Digital Commons Network^™

Sovereignty Before Law, Salmoli Choudhuri, Moiz Tundawala

Articles

Book review: Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age, by Shruti Kapila, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2021, 328 pp., $37.00/£30.00, ISBN 9780691195223

Perspectives On Practice: Building A Better Environment For All – An Interview With Jane Daly And Siobhán Bourke, Tanya Dean

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In this Perspectives on Practice interview, Tanya Dean speaks to SiobhánBourke and Jane Daly about their work with Irish Theatre Institute in supporting Irish theatre and fostering positive change in the industry. The discussion explores how the purpose of Irish Theatre Institute has evolved, and how it has adapted to and reflected the changes and challenges facing Irish theatre over the decades

Amazon's Pricing Paradox, Rory Van Loo, Nikita Aggarwal

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Antitrust scholars have widely debated the paradox of Amazon seemingly wielding monopoly power while charging low prices to consumers. A single company's behavior thereby helped spark a vibrant intellectual conversation as scholars debated why Amazon's prices were so low, whether enforcers should intervene, and, eventually, how the field of antitrust should be reformed. One of the main sources of agreement in these and other scholarly conversations has long been that Amazon charges low prices. This Article challenges that assumption by demonstrating that Amazon customers may pay significantly higher prices than is commonly understood due to strategies that do not necessarily …

The Awkward Middle For Automated Vehicles: Liability Attribution Rules When Humans And Computers Share Driving Responsibilities, William H. Widen, Philip Koopman

Articles

This Article proposes an architecture of concepts and language for use in a state statute that establishes when a human occupant of an automated vehicle (AV) has contributory negligence for her interactions with a driving automation system. Existing law provides an insufficient basis for addressing the question of liability because a driving automation system intentionally places some burden for safe operation of an AV on a human driver. Without further statutory guidance, leaving resolution to the courts will likely significantly delay legal certainty by creating inefficient and potentially inconsistent results across jurisdictions because of the technological complexity of the area. …

Baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, And The Judicial Strike Zone - Home Run Or Foul On The Play?, Jan L. Jacobowitz

Articles

Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Micky Mantle, and Shoeless Joe Jackson—There are many well-known baseball legends, but perhaps less well-known is the story of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a judge turned baseball commissioner who inspired not only baseball fans, but also the American Bar Association’s first Judicial Canon of Ethics. The parallel stories of baseball’s greatest scandal, the judge appointed to be the first baseball commissioner, and the development of the judicial canons, provide context for the current controversial judicial prohibition--the appearance of impropriety.

Silencing Litigation Through Bankruptcy, Pamela Foohey, Christopher K. Odinet

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Bankruptcy is being used as a tool for silencing survivors and their families. When faced with claims from multiple plaintiffs related to the same wrongful conduct that can financially or operationally crush the defendant over the long term—a phenomenon we identify as onslaught litigation—defendants harness bankruptcy’s reorganization process to draw together those who allege harm and pressure them into a swift, universal settlement. In doing so, they use the bankruptcy system to deprive survivors of their voice and the public of the truth. This Article identifies this phenomenon and argues that it is time to rein in this destructive use …

The Weakness Of Neighborhood Revitalization Planning In The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program: Warnings From Connecticut, Noah Kazis, Katherine M. O'Regan

Articles

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is the nation's largest program to produce and preserve subsidized housing. To ensure that LIHTC avoids harmfully concentrating poverty, entrenching segregation, or inefficiently deploying resources, federal law requires that states prioritize allocating credits to projects located in high-poverty locations that contribute to a "concerted community revitalization plan" (CCRP). In high-poverty neighborhoods, tax credit developments are meant to facilitate broader neighborhood revitalization, not only to benefit the residents of the housing itself. This paper provides new, empirical support for long-standing concerns that the CCRP process is ineffectively enforced.

