Law Commons^™

Reviving Lenity And Honest Belief At The Boundaries Of Criminal Law, John L. Diamond

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

It is a common misconception that there is a line between criminal and innocent conduct that is transparent and fixed. In fact, much of criminal law is fluid and elastic, free, if strategically applied, to label conduct as legal or illegal. In some cases, this reflects crimes that are vaguely defined or imprecise. In other cases, the prohibited conduct simply includes what is so conventionally accepted as legal that the criminal label is perceived as inapplicable until a prosecutor chooses to apply it. The problem of a fluid rather than a fixed line for criminality is that prosecutorial discretion becomes …

Enforcing International Corrupt Practices Law, Paul D. Carrington

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Essay strives to advance the current international movement to deter the transnational corrupt practices that have long burdened the global economy and weakened governments, especially in "developing" nations. Laws made in the last decade to address this longstanding global problem have not been effectively enforced. Described here are the moderately successful efforts in the United States since 1862 to reward private citizens serving as enforcers of laws prohibiting corrupt practices. It is suggested that this American experience might be adapted by international organizations to enhance enforcement of the new public international laws.

Identifying And Enforcing Back-End Electoral Rights In International Human Rights Law, Katherine A. Wagner

Michigan Journal of International Law

From Kenya to Afghanistan, Ukraine, the United States, Mexico, and Iran, no region or form of government has been immune from the unsettling effects of a contested election. The story is familiar, and, these days, hardly surprising: a state holds elections, losing candidates and their supporters claim fraud, people take to the streets, diplomats and heads of state equivocate, and everyone waits for the observers' reports. It is the last chapter of this story-the resolution-that remains unfamiliar and still holds the potential to surprise. The increasing focus on and importance of the resolution of contested elections, that resolution's link to …

Vol. 61, No. 1, September 30, 2010, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

•Dean Z Speaks •Zach Letter Law •Trivial Pursuit of Justice •Law and Lit •The Ex-Pat Perspective •Trespassing with Felix •Kicking It Old School •Grade Curves

The Case For Dividend Deduction, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Amir C. Chenchinski

Law & Economics Working Papers

There have been various proposals made in the past two decades to integrate the corporate and shareholder tax, including dividend exemption, imputation, and the Comprehensive Business Income Tax (CBIT). In our view, the problem with all of these proposals is that they omit to ask the crucial question of why we should tax business entities in the first place. Taxes, the economists tell us, are always borne by human beings, not by legal entities. Why should legal entities, be they corporations or other forms of business entity, be subject to tax at all? Would it not be easier to just …

Revolutions In Local Democracy? Neighborhood Councils And Broadening Inclusion In The Local Political Process, Matthew J. Parlow

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Political marginalization of minorities and government corruption are two key factors that have led to the overwhelming decline and decay of America's major cities. Local governments must combat the historical entrenchment of these two evils in order to reverse the trend toward demise. Neighborhood councils may be the best structural changes to local government because they provide more meaningful opportunities for political engagement of minority groups, while also serving as an antidote to systemic corruption in local government. This Essay analyzes the problems plaguing local government in urban cities and explores how neighborhood councils may be able to help address …

Citizens United And The Threat To The Regulatory State, Tamara R. Piety

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Although Citizens United has been roundly criticized for its potential effect on elections and its display of judicial immodesty (or "activism"), the effect of the case which may be both most profound and perhaps most pernicious is its effect on the commercial speech doctrine. This is an aspect of the case which has been largely overlooked. Most people seem to be unaware of any connection between election law and the commercial speech doctrine-except, that is, those who have been working long and hard to accomplish the change it foreshadows. They are keenly aware of its implications.

