Law Commons^™

Curb Your Enthusiasm For Pigovian Taxes, Victor Fleischer

Faculty Scholarship

Pigovian (or “corrective”) taxes have been proposed or enacted on dozens of harmful products and activities: carbon, gasoline, fat, sugar, guns, cigarettes, alcohol, traffic, zoning, executive pay, and financial transactions, among others. Academics of all political stripes are mystified by the public’s inability to see the merits of using Pigovian taxes more frequently to address serious social harms, some even calling for the creation of a “Pigovian state.”

This academic enthusiasm for Pigovian taxes should be tempered. A Pigovian tax is easy to design—as a uniform excise tax—if one assumes that each individual causes the same amount of harm with …

Art Resale Royalty Options, Herbert I. Lazerow

Faculty Scholarship

Proposed federal law requires payments from the reseller of art to an artist when her work is resold. They can be conceptualized as a substitute for copyright royalties or for the profits of a joint venture between the artist and the collector. Application is analyzed by art type, especially multiples, place of sale, and nationality or residence of the seller, buyer, intermediary or artist, and by what constitutes a sale in a world of leases, exchanges, gifts, bequests, charitable donations, loans and casualty losses. If the base is gross sales price, is that the amount the seller receives, the amount …

Free Trade Then And Now, Or Still Manchester United, Maimon Schwarzschild

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Libertarianism And The Charitable Tax Subsidies, Miranda Perry Fleischer

Faculty Scholarship

Tax scholarship is largely silent about the interaction between libertarian principles and the structure of our tax system. If all taxation is indeed slavery, as Nozick suggested, why bother analyzing libertarianism for insights into our tax system? This dismissal, however, ignores the diversity of libertarian thought. To that end, this Article mines the nuances of libertarian theory for insights into one feature of our tax system: the charitable tax subsidies. One strand of libertarianism suggests that the charitable tax subsidies are in and of themselves illegitimate. Yet several other understandings of libertarianism see a role for the state to engage …

Do Economic Downturns Dampen Patent Litigation?, Alan C. Marco, Shawn P. Miller, Ted M. Sichelman

Faculty Scholarship

Recent studies estimate that the economic impact of U.S. patent litigation may be as large as $80 billion per year and that the overall rate of U.S. patent litigation has been growing rapidly over the past twenty years. And yet, the relationship of the macroeconomy to patent litigation rates has never been studied in any rigorous fashion. This lacuna is notable given that there are two opposing theories among lawyers regarding the effect of economic downturns on patent litigation. One camp argues for a substitution theory, holding that patent litigation should increase in a downturn because potential plaintiffs have a …

Free Speech And Speaker's Intent: A Reply To Kendrick., Larry Alexander

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Misconceived Search For The Meani Of "Speech"In Freedom Of Speech, Larry Alexander

Faculty Scholarship

In this (very) short essay, I establish these points: All speech is symbolic; any conduct can be used to communicate a message (i.e., symbolically); government's purpose in regulating, and not a speaker's intention to communicate, defines the realm of freedom of expression; and determining the value of speech has a denominator problem.