Law Commons^™

Vat Triangulation With A Us Middleman Vstr, C-587/10, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

It is not every day that an American firm finds itself in the middle of an EU VAT controversy that significantly develops the law. However, the September 27, 2012 decision of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) does just that. The case is Vogtländische Straβen-,Tief- und Rohrleitungsbau GmbH Rodewisch (VSTR) v. Finanzamt Plauen.

In November 1998 Atlantic International Trading Company (AIT), an American company established in New York, NY, purchased two stone-crushers from VSTR, a firm established in Germany. AIT quickly re-sold the stone-crushers to an end user established in Finland. The VSTR/AIT contract was “ex works,” that is AIT …

Marriage Pluralism, Family Law Jurisdiction, And Sex Equality In The United States, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

In many regions of the world, rights guaranteed under the civil law, including rights to gender equality within marriage and rights in the distribution of family property and child custody upon divorce, are in conflict with the principles of religious law. Women's rights issues are often at the heart of these tensions, which present pressing challenges for theorists, lawyers, and policymakers. This anthology brings together leading scholars and activists doing innovative work in Jewish law, Muslim law, Christian law, and African customary law. Using examples drawn from a variety of nations and religions, they interrogate the utility of recent theoretical …

Vat Fraud & Triangulation, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

Missing trader intra-community (MTIC) fraud has received a lot of domestic enforcement attention. True cross border enforcement (joint or coordinated multi-Member State audit) has been limited. There are signs that this is changing as the Member States become more aggressive in their search for revenue.

Along with this shift in enforcement focus, triangulation analysis has moved from being an interesting aspect of the MTIC fraud structure to the central element in a larger understanding of how a fraudster thinks and how he carries out his fraud. We are coming to understand that triangulations are not only the mechanism of how …

Beyond Confusion?, Stacey Dogan

Shorter Faculty Works

Trademark law is in the midst of an identity crisis. The prevailing economic account of the law has come under sustained attack by scholars, who have both challenged its descriptive accuracy and blamed it for many of the expansions of trademark rights in recent decades. The likelihood of confusion test – long the nucleus of infringement analysis – has been roundly condemned as indeterminate, incoherent, and normatively empty. No one seems to agree about why we have trademark law and how best to implement it. Scholars have cast about for explanations of how we got here and ideas of how …

Common Ownership And Equality Of Autonomy, Anna Di Robilant

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, common ownership has enjoyed unprecedented favour among policy-makers and citizens in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Conservation land trusts, affordable-housing co-operatives, community gardens, and neighborhood-managed parks are spreading throughout major cities. Normatively, these common-ownership regimes are seen as yielding a variety of benefits, such as a communitarian ethos in the efficient use of scarce resources, or greater freedom to interact and create in new ways. The design of common-ownership regimes, however, requires difficult trade-offs. Most importantly, successful achievement of the goals of common-ownership regimes requires the limitation of individual co-owners’ ability to freely use the common …

The Litigation Finance Contract, Maya Steinitz

Faculty Scholarship

Litigation funding-for-profit, nonrecourse funding of a litigation by a nonparty-is a new and rapidly developing industry. It has been described as one of the "biggest and most influential trends in civil justice" today by RAND, the New York Times, and others. Despite the importance and growth of the industry, there is a complete absence of information about or discussion of litigation finance contracting, even though all the promises and pitfalls of litigation funding stem from the relationships those contracts establish and organize. Further, the literature and case law pertaining to litigation funding have evolved from an analogy between litigation funding …

Do Damages Caps Reduce Medical Malpractice Insurance Premiums?: A Systematic Review Of Estimates And The Methods Used To Produce Them, Kathryn Zeiler, Lorian Hardcastle

Faculty Scholarship

Despite common claims made in policy debates, the theoretical connection between tort reform and medical malpractice insurance premiums is ambiguous. Simple models suggest reforms such as statutory damages caps reduce premiums. More elaborate models that account for changes in physician behavior suggest caps might increase or have no impact on premiums. A number of empirical studies have been conducted to estimate the impacts of caps on premiums, and several qualitative literature reviews have attempted to draw general conclusions from the literature. No review, however, has offered a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the full set of empirical studies. This chapter …

