Digital Commons Network^™

Balance In The Taxation Of Derivative Securities: An Agenda For Reform, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

It is well understood that aggressive tax planning with derivatives threatens the U.S. income tax system. The conventional solution to this threat has been consistency, meaning that the same tax treatment should apply to all economically comparable bets, regardless of the form used. Yet familiar political and administrative barriers stand in the way of achieving this lofty goal.

This Article develops a reform agenda to eliminate tax planning without requiring consistency. Policymakers should strive instead for a new goal, which this Article calls "balance": For each risky position, the treatment of gains should match the treatment of losses. For example, …

The Law Professor As Legal Commentator, Amy Gajda

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Copyright Class War, Niels Schaumann

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Race, Immigration, And The Department Of Homeland Security, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the wisdom of separating the service and enforcement functions of our immigration bureau, the new tripartite system under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security risks fueling the "immigrant Arab as terrorist" stereotype, rather than helping to re-establish the reality that noncitizen terrorists, like U.S. citizen ones, are a rare species.

Transnational Law As A Domestic Resource Thoughts On The Case Of Women's Rights, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lara, Lawrence, Supreme Court Litigation, And Lessons From Social Movements, Kevin Washburn

Faculty Scholarship

United States v. Lara was hailed as a victory for Indian tribes because it upheld tribal criminal jurisdiction over non-member Indians. Lawrence v. Texas was hailed as a victory for the gay rights movement because it upheld the due process right of gays to be protected from criminal prosecutions for consensual sexual acts done in private within their own homes. Despite dramatically different contexts, the two cases share a common thread: both are cases in which interested groups achieved important successes by marshalling broad support for their arguments at the briefing stage which helped pave the way for Supreme Court …

At The Intersection Of North American Free Trade And Same-Sex Marriage, Laura Spitz

Faculty Scholarship

Using same-sex marriage as a presently salient site of cultural struggle, this article asks whether the U.S. can expect economic integration with Canada-on the scale envisioned by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)-without feeling the influence of Canadian culture. The author comes at this question from the United States side because, while much has been written from Canadian points of view as to whether it is possible to protect and maintain national differences in the face of economic integration with the United States, very little has been written about whether economic globalization in North America could mean that Canadian …

‘Idiot’S Guide’ To Sovereign Debt Restructuring, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Freedom’S New Fight, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Reviewing, Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2004)

Hormesis, Hotspots And Emissions Trading, Jonathan B. Wiener

Faculty Scholarship

Instrument choice -- the comparison of technology standards, performance standards, taxes and tradable permits -- has been a major topic in environmental law and environmental economics. Most analyses assume that emissions and health effects are positively and linearly related. If they are not, this complicates the instrument choice analysis. This article analyses the effects of a nonlinear dose/response function on instrument choice. In particular, it examines the effects of hormesis (highdose harm but low-dose benefit) on the choice between fixed performance standards and tradable emissions permits. First, the article distinguishes the effects of hormesis from the effects of local emissions. …

Convergence, Divergence, And Complexity In Us And European Risk Regulation, Jonathan B. Wiener

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Radical Tax Reform, Municipal Finance, And The Conservative Agenda, Eric J. Gouvin

Faculty Scholarship

Proponents of a consumption tax system to replace the federal income tax typically couch their support for radical tax reform in the language of traditional tax policy goals. They claim that their reform plans promote the goals of simplicity, economic efficiency, stability, and equity. This Article examines how well the proposed tax reforms will achieve those goals in the context of their anticipated impact on state and local finance. The effects on state and local governments of a flattened-rate income tax, flat tax, or a broad federal consumption tax could be enormous and devastating. The Article finds that all of …

Rethinking Copyright Misuse, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last few decades, copyright has evolved in dramatic and unprecedented ways. At the heart of this evolution lies a series of changes in the statutory scheme that have substantially expanded copyright's scope. There has also been a rise in private ordering as copyright holders increasingly use licenses to govern use of their copyrighted material and thereby supplant the default terms prescribed by the Copyright Act. Mediating and contributing to this evolution has been the judiciary. The judiciary has long played an active role in protecting copyright policy, and the dynamism of the last thirty years has only accentuated …

