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Full-Text Articles in Law

Back To The 1930s? The Shaky Case For Exempting Dividends, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Dec 2002

Back To The 1930s? The Shaky Case For Exempting Dividends, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

This article is based in part on the author’s U.S. Branch Report for Subject I of the 2003 Annual Congress of the International Fiscal Association, to be held next year in Sydney, Australia (forthcoming in Cahiers de droit fiscal international, 2003). He would like to thank Emil Sunley for his helpful comments on that earlier version, and Steve Bank, Michael Barr, David Bradford, Michael Graetz, and David Hasen for comments on this version. Special thanks are due to Yoram Keinan for his meticulous work on the EU regimes (see Appendix). All errors are the author’s. In this report, Prof. Avi-Yonah …


'A Time To Build' - William W. Cook And His Architects: Edward York And Philip Sawyer, Margaret A. Leary Dec 2002

'A Time To Build' - William W. Cook And His Architects: Edward York And Philip Sawyer, Margaret A. Leary

Articles

The following narrative outlines the role of donor William W. cook and the architects who built the Law Quadrangle 70 years ago. The report is excerpted and adapted from 94 Law Library Journal 395-425 (2002-26). The author is director of the University of Michigan Law School's Law Library.


All My Rights, Carl E. Schneider Jul 2002

All My Rights, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Diane Pretty was an Englishwoman in her early 40s who had been married nearly a quarter of a century. In November 1999, she learned she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-in Britain, motor neurone disease. Her condition deteriorated rapidly, and soon she was "essentially paralysed from the neck downwards." She had "virtually no decipherable speech" and was fed by a tube. She was expected to live only a few months or even weeks. AB a court later explained, however, "her intellect and capacity to make decisions are unimpaired. The final stages of the disease are exceedingly distressing and undignified. AB she is …


Who Should Watch Over Refugee Law?, James C. Hathaway Jul 2002

Who Should Watch Over Refugee Law?, James C. Hathaway

Articles

On 13 December 2001, states committed themselves" ... to consider ways that may be required to strengthen the implementation of the 1951 Convention and/or 1967 Protocol". It is wonderful that after half a century we may finally be on the verge of taking oversight of the treaty seriously.


For Haven's Sake: Reflections On Inversion Transactions, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Jun 2002

For Haven's Sake: Reflections On Inversion Transactions, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

This article discusses “inversion” transactions, in which a publicly traded U.S. corporation becomes a subsidiary of a newly established tax haven parent corporation. In the last three years, an increasing number of these transactions have been taking place, undeterred by the shareholderlevel tax imposed by the IRS on them in 1994. The article first discusses the reasons for the increasing popularity of the transactions and the tax goals they aim at achieving (primarily avoiding subpart F and U.S. earnings stripping). The article then discusses the tax policy implications of these transactions. In the short run, the article suggests that the …


How Underlying Patient Beliefs Can Affect Physician-Patient Communicaion About Prostate-Specific Antigen Testing, Michael H. Farrell, Margaret Ann Murphy, Carl E. Schneider May 2002

How Underlying Patient Beliefs Can Affect Physician-Patient Communicaion About Prostate-Specific Antigen Testing, Michael H. Farrell, Margaret Ann Murphy, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Routine cancer screening with prostate-specific antigen (PSA) is controversial, and practice guidelines recommend that men be counseled about its risks and benefits. OBJECTIVE. To evaluate the process of decision making as men react to and use information after PSA counseling. DESIGN. Written surveys and semistructured qualitative interviews before and after a neutral PSA counseling intervention. PARTICIPANTS. Men 40 to 65 years of age in southeastern Michigan were recruited until thematic saturation—that is, the point at which no new themes emerged in interviews (n = 40). RESULTS. In a paper survey, 37 of 40 participants (93%) said that they interpreted the …


Access To Financial Services In The 21st Century: Five Opportunities For The Bush Administration And The 107th Congress (Symposium On Poverty And The Law)., Michael S. Barr Jan 2002

Access To Financial Services In The 21st Century: Five Opportunities For The Bush Administration And The 107th Congress (Symposium On Poverty And The Law)., Michael S. Barr

Articles

Noticeably absent from debate over President Bush's agenda is any discussion of a central question for equality of opportunity in the 21st century. Access to financial services is the "passport" to our modem economy, as former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers oft said, but despite the enormous progress that has been made over the last decade, too many families in the United States still are left out of the financial services mainstream. There are five key opportunities that the Bush Administration, working with Congress and the private sector, can seize in order to continue to democratize access to financial services: …


