Law Commons^™

Unburdening Broadway: Spotlight On The American's With Disabilites Act, Naomi Edwards

Journal of Law and Policy

Inspired by the Shakespearian play, someone once said, “All the world’s a stage, some of us just have better seats,” but what if you cannot even get into the theater to take your seat? Imagine you just watched the Tony Awards, the performers were spectacular, the musical numbers are stuck in your head, and you cannot wait to buy tickets to this year’s best musical. You go online, research the theater where the production is playing, and your heart sinks. There is a small step into the front of the theater, and the nearest handicapped bathroom is located in a …

The Modern-Day Scarlet Letter: Erasing The Scar Of Non-Consensual Pornography Through Affirmative Consent, Jennifer Esposito

Journal of Law and Policy

Most have heard the phrase “revenge pornography” via the various websites that have infiltrated the internet for the sole purpose of posting this type of content. Not only do these websites display photos and videos of the victim in their most intimate moments, but they also often include names, addresses, phone numbers, and other identifying information. While many people know what revenge pornography is, they are completely unaware of the devastating impact that revenge pornography has on victims, the majority of which are women. As a result of revenge pornography, victims often suffer from mental illnesses (depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, …

Swimming Upstream: The Need To Resolve Inconsistency In The Fda's Fishy Regulatory Scheme, Kelsie Kelly

Journal of Law and Policy

The citizens of the United States rely on the federal government to maintain the safety of their food through effective regulation. As the technology used to develop food has advanced, the outermost limits of the current regulatory framework are being tested. The result has been a circuitous and ineffective attempt to regulate transgenic organisms, intended for human consumption, using multiple agencies and a patchwork of laws. The ability to incorporate DNA from nearly any organism into the genome of another provides immense potential for innovative new food products, but may also allow for unintended health and environmental consequences. Proper regulation …

Throwing Out Junk Science: How A New Rule Of Evidence Could Protect A Criminal Defendant's Right To Confront Forensic Scientists, Michael Luongo

Journal of Law and Policy

As the forensic science industry grows, so do the scandals – overburdened crime labs, unverified science, corrupt analysts, and diminishing federal oversight. Given the need to ensure that valid forensic science-based evidence is used at trial, a criminal defense attorney typically has the opportunity to cross-examine the scientist who conducted the forensic analysis. However, the 2012 Supreme Court decision of Williams v. Illinois has muddied an otherwise cohesive Confrontation Clause doctrine, allowing for the admission of forensic evidence without the testimony of the forensic scientist, but with no clear holding and different interpretations about what is considered “testimonial evidence.” To …

Single Subject Rules And Civil Rights: Using Legislative-Process Restrictions To Facially Challenge Constitutionally Suspect Laws, Annie Melton

Journal of Law and Policy

This Note argues that the single subject rule, a procedural restriction, can be used to facially challenge certain insidious laws. By giving courts an opening to review a law in its most elemental form—a deliberated-over means of adequately implementing a new, or remedying an existing, policy—the single subject rule tests it for characteristics like clarity, practicality, and predictability. The rule is rarely litigated in many states, but doing so draws attention to a fundamental philosophy of the legislative process, which is especially compelling in light of the ideological battles that are dominating statehouses across the country and giving rise to …

Speech-And-Display Laws: Balancing Physicians' Free Speech Rights And States' Interests In The Context Of Abortion, Emily Ruppert

Journal of Law and Policy

“The question is not pro-abortion or anti-abortion, the question is who makes the decision: a woman and her physician, or the government.” – Gloria Steinem

Insider Information And The Limits Of Insider Trading, Yesha Yadav

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This essay offers brief observations on the internal coherence of the rationales underlying the prohibition against insider trading, taking the opportunity offered by Newman and Salman to reflect on its central policy aims. I do not discuss these cases specifically, or what a resolution by the Supreme Court might mean for the future of insider trading. Scholars and commentators have thoughtfully critiqued Newman alongside the doctrinal whiplash that has followed in its wake. Rather, I take this opportunity to look under the hood of securities trading to examine information flows within the mechanisms by which securities are bought and sold. …

