Jurisprudence Commons^™

Love In The Time Of Covid, Jeanne L. Schroeder

Articles

A striking aspect of the current American cultural divide is divergent attitudes towards expertise, generally, and masking and vaccination to mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic, specifically. Liberal pundits profess shock that Red State America won’t just ‘trust the science’. On the right, politicians and television personalities reject mandates in the name of ‘freedom’.

Lacanian discourse theory gives insight into this. The rejection of expertise is an example of an ‘hysteric discourse’ challenging a ‘university discourse’: the regime of experts. An hysteric discourse is a critique of rules imposed by experts by the subjects-subjected-to them. Hysteria can lead, in turn, to a …

Travelers, Reasoned Textualism, And The New Jurisprudence Of Erisa Preemption, Edward A. Zelinsky

Articles

Upon the enactment of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 ("ERISA"), few would have predicted that, a generation later, ERISA's provisions preempting state law would be front page news, a central topic of national debate about health care and its regulation. Similarly, few foresaw at the time ERISA was adopted that the United States Supreme Court would have great difficulty construing ERISA's preemption provisions. By the same token, in 1974 the contemporary revival of interest in statutory textualism lay well into the future.

The Tax Treatment Of Qualified Plans: A Classic Defense Of The Status Quo, Edward A. Zelinsky

Articles

The current tax treatment of qualified pension and profit sharing plans has been criticized by commentators as an unfair and expensive tax expenditure. In this Article, Professor Zelinsky challenges this characterization and defends the current treatment of qualified plans on the ground that it is at least as attractive as its alternatives and superior to many of them. After evaluating the current treatment and the alternatives under the criteria of measurability, administrability, liquidity, equity, and simplicity, Professor Zelinsky concludes that the present treatment of qualified plans can be viewed as an acceptable part of a normative income tax.