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The Taxation Of A Gift Or Inheritance From An Employer., Douglas A. Kahn Jan 2011

The Taxation Of A Gift Or Inheritance From An Employer., Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

The focus of this article is to examine the following questions: 1. whether, despite its unrestricted language, section 102(c) does not apply to some gratuitous transfers to an employee; 2. if so, what are the exceptions to section 102(c); and 3. when section 102(c) does not apply to a transfer, whether it will be excluded from income. Part II of this article examines the conditions under which a gratuitous transfer to an employee will be excluded from income under the Duberstein standard and under the normal tax treatment of testamentary transfers -- in other words, how the section 102(a) gift …


Patent Costs And Unlicensed Use Of Patented Inventions, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Jan 2011

Patent Costs And Unlicensed Use Of Patented Inventions, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Recent commentators have observed, and sometimes lamented, significant gaps between the formal reach of the patent system and the practical exclusionary effect of patent law. It is costly for technology developers to obtain and assert patents, for technology users to identify the patents they might be infringing and to clear rights, and for the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to find patent-defeating prior art. The costs of the patent system provide shelter for infringing behavior that might otherwise lead to either licensing or liability, perhaps mitigating excesses in the patent system while retaining strong rights that motivated owners may enforce. …


Ask And What Shall Ye Receive? A Guide For Using And Interpreting What Jurors Tell Us, Barbara O'Brien, Samuel R. Sommers, Phoebe C. Ellsworth Jan 2011

Ask And What Shall Ye Receive? A Guide For Using And Interpreting What Jurors Tell Us, Barbara O'Brien, Samuel R. Sommers, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

We review the extensive body of studies relying on jurors' self-reports in interviews or questionnaires, with a focus on potential threats to validity for researchers seeking to answer particularly provocative questions such as the influence of race in jury decision-making. We then offer a more focused case study comparison of interview and questionnaire data with behavioral data in the domain of race and juror decision-making. Our review suggests that the utility of data obtained from juror interviews and questionnaire responses varies considerably depending on the question under investigation. We close with an evaluation of the types of empirical questions most …


Searching For Effective And Constitutional Responses To Homegrown Terrorists, Barbara L. Mcquade Jan 2011

Searching For Effective And Constitutional Responses To Homegrown Terrorists, Barbara L. Mcquade

Articles

Thank you, Brad, and thank you to the Law Review for inviting me here today. Protecting national security while honoring civil liberties is the greatest challenge of our generation. As a prosecutor, I am charged with protecting national security, and I understand the importance of protecting the public from acts of terrorism. But prosecutors are also sworn to uphold the Constitution. In fact, at the U.S. Attorney's Office, we are also charged with prosecuting violations of civil rights. So in every case, we understand how important it is to protect people's constitutional rights, such as First Amendment rights to free …


The Illusory Right To Counsel, Eve Brensike Primus Jan 2011

The Illusory Right To Counsel, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

Imagine a woman wrongly accused of murdering her fianc6. She is arrested and charged with first-degree murder. If convicted, she faces a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Her family scrapes together enough money to hire two attorneys to represent her at trial. There is no physical evidence connecting her to the murder, but the prosecution builds its case on circumstantial inferences. Her trial attorneys admit that they were so cocky and confident that she would be acquitted that they did not bother to investigate her case or file a single pre-trial motion. Rather, they waived the …


Disentangling Administrative Searches, Eve Brensike Primus Jan 2011

Disentangling Administrative Searches, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

Everyone who has been screened at an international border, scanned by an airport metal detector, or drug tested for public employment has been subjected to an administrative search. Since September 11th, the government has increasingly invoked the administrative search exception to justify more checkpoints, unprecedented subway searches, and extensive wiretaps. As science and technology advance, the frequency and scope of administrative searches will only expand. Formulating the boundaries and requirements of administrative search doctrine is therefore a matter of great importance. Yet the rules governing administrative searches are notoriously unclear. This Article seeks to refocus attention on administrative searches and …


Eric Stein, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jan 2011

Eric Stein, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Eric Stein was one of the wisest, shrewdest, most broadly knowledgeable, and most benign human beings I have ever known. Since others can speak more authoritatively about Eric's scholarship and his contributions to international law, I am going to concentrate on him personally and on his relationships with his Michigan Law School colleagues.


