Law Commons^™

Elimination Of The Deduction For Business Entertainment Expenses, Richard L. Schmalbeck, Jay A. Soled

Faculty Scholarship

The proposal is offered as a part of the Shelf Project, a collaboration by tax professionals to develop and perfect proposals to help Congress when it needs to raise revenue. Shelf Project proposals are intended to raise revenue without raising tax rates because the best systems have taxes that are unavoidable to reach the lowest feasible tax rates.

This proposal would deny deductions for all business entertainment expenses. Also, the definition of the term ‘‘entertainment’’ would be narrowed so that expenses that are incurred in a clear business setting and are deeply rooted in producing immediate income or in mining …

A Response To The Critics Of Corporate Criminal Liability, Sara Sun Beale

Faculty Scholarship

This essay responds to critics of corporate liability and to the claim that elimination or limitation of such liability should be a priority for law reform. It discusses four points. First, imposing criminal liability on corporations makes sense, because corporations are not mere “fictional” entities. Rather, corporations are very real – and enormously powerful – actors whose conduct often causes very significant harms both to individuals and to society as a whole. Second, in evaluating the priorities for law reform it is critical to recognize that most of the problems with corporate liability are endemic to U.S. criminal law, rather …

Making Good On Good Intentions: The Critical Role Of Motivation In Reducing Implicit Workplace Discrimination, Katharine T. Bartlett

Faculty Scholarship

Discrimination in today’s workplace is largely implicit, making it ambiguous and often very difficult to prove. Employment discrimination scholars have proposed reforms of Title VII to make implicit discrimination easier to establish in court and to expand the kinds of situations to which liability attaches. The reform proposals reflect a broad consensus that strong legal norms are crucial to addressing the problem. Yet it is mistaken to assume that strengthening plaintiffs’ hands in implicit discrimination cases will necessarily achieve the long-term goal of reducing its occurrence. This Article brings together several strands of social science research showing that (1) implicit …

No Future Without (Personal) Forgiveness: Re-Examining The Role Of Forgiveness In Transitional Justice, John D. Inazu

Faculty Scholarship

The role of forgiveness has been much discussed in the literature on transitional justice, but a basic point has been muddled: most acts of forgiveness are inherently personal and cannot be achieved by state actors alone. What I call personal forgiveness is extended by a single human victim who has been harmed by a wrongdoer. Personal forgiveness is distinguishable from three other forms of forgiveness: group forgiveness, legal forgiveness (a form of group forgiveness), and political forgiveness. In the context of transitional justice, I argue that: (1) personal forgiveness is a necessary condition for political forgiveness; (2) group forgiveness (including …

Preamble I: Purposes, Legal Nature, And Scope Of The Picc; Applicability By Courts; Use Of The Picc For The Purpose Of Interpretation And Supplementation And As A Model, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Michael's chapter provides commentary on Preamble I of the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts. Areas covered include purposes, legal nature and scope of the PICC; applicability by courts; use of the PICC for the purpose of interpretation and supplementation and as a model.

Keynote Address: The Conflicted Trustee Dilemma, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Guns As Smut: Defending The Home-Bound Second Amendment, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment guarantees a personal, individual right to keep and bear arms. But the Court left lower courts and legislatures adrift on the fundamental question of scope. While the Court stated in dicta that some regulation may survive constitutional scrutiny, it left the precise contours of the right, and even the method by which to determine those contours, for 'future evaluation."

This Article offers a provocative proposal for tackling the issue of Second Amendment scope, one tucked in many dresser drawers across the nation: Treat the Second Amendment …

Describing The Effect Of Adaptation On Settlement, John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan Masur

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

International Common Law: The Soft Law Of International Tribunals, Andrew T. Guzman, Timothy L. Meyer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Narratives Of Oppression, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Competition In The Courtroom: When Does Expert Testimony Improve Jurors’ Decisions?, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

Many scholars lament the increasing complexity of jury trials and question whether the testimony of competing experts helps unsophisticated jurors to make informed decisions. In this article, we analyze experimentally the effects that the testimony of competing experts has on (1) sophisticated versus unsophisticated subjects' decisions and (2) subjects' deci- sions on difficult versus easy problems. Our results demonstrate that competing expert testimony, by itself, does not help unsophisticated subjects to behave as though they are sophisticated, nor does it help subjects make comparable decisions on difficult and easy problems. When we impose additional institutions (such as penalties for lying …

Tax Policy And Personal Identity Over Time, Lawrence A. Zelenak

Faculty Scholarship

Tax policy analysts often claim that tax distributional analysis should be based on a lifetime perspective, at least as a theoretical ideal. A prominent argument in favor of a consumption tax base over an income tax base appeals to this lifetime equity perspective, as does the argument for lifetime income averaging under an income tax with progressive marginal rates. These appeals to lifetime equity assume, in most cases without discussion, that personal identity over time is an unproblematic concept, so that the whole-life person is clearly the ideal unit for purposes of distributional analysis. However, the philosopher Derek Parfit claims …

