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The Economic Analysis Of Evidence Law: Common Sense On Stilts, Richard O. Lempert Dec 2001

The Economic Analysis Of Evidence Law: Common Sense On Stilts, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

There was a time when the empire of Law was not overrun by economists. The economists had their own fiefdoms to be sure-there was the Duchy of Antitrust and the Kingdom of Regulatory Law-but the economists lived in peace within these borders, welcoming many unlike themselves into their midst, only gently proselytizing their students in the first few classes of a term, and swearing fealty to the law. It is true that a few marauders from beyond the borders saw the wealth of the empire and sought to colonize it, but even the most daring, Archbishop Coase and Duke Gary …


Introduction To "Books", Margaret A. Leary Dec 2001

Introduction To "Books", Margaret A. Leary

Articles

It's well known that graduate William B. Cook's generosity provided the Law School with its trademark Gothic Law Quadrangle. It is less universally known that Cook endowed the Law School with a trust to support faculty research, and had a strong interest in the nature of that research. He chose to call the library building "Legal Research" and to inscribe above the main entrance "Learned and cultured lawyers are safeguards of the republic." Cook often said that the lack of "intellectual leadership 1s the greatest problem which faces America," and he wanted this Law School to provide that missing leadership. …


Why The Corporate Amt Should Be Retained, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Nov 2001

Why The Corporate Amt Should Be Retained, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The corporate AMT is under attack. Repeal has been proposed by the White House, endorsed by the ABA/AICPA/TEI tax simplification project, and included in the stimulus bill passed by the House of Representatives. Repeal is supported on two principal grounds: That the corporate AMT increases complexity, and that it is pro-cyclical.


Tax Competition And E-Commerce, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Sep 2001

Tax Competition And E-Commerce, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In the last four years, there has been increasing concern by developed countries about the potential erosion of the corporate income tax base by "harmful tax competition" (in the European Union since 1997, in the OECD since 1998). However, the data on tax competition available to date present a mixed and somewhat puzzling picture. On the one hand, there is considerable evidence that effective corporate income tax rates in many countries have been declining, and that the worldwide effective tax rates on multinational enterprises (MNEs) have been going down as well. On the other hand, macroeconomic data from developed countries …


Citizen Participation In Judicial Decision Making: Juries, Lay Judges And Japan, Richard O. Lempert Sep 2001

Citizen Participation In Judicial Decision Making: Juries, Lay Judges And Japan, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

In the late 1920s and 1930s Japan had a jury system. It was suspended in 1943 as a wartime measure, but it had fallen into desuetude long before that. Arguably it was like the Spanish jury, which has several times risen during periods of relative political liberalism or populism and been suppressed during periods of militarism and autocracy. That is, it may be more than a coincidence that use of the Japanese jury fell precipitously during the 1930s as militarism took hold of the Japanese nation. Now the reinstatement of the Japanese jury is again being seriously considered. Similarly it …


Experts, Carl E. Schneider Jul 2001

Experts, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

George Bernard Shaw famously said that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. Less famously, less elegantly, but at least as accurately, Andrew Abbott argued that professions are conspiracies against each other. Professions compete for authority to do work and for authority over work. The umpire in these skirmishes and sieges is the government, for the state holds the gift of monopoly and the power to regulate it. In Abbott's terms, "bioethics" is contesting medicine's power to influence the way doctors treat patients. If it follows the classic pattern, bioethics will solicit work and authority by recruiting government's power. A …


On American Legal Education Reform In Japanese Legal Education, Carl E. Schneider Apr 2001

On American Legal Education Reform In Japanese Legal Education, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The one hundredth anniversary of the Kyoto University Faculty of Law is the kind of splendid occasion when, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked, a distinguished institution "becomes conscious of itself and its meaning." I can hardly express my pleasure at being invited to join in your celebration; but I must express my fear that I can add little to it. When Dean Tanaka kindly invited me, I should probably have declined, for I, a foreigner, can hardly know enough about an institution so central to the life of its country and its profession to speak of it and its …


Globalization And Tax Competition: Implications For Developing Countries, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Jan 2001

Globalization And Tax Competition: Implications For Developing Countries, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

This article analyses the effects of tax competition on developing countries. Since the 1980s, globalization and greater capital mobility have led many developing countries to adopt the policy of competing with one another to attract capital investment. One of the main forms taken by this competition has been the granting of tax holidays and other tax reductions to investing multinationals. This paper reviews the normative arguments for and against this type of tax competition, from a global perspective. It then examines these arguments in depth from the point of view of developing countries. The conclusion in general is that, since …


