Law Commons^™

Consumption Taxation Is Still Superior To Income Taxation, David A. Weisbach, Joseph Bankman

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No abstract provided.

Advocacy Strategies To Fight Eviction In Cases Of Compulsive Hoarding And Cluttering, Tom Cobb, Eric Dunn, Vanessa Torres Hernandez, Jake Moroni Okleberry, Riana Pfefferkorn, Chelsea Spector

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No abstract provided.

The New Massachusetts Health Law: Preemption And Experimentation, Edward A. Zelinsky

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The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) preempts major features of the new Massachusetts health law. Although regrettable, this conclusion is mandated by ERISA's statutory terminology and the controlling case law. Other states, in fashioning their health care policies, are looking at elements of the new Massachusetts law. Just as ERISA preempts the individual and business contribution mandates of the Massachusetts statute, ERISA will preempt any similar provisions adopted by other states.

Because state experimentation with health care is particularly desirable today, Congress should, at a minimum, amend ERISA to validate the new Massachusetts health law. More comprehensively, …

All In The Family As A Single Shareholder Of An S Corporation, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn, Terrence G. Perris

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Subject to a few exceptions, a corporation that has elected to be taxed under subchapter S of chapter 1 of subtitle A of title 26 of the United States tax code is not taxed on its net income. Instead, the income, deductions, credits, and other tax items of an S corporation pass through to its shareholders on a pro rata basis. To qualify for subchapter S treatment, an electing corporation must satisfy the requirements that are set forth in section 1361, one of which is that the corporation can have no more than 100 shareholders. One aspect of that requirement …

The Cash Nexus, Carl E. Schneider

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Courts and legislatures have labored for decades to protect patients' choice of medical treatments, even though patients seize that gift less eagerly than lawmakers expect. Yet while courts have rushed to build the whited sepulchre of informed consent, they have fled from a related problem that patients actually yearn to solve and that actually can be ameliorated the plight of patients who perforce agree to a treatment before they know its costs and who receive a bill both unrelated to the treatment's value and several times what an insured patient would pay. Increasingly, patients must be consumers in the medical …

Current Research On Medical Malpractice Liability, Anup Malani

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Optimal Tax Compliance And Penalties When The Law Is Uncertain, Kyle D. Logue

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This article examines the optimal level of tax compliance and the optimal penalty for noncompliance in circumstances in which the substance of the tax law is uncertain - that is, when the precise application of the Internal Revenue Code to a particular situation is not clear. In such situations, a number of interesting questions arise. This article will consider two of them. First, as a normative matter, how certain should taxpayers be before they rely on a particular interpretation of a substantively uncertain tax rule? If a particular position is not clearly prohibited but neither is it clearly allowed, what …

Probability Thresholds, Jonathan Masur

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Scholars and lower courts have traditionally operated under the belief that cases involving direct tradeoffs between free speech and national security call for the application of straightforward cost-benefit analysis. But the Supreme Court has refused to adhere to this approach, instead deciding difficult liberty-versus-security questions with reference to a "probability threshold"--a doctrinal floor defining how likely a potential threat must be in order to register in the constitutional calculus. This doctrinal innovation has served as a necessary corrective to what would otherwise be the systematic overestimation of speech-based threats driven by the interaction of two factors. First, distinct informational asymmetries …

Dispatches From The Tort Wars, Anthony J. Sebok

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It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, as a political matter, the modern tort reform movement has been very successful. This essay reviews three books that either rebut the tort reform movement's central theses or analyze the strategies that allowed the movement to prevail. I discuss Tom Baker's The Medical Malpractice Myth, Herbert Kritzer's Risks, Reputations, and Rewards: Contingency Fee Legal Practice in the United States, and William Haltom & Michael McCann's Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis. Although each book has a very different focus from the other two, I argue that a common theme …

The Internationalization Of Lay Legal Decision-Making: Jury Resurgence And Jury Research, Richard O. Lempert

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When I first began to study the jury more than thirty years ago, the topic of this Journal issue, jury systems around the world, was unthinkable. The use of juries, especially in civil litigation, had long been in decline, to the point of near extinction in England, the land of their birth, and the live question was whether the jury system would endure in the United States. It seemed clear that juries would not continue in their classic form, as many U.S. states, with the Supreme Court's eventual approval, mandated juries of less than twelve people and allowed verdicts to …

Classic Revisited: Penal Theory In Paradise Lost, Richard A. Posner, Jillisa Brittan

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John Milton: Complete Poems And Major Prose, Richard A. Posner

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On Logic In The Law: Something, But Not All, Susan Haack

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In 1880, when Oliver Wendell Holmes (later to be a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) criticized the "logical theology" of law articulated by Christopher Columbus Langdell (the first Dean of Harvard Law School), neither Holmes nor Langdell was aware of the revolution in logic that had begun, the year before, with Frege's Begriffsschrift. But there is an important element of truth in Holmes's insistence that a legal system cannot be adequately understood as a system of "axioms and corollaries"; and this element of truth is not obviated by the more powerful logical techniques that are now available.