A Systematic Literature Review Of Individuals' Perspectives On Privacy And Genetic Information In The United States, Ellen W. Clayton, Colin M. Halverson, Nila A. Sathe, Bradley A. Malin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Concerns about genetic privacy affect individuals' willingness to accept genetic testing in clinical care and to participate in genomics research. To learn what is already known about these views, we conducted a systematic review, which ultimately analyzed 53 studies involving the perspectives of 47,974 participants on real or hypothetical privacy issues related to human genetic data. Bibliographic databases included MEDLINE, Web of Knowledge, and Sociological Abstracts. Three investigators independently screened studies against predetermined criteria and assessed risk of bias. The picture of genetic privacy that emerges from this systematic literature review is complex and riddled with gaps. When asked specifically …

Private Governance Responses To Climate Change: The Case Of Global Civil Aviation, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Daniel J. Metzger

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article explores how private governance can reduce the climate effects of global civil aviation. The civil aviation sector is a major contributor to climate change, accounting for emissions comparable to a top ten emitting country. National and international governmental bodies have taken important steps to address civil aviation, but the measures adopted to date are widely acknowledged to be inadequate. Civil aviation poses particularly difficult challenges for government climate mitigation efforts. Many civil aviation firms operate globally, emissions often occur outside of national boundaries, nations differ on their respective responsibilities, and demand is growing rapidly. Although promising new technologies …

Who Knows What, And When?: A Survey Of The Privacy Policies Proffered By U.S. Direct-To-Consumer Genetic Testing Companies, Christopher Slobogin, James W. Hazel

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTC-GT) companies have proliferated in the past several years. Based on an analysis of genetic material submitted by consumers, these companies offer a wide array of services, ranging from providing information about health and ancestry to identification of surreptitiously-gatheredb iological materials ent in by suspicious spouses. Federal and state laws are ambiguous about the types of disclosures these companies must make about how the genetic information they obtain is collected, used, and shared. In an effort to assist in developing such laws, this Article reports a survey of the privacy policies these companies purport to follow. It …

Valuing The Risk Of Workplace Sexual Harassment, Joni Hersch

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Using data on sexual harassment charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, I calculate the risk of sexual harassment by gender, industry, and age and establish that white females, but not nonwhite females, receive a compensating wage differential for exposure to a higher risk of sexual harassment. I use this risk premium to calculate the value of statistical harassment (VSH) in a manner analogous to the calculation of the value of statistical life (VSL). The VSH is around $7.6 million, about three-quarters of the size of the most-commonly cited levels of the VSL, and far above the maximum damages …

Household And Block Level Influences On Residential Fertilizer Use, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Amanda Carrico, Urooj Raja, James C. Fraser

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Urban and suburban lawns make up a large share of land use in the US. Maintaining lawns to fulfill aesthetic norms has environmental consequences. In this analysis, we examine household decisions to apply nitrogen-containing lawn fertilizer. Using survey data of 298 households in Nashville, Tennessee, we first examine the prevalence of fertilizer use and the rate of annual nitrogen applied. We find that the resulting distribution is skewed, with the top 20% of the sample applying 56% of the total share of nitrogen. In contrast to this subset of “intensive” fertilizers, 93% of households applied at or below levels recommended …

The Income Elasticity Of Global Values Of A Statistical Life: Stated Preference Evidence, W. Kip Viscusi, Clayton J. Masterman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Countries throughout the world use estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL) to monetize fatality risks in benefit-cost analyses. However, the vast majority of countries lack reliable revealed preference or stated preference estimates of the VSL. This article proposes that the best way to calculate a population-average VSL for countries with insufficient or unreliable data is to transfer a base VSL from the United States calculated using labor market estimates from Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries data, coupled with adjustments for differences in income between the United States and the country of interest. This approach requires estimation of …

Oligopoly Pricing And Richard Posner, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