A Suggestion On Suggestion, Richard D. Friedman, Stephen J. Ceci Jan 2001

A Suggestion On Suggestion, Richard D. Friedman, Stephen J. Ceci

Articles

Part I of the full article briefly describes the history and current slate of research into children's suggestibility. In this part, we argue that, although psychological researchers disagree considerably over the degree to which he suggestibility of young children may lead to false allegations of sexual abuse, there is an overwhelming consensus that children are suggestible to a degree that, we believe, must be regarded as significant. In presenting this argument, we respond to the contentions of revisionist scholars, particularly those recently expressed by Professor Lyon. We show that there is good reason to believe the use of highly suggestive …


The Liberal Commons, Hanoch Dagan, Michael A. Heller Jan 2001

The Liberal Commons, Hanoch Dagan, Michael A. Heller

Articles

Following the Civil War, black Americans began acquiring land in earnest; by 1920 almost one million black families owned farms. Since then, black rural landownership has dropped by more than 98% and continues in rapid decline-there are now fewer than 19,000 black-operated farms left in America. By contrast, white-operated farms dropped only by half, from about 5.5 million to 2.4 million. Commentators have offered as partial explanations the consolidation of inefficient small farms and intense racial discrimination in farm lending. However, even absent these factors, the unintended effects of old-fashioned American property law might have led to the same outcome. …


The Dynamic Analytics Of Property Law, Michael A. Heller Jan 2001

The Dynamic Analytics Of Property Law, Michael A. Heller

Articles

The standard property trilogy of private, commons, and state has become so outdated that it now impedes imagination and innovation at the frontiers of ownership. This essay suggests two approaches - creating new ideal types and synthesizing existing ones - that may help update our static property metaphors. Using these dynamic approaches to property analytics, legal theory can move beyond polarizing oppositions that have made jurisprudential debates unsolvable and rendered concrete problems invisible.


Globalization And Tax Competition: Implications For Developing Countries, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Jan 2001

Globalization And Tax Competition: Implications For Developing Countries, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The current age of globalization can be distinguished from the previous one (from 1870 to 1914) by the much higher mobility of capital than labor (in the previous age, before immigration restrictions, labor was at least as mobile as capital). This increased mobility has been the result of technological changes (the ability to move funds electronically), and the relaxation of exchange controls. The mobility of capital has led to tax competition, in which sovereign countries lower their tax rates on income earned by foreigners within their borders in order to attract both portfolio and direct investment. Tax competition, in turn, …


Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel Jan 2001

Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel

Articles

When I was first introduced to the constitutional regulation of criminal procedure in the mid-1950s, a single issue dominated the field: To what extent did the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment impose upon states the same constitutional restraints that the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments imposed upon the federal government? While those Bill of Rights provisions, as even then construed, imposed a broad range of constitutional restraints upon the federal criminal justice system, the federal system was (and still is) minuscule as compared to the combined systems of the fifty states. With the Bill of Rights provisions …


Myths And Facts About Affirmative Action, Richard O. Lempert, David L. Chambers, Terry K. Adams Jan 2001

Myths And Facts About Affirmative Action, Richard O. Lempert, David L. Chambers, Terry K. Adams

Articles

The case against affirmative action in admissions to institutions of higher education is based on the moral attractiveness of colorblind decision making and buttressed by a sense that such programs are not just unfair but pointless. Their intended beneficiaries, the argument goes, are put in situations in which they are unable to compete with whites and not only perform poorly but are destructively demoralized in the process. Common to arguments against affirmative action in admissions is a belief that minorities advantaged by it displace whites who are more deserving of admission because they have accomplished more, can better benefit from …


The Pro Bono Priority: The University Of Michigan's Approach To Instilling Public Service, Robert E. Precht, Suellyn Scarnecchia Jan 2001

The Pro Bono Priority: The University Of Michigan's Approach To Instilling Public Service, Robert E. Precht, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Articles

The Pro Bono Priority is a two-part feature on pro bono service in Michigan law schools. in Crossing the Bar, the column of the Legal Education Committee, Dolores M. Coulter discusses how Michigan law schools measure up to the recommendations made in Learning to Serve, the report of the Commission on Pro Bono and Public Service Opportunities from the Association of American Law Schools. In the Access to Justice column, Robert E. Precht and Suellyn Scarnecchia focus specifically on the University of MichiHgan's unique approach to pro bono service.


