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Full-Text Articles in Law

Accountability And The Sri Lankan Civil War, Steven R. Ratner Oct 2012

Accountability And The Sri Lankan Civil War, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

Sri Lanka's civil war came to a bloody end in May 2009, with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by Sri Lanka's armed forces on a small strip of land in the island's northeast. The conflict, the product of long-standing tensions between Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils over the latter's rights and place in society, had begun in the mid-1980s and ebbed and flowed for some twenty-five years, leading to seventy to eighty thousand deaths on both sides. Government repression of Tamil aspirations was matched with ruthless LTTE tactics, including suicide bombings of civilian …


Can Consumers Control Health-Care Costs?, Mark A. Hall, Carl E. Schneider Sep 2012

Can Consumers Control Health-Care Costs?, Mark A. Hall, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The ultimate aim of health care policy is good care at good prices. Managed care failed to achieve this goal through influencing providers, so health policy has turned to the only market-based option left: treating patients like consumers. Health insurance and tax policy now pressure patients to spend their own money when they select health plans, providers, and treatments. Expecting patients to choose what they need at the price they want, consumerists believe that market competition will constrain costs while optimizing quality. This classic form of consumerism is today’s health policy watchword. This article evaluates consumerism and the regulatory mechanism …


Sales Between A Partnership And Non-Partners, Douglas A. Kahn Aug 2012

Sales Between A Partnership And Non-Partners, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

The code denies a deduction for a loss recognized on a sale or exchange between certain related parties. Two of the principal code sections that deny a deduction in that circumstance are sections 267(a)(1) and 707(b)(1)(A). Two regulatory provisions promulgated under section 267 apply the denial of a loss deduction rule to partnerships — reg. section 1.267(b)-1(b) and temp. reg. section 1.267(a)-2T(c), Question 2. I conclude that to the extent reg. section 1.267(b)-1(b) applies to section 267(a)(1), it is invalid and has been invalid since 1986. Also, two of the questions and answers in the temporary regulation are invalid.


Contribution Of A Built-In Loss To A Partnership, Douglas A. Kahn Jul 2012

Contribution Of A Built-In Loss To A Partnership, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

Before 2004, it was possible to use the partnership tax provisions of the code to shift the benefit ofa loss deduction for a decline in property valuefrom the person who incurred it to another person.One method of accomplishing that goal involvedthe contribution of depreciated property to a partnership.


Retirees Beware: Don't Worry About The British-- 2013 Is Coming, Douglas A. Kahn, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jul 2012

Retirees Beware: Don't Worry About The British-- 2013 Is Coming, Douglas A. Kahn, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

Retirees beware. The easy money policy of the Federal Open Market Committee and the 15 percent tax rate on qualified dividends have encouraaged retirees, especially middle-income retired savers, to reorient their nest eggs away from certificates of deposit, treasuries, and money market funds to dividend-paying stocks and mutual funds. According to the IRS, 43 percent of taxpayers age 65 or older reported qualified dividend income amounting to nearly half of the qualified dividend income reported by all taxpayers. By contrast, 46 percent of taxpayers age 65 or older reported net capital gains amounting to 30.5 percent of the net capital …


Slicing The Shadow: A Proposal For Updating U.S. International Taxation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Jun 2012

Slicing The Shadow: A Proposal For Updating U.S. International Taxation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In the article Avi-Yonah proposed that the United States tax multinational corporations using a formulary apportionment system based solely on income derived from sales. The background for the article was drawn principally from Robert Reich’s The Work of Nations (1991), and the analysis was inspired by Stanley I. Langbein’s work on transfer pricing, especially his seminal article "The Unitary Method and the Myth of Arm’s Length," Tax Notes, Feb. 17, 1986, p. 625; see also Louis Kauder, "Intercompany Pricing and Section 482: A Proposal to Shift From Uncontrolled Comparables to Formulary Apportionment Now," Tax Notes, Jan. 25, 1993, p. 485.


