Law Commons^™

Response By Tax-Exempt Organization Scholars To Request For Information, Ellen P. Aprill, Roger Colinvaux, Brian D. Galle, Philip Hackney, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Articles

A group of academics who study and write about tax-exempt organizations, including their politically related activities, has responded to an August 14, 2023 Request for Information (RFI) from the Ways and Means Committee regarding issues in connection with the advocacy activities of tax-exempt organizations. The submission describes aspects of current law and provides an appendix with a list of the authors’ relevant scholarly work. As a preliminary matter, the submission emphasizes the importance of the voice of tax-exempt organizations to a well-functioning civil society and democracy. The submission also notes that in no case do the laws applicable to tax-exempt …

Eating Is Not Political Action, Joshua Galperin, Graham Downey, D. Lee Miller

Articles

Food and environment are cultural stalwarts. Picture the red barn and solitary farmer toiling over fruited plains; or purple mountains majesty reflected in pristine waters. Agriculture and environment are core, distinct, American mythologies that we know are more intertwined than our stories reveal.

To create policy at the interface of such centrally important and overlapping American ideals, there are two options. Passive governance fosters markets in which participants make individual choices that aggregate into inadvertent collective action. In contrast, assertive governance allows the public, mediated through elected officials, to enact intentional, goal oriented policy.

American mythologies of food and environment …

Visual Rulemaking, Elizabeth G. Porter, Kathryn A. Watts

Articles

Federal rulemaking has traditionally been understood as a text-bound, technocratic process. However, as this Article is the first to uncover, rulemaking stakeholders—including agencies, the President, and members of the public—are now deploying politically tinged visuals to push their agendas at every stage of high-stakes, often virulently controversial, rulemakings. Rarely do these visual contributions appear in the official rulemaking record, which remains defined by dense text, lengthy cost-benefit analyses, and expert reports. Perhaps as a result, scholars have overlooked the phenomenon we identify here: the emergence of a visual rulemaking universe that is splashing images, GIFs, and videos across social media …