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Full-Text Articles in Law

Accountability And The Sri Lankan Civil War, Steven R. Ratner Oct 2012

Accountability And The Sri Lankan Civil War, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

Sri Lanka's civil war came to a bloody end in May 2009, with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by Sri Lanka's armed forces on a small strip of land in the island's northeast. The conflict, the product of long-standing tensions between Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils over the latter's rights and place in society, had begun in the mid-1980s and ebbed and flowed for some twenty-five years, leading to seventy to eighty thousand deaths on both sides. Government repression of Tamil aspirations was matched with ruthless LTTE tactics, including suicide bombings of civilian …


Can Consumers Control Health-Care Costs?, Mark A. Hall, Carl E. Schneider Sep 2012

Can Consumers Control Health-Care Costs?, Mark A. Hall, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The ultimate aim of health care policy is good care at good prices. Managed care failed to achieve this goal through influencing providers, so health policy has turned to the only market-based option left: treating patients like consumers. Health insurance and tax policy now pressure patients to spend their own money when they select health plans, providers, and treatments. Expecting patients to choose what they need at the price they want, consumerists believe that market competition will constrain costs while optimizing quality. This classic form of consumerism is today’s health policy watchword. This article evaluates consumerism and the regulatory mechanism …


Sales Between A Partnership And Non-Partners, Douglas A. Kahn Aug 2012

Sales Between A Partnership And Non-Partners, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

The code denies a deduction for a loss recognized on a sale or exchange between certain related parties. Two of the principal code sections that deny a deduction in that circumstance are sections 267(a)(1) and 707(b)(1)(A). Two regulatory provisions promulgated under section 267 apply the denial of a loss deduction rule to partnerships — reg. section 1.267(b)-1(b) and temp. reg. section 1.267(a)-2T(c), Question 2. I conclude that to the extent reg. section 1.267(b)-1(b) applies to section 267(a)(1), it is invalid and has been invalid since 1986. Also, two of the questions and answers in the temporary regulation are invalid.


Contribution Of A Built-In Loss To A Partnership, Douglas A. Kahn Jul 2012

Contribution Of A Built-In Loss To A Partnership, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

Before 2004, it was possible to use the partnership tax provisions of the code to shift the benefit ofa loss deduction for a decline in property valuefrom the person who incurred it to another person.One method of accomplishing that goal involvedthe contribution of depreciated property to a partnership.


Retirees Beware: Don't Worry About The British-- 2013 Is Coming, Douglas A. Kahn, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jul 2012

Retirees Beware: Don't Worry About The British-- 2013 Is Coming, Douglas A. Kahn, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

Retirees beware. The easy money policy of the Federal Open Market Committee and the 15 percent tax rate on qualified dividends have encouraaged retirees, especially middle-income retired savers, to reorient their nest eggs away from certificates of deposit, treasuries, and money market funds to dividend-paying stocks and mutual funds. According to the IRS, 43 percent of taxpayers age 65 or older reported qualified dividend income amounting to nearly half of the qualified dividend income reported by all taxpayers. By contrast, 46 percent of taxpayers age 65 or older reported net capital gains amounting to 30.5 percent of the net capital …


Effectively Curbing The Gst Exemption For Perpetual Trusts, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jun 2012

Effectively Curbing The Gst Exemption For Perpetual Trusts, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

In "Effectively Curbing the GST Exemption for Perpetual Trusts," I criticized the Treasury Department’s proposal for dealing with perpetual trusts. My objection is that Treasury’s approach would leave many trusts and much wealth GST-exempt for much longer than Congress originally intended. For perpetual trusts created before enactment, Treasury’s approach would allow them to continue to be unburdened by a durational limit. For perpetual trusts created after the effective date of enactment, Treasury’s approach would still allow them to qualify for the GST exemption, but would have the exemption expire 90 years after the trust was created.


