Reimagining the Rules of Evidence at 50
The speakers for this symposium have all suggested fundamental ways of rethinking the evidence rules over the last decade, and shared how they might reform the rules in their areas of expertise.
2022 Symposium
Vanderbilt Law Review and The Branstetter Litigation and Dispute Resolution Program hosted the 2022 Vanderbilt Law Review Symposium, “Reimagining the Rules of Evidence at 50,” on Thursday, November 3, and Friday, November 4, 2022.
November 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the original adoption of the Federal Rules of Evidence by the Supreme Court. The Federal Rules of course embody evidentiary traditions and ideas from decades and centuries past, but much has changed since their adoption in our understanding of psychology, epistemology, and other fields related to evidence and proof. This symposium therefore endeavors to take a fresh look at what evidence law might be. What might the evidence rules look like if we were not beholden to tradition or even the cumbersome rulemaking process? Are there rules that would be more empirically defensible and more likely to lead to fair and accurate outcomes? Should the rules stay focused on the (ever-vanishing) trial, or should they be re-envisioned with a broader context in mind?
The speakers for this symposium have all suggested fundamental ways of rethinking the evidence rules over the last decade, and will be sharing how they might reform the rules in their areas of expertise. The symposium promises to be packed with new ideas and lively discussion. Looking forward, our hope is that it will kickstart a broader conversation about the future of evidence law, and perhaps provide a blueprint for research in the years to come.
Professor Margaret Blair’s Contributions to Understanding:
The Role of Corporations in the Economy
The Symposium featured four panels of scholars discussing their recent work in corporate law and economics and a keynote address delivered by Harvard Law School Professor of Law Mark Roe.
2020 Symposium
The Vanderbilt Law Review and the Vanderbilt Law and Business Program co-hosted the 2020 Symposium. The Symposium was a conference on Professor Margaret Blair’s contributions to our understanding of the role of corporations in the economy.
Governing Wicked Problems
“Governing Wicked Problems” explores whether emerging theoretical and empirical work centered around concepts of resilience, adaptive governance, and complex adaptive systems offers a generalizable approach that could improve upon the conventional “war on” strategy often taken when government wrestles with intractable policy challenges—i.e., wicked problems.
2019 Symposium
The Vanderbilt Law Review held a symposium entitled “Governing Wicked Problems,” at Vanderbilt Law School on October 24–25, 2019. You can read the resulting scholarship in the Symposium issue here. The event was co-hosted by Professors J.B. Ruhl and James Salzman, who described the theme in this way:
“Governing Wicked Problems” explores whether emerging theoretical and empirical work centered around concepts of resilience, adaptive governance, and complex adaptive systems offers a generalizable approach that could improve upon the conventional “war on” strategy often taken when government wrestles with intractable policy challenges—i.e., wicked problems.
Wicked problems are the opposite of hard but ordinary problems, which public and private governance institutions can solve in a finite time period by applying standard techniques. Not only do conventional governance processes fail to tackle wicked problems, they may exacerbate situations by generating undesirable consequences. The symposium was organized to step back and ask whether there are general governance design principles that could prove useful across the category of wicked problems. More fundamentally, we pushed back on the conception that each wicked problem is sui generis as a governance challenge.
We invited a small number of thought leaders from a variety of fields to write about both substantive wicked problems (such as climate change and gentrification) and governance strategies to address such problems (such as resilience and adaptive governance). The focus of the symposium was neither to run through each problem and its specific challenges nor to consider governance strategies in the abstract. Instead, it married the specific and abstract, asking what generalizable insights have been learned about how to design public and private governance regimes to manage wicked problems.
October 2017
The Future of Discovery
The Vanderbilt Law Review and Professor Brian Fitzpatrick hosted the 2017 Vanderbilt Law Review Symposium: The Future of Discovery. The Symposium took place on Friday, October 13, 2017 at Vanderbilt Law School.
October 2017 Symposium
The Symposium featured four panels of scholars discussing their recent work in the area of e-discovery, a keynote address delivered by U.S. District Judge Paul W. Grimm, and a round table discussion with sitting federal judges to consider advances in and future challenges of discovery.
March 2017
The Dodd-Frank Act and Financial Reform: What Next?
In March 2017, Vanderbilt University Law School Professors Yesha Yadav and Morgan Ricks hosted a Symposium on the future of financial reform.
March 2017 Symposium
The Symposium brought together scholars from all over the world to discuss regulatory implications under different administrations and included a keynote from Professor Simon Johnson, Professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT.
2016
Erwin Chemerinsky’s Case Against the Supreme Court
In May 2016, the Vanderbilt Law Review, with the generous support of the Branstetter Litigation & Dispute Resolution Program and the Program in Law & Government, hosted a paper symposium entitled, “Erwin Chemerinsky’s Case Against the Supreme Court.”
2016 Symposium
In his book, The Case Against the Supreme Court, Dean Chemerinsky challenges a fundamental justification for judicial review—the notion that the judiciary is better than the legislature at protecting rights—and instead argues that the Supreme Court has consistently failed to protect controversial rights across the board. Dean Chemerinsky’s book criticizing the Court’s performance in protecting controversial rights thus served as a launching point for the symposium. The following seven articles by distinguished authors provide thoughtful, experienced reflections on the normative role of the Court in the twenty-first century.