Tax Enforcement For Gamers: High Penalties Or Strict Disclosure Rules?, Lawrence A. Zelenak

Faculty Scholarship

This essay responds to Alex Raskolnikov’s proposal to replace the current federal income tax compliance regime with a two-track approach based on taxpayer choice. The “deterrence regime” (DR) would be designed to be chosen by “gamers”, and the “compliance regime” (CR) would be designed to be chosen by all other taxpayers. Penalty rates would be significantly higher in the DR than in the CR. In this response, Lawrence Zelenak notes that the tax shelter disclosure rules of current law can also be viewed as a way of imposing a special compliance regime-featuring high odds of detection rather than high penalty …

What Do Federal District Judges Want?: An Analysis Of Publications, Citations, And Reversals, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

We report evidence from a dataset of federal district judges from 2001 to 2002 that district judges adjust their opinion-writing practices to minimize their workload while maximizing their reputation and chance for elevation to a higher court. District judges in circuits with politically uniform circuit judges are better able to predict what opinions will get affirmed by the circuit court, leading to higher publication rates and a higher affirmance rate. In contrast, district judges in circuits with politically diverse circuit judges are less able to predict the preferences of the reviewing circuit court panel, leading district judges to publish fewer …

Umdenken Für Die Unidroit - Prinzipien: Vom Rechtswahlstatut Zum Allgemeinen Teil Des Transnationalen Vertragsrechts [Rethinking The Unidroit Principles: From A Law To Be Chosen By The Parties Towards A General Part Of Transnational Contract Law], Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

The most talked-about purpose of the UNIDROIT Principles of International and Commercial Contracts (PICC) is their applicability as the law chosen by the parties. However, focusing on this purpose in isolation is erroneous. The PICC are not a good candidate for a chosen law - they are conceived not as a result of the exercise of freedom of contract, but instead as a framework to enable such exercise. Their real potential is to serve as objective law - as the general part of transnational contract law.

This is obvious in practice. Actually, choice of the PICC is widely possible. National …

Unshackling Speech (Book Review), David L. Lange

Faculty Scholarship

Reviewing, Brian C. Anderson and Adam D. Thierer, A Manifesto for Media Freedom (2008))

Juries And Medical Malpractice Claims: Empirical Facts Versus Myths, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

Juries in medical malpractice trials are viewed as incompetent, anti-doctor, irresponsible in awarding damages to patients, and casting a threatening shadow over the settlement process. Several decades of systematic empirical research yields little support for these claims. This article summarizes those findings. Doctors win about three cases of four that go to trial. Juries are skeptical about inflated claims. Jury verdicts on negligence are roughly similar to assessments made by medical experts and judges. Damage awards tend to correlate positively with the severity of injury. There are defensible reasons for large damage awards. Moreover, the largest awards are typically settled …

Global Warming And The Problem Of Policy Innovation: Lessons From The Early Environmental Movement, Christopher H. Schroeder

Faculty Scholarship

When it comes to influencing government decisions, special interests have some built-in advantages over the general public interest. When the individual members of special interest groups have a good deal to gain or lose as a result of government action, special interests can organize more effectively, and generate benefits for elected officials, such as campaign contributions and other forms of political support. They will seek to use those advantages to influence government decisions favorable to them. The public choice theory of government decision making sometimes comes close to elevating this point into a universal law, suggesting that the general public …

Foreign Officials And Sovereign Immunity In U.S. Courts, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Special Threat Of Informants To The Innocent Who Are Not Innocents: Producing “First Drafts,” Recording Incentives, And Taking A Fresh Look At The Evidence, Robert P. Mosteller

Faculty Scholarship

Fabricated testimony by informants often plays an important role in convictions of the innocent. In this article, I examine the particularly problematic situation of defendants who are innocent of the particular crime charged but are not strangers to crime. As to such defendants, potential informants abound among crime associates, and they have a ready story line that authorities are preconditioned to accept. Independent proof, which could be an antidote, will predictably be lacking. Indeed, that the informant has exclusive, critical knowledge often leads the prosecution to offer particularly tempting deals.

I focus on the case of Lee Wayne Hunt, a …

Ratification: Useful But Uneven, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

Ratification permits a principal to determine to be bound by the legal consequences of action taken by an agent after the fact of the agent’s conduct when the principal would otherwise not be bound. By ratifying a principal may clarify the effects of uncertainty, furnishing reassurance to the agent, the third party with whom the agent dealt, and other parties interested in the status of the transaction. However, at the point the principal decides whether to ratify, the principal knows facts not known to agent and third party at the time of the agent’s unauthorised transaction, in particular subsequent developments …