Law Commons^™

Private Enforcement, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang, Herbert Kritzer

Sean Farhang

Our aim in this Article is to advance understanding of private enforcement of statutory and administrative law in the United States and to raise questions that will be useful to those who are concerned with regulatory design in other countries. To that end, we briefly discuss aspects of American culture, history, and political institutions that reasonably can be thought to have contributed to the growth and subsequent development of private enforcement. We also set forth key elements of the general legal landscape in which decisions about private enforcement are made, aspects of which should be central to the choice of …

'The Better Part Of Valour Is Discretion': Should The Irs Change Or Surrender Its Oversight Of Tax-Exempt Organizations?, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Recent events have highlighted the difficulties the Internal Revenue Service faces when attempting to ensure that purportedly tax-exempt organizations in fact qualify for that status. The problems in this area go much deeper than a group of IRS employees subjecting certain organizations to greater scrutiny based on their political leanings, however. For decades members of the public, the media, the academy, and Congress have criticized the limited ability of the IRS to ensure that organizations claiming exemption from federal income tax in fact deserve that categorization. Yet examples of IRS failings in this area continue to arise with depressing frequency. …

Modern-Day Monitorships, Veronica Root

Veronica Root

When a sexual abuse scandal rocked Penn State, when Apple engaged in anticompetitive behavior, and when servicers like Bank of America improperly foreclosed upon hundreds of thousands of homeowners, each organization entered into a Modern-Day Monitorship. Modern-Day Monitorships are utilized in an array of contexts to assist in widely varying remediation efforts. They provide outsiders a unique source of information about the efficacy of the tarnished organization’s efforts to remediate misconduct. Yet despite their use in high-profile and serious matters of organizational wrongdoing, they are not an outgrowth of careful study and deliberate planning. Instead, Modern-Day Monitorships have been employed …

A Market For Tax Compliance, W. Edward Afield

W. Edward "Ted" Afield

This piece seeks to lay the framework for how such a voluntary compliance certification program would work and to discuss the benefits of such a system that are currently not being realized through the IRS’s current regulation of paid preparers. Part II summarizes in brief the current regulatory landscape for paid preparers and illustrates that the current environment falls short in providing a mechanism to allow the government to better direct its enforcement resources and to incentivize a culture of compliance among tax preparers and their clients. Part III describes in general terms how a voluntary compliance certification system should …

Justice Or Just Between Us? Empirical Evidence Of The Trade-Off Between Procedural And Interactional Justice In Workplace Dispute Resolution, Zev Eigen, Adam Seth Litwin

Adam Seth Litwin

In this article, the authors examine the relationship between an employer’s implementation of a typical dispute resolution system (DRS) and organizational justice, perceived compliance with the law, and organizational commitment. They draw on unique data from a single, geographically expansive, U.S. firm with more than 100,000 employees in more than 1,000 locations. Holding all time-constant, location-level variables in place, they find that the introduction of a DRS is associated with elevated perceptions of interactional justice but diminished perceptions of procedural justice. They also find no discernible effect on organizational commitment, but a significant boost to perceived legal compliance by the …

Who Let The Lawyers Out?: Reconstructing The Role Of The Chief Legal Officer And The Corporate Client In A Globalizing World, Constance Bagley

Constance E. Bagley