Simplified Rules Of Federal Procedure?, Edward H. Cooper Jan 2002

Simplified Rules Of Federal Procedure?, Edward H. Cooper

Articles

Writing in 1924, seventy-eight volumes ago, Professor Edson R. Sunderland began The Machinery of Procedural Reform with this sentence: "Much has been said and written about the imperfections of legal procedure."' Much of his article describes circumstances in which procedural reform occurred only in response to conditions that had become "intolerable." A decade later, Congress enacted the Rules Enabling Act that still provides the framework for reforming federal procedure.2 The Enabling Act establishes a deliberate and open process for amending the rules initially adopted under its authority. It may take longer today to consider and adopt a single rule amendment …


The Conundrum Of Children, Confrontation, And Hearsay, Richard D. Friedman Jan 2002

The Conundrum Of Children, Confrontation, And Hearsay, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

The adjudication of child abuse claims poses an excruciatingly difficult conundrum. The crime is a terrible one, but false convictions are abhorrent. Often the evidence does not support a finding of guilt or innocence with sufficient clarity to allow a decision free of gnawing doubt. In many cases, a large part of the problem is that the prosecution's case depends critically on the statement or testimony of a young child. Even with respect to adult witnesses, the law of hearsay and confrontation is very perplexing, as anyone who has studied American evidentiary law and read Supreme Court opinions on the …


Proposed Amendments To Fed. R. Crim. P. 26: An Exchange: Remote Testimony, Richard D. Friedman Jan 2002

Proposed Amendments To Fed. R. Crim. P. 26: An Exchange: Remote Testimony, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Recently, the Supreme Court declined to pass on to Congress a proposed change to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 26 submitted to it by the Judicial Conference. In this Article, Professor Friedman addresses this proposal, which would allow for more extensive use of remote, video-based testimony at criminal trials. He agrees with the majority of the Court that the proposal raised serious problems under the Confrontation Clause. He also argues that a revised proposal, in addition to better protecting the confrontation rights of defendants, should include more definite quality standards, abandon its reliance on the definition of unavailability found in …


The Causal Nexus In International Refugee Law, James C. Hathaway Jan 2002

The Causal Nexus In International Refugee Law, James C. Hathaway

Articles

For all of its value as a critical mechanism of human rights protection, international refugee law is not an all-encompassing remedy. In at least two ways, the category of persons of concern to refugee law is significantly more narrow than the universe of victims of human rights abuse. First, only persons able somehow to leave their own country can be refugees. Alienage is a requirement for refugee status because of concerns about the limits of international resources and the potential for responsibility-shifting, as well as in recognition of the fundamental constraints which sovereignty still places on meaningful intervention by the …


Default Rules In Sales And The Myth Of Contracting Out, James J. White Jan 2002

Default Rules In Sales And The Myth Of Contracting Out, James J. White

Articles

In this article, I trace the dispute in the courts and before the ALI and NCCUSL over the proper contract formation and interpretation default rules. In Part II, I consider the Gateway litigation. In Part III, I deal with UCITA and the revision to Article 2. In Part IV, I consider the merits of the competing default rules.


(How) Should Trade Agreements Deal With Income Tax Issues?, Joel Slemrod, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Jan 2002

(How) Should Trade Agreements Deal With Income Tax Issues?, Joel Slemrod, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

What is the relationship between the international tax regime, as embodied in bilateral international tax treaties, and multilateral free trade agreements like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATr)?' Are their fundamental goals consistent or inconsistent? If they are inconsistent, should the tax treaties or the GATT be changed to remedy the inconsistency? If they are consistent, should the scope of either be expanded to include the other?


Federal Class Action Reform In The United States: Past And Future And Where Next?, Edward H. Cooper Jan 2002

Federal Class Action Reform In The United States: Past And Future And Where Next?, Edward H. Cooper

Articles

Predicting the likely future developments in class action practice in the federal courts of the United States must begin in the past.


Refugee Law Is Not Immigration Law, James C. Hathaway Jan 2002

Refugee Law Is Not Immigration Law, James C. Hathaway

Articles

The spectacle of the governments of Australia, Indonesia, and Norway playing pass the parcel with 400 refugees, most of them Afghans, is not an edifying one... Yet the issues of responsibility, over which the three governments are arguing, are important ones which, left unsettled in this and other cases, could only worsen the prospects for all refugees in the longer run. For the truth is that when what agreement has been painfully achieved between nations on how to deal with refugees breaks down, the natural reaction is to erect even higher barriers than already exist.


