Law Commons^™

Another Approach To Corporate Stock Basis, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

Gordon Warnke's article makes a significant contribution. It helps to map a largely unexplored continent of tax law, the use and determination of adjusted basis in corporate shares in connection with certain nonrecognition transactions, recently elaborated in Reg. §1.358-2.2 The regulation provides guidance of particular relevance to the allocation of basis when the shareholder owns two or more batches of stock with differing adjusted bases. As Gordon's article makes clear, apparently simple tax law directives concerning the treatment of adjusted basis raise difficult questions and choices, often in common situations. In this article, I propose to make explicit some of …

Internet Nondiscrimination Principles: Commercial Ethics For Carriers And Search Engines, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Unaccountable power at any layer of online life can stifle innovation elsewhere. Dominant search engines rightly worry that carriers will use their control of the physical layer of internet infrastructure to pick winners among content and application providers. Though they advocate net neutrality, they have been much less quick to recognize the threat to openness and fair play their own practices may pose.

Just as dominant search engines fear an unfairly tiered online world, they should be required to provide access to their archives and indices in a nondiscriminatory manner. If dominant search engines want carriers to disclose their traffic …

The Problems Of Securitizing Sub-Prime Loans, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

In October 2007, the board of directors of Merrill-Lynch, Smith & Fenner, one of the largest if not the largest brokerage houses in the United States, accepted the request for early retirement of its Chief Executive Officer. The brokerage firm disclosed that it has lost over $8 billion on its investments in sub-prime mortgage loans.¹ Merrill Lynch was not the only financial giant to sustain enormous losses. The losses caused market liquidity to dry up. The U.S. government took steps to ease the pressure.² But the high leverage of the system is still unravelling. The effect of these …