The Tax Expenditure Budget Is A Zombie Accountant, Steven Dean

Faculty Scholarship

Like a student blocking his access to the internet to help him study, governments across the globe rely on commitment devices to generate fiscal discipline. From the collapse of the Congressional Supercommittee in the United States to the near-cataclysmic failure of a mechanism designed to prevent the European Union debt crisis, the evidence suggests that faith in such commitment devices is misplaced. This Article focuses on one such device that stubbornly refuses to stay dead: the tax expenditure budget. Created to guard against abuse by publicizing the costs of tax subsidies then resurrected as a bean counter, the tax expenditure …

Real-Time Collection Of The Value-Added Tax: Some Business And Legal Implications, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Boryana Madzharova

Faculty Scholarship

Recent estimates of the level of VAT fraud in the EU are commensurate with the EU budget. With the Green paper on the future of VAT, the European Commission stressed the urgency and necessity of comprehensive VAT reforms. This paper analyses the business and legal implications of the recently proposed split-payment mechanism, which, if implemented, would move VAT’s method of collection to real-time. The discussion is positioned in the context of two increasingly visible trends in the EU – the general shift towards greater reliance on indirect taxation and the growing popularity of electronic payment instruments. The potential implementation of …

Punishment Without Conviction: Controlling The Use Of Unconvicted Conduct In Federal Sentencing, Gerald F. Leonard, Christine Dieter

Faculty Scholarship

Federal sentencing law is widely applied to punish offenders not only for the offenses of which they have been convicted, but also, in the same proceeding, for offenses of which they have not been convicted. Unlike many scholars, we accept that federal courts can, in the right circumstances, legitimately enhance sentences for facts and conduct found at sentencing, even when those facts and conduct constitute uncharged offenses or even charges on which the defendant actually won an acquittal. But we argue that in identifiable cases, the use of such sentencing facts does cross the line from appropriate contextualization of the …

The Private Costs Of Patent Litigation, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

This paper estimates the total cost of patent litigation to alleged infringers. We use a large sample of stock market event studies around the date of lawsuit filings for US public firms from 1984-99. We find that the total costs of litigation are much greater than legal fees and costs are large even for lawsuits that settle. Lawsuits cost alleged infringers about $28.7 million ($92) in the mean and $2.9 million in the median. Moreover, infringement risk rose sharply during the late 1990s to over 14% of R&D spending. Small firms have lower risk relative to R&D.

Disclosure To The Rescue: A Conceptual Framework For Retained Asset Accounts, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

RAAs (Retained Asset Accounts) are a life insurance innovation that is likely of small value to most beneficiaries. In many cases, it will make the most financial sense for a beneficiary to write a check to himself for the entire policy proceeds and deposit those funds into an insured bank account. Some beneficiaries, however, may find the RAA device helpful. It is impossible to anticipate the myriad circumstances that beneficiaries may face at the time of an insured's death. As long as insurers provide full and clear disclosure (which ERISA fiduciary standards demand), consumers should remain free to choose an …

The Public Pension Crisis, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Unfunded employee pension obligations will present a serious fiscal problem to state and local governments in the not too distant future. This article takes a looks at the causes and potential cures for the public pension mess, mainly through the lens of legal doctrines that limit public employers’ ability to avoid obligations. As far as the causes are concerned, this article examines the political environment within which public pension promises are made and funded, as an attempt to understand how this occurred. The article then turns to ask if states could implement meaningful reforms without violating either state or federal …

Nature, Culture, And Social Engineering: Reflections On Evolution And Equality, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This book chapter explores evolution and morality by considering the appeal to nature, and in particular to how evolution has shaped female and male brains differently, to explain evident sex differences and the persistence of sex inequality. It uses as illustrative the popularizing accounts of male and female brains found in Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain and The Male Brain, and the portrayal in such accounts of fundamental male and female differences in human mate selection and parenting. Drawing on the work of scientist and philosophers, the chapter critiques these accounts for engaging in an increasingly popular “neurosexism.” Such neurosexism …

Jewish Identity And Judging: Seymour Simon Of Illinois, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Illinois Supreme Court Justice Seymour F. Simon (1915-2006) would have filled the stereotype of the righteous man in Jewish lore. He was a man of principle, communicated those principles in an insistent tone to anyone who would listen, worked hard to further the cause of justice and earned a reputation as a committed public servant. Justice Simon served as Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court from 1980-1988 after having served on the Illinois Appellate Court from 1974-1980. Before winning election to the courts, Justice Simon was a politician, serving, inter alia, as an alderman in the City of Chicago and …