Essay: On The Divergent American Reactions To Terrorism And Climate Change, Cass R. Sunstein

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Two of the most important sources of catastrophic risk are terrorism and climate change. The United States has responded aggressively to the risk of terrorism while doing very little about the risk of climate change. For the United States alone, the cost of the Iraq War is in excess of the anticipated cost of the Kyoto Protocol. The divergence presents a puzzle; it also raises more general questions about both risk perception and the public demand for legislation. The best explanation for the divergence emphasizes bounded rationality. Americans believe that aggressive steps to reduce the risk of terrorism promise to …

A Creditable Vat?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

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In the early 1990s, Bolivia tried to adopt a popular U.S. tax reform proposal: replacing its corporate income tax with a cash-flow -type consumption tax, broadly similar in structure to taxes proposed by a long line of theorists from Prof. William Andrews in 1974 to the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform in 2006. Unfortunately, the Bolivian experiment ran into an insuperable obstacle: the U.S. foreign tax credit (FTC) rules. The U.S. Treasury decided that the Bolivian tax would not be creditable for U.S. corporations investing in Bolivia. Given the importance of U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) for Bolivia, …

The Law And Economics Of Company Stock In 401(K) Plans, Cass R. Sunstein, Shlomo Benartzi, Richard H. Thaler, Stephen P. Utkus

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Some 11 million participants in 401(k) plans invest more than 20 percent of their retirement savings in their employer's stock. Yet investing in the stock of one's employer is risky: single securities are riskier than diversified portfolios, and an employee's human capital typically is positively correlated with the company's performance. In the worst-case scenario, workers can lose their jobs and much of their retirement wealth simultaneously. For workers who expect to work for a company for many years, a dollar of company stock can be valued at less than 50 cents after accounting for risk. However, employees still invest voluntarily …

Preserving A Special Collection - Ten Things You Can Do When You're On Your Own, Stacy Etheredge

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No abstract provided.

A Cancer On The Republic: The Assault Upon Impartiality Of State Courts And The Challenge To Judicial Selection, Donald L. Burnett Jr.

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E-Mail To Rebecca, Dale Goble

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Concerns At The Margins Of Supervised Access To Children, Elizabeth Brandt

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Their Servants’ Keepers: Examining Employer Liability For The Crimes And Bad Acts Of Employees, Monique C. Lillard

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University Of Idaho Weighs Future Options In Statewide Legal Education, Donald L. Burnett Jr.

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No abstract provided.

Exciting Initiatives In Environment And Natural Resources Law At The University Of Idaho College Of Law, Donald L. Burnett Jr.

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Representing Victims Of Domestic Violence In Property Distribution Proceedings After The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention And Consumer Protection Act Of 2005, Elizabeth Brandt

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More Stories Of Jurisdiction-Stripping And Executive Power: Interpreting The Prison Litigation Reform Act (Plra), Johanna Kalb

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Loud Rules, Wendy Gerwick Couture

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Chevron's Demise: A Survey Of Chevron From Infancy To Senescence, Linda Jellum

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Justice O'Connor And 'The Threat To Judicial Independence': The Cowgirl Who Cried Wolf?, Arthur D. Hellman

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Sandra Day O'Connor retired from active service on the United States Supreme Court in early 2006. As her principal "retirement project," she has taken on the task of defending the independence of the judiciary. In speeches, op-ed articles, and public interviews, she has warned that "we must be ever vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies." Justice O'Connor has done the nation a service by bringing the subject of judicial independence to center stage and by calling attention to the important values it serves. Unfortunately, however, in describing the threats to that independence, she …

The Dutch Auction Myth, Peter B. Oh

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The bursting of the internet bubble continues to have ripple effects on the initial public offering (IPO) process. Critics of this process have fashioned a complex set of interconnected objections to the orthodox bookbuilding method for conducting IPOs, pricing shares, and allocating them to preferred investors. Critics instead hail online reverse-bid, or Dutch, auctions (Dutch IPOs) as an alternative method promising more equitable access, efficient prices, and egalitarian allocations.

This article comprehensively assesses the case for Dutch IPOs. Part I dissects critiques of bookbuilding, which rely on anomalous data, derogate established financial literature, and largely evaporate in the face of …

Legal Scholarship, Humility, And The Scientific Method, David J. Herring

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This essay responds to the question of What next for law and behavioral biology? by describing an approach to legal scholarship that relies on the scientific method. There are two steps involved in this approach to legal scholarship. First, the legal scholar must become familiar with an area of scientific research that is relevant to the development of law and policy. (This essay uses behavioral biology research as an example.) Second, the legal scholar must seek and form relationships across disciplines, becoming an active member of a scientific research team that conducts studies relevant to particular issues of law and …