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Full-Text Articles in Law

General Anti-Avoidance Rules And The Rule Of Law, Vincent Ooi Jul 2019

General Anti-Avoidance Rules And The Rule Of Law, Vincent Ooi

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

General Anti-Avoidance Rules (“GAARs”) grant tax authorities wide powers to counteract tax avoidance transactions notwithstanding that the taxpayer may have complied with the strict letter of the law. These wide powers raise questions of possible conflicts with fundamental principles such as the Rule of Law, and Distributive and Corrective Justice. The main difficulty arises in attempting to reconcile the need for a GAAR to apply to unpredictable and rapidly developing situations, and the principle of certainty as one of the foundations of the Rule of Law. This paper begins by defining tax avoidance, establishing a moral duty to pay tax …


Considerations Of History And Purpose In Constitutional Borrowing, Robert L. Tsai Jan 2019

Considerations Of History And Purpose In Constitutional Borrowing, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is part of a symposium issue dedicated to "Constitutional Rights: Intersections, Synergies, and Conflicts" at William and Mary School of Law. I make four points. First, perfect harmony among rights might not always be normatively desirable. In fact, in some instances, such as when First Amendment and Second Amendment rights clash, we might wish to have expressive rights consistently trump gun rights. Second, we can't resolve clashes between rights in the abstract but instead must consult history in a broadly relevant rather than a narrowly "originalist" fashion. When we do so, we learn that armed expression and white …


Manufactured Emergencies, Robert Tsai Jan 2019

Manufactured Emergencies, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Emergencies are presumed to be unusual affairs, but the United States has been in one state of emergency or another for the last forty years. That is a problem. The erosion of democratic norms has led to not simply the collapse of the traditional conceptual boundary between ordinary rule and emergency governance, but also the emergence of an even graver problem: the manufactured crisis. In an age characterized by extreme partisanship, institutional gridlock, and technological manipulation of information, it has become exceedingly easy and far more tempting for a President to invoke extraordinary power by ginning up exigencies. To reduce …