Public Vs. Proprietary Science: A Fruitful Tension?, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Richard R. Nelson Jan 2002

Public Vs. Proprietary Science: A Fruitful Tension?, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Richard R. Nelson

Articles

What should be public and what should be private in scientific research? The competitive sprint of public and private laboratories to complete the sequence of the human genome has brought this question to the fore. The same question frames the developing struggle over terms of access to human embryonic stem cell lines and the conflict between Microsoft and the open source movement over how best to promote software development. We expect such conflicts to become more widespread as the role of for-profit research expands in a broader range of scientific fields. Will science progress more swiftly and fruitfully if its …


The Bill For Rights, Carl E. Schneider Jan 2002

The Bill For Rights, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Where today is legislative ingenuity lavished more bountiully than on the titles of statutes? And where has that ingenuity been better exercised than in the name "patients' bill of rights"? Do not our dearest liberties flow from the Bill of Rights? And who more deserves similar protection than patients in the hands of an angry Managed Care Organization? And behold, both Democrats and Republicans, both President Clinton and President Bush, have summoned us to arms. The patients' bill of rights is an idea whose time has seemed to have come for several years, and only conflicts among the numerous proposals …


Justice Frank Murphy And American Labor Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jan 2002

Justice Frank Murphy And American Labor Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Working people and disfavored groups were central concerns of Frank Murphy, the last Michigan Law School graduate to sit on the United States Supreme Court. In the pages of this Review, just over a half century ago, Archibald Cox wrote of him: "It was natural ...th at his judicial work should be most significant in these two fields [labor law and civil rights] and especially in the areas where they coalesce."' In this Essay, after a brief overview of Murphy the man, his days at the University of Michigan, and his career prior to the Court appointment, I shall review …


Digital Copyright And The "Progress Of Science, Jessica D. Litman Jan 2002

Digital Copyright And The "Progress Of Science, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

Let me start with a truism: Networked digital technology has transformed information and the way we interact with it. Digital information is dynamic rather than fixed. What we think of as “documents” can change constantly. That’s challenged our notions of what it means to archive material.


Who Should Watch Over Refugee Law?, James C. Hathaway Jan 2002

Who Should Watch Over Refugee Law?, James C. Hathaway

Articles

We simply cannot afford to sell out the future of refugee protection in a hasty bid to establish something that looks, more or less, like an oversight mechanism for the Refugee Convention.


Sex, Gender, And September 11, Hilary Charlesworth, Christine M. Chinkin Jan 2002

Sex, Gender, And September 11, Hilary Charlesworth, Christine M. Chinkin

Articles

The October 2001 issue of the American Journal ofInternational Law contained several editorials on the international law implications of the hijackings of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath.' In one respect these editorials resemble other writings on these events in academic and popular media: questions of sex and gender are largely overlooked.' In our view, however, concepts of sex and gender provide a valuable perspective on these devastating actions.' We use the term "sex" here to refer to issues about women as distinct biological beings from men, and the term "gender" to encompass social understandings of femininity and masculinity. Although …


Expert Testimony On Fingerprints: An Internet Exchange, Richard D. Friedman, David H. Kaye, Jennifer Mnookin, Dale Nance, Michael Saks Jan 2002

Expert Testimony On Fingerprints: An Internet Exchange, Richard D. Friedman, David H. Kaye, Jennifer Mnookin, Dale Nance, Michael Saks

Articles

In United States v. Llera Plaza, 188 F. Supp. 2d 549 (E.D. Pa. 2002), a federal district initially limited expert opinion testimony on fingerprint identifications because the government was unable to show that such identifications were sufficiently valid and reliable under Federal Rule of Evidence 702. Then, the court withdrew the opinion. This article reproduces an exchange of notes on the initial opinion submitted by five law professors.


Statutes With Multiple Personality Disorders: The Value Of Ambiguity In Statutory Design And Interpretation, Joseph A. Grundfest, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 2002

Statutes With Multiple Personality Disorders: The Value Of Ambiguity In Statutory Design And Interpretation, Joseph A. Grundfest, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

Ambiguity serves a legislative purpose. When legislators perceive a need to compromise they can, among other strategies, "obscur[e] the particular meaning of a statute, allowing different legislators to read the obscured provisions the way they wish." Legislative ambiguity reaches its peak when a statute is so elegantly crafted that it credibly supports multiple inconsistent interpretations by legislators and judges. Legislators with opposing views can then claim that they have prevailed in the legislative arena, and, as long as courts continue to issue conflicting interpretations, these competing claims of legislative victory remain credible. Formal legal doctrine, in contrast, frames legislative ambiguity …