Kids Are Different, Stephen St.Vincent

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The Supreme Court recently handed down its decision in Graham v. Florida. The case involved a juvenile, Graham, who was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted as an adult of a nonhomicidal crime. The offense, a home invasion robbery, was his second; the first was attempted robbery. Due to Florida's abolition of parole, the judge's imposition of a life sentence meant that Graham was constructively sentenced to life without parole for a nonhomicide crime. Graham challenged this sentence as unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. Somewhat surprisingly, the Supreme Court invalidated Graham's sentence by a 6-3 majority. By a …

Establishing A "Due Care" Standard Under The Lacey Act Amendments Of 2008, Rachel Saltzman

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The Lacey Act was first enacted in 1900 as a narrow measure for domestic bird preservation and agriculture protection. It was significantly amended in 1981 and 1988 to prohibit trafficking in fish and wildlife "taken, possessed, transported, or sold" in violation of state and foreign laws. For the past three decades, the amended statute has provided the federal government with a powerful tool for regulating imports of fish and wildlife. In 2008 Congress expanded its reach still further, responding to widespread concern about the effects of illegal logging on local governance, the environment, and American business by extending the Act's …

Insterstitial Exclusivities After Association For Molecular Pathology, Mary Mitchell, Dana A. Remus

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The high profile cases Bilski v. Kappos and Association for Molecular Pathology v. United States Patent and Trademark Office have renewed public debate about the proper scope of patentable subject matter. The subject matter inquiry has traditionally been treated as a threshold inquiry in patent law, serving a gate-keeping function by defining the types of inventions that are eligible for patent protection. The Patent Office and courts have approached the subject matter inquiry both by determining whether an invention falls into a statutory category-processes, machines, manufactures, or compositions of matter-as well as by determining whether an invention falls into a …

"What Do I Do About This Word, 'Unavoidable'?": Resolving Textual Ambiguity In The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, Jason Lafond

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The quote in the title of this Essay comes from Justice Breyer, expressing his frustration with the language of section 22(b)(1) of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. Justice Breyer made this comment during the October 12, 2010, oral argument in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, Inc., a case about the availability of state tort claims based on vaccine design defects. The question before the Court was whether that section expressly preempts such claims against vaccine manufacturers "if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions …

Commerce In The Commerce Clause: A Response To Jack Balkin, Robert G. Natelson

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The Constitution's original meaning is its meaning to those ratifying the document during a discrete time period: from its adoption by the Constitutional Convention in late 1787 until Rhode Island's ratification on May 29, 1790. Reconstructing it requires historical skills, including a comprehensive approach to sources. Jack Balkin's article Commerce fails to consider the full range of evidence and thereby attributes to the Constitution's Commerce Clause a scope that virtually no one in the Founding Era believed it had.

Race, Educational Loans & Bankruptcy, Abbye Atkinson

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article reports new data from the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project revealing that college graduates and specifically White graduates are less likely to file for bankruptcy than their counterparts without a college degree. Although these observations suggest that a college degree helps graduates to weather the setbacks that sometimes lead to financial hardship as measured by bankruptcy, they also indicate that a college degree may not help everyone equally. African American college graduates are equally likely to file for bankruptcy as African Americans without a college degree. Thus, a college education may not confer the same protective benefit against financial …

Racial Cartels, Daria Roithmayr

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article argues that we can better understand the dynamic of historical racial exclusion if we describe it as the anti-competitive work of "racial cartels." We can define racial cartels to include a range of all-White groups - homeowners' associations, school districts, trade unions, real estate boards and political parties - who gained signficant social, economic and political profit from excluding on the basis of race. Far from operating on the basis of irrational animus, racial cartels actually derived significant profit from racial exclusion. By creating racially segmented housing markets, for example, exclusive White homeowners' associations enjoyed higher property values …

Federal Employer Sanctions As Immigration Federalism, Darcy M. Pottle

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

For low-skilled workers in much of the world, U.S. admission policies make illegal immigration the most viable means of entering the country. Low average schooling, which disqualifies many potential immigrants from employment-based visas, and long queues affecting family preference immigration from high-traffic countries, make the admission criteria outlined in the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) prohibitive for most would-be immigrants to the United States. Perhaps due to this failure of immediate legal avenues, many immigrants enter the country illegally. Though many eventually gain legal status, in the meantime they live and work in the United States without documentation. "Illegal …

