Digital Commons Network^™

Environmentalism And Antitrust, Albert H. Choi, Daniel A. Crane

Law & Economics Working Papers

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of interest concerning environmental issues and the application of the antitrust laws. Numerous commentators, for instance, have argued that the antitrust enforcement should adjust to reflect the environmental harm (or benefit) that is generated from a competitive condition. In this paper, we take a step back and argue that analysis of the intersection between antitrust and environmentalism should begin with more mundane questions of economics. More specifically, we argue that environmental regulations can inform antitrust analysis by considering (at least) three issues: (1) the impact of environmental regulation on the firms' production …

Tax Delegation Post-Loper Bright, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

In its recent decision in Loper Bright, the Supreme Court has fundamentally shifted the contours of judicial deference to administrative interpretations by repealing the Chevron doctrine. However, while the Court has curtailed deference, it simultaneously underscored the legitimacy of statutory delegation to agencies. The Internal Revenue Code (Code) is the most intricate legislative text within the U.S. legal framework, necessitating significant technical expertise for its application. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Congress often delegates authority to the IRS for the execution of the statute. In light of the Court's decision in Loper Bright, it becomes imperative to clarify the parameters …

The Triumph Of Tax Textualism, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In Varian Medical Systems, the Tax Court held in a unanimously reviewed opinion that the taxpayer was entitled to take a section 245A deduction for an amount treated as a dividend under section 78. Section 78 provides that deemed paid foreign taxes are treated as dividends received for foreign tax credit purposes, thus grossing up the amount of the dividend by the foreign taxes attributable to it before granting the FTC. This provision is needed because otherwise the taxpayer would enjoy both a deduction and a credit for the same foreign tax. Section 245A, however, eliminates the tax on the …

Tax Delegation After Loper Bright, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

This paper examines the scope of the IRS and Treasury’s tax reg-writing authority after the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright.

Finding The Thinkable Thoughts, Beth H. Wilensky

Reviews

When John B. West developed his legal classification system in the 1880s, he likely didn’t anticipate that his system of indexing the law would persist into the twenty-first century. But persist it has, and flourished, most prominently in the form of Westlaw’s headnote and key number system. West’s index built on several precursors, but it was his version, West’s American Digest, that established the foundations of the classification system that most modern legal researchers use today, in one form or another.

This history—of the late-nineteenth-century fascination with indexing—and much more is told in charming detail in Dennis Duncan’s Index, A …

Curbing Private Enforcement Of The Voting Rights Act: Thoughts On Recent Developments, Ellen D. Katz

Michigan Law Review Online

For decades, private plaintiffs have brought claims to enforce key provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Recent decisions have tossed out these claims on the ground that enforcement authority lies solely with the Attorney General of the United States. These decisions are deeply flawed. The VRA’s text and structure, history, precedent, and longstanding practice all support private enforcement of the VRA—including private enforcement of Sections 2 and 11(b). This Essay explains why.

A Fresh Look At Judicial Remedies In Eu Equality Law And Beyond: The Untapped Possibility Of Structural Injunctions., Daniel H. Halberstam, Sina Van Den Bogaert

Articles

This article proposes a shift in thinking about judicial remedies (or “sanctions”), from anti-discrimination law to equal pay and beyond.We suggest the currently preferred remedies – one-off declarations, compensation, fines, and simple orders to obey the law – may be insufficient when confronting a recalcitrant institution, complex violations, and broad, ongoing harm. In such cases, we suggest considering a remedy long overlooked in Europe: a “structural injunction”, i.e. ordering changes to an offending organization’s structure, processes, or rules. We argue that under certain circumstances, an injunction, including a structural injunction, may be appropriate or required under EU law to remedy …

Antitrust After The Coming Wave, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