Effectively Curbing The Gst Exemption For Perpetual Trusts, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jun 2012

Effectively Curbing The Gst Exemption For Perpetual Trusts, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

In "Effectively Curbing the GST Exemption for Perpetual Trusts," I criticized the Treasury Department’s proposal for dealing with perpetual trusts. My objection is that Treasury’s approach would leave many trusts and much wealth GST-exempt for much longer than Congress originally intended. For perpetual trusts created before enactment, Treasury’s approach would allow them to continue to be unburdened by a durational limit. For perpetual trusts created after the effective date of enactment, Treasury’s approach would still allow them to qualify for the GST exemption, but would have the exemption expire 90 years after the trust was created.


Vive La Petite Difference: Camp, Obama, And Territoriality Reconsidered, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah May 2012

Vive La Petite Difference: Camp, Obama, And Territoriality Reconsidered, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The recent tax reform proposals by House Ways and Means Committee Chair David Camp, R-Mich., and by President Obama seem to offer starkly contrasting visions of how to reform the taxation of foreign-source income earned by U.S.-based multinational enterprises.1 Both acknowledge the problem, which is that U.S.-based MNEs currently have more than $1 trillion of ‘‘permanently reinvested’’ income offshore, which they cannot bring back to the U.S. without incurring a 35 percent tax penalty. However, they seem to offer radically different solutions: Under the Camp proposal, a participation exemption will enable U.S.-based MNEs to bring back the income without paying …


Is Tort Law A Form Of Institutionalized Revenge, Gabriel S. Mendlow Jan 2012

Is Tort Law A Form Of Institutionalized Revenge, Gabriel S. Mendlow

Articles

Viewed in a certain light, tort law serves primarily to give injury victims a means of imposing onerous burdens on their injurers. Through the remedy of injunction, tort law enables victims to restrict their injurers' freedom of action, and through the remedies of damages and restitution, tort law enables victims to deprive their injurers of money and other things of value. Moreover, tort law distinctively grants victims themselves the power to impose these burdens, rather than reserving prosecutorial discretion to the state. These features of tort law invite the charge that tort law is essentially a form of institutionalized revenge. …


Antibiotic Resistance, Jessica D. Litman Jan 2012

Antibiotic Resistance, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

Ten years ago, when I wrote War Stories,' copyright lawyers were fighting over the question whether unlicensed personal, noncommercial copying, performance or display would be deemed copyright infringement. I described three strategies that lawyers for book publishers, record labels, and movie studios had deployed to try to assure that the question was answered the way they wanted it to be. First, copyright owners were labeling all unlicensed uses as "piracy" on the ground that any unlicensed use might undermine copyright owners' control. That epithet helped to obscure the difference between unlicensed uses that invaded defined statutory exclusive rights and other …


When Federal And State Systems Converge: Foreign National Human Trafficking Victims Within Juvenile And Family Courts, Bridgette A. Carr Jan 2012

When Federal And State Systems Converge: Foreign National Human Trafficking Victims Within Juvenile And Family Courts, Bridgette A. Carr

Articles

This article highlights the concerns facing foreign national children who are both victims of human trafficking and under the jurisdiction of juvenile and family courts. Human trafficking is modern day slavery in which individuals, including children, are compelled into service and exploited. Foreign national human trafficking victims in juvenile and family court systems must navigate both the state system and a complex federal immigration system. This article explains the federal benefits available to these children and identifies the best practice approaches for juvenile and family court systems to increase identification of and support for foreign national child trafficking victims.jfcj_1073


King Arthur Confronts Twiqy Pleading, Edward H. Cooper Jan 2012

King Arthur Confronts Twiqy Pleading, Edward H. Cooper

Articles

Rule 25 of the 1912 Equity Rules stated that "it shall be sufficient that a bill in equity shall contain ... a short and simple statement of the ultimate facts upon which the plaintiff asks relief, omitting any mere statement of evidence." Not mere conclusions, not evidence, but "ultimate facts." And, at that, not facts "constituting the cause of action." The bare words of Rule 25 could mean something quite different to a twenty-first-century audience than they meant to a twentieth-century audience. But they may serve as a foil to the challenge framed by the Supreme Court in Bell Atlantic …