Strong Medicine: Toward Effective Sentencing Of Child Pornography Offenders, Kristin Carlson

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

In recent years, possessors of child pornography have entered the federal criminal justice at an alarming rate. In 2006, child pornography cases accounted for sixty-nine percent of the child exploitation cases that were prosecuted federally. Average federal sentences for these offenses also rose sharply, by about 300 percent over the past fourteen years. The mean sentence imposed for child pornography offenses increased from thirty-six months in 1994 to 109 months by 2008. The severe sentences imposed on possessors of child pornography in federal courts have inspired an ongoing deb ate. Critics feel the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines are too harsh on …

State Fiscal Policies And Transitory Income Fluctuations, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

State and local expenditure and tax revenue respond less to the business cycle than do federal spending and revenue, thereby reducing the countercyclicality of total government expenditure and revenue. This paper considers forces responsible for the cyclical pattern of state expenditure and revenue. Annual fluctuations in state personal income are associated with small changes in state spending and significant changes in tax receipts; receipt of federal grants is associated with greater state spending. Tax collections, and to a lesser degree expenditure, of larger states are more closely associated with annual income fluctuations than are the tax collections and expenditure of …

Traveling Concepts: Substantive Equality On The Road, Susanne Baer

Articles

Ideas travel. Even legal concepts migrate on the globe. However, it is a contested issue whether migration is a good idea. We may enjoy traveling ourselves, but many people in the world of law are somewhat worried if we take legal baggage along. Some claim that legal baggage never arrives at its destination and challenge the very possibility of what some call a legal transplant. Others claim that we already live in transnational legal contexts, while still others claim that migration occurs, and that modifies each legal concept on the road in rather significant ways, which may render the project …

The Rise In Elder Bankruptcy Filings And Failure Of U.S. Bankruptcy Law, John A. E. Pottow

Law & Economics Working Papers

Recent empirical legal scholarship on the consumer bankruptcy system has uncovered a marked rise in the proportion of elder Americans filing for relief under the Bankruptcy Code. But these studies have not probed the reasons behind that rise, an omission this Article seeks to address. Professor John Pottow and colleagues recently assembled the new dataset of the Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP), the largest national sample of consumer debtors in this country, which he uses to explore the sources of elder bankruptcy. The findings are both striking and ominous. While multiple factors, such as health problems and medical debts, contribute to …

The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Potential Insurance Coverage Implications, Lynn K. Neuner, W. Nicholson Price

Articles

More than 300 lawsuits have already been filed in Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama against BP and other corporations involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, including Transocean, Halliburton, and Cameron, with thousands more anticipated. This article briefly addresses the contours of the coverage lawsuit already filed against BP and other coverage disputes we may see in the future.

Taxation As Regulation: Carbon Tax, Health Care Tax, Bank Tax And Other Regulatory Taxes, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

This paper addresses three questions: 1. Is regulation a legitimate goal for taxation? 2. Which tax is best suited for regulation? 3. Would it be better to allocate just one goal per tax among the major taxes (individual and corporate income tax and VAT)? It then analyzes the proposed bank tax and the enacted health care tax as regulatory taxes, and concludes that the first is desirable (as is a carbon tax) but the second is not.

The Redemption Puzzle, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

After the adoption of partial integration in 2003, there has been only a modest rise in dividends, but a sixfold increase in redemptions. This article argues that the explanation for that lies in the different treatment of dividends and capital gains to foreign shareholders and that Congress should respond by making sections 302 and 304 inapplicable to foreign shareholders.

The Price Of Pay To Play In Securities Class Actions, Stephen Choi, Drew T. Johnson-Skinner, Adam C. Pritchard

Law & Economics Working Papers

This paper studies the effect of campaign contributions to lead plaintiffs — “pay to play’’ — on the level of attorneys’ fees in securities class actions. We find that state pension funds generally pay lower attorneys’ fees when they serve as lead plaintiffs in securities class actions than do individual investors serving in that capacity. This differential disappears, however, when we control for campaign contributions made to officials with influence over state pension funds. Thus, pay to play appears to increase agency costs borne by shareholders in securities class actions.