A coming wave of general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence ("AI"), robotics, quantum computing, synthetic biology, energy expansion, and nanotechnology, is likely to fundamentally reshape the economy and erode the assumptions on which the antitrust order is predicated. First, AI-driven systems will vastly improve firms' ability to detect (and even program) consumer preferences without the benefit of price signals, which will undermine the traditional information-producing benefit of competitive markets. Similarly, these systems will be able to determine comparative producer efficiency without relying on competitive signals. Second, AI systems will invert the salient characteristics of human managers, whose intentions are opaque but …

Chenery Ii Revisited, Daniel T. Deacon

Articles

Ever since the Supreme Court’s 1947 decision in SEC v. Chenery Corporation, known as Chenery II, agencies have enjoyed wide latitude to develop policy through individual adjudications in addition to rulemaking. Chenery II has never been completely uncontroversial, and in recent years, calls to overturn or limit it have been expressed in increasingly fervent tones. Agency policymaking by adjudication has emerged as a new front in the struggle over the administrative state.

Against the backdrop of such calls, this Article revisits some of the fundamental questions concerning the Chenery II doctrine. I argue in favor of retaining Chenery II’s core …

The Origins Of The Major Questions Doctrine, Rachel Rothschild

Articles

In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has invoked the newly named “major questions doctrine” to strike down agency regulations that protect public health and the environment. Several Justices have argued that while the name “major questions” may be new, these decisions are simply the latest iteration in a longstanding effort of the courts to curtail the explosive growth of the administrative state since 1970. The first paradigmatic example of this line of cases is the 1980 “Benzene” case, in which the Supreme Court set aside the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)’s new workplace standards for the …

A Global Wealth Tax?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

Mitt Romney famously said during his 2012 presidential campaign that “corporations are people.” Mindy Herzfeld’s column comparing the proposed 2 percent global wealth tax on billionaires with the corporate minimum tax (pillar 2) raises the opposite question: Are people like corporations for tax purposes? I would say no, for several reasons.

Crypto And The Exit Tax, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

Robert Goulder has devoted one of his excellent columns to the fascinating case of “Bitcoin Jesus.” As explained by Goulder:

Another billionaire was in the news recently for reasons that relate to taxation, although it’s doubtful he will be accused of much virtue. The man known internationally as “Bitcoin Jesus” got himself arrested in Spain on April 27. He now faces extradition to the United States, where an eight-count criminal tax indictment awaits him. Bitcoin Jesus is coming home.

This is a far cry from the Jesus born in Bethlehem who once said that it was easier for a camel …

Regulating Algorithmic Harms, Sylvia Lu

Law & Economics Working Papers

In recent years, the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) innovations has led to a rise in algorithmic harms—harms emerging from AI operations that pose significant threats to civil rights and democratic values in today’s technological landscape. A facial recognition system for improving criminal detection wrongly collected sensitive personal data and flagged racial minorities as shoplifters. A risk-prediction algorithm adopted to identify patients denied medical treatment to Black individuals with poor health conditions. A social media algorithm intended to boost social engagement exacerbated addictive behavior and mental illness in teenagers. These harms are becoming increasingly ubiquitous yet often manifest in …

Sourcing Derivatives: Time To Reverse The Rule?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In their excellent Tax Notes article on the application of withholding taxes on derivatives, Lorenz F. Haselberger and Michael B. Shulman write that:

A taxpayer entering into a derivative may derive income of a kind that is different from the kind of income that would have been realized had the taxpayer instead acquired the underlying asset, resulting in different U.S. withholding tax treatment.

For example, when a foreign taxpayer enters into a swap referencing an equity security or interest rate, amounts it receives that correspond to dividends or interest generally are characterized as periodic payments on a financial contract rather …

Front Matter, University Of Michigan Law School

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Front Matter for Volume 58, Issue 1 of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Consumer Privacy And The Dobbs Disruption, Mason R. Clark

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The right to reproductive privacy is under attack in the United States, and it is losing ground. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that overruled Roe v. Wade’s constitutional protection of abortion and jeopardized privacy rights by proxy, reflects this losing posture. Scholarship in reproductive privacy varyingly critiques federal privacy initiatives, evaluates regulatory interventions, and proposes civil rights frameworks in response to Dobbs. This Article, however, pinpoints how Dobbs created a gaping hole in state consumer privacy laws even as they propagated across the United States. Currently, there are no state consumer privacy …

Animals In Cost-Benefit Analysis, Andrew Stawasz

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Federal agencies’ cost-benefit analyses do not capture nonhuman animals’ (animals’) interests. This omission matters. Cost-benefit analysis drives many regulatory decisions that substantially affect billions of animals. That omission creates a regulatory blind spot that is untenable as a matter of morality and of policy.

