Notes Category
Finding the Boundaries of Equitable Disgorgement
May. 18, 2022—Cameron K. Hood | 75 Vand. L. Rev. 1307 (2022) | The disgorgement of “ill-gotten gains” is a significant mechanism for enforcing the securities laws. By compelling a violator of the securities laws to forfeit their illegal proceeds, disgorgement serves as a strong deterrent for securities fraud and an important method by which investors are compensated...
What’s the Deference? Interpreting the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines After Kisor
Apr. 21, 2022—Liam Murphy | 75 Vand. L. Rev. 957 (2022) | For more than three decades, the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines have constrained the punishment doled out by federal judges, limiting discretion that was once nearly unlimited and bringing standardization to the penological decisionmaking process. For twice as long, the Supreme Court has constrained judges in a different...
Policing, Masculinities, and Judicial Acknowledgment
Apr. 21, 2022—Nicholas J. Prendergast | 75 Vand. L. Rev. 997 (2022) | In the 1980s, the Supreme Court held that courts must consider the “totality of the circumstances” when deciding the reasonableness of a police officer’s conduct in an excessive force suit. To this day, the precise meaning of “reasonableness” remains elusive. For years, courts around the...
Should It Stay or Should It Go: The Clash of Canons over Termination of the Automatic Stay for Repeat Filers
Mar. 22, 2022—John H. Gibbons | 75 Vand. L. Rev. 615 (2022) | One of the most important debtor protections provided by bankruptcy law is the automatic stay, which stops creditors from pursuing collection actions against the debtor. Over time, however, debtors began to abuse the stay by repeatedly filing for bankruptcy each time a creditor tried to...
Challenging the Challengers: How Partisan Citizen Observers Contribute to Disenfranchisement and Undermine Election Integrity
Mar. 22, 2022—Kate Uyeda | 75 Vand. L. Rev. 657 (2022) | Almost every state allows political parties to sponsor and train private citizens to serve as election observers and sometimes even to challenge the eligibility of other private citizens to vote. These partisan citizen observers, referred to in this Note as “PCOs,” have far too often perpetuated...
A Machete for the Patent Thicket
Jan. 24, 2022—Lisa Orucevic | 75 Vand. L. Rev. 277 (2022) | Outrageous drug prices have dominated news coverage of the American healthcare system for years. Yet despite widespread condemnation of skyrocketing drug prices, nothing seems to change. Pharmaceutical companies can raise drug prices with impunity because they hold patents on their drugs, which give them monopolies. These...
Dynamic Corporate Purpose
Jan. 24, 2022—Fields Pierce | 75 Vand. L. Rev. 325 (2022) | The debate over corporate purpose has turned into a “gordian knot” where parties with entrenched beliefs about what the corporation should or should not be within society refuse to waver. There are inherent flaws with the governance models proposed by academics, politicians, and practitioners alike, so...
Underwater Mortgages for Underwater Homes: The Elimination of Signals in the Coastal Lending Market
Oct. 19, 2021—Peyton J. Klein | 74 Vand. L. Rev. 1467 (2021) | Climate change and sea level rise threaten to increase the default risk of mortgages on homes in coastal areas. Faced with this reality, small coastal lenders have begun selling more climate-sensitive mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, thereby transferring the risk of climate-induced...
Let’s Talk About Gender: Nonbinary Title VII Plaintiffs Post-Bostock
Oct. 19, 2021—Meredith Rolfs Severtson | 74 Vand. L. Rev. 1507 (2021) | In Bostock v. Clayton County, the Supreme Court held that Title VII’s sex-discrimination prohibition applies to discrimination against gay and transgender employees. This decision, surprising from a conservative Court, has engendered a huge amount of commentary on both its substantive holding and its interpretive...
The Duty to Update Corporate Emissions Pledges
May. 28, 2021—Nathan Campbell | 74 Vand. L. Rev. 1137 (2021) | Facing both internal and external market pressures, a rapidly growing number of private companies are making public, voluntary, and ambitious pledges to reduce or outright eliminate by a certain date or benchmark their greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, ambition and necessity notwithstanding, nonfulfillment of these emission...
Private Offerings in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Targeted Advertising
May. 28, 2021—Christina M. Claxton | 74 Vand. L. Rev. 1187 (2021) | Social media platforms, as well as the internet more broadly, have fundamentally altered many aspects of modern life. In particular, platforms’ targeted advertising mechanisms have revolutionized how companies reach consumers by providing advertisers more effective tools for reaching consumers and by tailoring content to...
Make Hay While the Sun Shines: Private Equity and the False Claims Act
Apr. 20, 2021—Gregory F. Maczko | 74 Vand. L. Rev. 797 (2021) | For years, the federal government has used the False Claims Act to police fraud in the healthcare industry. Every year, the Department of Justice recovers billions of dollars from healthcare companies for their False Claims Act violations, both penalizing wrongdoers and providing incentives for...
Creditors, Keepers: Passive Retention of Estate Property and the Automatic Stay
Apr. 20, 2021—Caitlin M. McAuliffe | 74 Vand. L. Rev. 829 (2021) | The automatic stay provision is one of the most important provisions in the Bankruptcy Code. Until recently, however, it has remained unclear if passive retention of property of the bankruptcy estate must be immediately turned over to the debtor under the automatic stay provision....
Measuring Semantic Relatedness: A Proposal for a New Textual Tool
Mar. 24, 2021—Katherine A. Cohen | 74 Vand. L. Rev. 483 (2021) | Judicial decisions, statutes, constitutions, sentencing guidelines, and ERISA-related documents have at least one thing in common: at a molecular level, the laws are all composed of words. The scientific study of linguistics, particularly the field of semantics, analyzes what words mean and how they...
The Library of Babel for Prior Art: Using Artificial Intelligence to Mass Produce Prior Art in Patent Law
Mar. 24, 2021—Lucas R. Yordy | 74 Vand. L. Rev. 521 (2021) | Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important role in the invention and innovation processes of our society. To date, though, much of the academic discussion on the interaction of artificial intelligence and the patent system focuses on the patentability of inventions produced by artificial...
The New “Web-Stream” of Commerce: Amazon and the Necessity of Strict Products Liability for Online Marketplaces
Jan. 26, 2021—Margaret E. Dillaway | 74 Vand. L. Rev. 187 (2021) | Technology company Amazon has actively transformed into an e-commerce giant over the last two decades. Once a simple online bookstore, Amazon now boasts an ever-expanding identity as global cloud computing provider, major player in artificial intelligence, brick-and-mortar grocery store, and producer of original video...