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Full-Text Articles in Law

Back To The 1930s? The Shaky Case For Exempting Dividends, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Dec 2002

Back To The 1930s? The Shaky Case For Exempting Dividends, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

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This article is based in part on the author’s U.S. Branch Report for Subject I of the 2003 Annual Congress of the International Fiscal Association, to be held next year in Sydney, Australia (forthcoming in Cahiers de droit fiscal international, 2003). He would like to thank Emil Sunley for his helpful comments on that earlier version, and Steve Bank, Michael Barr, David Bradford, Michael Graetz, and David Hasen for comments on this version. Special thanks are due to Yoram Keinan for his meticulous work on the EU regimes (see Appendix). All errors are the author’s. In this report, Prof. Avi-Yonah …


Statutes With Multiple Personality Disorders: The Value Of Ambiguity In Statutory Design And Interpretation, Joseph A. Grundfest, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 2002

Statutes With Multiple Personality Disorders: The Value Of Ambiguity In Statutory Design And Interpretation, Joseph A. Grundfest, Adam C. Pritchard

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Ambiguity serves a legislative purpose. When legislators perceive a need to compromise they can, among other strategies, "obscur[e] the particular meaning of a statute, allowing different legislators to read the obscured provisions the way they wish." Legislative ambiguity reaches its peak when a statute is so elegantly crafted that it credibly supports multiple inconsistent interpretations by legislators and judges. Legislators with opposing views can then claim that they have prevailed in the legislative arena, and, as long as courts continue to issue conflicting interpretations, these competing claims of legislative victory remain credible. Formal legal doctrine, in contrast, frames legislative ambiguity …


Who Cares?, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 2002

Who Cares?, Adam C. Pritchard

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Jim Cox and Randall Thomas have identified an interesting phenomenon in their contribution to this symposium: institutional investors seem to be systematically "leaving money on the table" in securities fraud class actions. For someone who approaches legal questions from an economic perspective, the initial response to this claim is disbelief. As the joke goes, economists do not bend over to pick up twenty-dollar bills on the street. The economist knows that the twenty dollars must be an illusion. In a world of rational actors, someone else already would have picked up that twenty-dollar bill, so the effort spent bending over …