This Article advances two claims related to valuing animals in cost-benefit analyses, dubbed the “Weak Claim” and the “Strong Claim.” The Weak Claim argues that agencies typically may value animals in cost-benefit analyses. Usually, no legal prohibitions exist, and such valuation is within agencies’ legitimate discretion. The Strong Claim argues that agencies often must do so …

Shareholder Agreements In India: An Unsettled Jurisprudence., Vikramaditya S. Khanna

Book Chapters

Shareholder agreements (SAs) are becoming more common around the world as the ownership of companies become more concentrated. Larger investors— in particular, private equity investors— often document their understandings about their investments in increasingly sophisticated SAs. India has also witnessed a rise in SAs, usually with foreign private equity players, which reflects a level of sophistication and formality in contract negotiations that was not always present when such agreements were between family or affinity groups. This has placed increasing pressure on Indian case law to evolve in response to these agreements.

This chapter explores that response and finds that it …

Front Matter, Michigan Journal Of International Law

Michigan Journal of International Law

Front Matter for Volume 45, Issue 3 of Michigan Journal of International Law

Neutral Business Assistance And The Limits Of Complicity Under International Criminal Law, Nikola R. Hajdin

Michigan Journal of International Law

Business transactions between corporations and actors involved in grave human rights violations present significant challenges for the assessment of corporate criminal liability. This is particularly evident in cases of “neutral business assistance,” which refer to business conduct that appears legitimate on the surface and falls within day-to-day business operations but nonetheless contributes to the crime. An example of neutral business assistance is selling generic goods (for example, computer technology) legally at market rates, without the explicit intent to aid criminal activity, that increases the perpetrator’s capacity to carry out human rights violations. In such cases, discerning the point at which …

Aggressor State, Aggressor Individual, And What International Law Does/Should Protect, Nurbanu Hayır

Michigan Journal of International Law

This note examines the measures taken against Russian citizens in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War in positive international law and analyzes the rationale for sanctioning individual citizens of an aggressor state. It questions whether the gravity of state aggression by Russia enables measures targeting individuals based solely on their Russian citizenship by investigating whether the blanket denial of asylum and imposition of travel bans for Russian citizens constitutes a breach of norms of international law. It further tests this citizenship link by turning to the legality of denationalization of pro-Russian Ukrainian citizens under international law. Building on this foundation, …

The Last Frontier: Fair Procedure In Informal Administrative Adjudication, Michael Asimow

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The federal government engages in massive amounts of informal adjudication - a process that resolves a dispute between the government and a private party by making an individualized and legally binding decision without being required to conduct an evidentiary hearing if the dispute is not settled. This article sketches the highly diverse world of federal informal adjudication and surveys the procedural requirements imposed on it by due process and federal statutes. It proposes a set of best practices for conducting and improving informal adjudication that are rooted in those legal requirements. Agencies should adapt these practices to their individual circumstances …

Rewriting Nepa: Statutory Continuity And Disruption In A Polarized Era, Daniel A. Farber

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

For decades the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 was a paradigm of statutory stability. In 2023 that changed overnight with a major rewrite of NEPA as part of the debt ceiling bill. The text of the statute was hurriedly negotiated between President Biden and House Speaker McCarthy, and then passed with virtually no debate.