Slicing The Shadow: A Proposal For Updating U.S. International Taxation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Jun 2012

Slicing The Shadow: A Proposal For Updating U.S. International Taxation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In the article Avi-Yonah proposed that the United States tax multinational corporations using a formulary apportionment system based solely on income derived from sales. The background for the article was drawn principally from Robert Reich’s The Work of Nations (1991), and the analysis was inspired by Stanley I. Langbein’s work on transfer pricing, especially his seminal article "The Unitary Method and the Myth of Arm’s Length," Tax Notes, Feb. 17, 1986, p. 625; see also Louis Kauder, "Intercompany Pricing and Section 482: A Proposal to Shift From Uncontrolled Comparables to Formulary Apportionment Now," Tax Notes, Jan. 25, 1993, p. 485.


Vive La Petite Difference: Camp, Obama, And Territoriality Reconsidered, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah May 2012

Vive La Petite Difference: Camp, Obama, And Territoriality Reconsidered, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The recent tax reform proposals by House Ways and Means Committee Chair David Camp, R-Mich., and by President Obama seem to offer starkly contrasting visions of how to reform the taxation of foreign-source income earned by U.S.-based multinational enterprises.1 Both acknowledge the problem, which is that U.S.-based MNEs currently have more than $1 trillion of ‘‘permanently reinvested’’ income offshore, which they cannot bring back to the U.S. without incurring a 35 percent tax penalty. However, they seem to offer radically different solutions: Under the Camp proposal, a participation exemption will enable U.S.-based MNEs to bring back the income without paying …


Symposium On International Taxation And Competitiveness: Introduction And Overview, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Nicola Sartori Jan 2012

Symposium On International Taxation And Competitiveness: Introduction And Overview, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Nicola Sartori

Articles

In February, 2012, the Treasury and White House unveiled President Obama's Framework for Business Tax Reform. A major proposal was to abolish the deferral on income earned by foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations ("CFCs").


Too Libor, Too Late: Time To Move To A Market Rate, Michael S. Barr Jan 2012

Too Libor, Too Late: Time To Move To A Market Rate, Michael S. Barr

Articles

Barclays has been fined, the British have issued their report, and now the market is anxious for everything to go on as usual with the London Interbank Offer Rate (“LIBOR”). I think that would be a serious mistake. The U.S. and British investigations into rate-fixing by Barclays revealed a widespread culture of pervasive, deceitful conduct in the setting of the most important private sector benchmark for over $300 trillion in derivative contracts and $10 trillion in adjustable-rate loans. It is highly unlikely that Barclays was the only major bank engaging in this conduct, and public investigations and private lawsuits against …


Tying And Consumer Harm, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2012

Tying And Consumer Harm, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Brantley raises important issues of law, economics, and policy about tying arrangements. Under current legal principles, Brantley was on solid ground in distinguishing between anticompetitive ties and those that might harm consumer interests without impairing competition. As a matter of economics, the court was also right to reject the claim that the cable programmers forced consumers to pay for programs the customers didn’t want. The hardest question is a policy one - whether antitrust law should ever condemn the exploitation of market power in ways that extract surplus from consumers but do not create or enlarge market power. I shall …


A Neo-Chicago Perspective On Antitrust Institutions, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2012

A Neo-Chicago Perspective On Antitrust Institutions, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

It has long been fashionable to categorize antitrust by its "schools." From the Sherman Act's passage to World War II, there were (at least) neo-classical marginalism, populism, progressivism, associationalism, business commonwealthism, and Brandeisianism. From World War II to the present, we have seen (at least, and without counting the European Ordo-Liberals) PaleoHarvard structuralism, the Chicago School, Neo-Harvard institutionalism, and Post -Chicagoans. So why not Neo-Chicago? I am already on record as suggesting the possible emergence of such a school, so it is too late for me to dismiss the entire "schools" conversation as window-dressing. This Symposium is dedicated to defining …


Beyond Microfinance: Creating Opportunities For Women At The Base Of The Pyramid, Deborah Burand Jan 2012

Beyond Microfinance: Creating Opportunities For Women At The Base Of The Pyramid, Deborah Burand

Articles

A growing number of innovative social entrepreneurs are tackling this problem by creating 'busmesses in a bag' mspired by the world's largest direct seller of beauty products - Avon. These very small franchise or consignment businesses are affordable enough to be acquired and operated by women living at the base of the economic pyramid. Just as commercial franchise networks such as Avon have helped people with httle or no experience grow mto successful business owners around the world, microfranchise and microconsignment networks may hold similar promise.