Looking at each application for competitive tax …

The Right To Access Information On Land Recovery, Compensation, Assistance, And Resettlement: Case Study, City Of Can Tho, Vietnam, Hien Trung Phan, Hugh D. Spitzer

Articles

Land recovery in Vietnam is the process of compulsory transfer of land use rights from the hands of land users to the hands of the State by way of local government agencies. Land recovery frequently raises issues of compensation, assistance, and resettlement. It is vital for affected land users and the general public to have access to reports on land recovery, compensation, and resettlement. The article describes a limited survey of Vietnamese people whose land was subject to government recovery and evaluates their access to and understanding of information at each stage of the land recovery process. The study revealed …

The Housing Bubble And Consumer Banruptcy (Parts Iii And Iv), David G. Carlson

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During the COVID pandemic housing prices have soared. Consumers who have filed for bankruptcy are now looking at enormous realized and unrealized capital gains. This article assesses the chances that these consumer debtors can keep these gains out of the hands of their creditors. Part II of this two-part article addresses chapter 13 issues, which concern plan modification by the chapter 13 trustee to capture realized and unrealized capital gains. It also covers whether a trustee in a converted case can capture these gains. The law of the coverted chapter 7 case is spectacularly contradictory.

Public Defenders As Gatekeepers Of Freedom, Alma Magaña

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Nearly half a million people are currently held in pretrial detention across the United States. Legal scholarship has explored many of the actors and factors contributing to the deprivation of freedom of those presumed innocent. And while the scholarship in these areas is rich, it has primarily focused on certain system actors—including judges, prosecutors, and profit-seeking sheriffs—structural concerns, such as the role race plays in who is being held in pretrial detention, or critiques of the failed promise of algorithms to deliver on bias-free bail determinations. But relatively little scholarship exists about the contributions of public defenders to this deprivation. …

A Case For Humanistic Theory, Salmoli Choudhuri, Moiz Tundawala

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This article responds to a debate in Economic & Political Weekly on the state of theory in Indian academia. While earlier interventions focused on the “who” and “how” questions related to the subject and work of theory, a more fundamental question is addressed here: Why theory at all? In our age of permanent crises, the necessity to make a case for theory that can interpret the world rather than change it for the good has arisen due to the dominance of problem-solving and solution-driven approaches adopted by the social sciences.

Viability Of The ‘Democratic Liberalism’ Project, Prerna Dhoop

Articles

Book Review: From Free to Fair Markets: Liberalism after COVID -19 by Rosalind Dixon and Richard Holden (Oxford University Press, 2022); pp 240, 24 GBP.

Safeguarding Taxpayer Data, Michael Hatfield

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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) collects more information on more individuals than any other government agency. The information is not only financial but personal, potentially including information about health care needs and decisions; the caregivers, disabilities, and foreign birth of children; the educational progress and felony convictions of students; and one’s religious and charitable associations. In acknowledging the vast quantity of information held by the IRS, and the necessity of taxpayers trusting tax administrators with their information, Congress provided greater protection for taxpayer information under the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) than it was provided under the Privacy Act. Congress obligated …

Technical Report: A Framework For Confusion Mitigation In Task-Oriented Interactions, Na Li, Robert J. Ross

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Confusion is a mental state that can be triggered in task-oriented interactions and which can if left unattended lead to boredom, frustration, or disengagement from the task at hand. Since previous work has demonstrated that confusion can be detected in embodied situated interactions from visual and auditory cues, in this technique report, we propose appropriate interaction structures which should be used to mitigate confusion. We motivate and describe this dialogue mechanism through an information state-style policy with examples, and also outline the approach we are taking to integrate such a meta-conversational goal alongside core task-oriented considerations in modern data driven …

A Method For Generating A Non-Manual Feature Model For Sign Language Processing, Robert G. Smith Dr, Markus Hofmann Dr

Articles

While recent approaches to sign language processing have shifted to the domain of Machine Learning (ML), the treatment of Non-Manual Features (NMFs) remains an open question. The principal challenge facing this method is the comparatively small sign language corpora available for training machine learning models. This study produces a statistical model which may be used in future ML, rules-based, and hybrid-learning approaches for sign language processing tasks. In doing so, this research explores the emerging patterns of non-manual articulation concerning grammatical classes in Irish Sign Language (ISL). The experimental method applied here is a novel implementation of an association rules …

Ireland’S Response To Domestic, Sexual And Gender-Based Violence: An Interview With Orla O’Connor, Deirdre Kelly

Articles

Orla O’Connor is the Director of the “National Women’s Council of Ireland” (NWCI), the leading national women’s membership organisation with over
190 member groups. She has held senior management roles in several non-governmental organisations for over 25 years. Time magazine recognised her as one of the 100 Most Influential People in 2019 for her role as Co-director of “Together for Yes”, the successful national civil society campaign that was influential in Ireland voting overwhelmingly in favour of removing the Eighth Amendment from the Constitution, a landmark referendum, which led to the legalisation of abortion in 2018. In addition to campaigning …

