Law Commons^™

Tax Complexity And Technology, David I. Walker

Indiana Law Journal

The Federal Income Tax Code has become increasingly complex over time with the implication that many taxpayers no longer understand the connection between their life decisions and their taxes. Some commentators have suggested that increasing computational complexity may be attributable in part to the proliferation of tax preparation software that renders such complexity manageable at filing time, but otherwise does nothing to mitigate the “black box” nature of the tax system. While such complexity and opacity undercut explicit incentives embedded in the Code, make planning more difficult, and undermine political accountability for taxes, they may also reduce the inefficient distortion ...

Without Accommodation, Jennifer Bennett Shinall

Indiana Law Journal

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), workers with disabilities have the legal right to reasonable workplace accommodations provided by employers. Because this legal right is unique to disabled workers, these workers could, in theory, enjoy greater access to the types of accommodations that are desirable to all workers—including the ability to work from home, to work flexible hours, and to take leave. This Article compares access to these accommodations, which have become increasingly desirable during the COVID-19 pandemic, between disabled workers and nondisabled workers. Using 2017–2018 data from the American Time Use Survey’s Leave and Job ...

Taming Unicorns, Matthew Wansley

Indiana Law Journal

Until recently, most startups that grew to become valuable businesses chose to become public companies. In the last decade, the number of unicorns—private, venture-backed startups valued over one billion dollars—has increased more than tenfold. Some of these unicorns committed misconduct that they successfully concealed for years. The difficulty of trading private company securities facilitates the concealment of misconduct. The opportunity to profit from trading a company’s securities gives short sellers, analysts, and financial journalists incentives to uncover and reveal information about misconduct the company commits. Securities regulation and standard contract provisions restrict the trading of private company ...

Antitrust Class Actions In The Wake Of Procedural Reform, Christine P. Bartholomew

Indiana Law Journal

What is the current vitality of antitrust enforcement? Antitrust class actions—the primary mode of competition oversight—has weathered two decades of procedural reform. This Article documents the effects of those reforms. Relying on an original dataset of over 1300 antitrust class action settlements, this Article finds such cases alive but far from well. Certain suits do succeed on an impressive scale, returning billions of dollars to victims. But class action reform has made antitrust enforcement narrower, more time-consuming, and costlier than only a decade ago. And, as this Article’s sources reveal, new battle lines are forming. Across the ...

Tokenized: The Law Of Non-Fungible Tokens And Unique Digital Property, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

Indiana Law Journal

Markets for unique digital property—digital equivalents of rare artworks, collectible trading cards, and other assets that gain value from scarcity—have exploded in the past few years. At root is the next iteration of blockchain technology, unique digital assets called non-fungible tokens. Unlike bitcoin, where one coin is the same as another, NFTs are unique, each with different attributes. An NFT that represented ownership of Boardwalk would be quite different from one that represented Baltic Avenue.

NFTs have grown from a few early breakout successes to a rapidly developing market for unique digital treasures. The attraction to buyers is ...

Regulating Charitable Crowdfunding, Lloyd H. Mayer

Indiana Law Journal

Charitable crowdfunding is a global and rapidly growing new method for raising money to benefit charities and individuals in need. While mass fundraising has existed for hundreds of years, crowdfunding is distinguishable from those earlier efforts because of its low cost, speed of implementation, and broad reach. Reflecting these advantages, it now accounts annually for billions of dollars raised from tens of millions of donors through hundreds of internet platforms, including Charidy, Facebook, GoFundMe, and GlobalGiving. Although most charitable crowdfunding campaigns raise only modest amounts, on occasion a campaign attracts tens of millions of dollars in donations. However, charitable crowdfunding ...

Respeaking The Bill Of Rights: A New Doctrine Of Incorporation, Kurt Lash

Indiana Law Journal

The incorporation of the Bill of Rights against the states by way of the Fourteenth Amendment raises a host of textual, historical, and doctrinal difficulties. This is true even if (especially if) we accept the Fourteenth Amendment as having made the original Bill of Rights binding against the states. Does this mean we have two Bills of Rights, one applicable against the federal government with a “1791” meaning and a second applicable against the state governments with an “1868” meaning? Do 1791 understandings carry forward into the 1868 amendment? Or do 1868 understandings of the Bill of Rights carry backward ...

Big Data, Big Gap: Working Towards A Hipaa Framework That Covers Big Data, Ryan Mueller

Indiana Law Journal

One lasting impact of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the privacy protections it provides for our sensitive health information. In the era of Big Data, however, much of our health information exists outside the traditional doctor-patient dynamic. From wearable technology, to mobile applications, to social media and internet browsing, Big Data organizations collect swaths of data that shed light on sensitive health information. Big Data organizations largely fall outside of HIPAA’s current framework because of the stringent requirements for when the HIPAA protections apply, namely that the data must be held by a covered entity ...