Psychological Evaluation Of Parenting Capacity In Child Welfare Proceedings, Katherine L. Rosenblum, Joshua B. Kay Jan 2012

Psychological Evaluation Of Parenting Capacity In Child Welfare Proceedings, Katherine L. Rosenblum, Joshua B. Kay

Articles

In the child welfare context, courts, attorneys, and child protection agencies often turn to psychologists to evaluate parenting capacity. As evaluators in child protection cases, psychologists may be asked to evaluate different parties for different purposes, acting as agents of the court, the child protection agency, or directly retained by the parents or the lawyer guardian ad litem. In this article we focus specifically on psychological evaluations addressing issues pertaining to parenting capacity (in contrast to, for example, assessments that focus solely on child psychological well-being or developmental status). These types of assessments may help to inform dispositional decisions, including …


Learning From The Unique And Common Challenges: Clinical Legal Education In Jordan, Nisreen Mahasneh, Kimberly A. Thomas Jan 2012

Learning From The Unique And Common Challenges: Clinical Legal Education In Jordan, Nisreen Mahasneh, Kimberly A. Thomas

Articles

Legal education worldwide is undergoing scrutiny for its failure to graduate students who have the problem-solving abilities, skills, and professional values necessary for the legal profession.1 Additionally, law schools at universities in the Middle East have found themselves in an unsettled environment, where greater demands for practical education are exacerbated by several factors such as high levels of youth unemployment. More specifically, in Jordan there is a pressing need for universities to respond to this criticism and to accommodate new or different methods of legal education. Clinical legal education is one such method.3 We use the term "clinical legal education" …


What's In The Third And Final Volume Of The New Restatement Of Property That Estate Planners Should Know About, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 2012

What's In The Third And Final Volume Of The New Restatement Of Property That Estate Planners Should Know About, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

Professor John Langbein and I have just concluded a twenty-year project for the American Law Institute to restate the law of donative transfers. The official title of our three-volume Restatement is the Restatement (Third) of Property: Wills and Other Donative Transfers.1 We refer to it herein simply as the Property Restatement. The third and final volume of the work was published in the last days of 2011. Professor Langbein spoke about certain of the initiatives in the two earlier volumes, which set forth the principles governing the law of wills, intestacy, interpretation of instruments, and the nonprobate system. The concluding …


Queer Cases Make Bad Law, James C. Hathaway, Jason Pobjoy Jan 2012

Queer Cases Make Bad Law, James C. Hathaway, Jason Pobjoy

Articles

The Refugee Convention, now adopted by 147 states, is the primary instrument governing refugee status under international law. The Convention sets a binding and nonamendable definition of which persons are entitled to recognition as refugees, and thus to enjoy the surrogate or substitute national protection of an asylum state. The core of the article 1A(2) definition provides that a refugee is a person who has a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group.” A person is thus a refugee, and entitled to the non-refoulement and other protections …


On Overreaching, Or Why Rick Perry May Save The Voting Rights Act But Destroy Affirmative Action, Ellen D. Katz Jan 2012

On Overreaching, Or Why Rick Perry May Save The Voting Rights Act But Destroy Affirmative Action, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

The State of Texas is presently staking out two positions that are not typically pursued by a single litigant. On the one hand, Texas is seeking the invalidation of the Voting Rights Act, and, on the other, the State is now defending the validity of the expansive race-based affirmative action policy it uses at its flagship university. This Essay presses the claim that Texas has increased the chance it will lose in bothTexas v. Holder andFisher v. University of Texas because it has opted to stake out markedly extreme positions in each. I argue that Texas would be more likely …