The Question Of Courage, William I. Miller Jan 2012

The Question Of Courage, William I. Miller

Articles

Courage is first among virtues in heroic epic and in cultures of honor. Men cared to be known for their courage. It not only took courage to fight well, but the issue often being fought over was who had more of it. Courage was competitive. Men were ranked according to the degree of courage they possessed. Arguments arose as to what counted as truly courageous, what the perfect form of the virtue was, and what were lesser though still worthy semblances of it. Not only philosophers theorized about courage: warriors, politicians and spectators did so as well. The stakes were …


The Past And Future Of Deinstitutionalization Litigation, Samuel R. Bagenstos Jan 2012

The Past And Future Of Deinstitutionalization Litigation, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

Two conflicting stories have consumed the academic debate regarding the impact of deinstitutionalization litigation. The first, which has risen almost to the level of conventional wisdom, is that deinstitutionalization was a disaster. The second story challenges the suggestion that deinstitutionalization has uniformly been unsuccessful, as well as the causal link critics seek to draw with the growth of the homeless population. This Article, which embraces the second story, assesses the current wave of deinstitutionalization litigation. It contends that things will be different this time. The particular outcomes of the first wave of deinstitutionalization litigation, this Article contends, resulted from the …


The Sky Is Still Not Falling, Richard D. Friedman Jan 2012

The Sky Is Still Not Falling, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Cases since Crawford have mainly fallen into two categories. One involves accusations of crime, made by the apparent victim shortly after the incident. In Michigan v. Bryant, a majority of the Court adopted an unfortunately constricted view of the word "testimonial" in this context. That decision was a consequence of the Court having failed to adopt a robust view of when an accused forfeits the confrontation right. How the Court will deal with this situation-one mistake made in an attempt to compensate for another-is a perplexing and important question. This Essay, though, concentrates on the other principal category of post-Crawford …


The Effective Tax Rate Of The Largest Us And Eu Multinationals, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Yaron Lahav Jan 2012

The Effective Tax Rate Of The Largest Us And Eu Multinationals, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Yaron Lahav

Articles

The United States has the second highest statutory corporate tax rate in the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) (after Japan).1 This has not always been the case. After the Tax Reform Act of 1986 lowered the U.S. rate from 46% to 34%,2 the United States had one of the lowest statutory corporate tax rates in the OECD.3 In the past twenty-five years, however, the U.S. rate has remained essentially unchanged (it was raised to 35% in 1993),4 while most other OECD countries reduced their statutory rate so that the OECD average statutory corporate tax rate is 25.1%.


Do Sex Offender Registries Make Us Less Safe?, J. J. Prescott Jan 2012

Do Sex Offender Registries Make Us Less Safe?, J. J. Prescott

Articles

State legislatures enacted sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws with the explicit and exclusive aim of reducing sex offender recidivism. The general idea that we ought to “regulate” released offenders — of any type — to reduce the likelihood of their returning to crime is an attractive one, at least in theory. Criminal recidivism generates significant social harm. Nevertheless, despite their now-widespread use, SORN laws became the norm without any systematic study of their consequences. Admittedly, the logic underlying these laws seems at first difficult to gainsay: if a known sex offender poses even a small risk to a …


Were Standard Oil's Railroad Rebates And Drawbacks Cost Justified?, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2012

Were Standard Oil's Railroad Rebates And Drawbacks Cost Justified?, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

In this essay, written for a symposium on the centennial anniversary of the Supreme Court's Standard Oil decision, I reexamine the costjustification question. In the first part, I explain why the cost-justification question is central to the entire case and its acquired and evolving historical meaning. In the second part, I review the evidence of claimed efficiencies passed on to the railroads. I conclude that there is evidence that Standard Oil passed along significant cost savings to the railroads and that these savings could have justified a portion of the rebates and drawbacks. However, I conclude that there is little …


Shaken Baby Syndrome, Abusive Head Trauma, And Actual Innocence: Getting It Right, Keith A. Findley, Patrick D. Barnes, David A. Moran, Waney Squier Jan 2012

