Dru Stevenson, Professor of Law

Gun Violence as an Obstacle to Educational Equality   University of Memphis Law Review, Forthcoming Abstract:  This paper addresses the issue of school gun violence as both a result and a cause of ongoing educational inequality. First, gun violence and homicides have reached epidemic levels in recent years among minority teenagers in the United States, and the constant disruption, trauma, and fear that go along with such day to day violence significantly affect the educational and psychological development of urban youth, and thus their eventual educational and career achievements. Second, media attention and recent legislative initiatives to permit or require guns in schools (arming teachers, etc.) focus on the comparatively rare phenomenon of active shooter scenarios (school massacres or shooting rampages), which are predominantly a suburban phenomenon, while ignoring the causes and effects of routine, lower-fatality gun incidents in poorer urban schools. Measures ...

My writing project this summer is now taking shape as a draft manuscript, and is available for download on SSRN.  I would really appreciate current or former students, colleagues, and friends downloading it and giving me feedback on it, as I plan to spend the Fall revising it and then submit it to journals in February.  The title/link is Codification and Transaction Costs , and here is the tentative abstract: The consensus view in the academic literature has been that rules present lower transaction costs – in the form of information costs – for the courts and citizenry, when compared to standards. Rules are more specific and detailed, so there is less uncertainty and less need for sophisticated interpretation. At the same time, the prevailing wisdom holds, specific rules impose higher enactment costs for legislatures. Systematic codification, which became of universal feature of American statutes in the twentieth century, seems to invert this relationship, lowering transa...

My latest article - forthcoming in Boston College Law Review - Standing as Channeling in the Administrative Age by Drury Stevenson, Sonny Eckhart :: SSRN We're looking for input and feedback, so download it and send us comments!

I have a new article coming out this summer in the North Carolina Law Review  entitled Judicial Deference To State Legislatures in Constitutional Analysis . It started as a paper about Bustamonte- type consent searches and North Carolina's unique statute defining consent in these cases - but it turned into an article about the relationship between the judiciary and legislatures in Fourth and Fifth Amendment cases.  Here is the abstract:  North Carolina is one of the only states to have a statutory definition of voluntary consent for police searches; it essentially codified the Supreme Court’s “ Bustamonte ” rule. In theory, this statute could eventually face a constitutional challenge if the Supreme Court adopted a requirement of informed consent – police warnings of the right to refuse a search – as many have urged. Considering this possibility as a hypothetical, it seems strange that conventional Fourth Amendment analysis has largely ignored whether challenged state ...