Precontractual Reliance, Lucian A. Bebchuk, Omri Ben-Shahar Jan 2001

Precontractual Reliance, Lucian A. Bebchuk, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

During contractual negotiations, parties often make reliance expenditures that would increase the surplus should a contract be made. This paper analyzes decisions to invest in precontractual reliance under alternative legal regimes. Investments in reliance will be socially suboptimal in the absence of any precontractual liability-and will be socially excessive under strict liability for all reliance expenditures. Given the results for these polar cases, we focus on exploring how "intermediate"-liability rules could be best designed to induce efficient reliance decisions. One of our results indicates that the case for liability is shown to be stronger when a party retracts from terms …


'Bush' V. 'Gore': What Was The Supreme Court Thinking?, Richard D. Friedman Jan 2001

'Bush' V. 'Gore': What Was The Supreme Court Thinking?, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

One of the most astonishing episodes in American political history ended last month with perhaps the most imperial decision ever by the United States Supreme Court. In one stroke, the Court exercised power that belonged to Congress, the legislature of Florida, Florida's courts and administrators, and, most importantly, the people of the state.


Essay: Recent Trends In American Legal Education, Paul D. Reingold Jan 2001

Essay: Recent Trends In American Legal Education, Paul D. Reingold

Articles

An American law professor in Japan has much more to learn than to teach. A foreigner like me - who comes to Japan on short notice, with no knowledge of Japanese culture and institutions, and with no Japanese language skills - sets himself a formidable task. Happily, the courtesy of my hosts, the patience of my colleagues, and the devotion of my students, have made for a delightful visit. I thank all of you. You asked me to talk about American legal education. As you surely know, the system of legal education in the U.S. is very different from the …


The Current Life Insurance Crisis: How The Law Should Respond, Kyle D. Logue Jan 2001

The Current Life Insurance Crisis: How The Law Should Respond, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

This article explores some of the issues raised by the new evidence of underinsurance. Part I explores the initial theoretical question: why do people buy life insurance? Put differently, what function does life insurance serve? Part II provides some background on the life insurance market as it currently exists. Thus, Part II summarizes the major types of life insurance that are currently offered and summarizes the main elements of the current regulatory regime for life insurance companies. Part III then provides support for the claim that households tend to drastically underconsume life insurance. Section A of that Part summarizes the …


Framing Refugee Protection In The New World Disorder, James C. Hathaway, Colin J. Harvey Jan 2001

Framing Refugee Protection In The New World Disorder, James C. Hathaway, Colin J. Harvey

Articles

A number of jurisdictions have fastened onto a "solution" that appears to reconcile respect for refugee law with the determination of states to rid themselves quickly of potentially violent asylum seekers. Courts in these states have been persuaded that a person who has committed or facilitated acts of violence may lawfully be denied a refugee status hearing under a clause of the Refugee Convention that authorizes the automatic exclusion of persons whom the government reasonably believes are international or extraditable criminals. Refugee law so interpreted is reconcilable with even fairly blunt measures for the exclusion of violent asylum seekers. In …


Federalism, Preclearance, And The Rehnquist Court, Ellen D. Katz Jan 2001

Federalism, Preclearance, And The Rehnquist Court, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Lopez v. Monterey County is an odd decision. Justice O'Connor's majority opinion easily upholds the constitutionality of a broad construction of section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in language reminiscent of the Warren Court. Acknowledging the "substantial 'federalism costs" resulting from the VRA's "federal intrusion into sensitive areas of state and local policymaking," Lopez recognizes that the Reconstruction Amendments "contemplate" this encroachment into realms "traditionally reserved to the States." Justice O'Connor affirms as constitutionally permissible the infringement that the section 5 preclearance process "by its nature" effects on state sovereignty, and applies section 5 broadly, holding the statute …


The U.S. Treasury's Subpart F Report: Plus Ça Change, Plus C'Est La Même Chose?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Jan 2001

The U.S. Treasury's Subpart F Report: Plus Ça Change, Plus C'Est La Même Chose?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

On 29 December 2000, the U.S. Treasury Department released its long-awaited study of Subpart F, entitled “The Deferral of Income Earned through U.S. Controlled Foreign Corporations." This study was commenced in the aftermath of the controversy that ensued from the issuance and subsequent withdrawal of Notice 98-11. The study was originally expected to be issued in 1999 in response to the report published that year by the National Foreign Trade Council, which advocated significant changes in Subpart F. The Treasury Study’s delayed issuance at the end of the Clinton Administration means that it only has (at best) persuasive force for …


