Law Commons^™

Tax Preparation Services For Low- And Moderate-Income Households: Preliminary Evidence From A New Survey, Michael S. Barr, Jane K. Dokko

Articles

Recently, researchers have begun to examine the financial service patterns of low- and moderate-income households. These behaviors are of interest because high cost financial services, barriers to saving, the lack of insurance, and credit constraints contribute to poverty and other socioeconomic conditions . Many low- and moderate-income households use alterna­tive financial service (AFS) providers, such as check cashers, for their financial services needs. Tax preparation firms are among the important financial service providers in the lives of low-income households. Such firms help households navigate the complicated process of filing their taxes, and many low-income households obtain sizeable tax refunds. At …

Dick Wellman -- A Personal Remembrance, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

Dick Wellman was my teacher, mentor, collaborator, colleague, and friend. My law school class at The University of Michigan Law School voted Dick the most enthusiastic member of the faculty, and he was that. Dick devoted his professional life to teaching and scholarship, as most law professors do, but he had another career: Dick was a key player in the Uniform Law Conference,' an organization dedicated to improving private law and promoting legislative uniformity among the states.2

The War On Terrorism And International Humanitarian Law, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

My focus today is on the broad question of the so-called "war on terrorism" and how it fits within the framework of the rules of international humanitarian law. Are these laws applicable? There have been a variety of claims since September 11th that humanitarian law needs some kind of revision. Some making this claim assert that the current legal regime is too generous to terrorists, while others insist that it is too generous to governments. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has even convened various groups of experts to discuss this issue and the assumption among many has …

Peoples' Tribunals: Legitimate Or Rough Justice, Christine M. Chinkin

Articles

The article examines the use of Peoples' Tribunals in seeking access to justice where none has been possible through more formal methods. It uses as illustration the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal that sought justice for the so-called comfort women, the primarily Asian women who were subjected to sexual slavery by the Japanese military before and during World War Two. The article briefly recounts the fate of the comfort women and then considers the legal and practical obstacles they faced in accessing justice at the end of the War. It outlines how towards the end of the 20th century the …

Global Administrative Law: The View From Basel, Michael S. Barr, Geoffrey P. Miller

Articles

International law-making by sub-national actors and regulatory networks of bureaucrats has come under attack as lacking in accountability and legitimacy. Global administrative law is emerging as an approach to understanding what international organizations and national governments do, or ought to do, to respond to the perceived democracy deficit in international law-making. This article examines the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a club of central bankers who meet to develop international banking capital standards and to develop supervisory guidance. The Basel Committee embodies many of the attributes that critics of international law-making lament. A closer examination, however, reveals a structure of …

Is The Report Of Lazarus's Death Premature? A Reply To Cameron And Postlewaite, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

Over a year ago, Ms. Faith Cuenin and I wrote an article in this Review (which I hereafter refer to as the "2004 Article") about the tax treatment of guaranteed payments under section 707(c) that are made in kind.' We concluded that a partnership does not recognize gain or loss on the making of a guaranteed payment with appreciated or depreciated property. We also concluded that the partner's basis in the property received will equal its fair market value at the time of payment, and that the payment does not affect the partner's outside basis in his partnership interest except …

From Laredo To Fort Worth: Race, Politics And The Texas Redistricting Case, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

LULAC v. Perry held that Texas violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when it displaced nearly 100,000 Latino residents from a congressional district in Laredo to protect the Republican incumbent they refused to support. At the same time, the Justices let stand the dismantling of a so-called “coalition” district in Fort Worth where African-American voters comprising a minority of the district’s population allegedly enjoyed effective control in deciding the district’s representative. Only Justice Kennedy supported the outcome in both Laredo and Fort Worth. His opinion marks the first time that he, or indeed a majority of the Justices, …

Videotaping Investigative Interviews Of Children In Cases Of Child Sexual Abuse: One Community's Approach, Frank E. Vandervort

Articles

Legal scholars have long debated the efficacy and necessity of videotaping investigative interviews with children when allegations of child sexual abuse have surfaced. This debate has been advanced from the perspectives of adversaries in the criminal justice system, prosecutors and defense advocates. Absent from this debate has been the perspective of the broader community. This debate has failed to consider how other investigative tools might be used in conjunction with videotaping to advance the interests of the community. Moreover, the debate about videotaping has taken place with little actual data. This Article seeks to accomplish two goals. First, it seeks …