Over a span of nearly 50 years Richard Posner’s voice has loomed large over the subject of oligopoly pricingand antitrust. The span begins in 1969 with Posner’s publication of “Oligopoly and the Antitrust Laws: A Suggested Approach,” which argues for more aggressive enforcement of Section 1 in cases involving circumstantial evidence of conspiracy. The span ends with Posner’s opinion in In re Text Messaging Antitrust Litigation, in 2015. The two writings, the first an academic article published early in Posner’s career and the second a judicial opinion published near the end of his time on the bench, suggest very different …

Onsite Sewage Systems: Background, Framework, And Solutions, Jamie Huffman, Sarah Simonetti, R. Scott Herbert

Virginia Coastal Policy Center

No abstract provided.

Administrative Law's Political Dynamics, Kent Barnett, Christina L. Boyd, Christopher J. Walker

Vanderbilt Law Review

Over thirty years ago, the Supreme Court in Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. commanded courts to uphold federal agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes as long as those interpretations are reasonable. This Chevron deference doctrine was based in part on the Court's desire to temper administrative law's political dynamics by vesting federal agencies, not courts, with primary authority to make policy judgments about ambiguous laws Congresscharged the agencies to administer. Despite this express objective, scholars such as Frank Cross, Emerson Tiller, and Cass Sunstein have empirically documented how politics influence circuit court review of agency statutory interpretations …

Environmental Governance And The Global South, Jeffrey Minneti

Faculty Articles

Over the last several decades, efforts to regulate the environment through traditional public law at national and international levels have stalled. In contrast, private environmental governance has flourished as nongovernmental entities have engaged in standard setting and assessment practices traditionally left to public government. Such entities include the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and Rainforest Alliance, both of which are nongovernmental entities that prescribe environmental standards for producers, provide labels and logos for producers that choose to comply with the standards, and maintain compliance through independent audits. The schemes incentivize environmentally responsible products and production processes by linking producers who conform …

Labor Organizing In The Age Of Surveillance, Charlotte Garden

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Milking The Estate, David R. Hague

Faculty Articles

Recent Chapter 7 bankruptcy cases are exposing a widespread problem. Chapter 7 trustees are retaining their own law firms to represent them and then in clear breach of their fiduciary duties to creditors-requesting illegitimate legal fees to be paid by the estate. This practice is immoral and particularly harmful to creditors. Indeed, every dollar paid to the trustee and his firm is a dollar that will not be distributed to creditors. The Bankruptcy Code, remarkably, allows a trustee to retain his own law firm to represent him in his capacity as a trustee. But this inherently conflicted arrangement is not …

Delineating Victims From Perpetrators: Prosecuting Self-Produced Child Pornography In Youth Criminal Justice Systems, Bryce Westlake

Faculty Publications

Video recording technology advancements and accessibility has been paralleled by a growth in self-produced child pornography (SPCP). Although social and judicial attention has been given to instances of teenage sexting, Internet-based forms of SPCP, such as webcam/website sex tourism, have almost been ignored. While some of the proposed legislation reform has referenced video-based SPCP, the majority has focused on SPCP distributed through cellular phones; excluding that which is manifested online or through entrepreneurial efforts. The purpose of this article is to introduce non-sexting SPCP, using the case study of Justin Berry (in the United States), and to propose a broad …

Law Library Blog (October 2018): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

The Law Of Advertising Outrage, Mark Bartholomew

Journal Articles

This article examines the stimulation of audience outrage, both as a marketing strategy and as a subject of legal regulation. A brief history of advertising in the United States reveals repeated yet relatively infrequent attempts to attract consumer attention through overt transgressions of social norms relating to sex, violence, race, and religion. Natural concerns over audience reaction limited use of this particular advertising tactic as businesses needed to be careful not to alienate prospective purchasers. But now companies can engage in “algorithmic outrage”—social media advertising meant to stimulate individual feelings of anger and upset—with less concern for a consumer backlash. …