The Unaffordable Health Care Act - A Reponse To Professors Bagley And Horwitz, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn Jan 2011

The Unaffordable Health Care Act - A Reponse To Professors Bagley And Horwitz, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn

Articles

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 has stirred considerable controversy. In the public debate over the program, many of its proponents have defended it by focusing on what is sometimes called the “free-rider” problem. In a prior article, we contended that the free-rider problem has been greatly exaggerated and was not a significant factor in the congressional decision to adopt the Act. We maintained that the free-rider issue is a red herring advanced to trigger an emotional attraction to the Act and distract attention from the actual issues that favor and disfavor its adoption. In a recently …


Exclusion From Income Of Compensation For Services And Pooling Of Labor Occurring In A Noncommercial Setting, Douglas A. Kahn Jan 2011

Exclusion From Income Of Compensation For Services And Pooling Of Labor Occurring In A Noncommercial Setting, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

When cash is received for services, it typically will constitute gross income to the recipient.' But what if the payments are made in a noncommercial setting such as the payment by a parent to a child for mowing the lawn or performing household chores? As discussed later in this Essay, there are reasons to conclude that such payments do not constitute income. The problem of how to treat receipts from a noncommercial activity frequently arises in the context of an exchange of services. A similar problem arises when services are provided by several persons pursuant to a pooling of labor …


Foreword: Rulemaking, Democracy, And Torrents Of E-Mail, Nina A. Mendelson Jan 2011

Foreword: Rulemaking, Democracy, And Torrents Of E-Mail, Nina A. Mendelson

Articles

This Foreword is meant as an initial foray into the question of what agencies should do with mass public comments, particularly on broad questions of policy. Part I discusses the extent to which congressional control, presidential control, and agency procedures themselves can ensure that agency decisions are democratically responsive. In view of shortcomings in both congressional and presidential control, I underscore the need to focus closely on rulemaking procedures as a source of democratic responsiveness. The possibility that agencies may be systematically discounting certain public submissions raises difficulties, and I present some examples. Part II makes a preliminary case that …


Juvenile Life Without Parole: Unconstitutional In Michigan?, Kimberly A. Thomas Jan 2011

Juvenile Life Without Parole: Unconstitutional In Michigan?, Kimberly A. Thomas

Articles

Last term, in Graham v Florida,1 the United States Supreme Court found unconstitutional the sentence of life without parole for a juvenile who committed a non-homicide offense. This attention to the sentencing of juvenile offenders is a continuation of the Court's decision in Roper v Simmons,2 in which the Court held that juvenile offenders could not constitutionally receive the death penalty. This scrutiny should be a signal to Michigan to examine its own jurisprudence on juveniles receiving sentences of life without parole. Michigan has the second-highest number of persons serving sentences of life without parole for offenses committed when they …


Child Pornography And Community Notification: How An Attempt To Reduce Crime Can Achieve The Opposite, J. J. Prescott Jan 2011

Child Pornography And Community Notification: How An Attempt To Reduce Crime Can Achieve The Opposite, J. J. Prescott

Articles

Community notification laws, designed to reduce the frequency of sex offenses by alerting potential victims to nearby threats and by encouraging citizen monitoring of potential recidivists, may make sense in the context of traditional sex offenses and sex offenders. But child pornography crimes and the individuals who commit them are different, and they differ from archetypal sex crimes and criminals in ways that may unintentionally cause community notification laws to facilitate crime rather than inhibit it. Child porn offenses typically involve money or trade, and their commission hinges on successfully conspiring with others. Markets and information are necessary building blocks …


Do Sex Offender Registration And Notification Laws Affect Criminal Behavior?, J. J. Prescott, Jonah E. Rockoff Jan 2011