Tax Convergence And Globalization, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

This paper addresses three questions: 1. Is there evidence that the tax systems of different countries have converged (i.e., become more similar) in the period 1980-2010? 2. If so, what is the explanation for this convergence? 3. Is convergence a positive or negative development?

Charity And Information: Correcting The Failure Of A Disjunctive Social Norm, Brian Broughman, Robert Cooter

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Charitable donations fund social goods that the state and markets undersupply. Despite widespread belief in the importance of private charity, most Americans donate little or nothing. Experiments in behavioral economics show that anonymity, not human nature, causes low contributions. Anonymity poses a particular challenge for charity because of the special character of the obligation. Charity is a disjunctive social norm, meaning the obligation is owed to "A or B or C or ...". Disclosure of each individual's aggregate conduct is necessary for the effectiveness of any disjunctive social norm. To revitalize charity we propose a public registry where each taxpayer …

Citizen Police: Using The Qui Tam Provision Of The False Claims Act To Promote Racial And Economic Integration In Housing, Jan P. Mensz

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Economic and racial integration in housing remains elusive more than forty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act. Recalcitrant municipal governments and exclusionary zoning ordinances have played a large role in maintaining and exacerbating segregated housing patterns. After discussing some of the persistent causes of segregated housing patterns, this Note presents a novel approach to enforcing the Fair Housing Act and the "affirmatively furthering fair housing" requirement on recipients of federal housing grants. This Note presents a citizen suit that emerged from the Southern District of New York in Anti-Discrimination Center v. Westchester County, where a private …

The French Huissier As A Model For U.S. Civil Procedure Reform, Robert W. Emerson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Huissiers de justice serve multiple roles in the French legal system. One is that of a court officer who compiles dossiers (reports). In that role, the huissier is d'audiencier (literally translated as "hearing" or "assisting") and works directly for the court system itself.

The huissier's report remains alien to the American lawyer, who is steeped in notions of procedure and "testimonialism" and in principles of fairness which appear ancient, but are rather modern dissimulations of law and equity's rich history in the American tradition. An important aspect of most legal processes, the collection of data in preparation for litigation is …

Turning A Short-Term Fling Into A Long-Term Commitment: Board Duties In A New Era, Nadelle Grossman

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Corporate boards face significant pressure to make decisions that maximize profits in the short run. That pressure comes in part from executives who are financially rewarded for short-term profits despite the long-term risks associated with those profit-making activities. The current financial crisis, where executives at AIG and numerous other institutions ignored the long-term risks associated with their mortgage backed securities investments, arose largely because those executives were compensated for the short-term profits generated by those investments despite their longer-term risks. Pressure on boards for short-term profits also comes from activist investors who seek to make quick money off of trading …

The Redemption Puzzle, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

Following the adoption of partial integration in 2003, there was only a modest increase in dividends during the period 2004-7, from about 300 to about 500 (if 1987 levels are set at 100). Redemptions, however, showed a remarkable increase, jumping from about the same as dividends (300) to 1,800. This, therefore, leads to a new puzzle: Why the sudden sharp increase in redemptions following 2003?

Like the dividend puzzle, the redemption puzzle is susceptible to several explanations. For example, Bratton and Wachter note that managers who hold stock options tend to favor redemptions over dividends. But in this case, I …

Inferiorizing Judicial Review: Popular Constitutionalism In Trial Courts, Ori Aronson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The ongoing debates over the legitimacy of judicial review-the power of courts to strike down unconstitutional statutes-as well as the evolving school of thought called "popular constitutionalism, " are characterized by a preoccupation with the Supreme Court as the embodiment of judicial power This is a striking shortcoming in prevailing constitutional theory, given the fact that in the United States, inferior courts engage in constitutional adjudication and in acts of judicial review on a daily basis, in ways that are importantly different from the familiar practices of the Supreme Court. The Article breaks down this monolithic concept of "the courts" …