The Problem Of Wage Theft, Nicole Hallett

Journal Articles

Wage theft inflicts serious harm on America's working poor but has received little attention from policymakers seeking to address income inequality in the United States. This Article provides a comprehensive analysis of the causes of the wage theft crisis and the failure of the current enforcement regime to address it. It argues that existing policy reforms will fail, because they misunderstand the nature of the crisis and the incentives that employers face when deciding to steal workers' wages. It then proposes series of reforms that could work, while arguing that changing the economic calculus alone will be unlikely to solve …

Is Natural Law A Public Good?, Eliot T. Tracz

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

إلغاء القرارات الإدارية القابلة للانفصال في عقود الإدارة ( دراسة مقارنة ), سيف صالح علي الحربي

Public Law Theses

تتناول هها الدراسة فكرة حدي ة نسبيا من حيث الموضوع، وهي الرقابة القضائية على الأعمال والإجراءات الممهدة لإبرام العقود التي تبرمها الجهات الإدارية، وتقتصر الدراسة تحديدا على دور القضاء في الرقابة على القرارات الإدارية السابقة على إبرام العقد بما فيها القرارات القابلة للانفصال عن العقد الإداري

ويدور موضوع الدراسة حول المقصود بالقرارات الإدارية القابلة للانفصال عن العقود الإدارية، من خلال إيجاد تعريفٍ لها مستمَد من تطبيقات القضاء أو شراح القانون والفقهاء. وانطلاقا من هلك سنسعى إلى بيان قيام هها القرارات، وهلك ب يراد عناصرها وأركانها، وصولا إلى تمييز هها القرارات عن غيرها من القرارات الأخرى أو الأعمال التي من شأنها …

قمع تمويل الارهاب في القانون الدولي – دراسة مقارنة, عيسى محمد عبد الله الحمادي

Public Law Theses

يعد تمويل الإرهاب من أهم التهديدات الأمنية الدولية والمحلية، التي تواجه المجتمع الدولي، نظرا لتصاعد وتيرة وشدة العمليات الإرهابية في العديد من بقاع العالم في الآونة الأخيرة، وأصبحت التنظيمات الإرهابية تستمد قوت ا بالدرجة الأولى من مصادر تمويل ا، فمتى تنوعت وتعددت مصادر التمويل اشتدت خطورة المنظمات الإرهابية والجرائم التي ترتكب ا. ولذلك أولت مختلف المنظمات الدولية والدول اهتماما بظاهرة تمويل الإرهاب، وقامت أغلب ا بتجريم الوسائل المعتمدة في تمويل العمليات الإرهابية، وإدماج ا ضمن استراتيجية مكافحة الإرهاب. وجاءت بمجموعة من الالتزامات ذات الطابع التشريعي والها دفة إلى تجريم ومتابعة جميع أشكال الدعم والتمويل المقدم للإرهابيين. كما اتخذت دولة الإمارات …

Masthead, Cardozo Journal Of Equal Rights & Social Justice, Vol. 25 (2018–19)

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents - Cardozo Journal Of Equal Rights & Social Justice, Vol. 25, Iss. 1

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Implied Warranty Of Habitability: Is Rent Escrow The Solution Or The Obstacle To Tenant's Enforcement?, Jana Ault Phillips, Carol J. Miller

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The implied warranty of habitability, a legal doctrine aimed at ensuring residential tenants receive habitable living conditions, has evolved significantly over the past fifty years. However, its effectiveness is often undermined by procedural barriers, cultural biases in judicial interpretations, and systemic challenges faced by low-income tenants. The article argues that while the doctrine has expanded tenants' rights through landmark court decisions and legislative efforts like the Uniform Residential Landlord Tenant Act (URLTA), its social justice goals are frequently frustrated by inadequate enforcement mechanisms and structural inequities in the legal system. The article calls for reforms to address these shortcomings and …

The Modern Public Square: Digital Viewpoint Discrimination In The Age Of @Realdonaldtrump, Jonathan Groffinan

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note argues that official social media accounts used by political figures for public engagement should be classified as designated public forums, ensuring First Amendment protections against viewpoint discrimination. It contends that blocking users based on their viewpoints violates constitutional rights, as such accounts serve as modern public squares essential for free speech and open discourse.