This article is the first to analyze the amendments. Due to the frenzied enactment process, NEPA is now loaded with overlapping and partially conflicting language, provisions that seem nonsensical if taken literally, and perplexing gaps. The article teases apart these problems, concluding that the …

An Artificial Intelligence Report Card For Judicial Review, Zoe E. Niesel

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The rapid advancement of technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), is creating new challenges for judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). In late 2023, federal administrative agencies publicly disclosed over 700 use cases of AI that employ sophisticated techniques like machine learning and natural language processing. While the APA's flexible judicial review framework certainly allows agencies to utilize new technologies, the APA also requires explainability of agency decisions; thus, agencies must be able to articulate the reasoning and methodology behind AI-enabled decisions for the purpose of judicial review. This Article examines APA judicial review as it applies to agency …

From Columbus To Lansing: Exploring The Prosecution Of Environmental Crimes Within Epa Region 5, Joshua Ozymy, Melissa Jarrell Ozymy

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Transgressions of federal environmental law involving significant harm or culpable conduct can result in criminal prosecution. However, we know very little about how such prosecutions have taken place within EPA Region 5, which includes Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. We undertake a content analysis of 2,807 criminal prosecutions that resulted from U.S. EPA criminal investigations from 1983-2022, selecting all 392 prosecutions occurring within Region 5 for analysis. Results show that over $3.4 billion in monetary penalties, 1,039 years of probation, and over 492 years of incarceration were assessed at sentencing. 33 % of prosecutions centered on water pollution, …

Solving The Stranded Asset Problem Of Retiring Coal Plants: An Evaluation Of Regulatory Approaches, Matthew Appel

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Meeting the Biden administration's goal of cutting greenhouse gases by at least 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 will necessarily require transitioning the U.S. energy system away from carbon-intensive fossil fuels like coal. However, coal plants that are retiring early in states with regulated electricity markets usually still have undepreciated book value that has not yet been recovered from ratepayers. If not handled correctly, these "stranded assets" could have financial consequences for utility companies and cause them to actively oppose the energy transition. This Note aims to evaluate possible solutions to this problem. Through the prism of ratemaking legal …

Front Matter, University Of Michigan Law School

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Front Matter for Volume 14, Issue 1 of Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Child-Taking, Diane Marie Amann

Michigan Journal of International Law

A ruling group at times takes certain children out of their community and then tries to remake them in its image. It tries to rid the child of undesired differences, in ethnicity or nationality, religion or politics, race or ancestry, culture or class. There are too many examples: the colonialist residential schools that forced settler cultures on Indigenous children; the military juntas that kidnapped dissidents’ children; and today’s reports of abductions amid crises like that in Syria. Too often nothing is done, and the children are lost. But that may be changing, as the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) is seeking …

Investment Treaty Arbitration Caught In The Public-Private Law Divide, Catharine Titi

Michigan Journal of International Law

The ongoing reform of investor-state dispute settlement (“ISDS”) underlines the pertinence of an old question that has received various and conflicting answers: Is investment arbitration a public or private method of dispute settlement? A key criticism leveled at investment treaty arbitration is that public interest disputes are decided by a system of private justice. This article critically reviews the dominant interpretations of investment treaty arbitration as public, private, or hybrid. It argues that the subjective nature of each interpretation means that none of them can be definitively adopted. Rather, the real arguments in favor of or against arbitration lie beyond …

Evaluating The Elimination Of Peremptory Challenges In Arizona, Hailey Badger Gordon

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Supreme Court confronted racial discrimination in jury selection in Batson v. Kentucky by prohibiting the use of race as a factor in exercising peremptory challenges. But Batson challenges rarely succeed in overcoming a challenged peremptory strike and have long been criticized as insufficient to eliminate racial discrimination in jury selection. Justice Marshall correctly predicted in his concurring opinion in Batson that racial discrimination in jury selection would continue as long as peremptory challenges were permissible.

Recognizing Batson’s shortfalls, states have experimented with reforms ranging from lowering the required showing for a successful Batson challenge to enumerating presumptively impermissible …