Whistleblowing And The Public Director: Countering Corporate Inner Circles, James A. Fanto

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sexual Tensions Of Post-Empire, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay Katherine Franke examines two contemporary cites in which state efforts to eradicate the traces of empire and to resurrect an authentic post-colonial nation have produced sexual subjects that serve as a kind of existential residue and reminder of a demonized colonial past and absence. Looking first at post-colonial Zimbabwe, Franke argues that President Mugabe's aggressively homophobic policies have played a key role in fortifying his leadership as authentically African and post-colonial.

Franke then turns to current efforts by the Mubarak government in Egypt to publically prosecute men for having sex with men. The Mubarak government has used …

Render Copyright Unto Caesar: On Taking Incentives Seriously, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay suggests we bifurcate our thinking. Conventional copyright rules by money, so let it rule the money-bound. Let a different set of rules evolve for more complex uses, particularly when the users have a personal relationship with the utilized text. Much recent scholarship contains dramatic suggestions to secure a freedom to be creative, rewrite, and be imaginative. My work has long sought to defend such freedoms, but I believe we understand imagination and its conditions too little to employ it as a starting point. I suggest instead that we acquire a better conceptual map of the generative process and …

Is The Work-Family Conflict Pathological Or Normal Under The Fmla? The Potential Of The Fmla To Cover Ordinary Work-Family Conflicts, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides relief to workers, helping them in their struggle to meet the sometimes competing demands of work and family. There have been numerous attempts to expand legislation to cover more occasions where work and family obligations are in tension. This Essay will address one way that the courts may be expanding the Act’s application. It will investigate whether this modest interpretive expansion can be explained partially by society’s deeper understanding of the challenges of work-family balance over the ten years since the FMLA’s passage. Have we changed our general understanding of conflicts between …

Reconstructing The Blaine Amendments, Frederick Mark Gedicks

Faculty Scholarship

In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision upholding school vouchers in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, school choice proponents have turned their attention to the state Blaine Amendments. Blaine Amendments are contained in 37 state constitutions, and are modeled after a failed federal constitutional amendment sponsored by James G. Blaine in 1876 that would have prohibited the states from allocating state funds and other resources to sectarian organizations. Thus, even though Zelman appears to have removed all federal Establishment Clause impediments to properly structured school choice programs, Blaine Amendments continue to stand in the way of such programs.

The validity of …

Agency Costs In International Human Rights, David H. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Do We Have A Right To Speak With Another's Language? Eldred And The Duration Of Copyright, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The law embodies two contradictory sets of rights and interests pertaining to copyright and speech. On the one hand. stand authors' claims to deserve compensation and control over their works. On the other hand stand the public's claims to be free to build on and deploy the cultural works that pervade daily life.

Judges As Film Critics: New Approaches To Filmic Evidence, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This Article exposes internal contradictions in case law deciding the use and admissibility of film as evidence. Based on a review of more than ninety state and federal cases dating from 1923 to the present, the Article explains how the source of these contradictions is the frequent miscategorization of film as "demonstrative evidence," that category of evidence that purports to illustrate other evidence rather than to be directly probative of some fact at issue. The Article further demonstrates how these contradictions are based on two venerable jurisprudential anxieties. One is the concern about the growing trend toward replacing the traditional …

Judges As Film Critics: New Approaches To Filmic Evidence, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This Article exposes internal contradictions in case law concerning the use and admissibility of film as evidence. Based on a review of more than ninety state and federal cases dating from 1923 to the present, the Article explains how the source of these contradictions is the frequent miscategorization of film as “demonstrative evidence,” evidence that purports to illustrate other evidence, rather than to be directly probative of some fact at issue. The Article further demonstrates how these contradictions are based on two venerable jurisprudential anxieties. One is the concern about the growing trend toward replacing the traditional testimony of live …

The Changing World Of Employee Benefits, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