Shaken Baby Syndrome, Abusive Head Trauma, And Actual Innocence: Getting It Right, Keith A. Findley, Patrick D. Barnes, David A. Moran, Waney Squier

Articles

In the past decade, the existence of shaken baby syndrome (SBS) has been called into serious question by biomechanical studies, the medical and legal literature, and the media. As a result of these questions, SBS has been renamed abusive head trauma (AHT). This is, however, primarily a terminological shift: like SBS, AHT refers to the two-part hypothesis that one can reliably diagnose shaking or abuse from three internal findings (subdural hemorrhage, retinal hemorrhage, and encephalopathy) and that one can identify the perpetrator based on the onset of symptoms. Over the past decade, we have learned that this hypothesis fits poorly …


United States--Certain Measures Affecting Imports Of Poultry From China: The Fascinating Case That Wasn't, Donald H. Regan Jan 2012

United States--Certain Measures Affecting Imports Of Poultry From China: The Fascinating Case That Wasn't, Donald H. Regan

Articles

US–Poultry (China) was the first Panel decision dealing with an origin-specific SPS measure, or with what the United States referred to as an ‘equivalence regime’. More specifically, it was the first instance in which the basis for the challenged measure was the claimed inability of the complainant country to enforce its own food-safety rules. Unfortunately, as the litigation developed, the very interesting novel issues raised by such a measure were not discussed. This essay discusses those novel issues – in particular, what sort of scientific justification or risk assessment should be required for a measure like this, and what SPS …


Facebook, The Jobs Act, And Abolishing Ipos, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 2012

Facebook, The Jobs Act, And Abolishing Ipos, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

Initial public offerings (IPOs)-the first sale of private firms' stock to the public-are a bellwether of investor sentiment. Investors must be bullish if they are putting their money into untested start-ups. IPOs are frequently cited in the business press as a key barometer of the health of financial markets. Politicians, too, see a steady flow of IPOs as an indicator that capital is fueling the entrepreneurial initiative that sustains the growth of new businesses. Growing businesses create jobs, so Republicans and Democrats can find common ground on the importance of promoting IPOs. That bipartisan consensus was on display this spring …


The Financial Crisis And The Path Of Reform, Michael S. Barr Jan 2012

The Financial Crisis And The Path Of Reform, Michael S. Barr

Articles

In the lead-up to the financial crisis, the U.S. financial sector was overleveraged, short-funded, risky, and opaque. "Shadow banking" permitted institutions to avoid comprehensive supervision and capital requirements. Innovation outpaced the ability or willingness of private- and public-sector guardians to rein in risks. An asset bubble fed the system, until the market imploded in the fall of 2008. When the crisis hit, our society found itself illequipped to deal with the failure of leading financial firms. In the wake of the crisis, the Obama Administration proposed a set of reforms that were eventually embodied, in large part, in the Dodd-Frank …


Search Neutrality As An Antitrust Principle, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2012

Search Neutrality As An Antitrust Principle, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Given the Internet's designation as "the great equalizer,"' it is unsurprising that nondiscrimination has emerged as a central aspiration of web governance.2 But, of course, bias, discrimination, and neutrality are among the slipperiest of regulatory principles. One person's bias is another person's prioritization. Fresh on the heels of its initial success in advocating a net neutrality principle,' Google is in the uncomfortable position of trying to stave off a corollary principle of search neutrality.' Search neutrality has not yet coalesced into a generally understood principle, but at its heart is some idea that Internet search engines ought not to prefer …


Learning From The Unique And Common Challenges: Clinical Legal Education In Jordan, Nisreen Mahasneh, Kimberly A. Thomas Jan 2012

Learning From The Unique And Common Challenges: Clinical Legal Education In Jordan, Nisreen Mahasneh, Kimberly A. Thomas