Do Sex Offender Registration And Notification Laws Affect Criminal Behavior?, J. J. Prescott, Jonah E. Rockoff

Articles

Sex offenders have become the targets of some of the most far-reaching and novel crime legislation in the U.S. Two key innovations in recent decades have been registration and notification laws which, respectively, require that convicted sex offenders provide valid contact information to law enforcement authorities, and that information about sex offenders be made public. Using the evolution of state law during the 1990s and 2000s, we study how registration and notification affect the frequency of reported sex offenses and the incidence of such offenses across victims. We find evidence that registration reduces the frequency of sex offenses by providing …


Pretrial Incentives, Post-Conviction Review, And Sorting Criminal Prosecutions By Guilt Or Innocence, Samuel R. Gross Jan 2011

Pretrial Incentives, Post-Conviction Review, And Sorting Criminal Prosecutions By Guilt Or Innocence, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

The fundamental problem with false convictions is that they are unobserved, and in general, unobservable. We don't spot them when they happen-if we did, they wouldn't happen-and in most cases we can't identify them after the fact. We have no general reliable test for innocence or guilt; if we did, we'd use it at trial. As result, we often say that we don't know for sure whether a convicted criminal defendant is innocent or guilty, or even that we can't know for sure. But this isn't exactly true-or rather, its truth depends on who we mean by "we."


Tribute: Dores Mccrary Mccree, David L. Chambers Jan 2011

Tribute: Dores Mccrary Mccree, David L. Chambers

Articles

Dores McCree made your day a little better whenever she walked into a room. When you talked with her, you knew her goal was simply to enjoy your company, not to get something out of you, and not to show herself off. She was good at talking and good at listening. She'd cock her head slightly and ask questions to which she really cared about the answers. On more than one occasion, I had to jockey with others to be able to sit with her at a dinner.


Taxation As Regulation: Carbon Tax, Health Care Tax, Bank Tax And Other Regulatory Taxes, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Jan 2011

Taxation As Regulation: Carbon Tax, Health Care Tax, Bank Tax And Other Regulatory Taxes, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

This paper addresses three questions: 1. Is regulation a legitimate goal for taxation? 2. Which tax is best suited for regulation? 3. Would it be better to allocate just one goal per tax among the major taxes (individual and corporate income tax and VAT)? It then analyzes the proposed bank tax and the enacted health care tax as regulatory taxes, and concludes that the first is desirable (as is a carbon tax) but the second is not.


Rural Hospital Ownership: Medical Service Provision, Market Mix, And Spillover Effects, Jill R. Horwitz, Austin Nichols Jan 2011

Rural Hospital Ownership: Medical Service Provision, Market Mix, And Spillover Effects, Jill R. Horwitz, Austin Nichols

Articles

Objective. To test whether nonprofit, for-profit, or government hospital ownership affects medical service provision in rural hospital markets, either directly or through the spillover effects of ownership mix. Data Sources/Study Setting. Data are from the American Hospital Association, U.S. Census, CMS Healthcare Cost Report Information System and Prospective Payment System Minimum Data File, and primary data collection for geographic coordinates. The sample includes all nonfederal, general medical, and surgical hospitals located outside of metropolitan statistical areas and within the continental United States from 1988 to 2005. Study Design. We estimate multivariate regression models to examine the effects of (1) hospital …


U.S. Defense Contracts During The Tax Expenditure Battles Of The 1980s, Susan J. Guthrie, James R. Hines Jr. Jan 2011

U.S. Defense Contracts During The Tax Expenditure Battles Of The 1980s, Susan J. Guthrie, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

This paper considers the impact of the tax treatment of military contractors on the cost and timing of U.S. military procurement. Prior to the early 1980s, taxpayers were permitted to defer tax obligations on profits earned from long-term contracts. Legislation passed in 1982, 1986, and 1987 required that at least 70 percent of the profits earned on long-term contracts be taxed as accrued, thereby significantly reducing the tax benefits associated with long term contracting. Comparing contracts that were ineligible for these tax benefits with those that were eligible, it appears that between 1981–1989 the duration of U.S. Department of Defense …


A Response To The Durham Statement Two Years Later, Margaret A. Leary Jan 2011

A Response To The Durham Statement Two Years Later, Margaret A. Leary

Articles

This response to The Durham Statement Two Years Later, published in the Winter 2011 issue of Law Library Journal, addresses that article's call for an end to print publication of law journals and its failure to sufficiently consider the national and international actors and developments that will determine the future of digital libraries.