Second Best Damage Action Deterrence, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Potential defendants faced with the prospect of tort or tort-like damage actions can reduce their liability exposure in a number of ways. Prior scholarship has dwelled primarily on the possibility that they may respond to the threat of liability by augmenting the amount of care they take.1 Defendants (I limit myself to defendants for simplicity) will increase their expenditures on care, so the theory goes, when those expenditures yield sufficient liability-reducing dividends; more care decreases liability exposure by simultaneously making it less likely that the actors will be found to have behaved tortiously in the event of an accident and …

Civil Rights Injunctions Over Time: A Case Study Of Jail And Prison Court Orders, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Lawyers obtained the first federal court orders governing prison and jail conditions in the 1960s. This and other types of civil rights injunctive practice flourished in the 1970s and early 1980s. But a conventional wisdom has developed that such institutional reform litigation peaked long ago and is now moribund. This Article's longitudinal account of jail and prison court-order litigation establishes that, to the contrary, correctional court-order litigation did not decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Rather, there was essential continuity from the early 1980s until1996, when enactment of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) reduced both the stock …

Why China?: A Startling Transformation, Nicholas C. Howson

Articles

Another vantage point—the view from inside China— reveals a process of transformation even more startling and far-reaching than the external manifestations of China’s rise.

China's Acquisitions Abroad - Global Ambitions, Domestic Effects, Nicholas C. Howson

Articles

In the past year or so, the world has observed with seeming trepidation what appears to be a new phenomenon-China's "stepping out" into the world economy. The move, labeled the "Going Out Strategy" by Chinese policy makers, sees China acting in the world not just as a trader of commodities and raw materials, or the provider of inexpensively-produced consumer goods for every corner of the globe, but as a driven and sophisticated acquirer of foreign assets and the equity interests in the legal entities that control such assets. The New Yorker magazine, ever topical and appropriately humorous, highlighted this attention …

The Totality Of The Circumstances Of The Debtor's Financial Situation In A Post-Means Test World: Trying To Bridge The Wedoff/Culhane & White Divide, John A. E. Pottow

Articles

Bankruptcy Judge Eugene Wedoff and Creighton Law School professors Marianne Culhane and Michaela White engage in a spirited debate over a series of law review articles about the proper scope of motions to dismiss a debtor's petition under section 707(b) of the freshly revised Bankruptcy Code. It is an interesting and provocative dialogue, with both sides advancing their respective positions persuasively. As a result, I find myself in the unfortunate position of wanting to agree with both. Since that is impossible, however, this brief article is my attempt to find a middle ground between their two positions. It does so …

Greed And Pride In International Bankruptcy: The Problems Of And Proposed Solutions To 'Local Interests', John A. E. Pottow

Articles

The collapses of Yukos, Parmalat, and other international juggernauts have focused scholarly attention on the failure of multinational enterprises. Even what one might consider "American" companies, such as Chicago-based United Airlines, have made clear in their restructuring plans that their operations have profound effects on the dozens of nations around the globe where they transact business. Government and quasi-government reform efforts to regulate these cross-border insolvencies have abounded, including among others, the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency. UNCITRAL is also building on World Bank and INSOL efforts at promulgating a Legislative Guide for "best practices" bankruptcy codes. Scholars vary …

Teaching Adr In The Labor Field In China, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

My first visit to China, in 1994, was purely as a tourist, and came about almost by accident. In late September of that year I attended the XIV World Congress of the International Society for Labor Law and Social Security in Seoul, South Korea. In the second week of October I was scheduled to begin teaching a one-term course in American law as a visiting professor at Cambridge University in England. Despite my hazy notions of geography, I realized it made no sense to return to the United States for the intervening week. The obvious solution was to continue flying …

Miranda's Reprieve: How Rehnquist Spared The Landmark Confession Case, But Weakened Its Impact, Yale Kamisar

Articles

June marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most praised, most maligned-and probably one of the most misunderstood-U.S. Supreme Court cases in American history, Miranda v. Arizona. The opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren conditions police questioning of people in custody on the giving of warnings about the right to remain silent, the right to counsel and the waiver of those rights. 384 U.S. 436. This ruling represents a compromise of sorts between the former elusive, ambiguous and subjective voluntariness/totality-of-the-circumstances test and extreme proposals that would have eliminated police interrogation altogether. But William H. Rehnquist didn't see Miranda that …