Articles

Legal education worldwide is undergoing scrutiny for its failure to graduate students who have the problem-solving abilities, skills, and professional values necessary for the legal profession.1 Additionally, law schools at universities in the Middle East have found themselves in an unsettled environment, where greater demands for practical education are exacerbated by several factors such as high levels of youth unemployment. More specifically, in Jordan there is a pressing need for universities to respond to this criticism and to accommodate new or different methods of legal education. Clinical legal education is one such method.3 We use the term "clinical legal education" …


School Districts And Families Under The Idea: Collaborative In Theory, Adversarial In Fact, Debra Chopp Jan 2012

School Districts And Families Under The Idea: Collaborative In Theory, Adversarial In Fact, Debra Chopp

Articles

To read the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is to be impressed with the ambition and promise of special education. The statute guarantees disabled students a "free appropriate public education" (FAPE) in the "least restrictive environment." At the core of this guarantee lies an entitlement for the parents of a disabled child to collaborate with teachers and school administrators to craft an educational program that is both tailored to the child's unique needs and designed to help her make progress in her education. This entitlement, and the IDEA generally, represents an enormous advance for children with disabilities--a community that, …


A Functional Approach To Targeting And Detention, Monica Hakimi Jan 2012

A Functional Approach To Targeting And Detention, Monica Hakimi

Articles

The international law governing when states may target to kill or preventively detain nonstate actors is in disarray. This Article puts much of the blame on the method that international law uses to answer that question. The method establishes different standards in four regulatory domains: (1) law enforcement, (2) emergency, (3) armed conflict for civilians, and (4) armed conflict for combatants. Because the legal standards vary, so too may substantive outcomes; decisionmakers must select the correct domain before determining whether targeting or detention is lawful. This Article argues that the "domain method" is practically unworkable and theoretically dubious. Practically, the …


David Baldus And The Legacy Of Mccleskey V. Kemp, Samuel R. Gross Jan 2012

David Baldus And The Legacy Of Mccleskey V. Kemp, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

The first major empirical challenge to racial discrimination in the use of the death penalty in the United States was presented in federal court in the case of William L. Maxwell, who was sentenced to death in Arkansas in 1962 for the crime of rape.1 It was based on a landmark study by Marvin Wolfgang, a distinguished criminologist who had collected data on some 3000 rape convictions from 1945 through 1965 in selected counties across eleven southern states.2 He found that black men who were convicted of rape were seven times more likely to be sentenced to death than white …


Symposium: Examining Shaken Baby Syndrome Convictions In Light Of New Medical And Scientific Research, David A. Moran Jan 2012

Symposium: Examining Shaken Baby Syndrome Convictions In Light Of New Medical And Scientific Research, David A. Moran

Articles

I've been asked to react to Professor Findley's talk, and I just wanted to try to put this in a concrete format that we can understand. In the summer of 2001, when my oldest daughter was about six months old, I put her in a backpack (the kind that you strap to your back) to go for a hike. In trying to get her out of that backpack after the walk, I dropped her, and she landed on her head, and she very briefly lost consciousness. So I rushed her to the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor, …


Confrontation And Forensic Laboratory Reports, Round Four, Richard D. Friedman Jan 2012

Confrontation And Forensic Laboratory Reports, Round Four, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Crawford v. Washington radically transformed the doctrine governing the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution. Before Crawford, a prosecutor could introduce against an accused evidence of a hearsay statement, even one made in contemplation that it would be used in prosecution, so long as the statement fit within a "firmly rooted" hearsay exception or the court otherwise determined that the statement was sufficiently reliable to warrant admissibility. Crawford recognized that the Clause is a procedural guarantee, governing the manner in which prosecution witnesses give their testimony. Therefore, a prosecutor may not introduce a statement that is testimonial …


The Rise, Decline And Fall(?) Of Miranda, Yale Kamisar Jan 2012

The Rise, Decline And Fall(?) Of Miranda, Yale Kamisar

Articles

There has been a good deal of talk lately to the effect that Miranda1 is dead or dying-or might as well be dead.2 Even liberals have indicated that the death of Miranda might not be a bad thing. This brings to mind a saying by G.K. Chesterton: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up."4