their privacy policies, cloud service providers are usually not a part of this arrangement. It is not entirely clear what, if any, obligations cloud service providers have to protect the data of individuals with whom they have no contractual relationship. This problem is especially acute because many institutions sharing personal data with cloud service providers fail to include significant privacy and security …

Space Madness: Subsidies And Economic Substance, Steven A. Dean

Faculty Scholarship

Extending the reach of the recently codified economic substance doctrine to embrace transactions spurred by tax subsidies would help both Congress and taxpayers promote worthy objectives such as historic preservation and the production of renewable energy. Congress-or quite possibly the courts-could use losses as the lynchpin of an economic substance doctrine for subsidized transactions.

A Model Litigation Finance Contract, Maya Steinitz, Abigail C. Field

Faculty Scholarship

Litigation financing is nonrecourse funding of litigation by a non-party for a profit. It is a burgeoning and controversial phenomenon that has penetrated the Unites States in recent years. Since "most of the important phenomena of modern litigation are best understood as results of changes in the financing and capitalization of the bar," it is not surprising that litigation financing has been dubbed by RAND as one of the "biggest and most influential trends in civil justice" and by the Chamber of Commerce "a clear and present danger to the impartial and efficient administration of civil justice in the United …

The Creation Of The Department Of Justice: Professionalization Without Civil Rights Or Civil Service, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers a new interpretation of the founding of the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 1870 as an effort to shrink and professionalize the federal government. The traditional view is that Congress created the DOJ to increase the federal government's capacity to litigate a growing docket due to the Civil War. More recent scholarship contends that Congress created the DOJ to enforce Reconstruction and ex-slaves' civil rights. However, it has been overlooked that the DOJ Act eliminated about one-third of federal legal staff. The founding of the DOJ had less to do with Reconstruction, and more to do with …

Legal Instrumentalism And The Lsa: A 'Movie Treatment', Toby S. Goldbach

All Faculty Publications

In the 2nd half century, LSA should entertain the death/rebirth of “law as a tool for social change.” We innovate by examining the artifacts of an instrumental genre of knowledge and by investigating our impulse to invent varieties of normative technologies.

Live And Let Die: Puerto Rico — The Unincorporated Jewel Of The Caribbean, Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud

Faculty Scholarship

Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the United States. However, the ambiguous meaning of that phrase has allowed for inconsistent treatment of Puerto Rico by the Supreme Court of the United States. This short article briefly tackles the manner in which the federal government most recently applied the federal death penalty to Puerto Rico despite the island's constitutional ban against capital punishment.

Book Review: Fact And Fiction: The Hanging Judge By Michael Ponsor, Tigran W. Eldred

Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews the debut novel by senior federal judge Michael Ponsor, a tale of the first death penalty case to occur in Massachusetts in more than 50 years.

Review Of Putting Intellectual Property In Its Place: Rights Discourses, Creative Labor And The Everyday By Laura J. Murray, S. Tina Piper & Kirsty Robertson, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This book is an interdisciplinary marvel. Its focus on creative communities and their practices avoids the frequent pitfalls of intellectual property (IP) scholarship: a myopic focus on the utilitarian and economic theories of IP. The authors acknowledge these dominant themes in much of IP scholarship, but they deliberately take a different tract. As such, this book cannot help but be generous and broad-minded in both its subject matter and range of detail. The authors, a trio of academics - two in the humanities and one in law - set out to explore how creative communities work, theorizing (and they turned …