Why I Do Law Reform, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 2012

Why I Do Law Reform, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

In this Article, Professor Waggoner, newly retired, provides a retrospective on his career in law reform. He was inspired to write the Article by a number of articles by law professors explaining why they write. He contrasts law-reform work with law-review writing, pointing out that the work product of a law-reform reporter is directed to duly constituted law-making authorities. He notes that before getting into the law-reform business, he had authored or co-authored law review articles that advocated reform, but he also notes that those articles did not move the law a whit. The articles did, however, lead to his …


United States--Certain Measures Affecting Imports Of Poultry From China: The Fascinating Case That Wasn't, Donald H. Regan Jan 2012

United States--Certain Measures Affecting Imports Of Poultry From China: The Fascinating Case That Wasn't, Donald H. Regan

Articles

US–Poultry (China) was the first Panel decision dealing with an origin-specific SPS measure, or with what the United States referred to as an ‘equivalence regime’. More specifically, it was the first instance in which the basis for the challenged measure was the claimed inability of the complainant country to enforce its own food-safety rules. Unfortunately, as the litigation developed, the very interesting novel issues raised by such a measure were not discussed. This essay discusses those novel issues – in particular, what sort of scientific justification or risk assessment should be required for a measure like this, and what SPS …


Shaken Baby Syndrome, Abusive Head Trauma, And Actual Innocence: Getting It Right, Keith A. Findley, Patrick D. Barnes, David A. Moran, Waney Squier Jan 2012

Shaken Baby Syndrome, Abusive Head Trauma, And Actual Innocence: Getting It Right, Keith A. Findley, Patrick D. Barnes, David A. Moran, Waney Squier

Articles

In the past decade, the existence of shaken baby syndrome (SBS) has been called into serious question by biomechanical studies, the medical and legal literature, and the media. As a result of these questions, SBS has been renamed abusive head trauma (AHT). This is, however, primarily a terminological shift: like SBS, AHT refers to the two-part hypothesis that one can reliably diagnose shaking or abuse from three internal findings (subdural hemorrhage, retinal hemorrhage, and encephalopathy) and that one can identify the perpetrator based on the onset of symptoms. Over the past decade, we have learned that this hypothesis fits poorly …


The Question Of Courage, William I. Miller Jan 2012

The Question Of Courage, William I. Miller

Articles

Courage is first among virtues in heroic epic and in cultures of honor. Men cared to be known for their courage. It not only took courage to fight well, but the issue often being fought over was who had more of it. Courage was competitive. Men were ranked according to the degree of courage they possessed. Arguments arose as to what counted as truly courageous, what the perfect form of the virtue was, and what were lesser though still worthy semblances of it. Not only philosophers theorized about courage: warriors, politicians and spectators did so as well. The stakes were …


King Arthur Confronts Twiqy Pleading, Edward H. Cooper Jan 2012

King Arthur Confronts Twiqy Pleading, Edward H. Cooper

Articles

Rule 25 of the 1912 Equity Rules stated that "it shall be sufficient that a bill in equity shall contain ... a short and simple statement of the ultimate facts upon which the plaintiff asks relief, omitting any mere statement of evidence." Not mere conclusions, not evidence, but "ultimate facts." And, at that, not facts "constituting the cause of action." The bare words of Rule 25 could mean something quite different to a twenty-first-century audience than they meant to a twentieth-century audience. But they may serve as a foil to the challenge framed by the Supreme Court in Bell Atlantic …


A Functional Approach To Targeting And Detention, Monica Hakimi Jan 2012

A Functional Approach To Targeting And Detention, Monica Hakimi

Articles

The international law governing when states may target to kill or preventively detain nonstate actors is in disarray. This Article puts much of the blame on the method that international law uses to answer that question. The method establishes different standards in four regulatory domains: (1) law enforcement, (2) emergency, (3) armed conflict for civilians, and (4) armed conflict for combatants. Because the legal standards vary, so too may substantive outcomes; decisionmakers must select the correct domain before determining whether targeting or detention is lawful. This Article argues that the "domain method" is practically unworkable and theoretically dubious. Practically, the …