Managing Judicial Discretion: Qualified Immunity And Rule 12(B)(6) Motions, Zachary R. Hart

Indiana Law Journal

Qualified immunity is a judicially created doctrine that shields government officials from personal liability for civil damages. Courts applying the doctrine, which is heavily dependent on the facts of the case, must determine whether the government officials’ conduct violated a clearly established statutory or constitutional right of which a reasonable person would have known. This inquiry is discretionary as judges must determine if the alleged violation was “clearly established,” a term that the Supreme Court has defined in conflicting ways. Moreover, when federal judges conduct the qualified immunity inquiry at the Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss stage, their ...

Systemic Racism In The U.S. Immigration Laws, Kevin R. Johnson

Indiana Law Journal

This Essay analyzes how aggressive activism in a California mountain town at the tail end of the nineteenth century commenced a chain reaction resulting in state and ultimately national anti-Chinese immigration laws. The constitutional immunity through which the Supreme Court upheld those laws deeply affected the future trajectory of U.S. immigration law and policy.

Responding to sustained political pressure from the West, Congress in 1882 passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, an infamous piece of unabashedly racist legislation that commenced a long process of barring immigration from all of Asia to the United States. In upholding the Act, the Supreme ...

Where Is The Author: The Copyright Protection For Ai-Generated Works, Chieh Huang

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

The two groups of the human-or-machine questions, whether AI-generated works are copyrightable and whether AI-generated works have human authors, are revisiting the current copyright law with the emergence of AI-generated works. These revisiting questions reveal that the current authorship requirement fails to provide a clear and operable standard on evaluating a human contributor’s intellectual labor for creative output. Such a defect of the current authorship requirement has to be fixed to respond to the technological change of artificial intelligence and the burgeoning prevalence of AI- or advanced computer program-generated works.

This dissertation’s main goal is to fix the ...

Alumna Doris Pryor, ’03, Nominated To Seventh Circuit, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

President Joe Biden announced three judicial nominees on May 25, including the Hon. Doris L. Pryor—a 2003 graduate of the Maurer School of Law—to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Madeira Serves As Legal Commentator In Netflix’S “Our Father”, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.

Conor Delehanty Is A Standup Guy, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.

Law Article By Prof. Rob Fischman Selected For Land Use & Environmental Law Review, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.

Kat Grant, ’22, Earns Prestigious Equal Justice Works Fellowship, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.

Class Of 22 Spotlight: Heather Gin, Jd, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.

Class Of 22 Spotlight: Charles Westerhaus, Jd, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.

May 2022 Newsletter

Ergo

No abstract provided.

The "Law To Use The Mark The Delpaís," Act 195-2016: Case Study Of A Puerto Rican Certification Mark With Potential Of Becoming A Geographic Indication For Economic Development, Paola Gabriela Zaragoza Cardenales

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

In 2016, the Puerto Rican Congress codified the “Law for the use of the DelPaís Mark” (the DelPaís Law), creating a composite certification mark called Productos DelPaís de Puerto Rico (the DelPaís Mark) for raw fruits, milk, honey, meats, egg, fish, ornamental plants, spices, vegetables, starches, and value-added products. The Puerto Rican Department of Agriculture intended the DelPaís Mark to function as a certification mark and Geographical Indication (GI) to differentiate local from imported products to promote purchasing of locally produced items and eventually export internationally. A GI is a source identifier identifying that a place makes a particular product ...

Ochoa Named Interim Dean For Maurer School Of Law Beginning July 1, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.

2l Brian Hills Honored With Iapp Annual Westin Scholar Award, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.

Maurer Continues Streak Of Exceptional Faculty Hires, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.

Fonseca Honored With The Latino Faculty And Staff Council Award, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.

Vol. 62, No. 13 (April 18, 2022)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Aneil Kovvali To Join Indiana Law This Fall, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.

Departing Dean Showed ‘True Leadership’: Parrish Leaves Strong Legacy As He Prepares To Depart Iu Maurer

Austen Parrish (2014-)

No abstract provided.

Vol. 62, No. 12 (April 11, 2022)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Examining Stock Trading Reforms For Congress Hearing Before The U.S. House Of Representatives Committee On House Administration, Donna M. Nagy

Public Testimony by Maurer Faculty

Professor Nagy testified (text attached, video below) in support of federal legislation that would prohibit members of Congress from owning the securities of individual publicly traded companies as well as certain other investments that would likely conflict with their official duties.

It was nearly 10 years ago to the day when President Barack Obama signed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, requiring enhanced financial disclosures and creating new securities transaction reporting rules for members of Congress, certain members of their family, and their staff. The Act also made absolutely clear that a member of Congress who trades securities ...

Dean Austen Parrish To Step Down From Maurer School Of Law, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.