The Value Of Rational Nature, Donald H. Regan Jan 2002

The Value Of Rational Nature, Donald H. Regan

Articles

Kant tells us in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that rational nature is an end in itself; that it is the only thing which is unconditionally valuable; and that it is the ultimate condition of all value.1 A striking trend in recent Kant scholarship is to regard these value claims, rather than the formalism of universalizability, as the ultimate foundation of Kant’s theory.2 But does rational nature as Kant conceives it deserve such veneration? Can it really carry the world of value on its shoulders? I think not. As will become clear, I do not doubt the value …


A Footnote For Jack Dawson, James J. White, David A. Peters Jan 2002

A Footnote For Jack Dawson, James J. White, David A. Peters

Articles

Jack Dawson, known to many at Michigan as Black Jack, taught at the Law School from 1927 to 1958. Much of his work was published in the Michigan Law Review, where he served as a student editor during the 1923-24 academic year. We revisit his work and provide a footnote to his elegant writing on mistake and supervening events. In Part I, we talk a little about Jack the man. In Part II, we recite the nature and significance of his scholarly work. Part III deals briefly with the cases decided in the last twenty years by American courts on …


Banking For The Unbanked, Michael S. Barr Jan 2002

Banking For The Unbanked, Michael S. Barr

Articles

The consequences of not having access to mainstream financial services can be severe. Fim, the "unbanked" face high costs for basic financial servies. For example, a 2000 Treasury [U.S. Treasury Department] study found that a worker eaming $12,000 a year would pay approximately $250 annually just to cash payroll checks at a check cashing outlet, in addition to fees for money orders, wire transfers, bill payments, and other common transactions. Regular payments with low credit risk that could be directly deposited into bank accounts, with significantly lower payment systems costs, form the bulk of checks cashed at these check cashing …


Looking Back On Planned Parenthood V. Casey, Christina B. Whitman Jan 2002

Looking Back On Planned Parenthood V. Casey, Christina B. Whitman

Articles

Scholarship that tells us what is really at stake in the lives of people affected makes the law honest and responsive. Whether or not it directly shapes doctrine, this type of scholarship can capture imagination and influence judgment. The Michigan Law Review has published some of the best of this work: Yale Kamisar's articles on coerced confessions, Terry Sandalow's essay on affirmative action, Joe Sax and Phillip Hiestand's description of the emotional impact of living in a slum, Martha Chamallas and Linda Kerber's demonstration of how injuries that uniquely befall women have been dismissed as merely emotional wrongs, and, most …


Property In Writing, Property On The Ground: Pigs, Horses, Land, And Citizenship In The Aftermath Of Slavery, Cuba, 1880-1909, Rebecca J. Scott, Michael Zeuske Jan 2002

Property In Writing, Property On The Ground: Pigs, Horses, Land, And Citizenship In The Aftermath Of Slavery, Cuba, 1880-1909, Rebecca J. Scott, Michael Zeuske

Articles

In the most literal sense, the abolition of slavery marks the moment when one human being cannot be held as property by another human being, for it ends the juridical conceit of a "person with a price." At the same time, the aftermath of emancipation forcibly reminds us that property as a concept rests on relations among human beings, not just between people and things. The end of slavery finds former masters losing possession of persons, and former slaves acquiring it. But it also finds other resources being claimed and contested, including land, tools, and animals-resources that have shaped former …


Building A Foreign Law Collection At The University Of Michigan Law Library, 1910-1960, Margaret A. Leary Jan 2002

Building A Foreign Law Collection At The University Of Michigan Law Library, 1910-1960, Margaret A. Leary

Articles

Ms. Leary describes the vision, energy, imagination, and techniques of the dedicated people who built an eminent foreign law collection at the University of Michigan Law Library. She also uses Michigan as an example to illustrate the development of libraries and librarianship nationally.


How Theology Might Learn From Law (Symposium: The Theology Of The Practice Of Law), James Boyd White Jan 2002

How Theology Might Learn From Law (Symposium: The Theology Of The Practice Of Law), James Boyd White

Articles

I want to start today with an account of the way lawyers think and speak, and then ask whether it might be useful for the theologically minded to take these practices and procedures seriously as a ground of comparison from which to look at their own. In doing this I shall look at the practice of law with an emphasis not on its social effects or ethical difficulties but on the nature of the activity itself, viewed from the inside, asking in particular what kind of knowledge it requires and creates in its practitioner. What does the lawyer learn from …