Reframing Federalism — The Affordable Care Act (And Broccoli) In The Supreme Court, Wendy K. Mariner, George J. Annas, Leonard H. Glantz

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court decision to uphold most of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), including the insurance-coverage requirement, allows historic reforms in the health care system to move forward. Because the justices were split four to four on whether the ACA was constitutional, Chief Justice John Roberts was able to write the lead opinion that commanded five votes for whatever outcome he determined was constitutional. The chief justice's leadership in upholding almost all of the ACA was unanticipated, as was much of his legal reasoning. It was widely assumed that the interpretation of the Commerce Clause by the Court would …

The Hidden Limits Of The Charitable Deduction: An Introduction To Hypersalience, Lilian Faulhaber

Faculty Scholarship

Behavioral economics introduced the concept of salience to law and economics. In the area of tax policy, salience refers to the prominence of taxes in the minds of taxpayers. This article complicates the literature on salience and taxation by introducing the concept of “hypersalience,” which is in many ways the mirror image of hidden taxation. While a revenue-raising tax provision must be hidden for taxpayers to underestimate their tax bill, a revenue-reducing tax provision – such as a deduction, exclusion, or credit – must be more than fully salient for taxpayers to underestimate their tax bill. In other words, the …

Reverse Regulatory Arbitrage: An Auction Approach To Regulatory Assignments, Frederick Tung, M Todd Henderson

Faculty Scholarship

In the years before the Financial Crisis, banks got to pick their regulators, engaging in a form of regulatory arbitrage that we now know was a race to the bottom. We propose to turn the tables on the banks by allowing regulators, specifically, bank examiners, to choose the banks they regulate. We call this “reverse regulatory arbitrage,” and we think it can help improve regulatory outcomes. Building on our prior work that proposes to pay bank examiners for performance — by giving them financial incentives to avoid bank failures — we argue that bank supervisory assignments should be set through …

Law And Justice On The Small Screen, Jessica Silbey

Books

'Law and Justice on the Small Screen' is a wide-ranging collection of essays about law in and on television. In light of the book's innovative taxonomy of the field and its international reach, it will make a novel contribution to the scholarly literature about law and popular culture. Television shows from France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and the United States are discussed. The essays are organised into three sections: (1) methodological questions regarding the analysis of law and popular culture on television; (2) a focus on genre studies within television programming (including a subsection on reality television), and …

Vat Fraud In The Customer Chain - The German Perfect Storm Cases, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

German civil and criminal courts have not always agreed over whether to allow a taxpayer to zero-rate intra-Community supplies when the taxpayer making the supply knew (or should have known) that his buyer in the other Member State intended to fraudulently evade VAT as a missing trader. This is no longer the case. Zero-rating of intra-community supplies is now being denied in German civil and criminal courts.

This paper considers how far Germany appears to be extending the law in this area. In 2011 six cases were heard by the Bundesfinanzhof (German Supreme Tax Court) that demonstrate both (a) the …

Medical Devices Excise Tax (Mdet) -- A Market-Specific Vat?, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Andrew Shact, Gail Wasylyshyn

Faculty Scholarship

VATs flourish in complex, clearly defined markets. New York discovered this when it converted its single-stage retail sales tax on hotel rooms, the Hotel Room Occupancy Tax (HROT), into a multi-stage European-style VAT. The HROT VAT-conversion demonstrates that (a) in a clearly defined market where (b) a single stage tax is imposed on (c) only part of a complex supply chain that (d) losses attributable to supply-chain-fragmentation can be remedied by moving to a multi-stage VAT.

The Medical Devices Excise Tax (MDET) imposes as 2.3% excise tax on the sale by manufacturers, producers or importers of clearly identified medical devises …

Mahagében Kft & Péter Dávid: Re-Directing The Eu Vat's Perfect Storm, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

On June 21, 2012 the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rendered judgment on two Hungarian references, Mahagében kft v. Nemzeti Adó-és Vámhivatal Dél-dunántúli Regionális Adó Fölgazgatósága and Péter Dávid v. Nemzeti Adó-és Vámhivatal Dél-dunántúli Regionális Adó Fölgazgatósága (Mahagében/Dávid). The Mahagében/Dávid decisions clarify the CJEU’s earlier holdings in the joined cases of Alex Kittel v. Belgium and Belgium v. Recolta Recycling SPRL (Kittel/Recolta).