Provigil: A Commentary, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2011

Provigil: A Commentary, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Michael Carrier's case study on Provigil' offers new support for the view that Big Pharma is to blame for stymieing competition, retarding innovation, and inflating prices in the drug industry. Carrier argues that Cephalon was able to thwart generic entry by a combination of anticompetitive strategies. It entered into a reverse payment settlement agreement with generics seeking to enter the market. These settlements purported to allow generic entry before the expiration of the patent period, but, according to Carrier, the promise of early entry was negated by the second prong of Cephalon's anticompetitive strategy. During the time that it had …


Corrective Justice For Civil Recourse Theorists, Scott Hershovitz Jan 2011

Corrective Justice For Civil Recourse Theorists, Scott Hershovitz

Articles

Though I think the civil recourse critique of the leading conceptions of corrective justice is in some respects misguided, I do not want to join up to the thrust and parry here. My aim in this Article is to show that there is a better conception of corrective justice than the ones that Goldberg and Zipursky target, that this conception of corrective justice is untouched by the civil recourse critique, and that civil recourse is best understood as a corrective justice account of tort. In other words, I aim to explain corrective justice for civil recourse theorists.


Harry Potter And The Trouble With Tort Theory, Scott Hershovitz Jan 2011

Harry Potter And The Trouble With Tort Theory, Scott Hershovitz

Articles

Economists argue that tort law promotes an efficient allocation of resources to safety, while philosophers contend that it dispenses corrective justice. Despite the divide, the leading tort theories share something in common: they are grounded in an unduly narrow view of tort. Both economists and philosophers confuse the institution of tort law with the rules that are distinctive of it. They offer theories of tort's substantive rules, but for the most part ignore the procedures by which those rules are implemented. As a consequence, both miss and misconstrue much about tort law. The problem is particularly acute for economists. They …


The Price Of Pay To Play In Securities Class Actions, Adam C. Pritchard, Stephen J. Choi, Drew T. Johnson-Skinner Jan 2011

The Price Of Pay To Play In Securities Class Actions, Adam C. Pritchard, Stephen J. Choi, Drew T. Johnson-Skinner

Articles

We study the effect of campaign contributions to lead plaintiffs—“pay to play”—on the level of attorney fees in securities class actions. We find that state pension funds generally pay lower attorney fees when they serve as lead plaintiffs in securities class actions than do individual investors serving in that capacity, and larger funds negotiate for lower fees. This differential disappears, however, when we control for campaign contributions made to offcials with infuence over state pension funds. This effect is most pronounced when we focus on state pension funds that receive the largest campaign contributions and that associate repeatedly as lead …


Narrowing The Tax Gap Through Presumptive Taxation, Kyle D. Logue, Gustavo G. Vettori Jan 2011

Narrowing The Tax Gap Through Presumptive Taxation, Kyle D. Logue, Gustavo G. Vettori

Articles

Can the United States government significantly reduce the federal tax gap? This question has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention over the years and has been the focus of numerous government reports. The "tax gap" is the official term for the Treasury Department's estimate of the difference between what American taxpayers should pay to the federal government in a given tax year (that is, the amount of tax they owe, based on a reasonable interpretation of existing tax laws as applied to particular taxpayers' circumstances) and what they actually pay. This estimate is derived from painstaking and detailed audits …


Hanging On By A Thread: The Exclusionary Rule (Or What's Left Of It) Lives For Another Day, David A. Moran Jan 2011