Race Ethics: Colorblind Formalism And Color-Coded Pragmatism In Lawyer Regulation, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

The recent, high-profile civil and criminal trials held in the aftermath of the George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery murders, the Kyle Rittenhouse killings, and the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally violence renew debate over race, representation, and ethics in the U.S. civil and criminal justice systems. For civil rights lawyers, prosecutors, and criminal defense attorneys, neither the progress of post-war civil rights movements and criminal justice reform campaigns nor the advance of Critical Race Theory and social movement scholarship have resolved the debate over the use of race in pretrial, trial, and appellate advocacy, and in the lawyering process more …

The Housing Bubble And Consumer Bankruptcy (Parts I And Ii), David G. Carlson

Articles

During the COVID pandemic housing prices have soared. Consumers who have filed for bankruptcy are now looking at enormous realized and unrealized capital gains. This article assesses the chances that these consumer debtors can keep these gains out of the hands of their creditors. Part I of this two-part article addresses chapter 7 issues, which concern lien stripping, abandonment, and monetary exemptions. It also addresses lien stripping in chapter 13 cases. Part II will address whether a chapter 13 debtor must surrender appreciation value to the chapter 13 trustee or to a trustee in a converted chapter 7 case.

Stopping Runs In The Digital Era, Luís C. Calderón Gómez

Articles

Bank runs, and the financial crises they catalyze and amplify, are incredibly costly-to individuals, families, society, and the economy writ large. Banking regulation has, for the most part, protected us from traditional bank runs for the last ninety years. However, as we saw in the devastating 2008 financial crisis, bank runs can still occur in lightly regulated or opaque segments of the financial sector.

The recent crypto market downturn dramatically forewarned regulators of the potential and significant risks that novel assets could pose to our financial system's stability. In particular, a novel, systemically important asset (stablecoins) revealed its vulnerability to …

The Historical Origins And Current Prospects Of The Multilateral Tax Convention, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Eran Lempert

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This article has three aims. First, it surveys the pre-BEPS efforts to create a multilateral tax convention (MTC) from the 19th century onward, and explains why these efforts have failed, leading to an international tax regime dominated by unilateralism and bilateralism. Second, it contrasts the success of multilateralism in investment and trade law. Third, it examines the BEPS era efforts to create an MTC and suggests that, while there has been more convergence of the tax laws of countries, a fundamental divergence of interests persists that will likely doom any such efforts to failure. The article concludes that, at this …

Book Review: Taxation In The Digital Economy: New Models In Asia And The Pacific, Edited By Nella Hendriyetty, Chris Evans, Chul Ju Kim, And Farhad Taghizadeh-Hesary, Sanyukta Chowdhury

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Book Review: Taxation in the Digital Economy: New Models in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Nella Hendriyetty, Chris Evans, Chul Ju Kim, and Farhad Taghizadeh-Hesary

Considering A Right To Repair Software, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Articles

The right to repair movement aims to extend the usability of products by allowing a consumer (or a repair professional acting on the consumer’s behalf) to fix broken products. Implicitly, the movement’s focus has been on hardware—on the right to repair cars, tractors, and phones. But as more and more of the functionality of goods comes from software, it is important to consider whether we need a right to repair software. There are practical challenges to software repair. For example, fixing software is more difficult and treacherous than fixing hardware. Complicating matters further, more and more software is embedded in …

Inventing Deportation Arrests, Lindsay Nash

Articles

At the dawn of the federal deportation system, the nation’s top immigration official proclaimed the power to authorize deportation arrests “an extraordinary one” to vest in administrative officers. He reassured the nation that this immense power—then wielded by a cabinet secretary, the only executive officer empowered to authorize these arrests—was exercised with “great care and deliberation.” A century later, this extraordinary power is legally trivial and systemically exercised by low-level enforcement officers alone. Consequently, thousands of these officers—the police and jailors of the immigration system— now have the power to solely determine whether deportation arrests are justified and, therefore, whether …

Grounding The Basic Structure In Legal Theory, Sanjay Jain

Articles

This article contributes to the everlasting debate on theorising the Basic Structure doctrine of the Indian Constitution. Having demonstrated that it cannot be justified either in orthodox positivism of Austin or Kelsenite normativity, the author makes the case to ground the debate in the modern avatar of analytical jurisprudence, popularly known as inclusive legal positivism.