Kittel/Recolta is a critically important decision. It is central to the EU’s anti-fraud effort. It is one of three legal imperatives that earlier this year appeared to be coalescing into a Perfect (enforcement) Storm.

After …

Constitutional Principles, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

Principles that are not given by the constitutional text are sometimes attributed to the Constitution. This is done within Professor Balkin’s “framework originalism.”1 The question I wish to consider is how it may properly be done. How can it be shown that the Constitution is committed tacitly to a given principle? I shall discuss Balkin’s theory with that question in mind.

Midnight Rules: A Reform Agenda, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

There is a documented increase in the volume of regulatory activity during the last 90 days of presidential administrations. The phenomenon of late-term regulatory activity has been called “Midnight Regulation” based on a comparison to the Cinderella story in which the magic wears off at the stroke of midnight. This Report, prepared for the Administrative Conference of the United States, looks closely at one species of Midnight Regulation, namely Midnight Rules, promulgated in the last 90 days of an administration. The Report examines the phenomenon and concludes with recommendations adopted by the Administrative Conference of the United States at its …

Dead Document Walking, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

As this symposium commences, originalism is a hot topic to discuss and a cool position to advocate. Either portion of that statement would have been nearly inconceivable two decades ago when I started in academia. Originalism at that time was something of an intellectual backwater, with a very limited set of adherents and an even more limited set of critics who were willing to take originalist ideas seriously.1

Living Originalism And Living Constitutionalism As Moral Readings Of The American Constitution, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

With this event – A Symposium on Jack Balkin’s Living Originalism and David Strauss’s The Living Constitution – we launch a Boston University School of Law series of symposia on significant recent books in law. The distinctive format is to pick two significant books that join issue on an important topic, to invite the author of each book to write an essay on the other book, and to invite several Boston University School of Law faculty to write an essay on one or both books.

What are the justifications for pairing Balkin’s Living Originalism1 and Strauss’s The Living Constitution2 in …

Why The 'Originalism' In 'Living Originalism'?, Hugh Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

Jack Balkin’s "Living Originalism" (2011), together with the companion volume "Constitutional Redemption," is an extraordinary achievement that secures his position in the front rank of American constitutional theorists. In those works, Balkin develops a constitutional theory he identifies alternatively as “living originalism” and as “framework originalism.” In this latter expression, Balkin distinguishes two senses of the term “framework.” In the first sense of “framework,” the Constitution establishes a framework for governance and politics. The second sense of “framework” derives from the first. Governance, Balkin argues, involves state-building and constitutional construction by the political branches, not just by the courts. Social …

A Generation Of Software Patents, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

This report examines changes in the patenting behavior of the software industry since the 1990s. It finds that most software firms still do not patent, most software patents are obtained by a few large firms in the software industry or in other industries, and the risk of litigation from software patents continues to increase dramatically. Given these findings, it is hard to conclude that software patents have provided a net social benefit in the software industry.

First Amendment Protection For Union Appeals To Consumers, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

This article explains why decisions of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama holding non-picketing secondary appeals to consumers not to be illegal under the National Labor Relations Act were necessary under a 1988 decision of the Supreme Court, Edward J. DeBartolo Corp. v. Florida Gulf Coast Building & Construction Trades Council. The article also explains why both the Supreme Court decision and the Board’s recent decisions were compelled by the first amendment and could not be based on the language of § 8(b)(4)(ii)(B) of the National Labor Relations Act as interpreted by the Court in other cases. The …

In Medias Res, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

It’s common in academic circles to distinguish between positive arguments (which describe things as they are) and normative arguments (which prescribe the way things ought to be). The distinction dissolves as soon as accounts of how the world works spill over into justifications for the status quo. That happens a lot, especially in discussions of theory. It happens again in David Strauss’ wonderful monograph.1 Strauss offers a succinct exposition of the constitutional system we actually observe, coupled with a powerful explanation of how and why the scheme functions as it does and genuine reassurance that, on the whole, we can …