When I graduated from law school in 1985, there were no courses offered in employee benefits law. Nor, as near as I can recall, was ERISA ever discussed in any of the labor and employment classes I took. There was no mention in the introductory labor law course or in other classes about employment discrimination, union organizing, and employment arbitration. Now, in contrast, many law schools include a course on employee benefits and ERISA, and students hoping to work in the labor and employment area frequently find that ERISA work is plentiful, and traditional NLRA work is not. This, of …

Using Mediation Techniques To Manage Conflict And Create Healthy Work Environments, Debra Gerardi

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Global Credit Card Use And Debt: Policy Issues And Regulatory Responses, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

The rise of card-based payments has transformed the landscape of payments in the last half century, from one dominated by government-supported paper-based payments to one dominated by wholly private systems. The rise of those payments presents a number of policy problems, the most serious of which is the empirically demonstrable likelihood that use of the cards here and elsewhere contributes to an undue level of consumer credit and that borrowing on the cards contributes to a rise in the level of consumer bankruptcy. Because increasing financial distress imposes substantial externalities on the economies in which it occurs, the global rise …

Copyright And Free Expression: Analyzing The Convergence Of Conflicting Normative Frameworks, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

Recent attempts to expand the domain of copyright law in different parts of the world have necessitated renewed efforts to evaluate the philosophical justifications that are advocated for its existence as an independent institution. Copyright, conceived of as a proprietary institution, reveals an interesting philosophical interaction with other libertarian interests, most notably the right to free expression. This paper seeks to understand the nature of this interaction and the resulting normative decisions. The paper seeks to analyse copyright law and its recent expansions, specifically from the perspective of the human rights discourse. It looks at the historical origins of modern …

Edith Wharton, Privacy, And Publicity, Jessica Bulman-Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

"It's the woman's soul, absolutely torn up by the roots-her whole self laid bare .... I don't mean to read another line; it's too much like listening at a keyhole." When Mrs. Touchett speaks these words in Edith Wharton's early novella, The Touchstone, we may wonder whether Wharton is mocking her own voyeuristic readership and grappling with her tenuous privacy as a professional female author. Despite her protestations, Mrs. Touchett has relished reading the letters of Mrs. Aubyn, a deceased novelist whose former lover, Stephen Glennard, has published her correspondence. It is precisely because these love letters (or "unloved letters" …

What Caused Enron? A Capsule Social And Economic History Of The 1990s, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The sudden explosion of corporate accounting scandals and related financial irregularities that burst over the financial markets between late 2001 and the first half of 2002 – Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia and others – raises an obvious question: Why now? What explains the concentration of financial scandals at this moment in time? Much commentary has rounded up the usual suspects and placed the blame on a decline in business morality, an increase in "infectious greed," or other similarly subjective trends that cannot be reliably measured. Although none of these possibilities can be dismissed out of hand, approaches that simply reason …

On Gun Registration, The Nra, Adolf Hitler, And Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding The Gun Culture Wars (A Call To Historians), Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Say the words "gun registration" to many Americans – especially pro-gun Americans, including the 3.5 million-plus members of the National Rifle Association ("NRA") – and you are likely to hear about Adolf Hitler, Nazi gun laws, gun confiscation, and the Holocaust. More specifically, you are likely to hear that one of the first things that Hitler did when he seized power was to impose strict gun registration requirements that enabled him to identify gun owners and then to confiscate all guns, effectively disarming his opponents and paving the way for the genocide of the Jewish population. "German firearm laws and …

"You Are Entering A Gay And Lesbian Free Zone": On The Radical Dissents Of Justice Scalia And Other (Post-) Queers – [Raising Questions About Lawrence, Sex Wars, And The Criminal Law], Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The most renowned substantive criminal law decision of the October 2002 Term, Lawrence v. Texas, will go down in history as a critical turning point in criminal law debates over the proper scope of the penal sanction. For the first time in the history of American criminal law, the United States Supreme Court has declared that a supermajoritarian moral belief does not necessarily provide a rational basis for criminalizing conventionally deviant conduct. The Court's ruling is the coup de grâce to legal moralism administered after a prolonged, brutish, tedious, and debilitating struggle against liberal legalism in its various criminal …