Democrats At Doj: Why Partisan Use Of The Voting Rights Act Might Not Be So Bad After All, Ellen D. Katz Jan 2012

Democrats At Doj: Why Partisan Use Of The Voting Rights Act Might Not Be So Bad After All, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

In notable ways, the ongoing dispute over redistricting in Texas offers a mirror image to one of the major redistricting battles of the last decade, only with Democratic and Republican roles reversed. In both Texas v. United States and Georgia v. Ashcroft, a state attorney general (AG) decided he would not ask the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) to approve new redistricting plans enacted in his state. In both cases, the state AGs were well aware that the Voting Rights Act (VRA) required them to obtain federal approval, known as preclearance, before changing any aspect of their state's election …


Building Resilience In Foster Children: The Role Of The Child's Advocate, Frank E. Vandervort, James Henry, Mark A. Sloane Jan 2012

Building Resilience In Foster Children: The Role Of The Child's Advocate, Frank E. Vandervort, James Henry, Mark A. Sloane

Articles

This Article provides an introduction to, and brief overview of trauma, its impact upon foster children, and steps children's advocates" can take to lessen or ameliorate the impact of trauma upon their clients. This Article begins in Part 11 by defining relevant terms. Part III addresses the prevalence of trauma among children entering the child welfare system. Part IV considers the neurodevelopmental (i.e., the developing brain) impact of trauma on children and will explore how that trauma may manifest emotionally and behaviorally. With this foundation in place, Part V discusses the need for a comprehensive trauma assessment including a thorough …


What Does Tort Law Do? What Can It Do?, Scott Hershovitz Jan 2012

What Does Tort Law Do? What Can It Do?, Scott Hershovitz

Articles

It’s not hard to describe what tort law does. As a first approximation, we might say that tort empowers those who suffer certain sorts of injuries or invasions to seek remedies from those who brought about those injuries or invasions. The challenge is to explain why tort does that, or to explain what tort is trying to do when it does that. After all, it is not obvious that we should have an institution specially concerned with the injuries and invasions that count as torts.


Is Tort Law A Form Of Institutionalized Revenge, Gabriel S. Mendlow Jan 2012

Is Tort Law A Form Of Institutionalized Revenge, Gabriel S. Mendlow

Articles

Viewed in a certain light, tort law serves primarily to give injury victims a means of imposing onerous burdens on their injurers. Through the remedy of injunction, tort law enables victims to restrict their injurers' freedom of action, and through the remedies of damages and restitution, tort law enables victims to deprive their injurers of money and other things of value. Moreover, tort law distinctively grants victims themselves the power to impose these burdens, rather than reserving prosecutorial discretion to the state. These features of tort law invite the charge that tort law is essentially a form of institutionalized revenge. …


The Financial Crisis And The Path Of Reform, Michael S. Barr Jan 2012

The Financial Crisis And The Path Of Reform, Michael S. Barr

Articles

In the lead-up to the financial crisis, the U.S. financial sector was overleveraged, short-funded, risky, and opaque. "Shadow banking" permitted institutions to avoid comprehensive supervision and capital requirements. Innovation outpaced the ability or willingness of private- and public-sector guardians to rein in risks. An asset bubble fed the system, until the market imploded in the fall of 2008. When the crisis hit, our society found itself illequipped to deal with the failure of leading financial firms. In the wake of the crisis, the Obama Administration proposed a set of reforms that were eventually embodied, in large part, in the Dodd-Frank …


Were Standard Oil's Railroad Rebates And Drawbacks Cost Justified?, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2012

Were Standard Oil's Railroad Rebates And Drawbacks Cost Justified?, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

In this essay, written for a symposium on the centennial anniversary of the Supreme Court's Standard Oil decision, I reexamine the costjustification question. In the first part, I explain why the cost-justification question is central to the entire case and its acquired and evolving historical meaning. In the second part, I review the evidence of claimed efficiencies passed on to the railroads. I conclude that there is evidence that Standard Oil passed along significant cost savings to the railroads and that these savings could have justified a portion of the rebates and drawbacks. However, I conclude that there is little …