Making Sense Of U.S. International Taxation: Six Steps Toward Simplification, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Jan 2001

Making Sense Of U.S. International Taxation: Six Steps Toward Simplification, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress issued a three-volume study in April 2001 entitled Study of the Overall State of the Federal Tax System and Recommendations for Simplification. Among the more than 100 recommendations of the Joint Committee Study, ten relate to international taxation. Of these, only one can be regarded as achieving significant simplification – the proposal to reduce the number of antideferral regimes from six to two. The other recommendations were limited to relatively minor changes of detail in various international provisions. Even these small steps toward simplifying the notoriously complex U.S. international tax …


Gender Matters: Teaching A Reasonable Woman Standard In Personal Injury Law, Margo Schlanger Jan 2001

Gender Matters: Teaching A Reasonable Woman Standard In Personal Injury Law, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Reasonable care is, of course, a concept central to any torts class. But what is it? One very standard doctrinal move is to conceptualize reasonable care as that care shown by a "reasonable person" under like circumstances. The next step, logically, is to visualize this reasonable person. Visualization requires some important choices. For example, is the reasonable person old or young? Disabled or not? These are two questions that all the casebooks I have consulted discuss. But, oddly, no casebook of which I am aware deals with the trait that nearly invariably figures in our description of people: sex. If …


Gang Aft Agley, Carl E. Schneider Jan 2001

Gang Aft Agley, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

In my last contribution to this column (HCR, July-August 2000), I argued that the law of bioethics has repeatedly failed to achieve the hopes cherished for it. I presented evidence, for example, that most doctors breach the duty of informed consent, that advance directives do not direct patients' care, and that repeated legal attempts to increase organ donation have failed to find the success predicted for them. I closed that column by promising to try to explain this chastening experience. It would, of course, take a lifetime of columns to capture all the reasons the law of bioethics …


Why Supervise The Refugee Convention?, James C. Hathaway Jan 2001

Why Supervise The Refugee Convention?, James C. Hathaway

Articles

The Refugee Convention is the only major human rights treaty that is not externally supervised. Under all of the other key UN human rights accords — on the rights of women and children, against torture and racial discrimination, and to promote civil and political, as well as economic, social, and cultural rights — there is at least some effort made to ensure that States are held accountable for what they have signed onto.


How To Talk About Religion, James Boyd White Jan 2001

How To Talk About Religion, James Boyd White

Articles

Our experience, supported we think by that of others, is that it is most difficult to do this well, whether we are trying to talk about religion within a discipline, such as law or psychology or anthropology, or even in more informal ways, with our friends and colleagues. There are many reasons for this: It is in the nature of religious experience to be ineffable or mysterious, at least for some people or in some religions; different religions imagine the world and its human inhabitants, and their histories, in ways that are enormously different; and there is no superlanguage into …


For The Best Of Friends And For Lovers Of All Sorts, A Status Other Than Marriage (Symposium: Unmarried Partners And The Legacy Of Marvin V. Marvin)" , David L. Chambers Jan 2001

For The Best Of Friends And For Lovers Of All Sorts, A Status Other Than Marriage (Symposium: Unmarried Partners And The Legacy Of Marvin V. Marvin)" , David L. Chambers

Articles

American governments have recently begun to experiment with new familial statuses for gay male and lesbian couples, who have demanded the right to marry but have been appeased with more modest forms of recognition.4 What I propose here is quite different. It is a status for people who have close bonds but do not want to be married to each other. I call this status "designated friends." Once registered, "designated friends" would obtain a limited number of privileges and undertake a limited number of responsibilities relating to the care for the other when ill or incapacitated or upon death, but …


Moral Courage And Civility, William I. Miller Jan 2001

Moral Courage And Civility, William I. Miller

Articles

Here follow some words from the book which, given our lost sense of security and innocence in light of Pearl Harbor II of Sept. 11, 2001, turns out to have a more pressing relevance than it had when I wrote it a couple of years ago.


Rescue And The War Story, William I. Miller Jan 2001

Rescue And The War Story, William I. Miller

Articles

It is precisely in the domain of rescue that twentieth-century battle has made its peculiar addition to the styles of the heroic.