Definition And Characteristic Features Of A ‘Cultural Flashpoint’: A Case Study Of Exploring Masculinities, A Controversial Gender And Education Programme In Ireland, Joan Hanafin, Paul Conway, Cormac O Beaglaoich, Jack Hanafin

Articles

The concept ‘cultural flashpoint’ (CF) has not been fully defined or described. The authors test this concept through the prism of a controversial gender-focused Irish school programme, Exploring Masculinities (EM). Adopting an instrumental case study methodology, they use media content analysis to develop a temporal trajectory of the CF, describe its shape, explicit and implied contentious themes, and its process. They identify characteristic features of a cultural flashpoint: (i) a focal issue, event and/or object; (ii) conflict; (iii) bounded time period; (iv) the involvement of exo- and multi-sectoral individuals and groups; (v) randomness, opaqueness and conflation among its expressions; and …

Rethinking Party Autonomy In Trust Law, Stewart E. Sterk

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The article critiques the current approach to party autonomy in trust law, particularly the freedom granted by the Second Restatement of Conflict of Laws for settlors to choose the governing law for their trusts. The author argues that this freedom, rooted in historically uniform trust laws, is now outdated due to the diversification of state trust laws, especially regarding issues like perpetual trusts and asset protection. The analysis advocates for a more restrictive approach to party autonomy, prioritizing the settlor's domicile and home state policies to prevent manipulation and ensure fairness, particularly for third parties affected by trust arrangements.

A More Perfect Union For Whom?, Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud

Articles

Amending the federal Constitution has been instrumental in creating and developing the North American constitutional project. The difficult process embedded in Article V has been used by “The People” to expand rights and democracy, fix procedural deficiencies, and even overturn Supreme Court precedent. Yet, it is no secret that the amendment process has fallen to the wayside and that a constitutional amendment in our present age of extreme political polarization feels impossible.

Our nation’s history suggests otherwise. In John F. Kowal and Wilfred U. Codrington III’s exciting and inspirational new book, they explain that interest in constitutional amendments has coincided …

Harm Egalitarianism, Michael E. Herz

Articles

In the last few years, law schools and law professors have given new attention to how questions of race can be interwoven into courses that are not explicitly about race. Much has been written about how to do so in both first-year and upper-level courses, and, from all reports, the law school classroom has meaningfully changed. My sense, though it is completely impressionistic and unscientific, is that the typical Administrative Law course may have changed less than many others. It seems fair to say, at least, that there has not developed a standard suite of topics that a professor wanting …

Fatty Acid, Carotenoid And Fat-Soluble Vitamin Composition Of Multispecies Swards Grown In Ireland—Implications For A Sustainable Feed In Dairy Farming, Samuel Rapisarda, Graham O'Neill, Nissreen Abu-Ghannam

Articles

Although traditional ryegrass pastures are still commonly used, they require intense management and input and do not perform well during the summer months. Multispecies systems have been recognised as more sustainable, needing less fertiliser and being tolerant to drought and heat. While data on monoculture system fat composition exist, information for multispecies is scarce. The present study compared the fatty acid (FA), carotenoid and fat-soluble composition of a multispecies system (consisting of perennial ryegrass, timothy, white clover, red clover, chicory and plantain) (MULTI) with two other conventional grazing systems (monoculture perennial ryegrass (PRG) and a binary mixture of perennial ryegrass …

Rethinking Social Enterprise Policy Making In Ireland – Untangling Proportionate, Disproportionate And Unengaged Sectoral Policy Contributions, Gerard Doyle

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The National Social Enterprise Policy of Ireland was launched in 2019 following a slow and episodic process. The aim of the paper is to examine the development and implementation of the National Social Enterprise Policy. In particular the interaction between key sectoral stakeholders in the development of the policy and the primary influences on the process. The results of a substantial qualitative enquiry details the complex set of relationships underpinning the development of social enterprise policy in a multi-level governance framework. It situates the National Social Enterprise Policy in an environment unusually susceptible to sub-sectoral advocacy and highlights the particular …