Hanging On By A Thread: The Exclusionary Rule (Or What's Left Of It) Lives For Another Day, David A. Moran

Articles

Back when there was a Soviet Union, foreign intelligence officers would anxiously await the May Day parade in Moscow to see who would be standing next to the chairman of the Communist Party and who would be missing from the reviewing platform altogether. Since the Soviet government and the statecontrolled press published very little about what was really going on in the halls of state power, this was considered the most reliable way to determine who was in or out of favor and, by extension, how the domestic and foreign policies of the world's second most powerful country were likely …


Another Word On The President's Statutory Authority Over Agency Action, Nina A. Mendelson Jan 2011

Another Word On The President's Statutory Authority Over Agency Action, Nina A. Mendelson

Articles

In this short symposium contribution, I attempt first to add some further evidence on the interpretive question. That evidence weighs strongly, in my view, in favor of Kagan's conclusion that the terminology does not communicate any particular congressional intent regarding presidential directive authority. Assessed in context, the "whole code" textual analysis presented by Stack does not justify the conclusion that Congress, by delegating to an executive branch official, meant to limit presidential control. Independent agencies excluded, interpreting the terms of simple and presidential delegations to speak to directive authority fails, in general, to make sense of the various statutes. Absent …


Introduction To Special Symposium Feature: Successes And Failures In International Human Trafficking Law, Bridgette A. Carr Jan 2011

Introduction To Special Symposium Feature: Successes And Failures In International Human Trafficking Law, Bridgette A. Carr

Articles

The Essays in this issue of the Michigan Journal of International Law showcase the results of an important and historic symposium held at the University of Michigan Law School in February 2011. Acknowledging the ten-year anniversary of both the international Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons (Trafficking Protocol), and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in the United States, the conference brought together an extraordinary group of legal scholars, government officials, and practitioners to examine the successes and failures in international human trafficking law. The need to evaluate both the successes and failures in antitrafficking law is …


Slavery And The Law In Atlantic Perspective: Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence, And Justice, Rebecca J. Scott Jan 2011

Slavery And The Law In Atlantic Perspective: Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence, And Justice, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

The four articles in this special issue experiment with an innovative set of questions and a variety of methods in order to push the analysis of slavery and the law into new territory. Their scope is broadly Atlantic, encompassing Suriname and Saint-Domingue/Haiti, New York and New Orleans, port cities and coffee plantations. Each essay deals with named individuals in complex circumstances, conveying their predicaments as fine-grained microhistories rather than as shocking anecdotes. Each author, moreover, demonstrates that the moments when law engaged slavery not only reflected but also influenced larger dynamics of sovereignty and jurisprudence.


Citizens United And The Corporate Form, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Jan 2011

Citizens United And The Corporate Form, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In Citizens United vs. FEC, the Supreme Court struck down a Federal statute banning direct corporate expenditures on political campaigns. The decision has been widely criticized and praised as a matter of First Amendment law. But it is also interesting as another step in the evolution of our legal views of the corporation. This article argues that by viewing Citizens United through the prism of theories about the corporate form, it is possible to see that the majority and the dissent departed from previous Supreme Court jurisprudence on the First Amendment rights of corporations. It is also possible to then …


Tax Policy And The Efficiency Of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad, Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley, James R. Hines Jr. Jan 2011

Tax Policy And The Efficiency Of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad, Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

Deferral of U.S. taxes on foreign source income is commonly characterized as a subsidy to foreign investment, as reflected in its inclusion among “tax expenditures” and occasional calls for its repeal. This paper analyzes the extent to which tax deferral and other policies inefficiently subsidize U.S. direct investment abroad. Investments are dynamically inefficient if they consistently generate less in returns to investors than they absorb in new investment funds. From 1982–2010, repatriated earnings from foreign affiliates exceeded net capital investments by $1.1 trillion in 2010 dollars, and from 1950–2010, repatriated earnings and net interest from foreign affiliates exceeded net equity …