Guidance Documents And Regulatory Beneficiaries, Nina A. Mendelson

Articles

Federal agencies rely heavily on guidance documents, and their volume is massive. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recently catalogued over 2000 and 1600 such documents, respectively, issued between 1996 and 1999. These documents can range from routine matters, such as how employees should maintain correspondence files, to broad policies on program standards, implementation, and enforcement. Documents in the latter category include Education Department policies on Title IX implementation, Environmental Protection Agency policies on hazardous waste cleanup, the Food and Drug Administration's policies on food safety and broadcast advertising of pharmaceuticals, and many more.Although these …

Prevention Of Double Deductions Of A Single Loss: Solutions In Search Of A Problem, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn

Articles

In the current tax system, a corporation is treated as a separate taxable entity. This tax system is sometimes referred to as an entity tax or a double tax system. Since a corporation is a separate and distinct entity from its owners, the shareholders, the default rule is that transfers between them are treated as realization events. Without a specific Internal Revenue Code (Code) provision providing otherwise, such transactions will also require the parties to recognize the realized gain or loss. Congress has enacted several nonrecognition corporate provisions when forcing the recognition of income could prevent changes to the form …

The Regulation Of Public Auditing In Canada And The United States: Self-Regulation Or Government Regulation?, Adam C. Pritchard, Poonam Puri

Other Publications

Auditors play an important role as gatekeepers to public capital markets. By attesting to the accuracy of a company’s financial statements, the auditor lends its credibility to that company and its financial health.

Both market and legal mechanisms play a role in ensuring that auditors perform high quality audits. Reputation is critical in the market for auditors. In addition, potential legal liability to issuers and investors arising from contract, tort, and statutory securities laws creates incentives for auditors to conduct high quality audits. Potential discipline by professional self-regulatory bodies also plays a part. Striking the appropriate balance among market-based, legal, …

Comparative Fiscal Federalism: What Can The U.S. Supreme Court And The European Court Of Justice Learn From Each Other's Tax Jurisprudence?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In October 2005, a group of distinguished tax experts from the European Union and the United States, who had never met before, convened at the University of Michigan Law School for a conference on "Comparative Fiscal Federalism: Comparing the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Justice Tax Jurisprudence." The purpose of the conference was to shed comparative light on the very different approaches taken by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the U.S. Supreme Court to the question of fiscal federalism. The conference was sponsored by the U-M Law School, U-M's European Union Center, and Harvard Law School's …

The (Legal) Pains Of Vioxx: Why Product Liability Can Make Products More Dangerous, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

Comparing the experience of Vioxx and Celebrex leads Omri Ben-Shahar to think that stiff product liability has the perverse effect of inducing manufacturers of defective products to leave these products on the market, rather than withdraw them.

The Report Of The President's Advisory Panel On Federal Tax Reform: A Critical Assessment And A Proposal, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

ON November 1, 2005, The President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform ("Panel") submitted its report ("Report") to the Secretary of the Treasury.1 At 272 pages, this is the most important and wide-ranging plan to reform the United States federal tax system since Blueprints for Basic Tax Reform (1977).2 While prospects for immediate action appear dim, the Report will no doubt be the basis of discussion of federal tax reform for a long time to come.

The Three Goals Of Taxation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The current debate in the United States about whether the income tax should be replaced with a consumption tax has been waged on the traditional grounds for evaluating tax policy: efficiency, equity, and administrability. For example, Joseph Bankman and David Weisbach recently argued for the superiority of an ideal consumption tax over an ideal income tax on three grounds: First, that the consumption tax is more efficient because it does not discriminate between current and future consumption,' while both income and consumption taxes have identical effect on work effort. Second, that the consumption tax is at least as good at …

They're Playing A Tango, John W. Reed

Other Publications

This essay is based on a talk delivered by Professor Reed at the State Bar of Michigan's Annual Meeting on September 22, 2005, which was published in Michigan B. J. 84, no. 11 (2005): 16-8.

Taxation And Multinational Activity: New Evidence, New Interpretations, Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

In the midst of rapid integration and globalization, multinational firms still face tax systems that differ among countries, and these differences have the potential to affect major investment and financing decisions. This research covers a wide range of topics, including the impact of indirect taxes as well as of corporate income taxes, the sensitivity of financing decisions to tax rates, the effects of taxes on repatriation policies, the demand for, and impact of, tax havens, and the use of indirect ownership as a means of avoiding taxes. The behavior of US multinational firms as revealed by the evidence collected by …