Law Commons^™

A Critical Reassessment Of The Role Of Neutrality In International Taxation, David Elkins

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Neutrality plays a central role in the literature on international taxation. In its most prevalent form, the concept of neutrality posits that in order to maximize aggregate global welfare, capital needs to flow to where it would produce the highest pretax return. The thesis of this Article is that neutrality is ordinarily inapplicable in the field of international taxation.

When considering neutrality in the international arena, the problem that one encounters is that the term “international taxation” is commonly used to describe a number of very different types of tax regimes (what the Article refers to as “intranational taxation,” “supranational …

Corporate Social Responsibility Versus Shareholder Value Maximization: Through The Lens Of Hard And Soft Law, Min Yan

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Even with a significant increase in the number of firms around the world engaging in corporate social responsibility (“CSR”), many people still perceive CSR as a voluntary commitment and shareholder value maximization (“SVM”) as a mandatory requirement. This paper borrows the concept of hard law and soft law in terms of coerciveness and overturns the stereotype that SVM is a hard-law constraint and CSR a soft-law constraint. The paper first demonstrates that directors of the board are not obliged to maximize shareholder value even in the Anglo-American jurisdictions where shareholder primacy culture is more dominant. Next, the paper critically discusses …

Western Corporate Fiscal Citizenship In The 21st Century, Alex Freund

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

For the Western world, the challenges of the 21st Century are numerous, from climate change’s effects on food production and coastal cities to underfunded social safety nets to automation’s impact on the middle class. To handle such costly problems, government intervention will be required. Government intervention, however, always comes at a cost to either individuals or corporations. To determine who should bear these costs, scholars and experts should turn to notions of fiscal citizenship – the social contract between the state and private parties through taxation and the provision of goods and services. By applying principles of individual fiscal citizenship …

How Countries Seek To Strengthen Anti-Money Laundering Laws In Response To The Panama Papers, And The Ethical Implications Of Incentivizing Whistleblowers, Carmina Franchesca S. Del Mundo

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

The Panama Papers is currently the world’s largest whistleblower case that involved 11.5 million leaked documents and over 214,000 offshore entities. It all linked back to one Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca. In 2016, over 400 investigative journalists collaboratively and simultaneously published stories that exposed the money laundering and tax-evading schemes committed by the rich and powerful. This included political figures and heads of states, celebrities, sports figures, criminal organizations, and terrorist groups.

This article aims to dissect the innerworkings of Mossack Fonseca’s asset-shielding strategy and investigate how the Panamanian law firm was able to circumvent the tax and anti-money …

Bankruptcy's Cathedral: Property Rules, Liability Rules, And Distress, Vincent S.J. Buccola

Northwestern University Law Review

What justifies corporate bankruptcy law in the modern economy? For forty years, economically oriented theorists have rationalized bankruptcy as an antidote to potential coordination failures associated with a company’s financial distress. But the sophistication of financial contracting and the depth of capital markets today threaten the practical plausibility, if not the theoretical soundness, of the conventional model. This Article sets out a framework for assessing bankruptcy law that accounts for changes in the technology of corporate finance. It then applies the framework to three important artifacts of contemporary American bankruptcy practice, pointing toward a radically streamlined vision of the field. …

Framing Trans Rights, Marie-Amélie George

Northwestern University Law Review

In the wake of marriage equality, opponents of LGBT rights refocused their attention, making transgender rights their main target. To persuade voters to maintain gender identity antidiscrimination protections, LGBT rights campaigns presented trans identity in a specific, but limited, way. These campaigns emphasized gender-conforming transgender individuals—those who adhere to male and female stereotypes—and thereby implicitly reinforced the gender binary. Although LGBT advocates have largely succeeded in their efforts to preserve LGBT rights, their messaging may undermine the movement’s broader litigation strategy and subject nonbinary members of the transgender community to greater discrimination and persecution.

The trans rights framing choices thus …

Passive Voter Suppression: Campaign Mobilization And The Effective Disfranchisement Of The Poor, Bertrall L. Ross Ii, Douglas M. Spencer

Northwestern University Law Review

A recent spate of election laws tightened registration rules, reduced convenient voting opportunities, and required voters to show specific types of identification in order to vote. Because these laws make voting more difficult, critics have analogized them to Jim Crow Era voter suppression laws.

We challenge the analogy that current restrictive voting laws are a reincarnation of Jim Crow Era voter suppression. While there are some notable similarities, the analogy obscures a more apt comparison to a different form of voter suppression—one that operates to effectively disfranchise an entire class of people, just as the old form did for African …

The Transgender Military Ban: Preservation Of Discrimination Through Transformation, Michele Goodwin, Erwin Chemerinsky

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay contends that the Trump Administration’s ban on transgender individuals serving in the military is based on prejudice and bias, lacking any legitimate justification. As such, the transgender military ban cannot be justified on legal grounds. Nor can it be justified based on health and safety. Engaging a robust empirical record, the authors show that the ban cannot be justified based on matters of efficiency, preparedness, or combat readiness—arguments used by the Trump Administration to justify the ban. Despite transgender individuals serving openly in the military in recent years, the Trump Administration has not been able to offer in …

Matter Of A-B-, Lgbtq Asylum Claims, And The Rule Of Law In The U.S. Asylum System, Nora Snyder

Northwestern University Law Review

On June 11, 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions released his decision in a case called Matter of A‑B‑, purporting to eliminate domestic violence and gang violence as grounds for asylum. The decision also cast doubt on the continued viability of asylum claims predicated on non-state actor violence, which alarmed LGBTQ advocates, whose asylum claims often involve non-state actor persecutors. In making this change, Sessions used a previously rarely used feature of the asylum system, the Attorney General’s self-certification power. This Note analyzes the potential impact of Matter of A‑B‑ on LGBTQ asylum seekers. Based on the text of the …

Private Prisons, Private Governance: Essay On Developments In Private-Sector Resistance To Privatized Immigration Detention, Danielle C. Jefferis

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

The Promise And Challenge Of Humanitarian Protection In The United States: Making Temporary Protected Status Work As A Safe Haven, Andrew I. Schoenholtz

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

The humanitarian program Congress created in 1990 to allow war refugees and those affected by significant natural disasters to live and work legally in the United States has only partially achieved its goals. More than 400,000 individuals have received temporary protected status (TPS). In many cases, the crisis ended, along with temporary protection. However, in about half of the designated nationalities—including the largest groups—conflict and instability continued, making this humanitarian protection program anything but temporary. Unfortunately, Congress did not provide the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with the tools it needed to address such long-term crises. That was purposeful—Congress worried …

Children Of A Lesser God: Reconceptualizing Race In Immigration Law, Sarah L. Hamilton-Jiang

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

The increased public exposure to the experiences of Latinx unaccompanied children seeking entry at the United States southern border has revealed the lived reality of the nation’s pernicious immigration laws. The harrowing experiences of unaccompanied children are amplified by their interaction with a legal system plagued by a legacy of systemic racism and sustained racial caste. While immigration law currently affords minimal legal protections for these children, in application, the law continues to fall egregiously short of providing for the safety of unaccompanied children. Though critics have long attested to the legal system’s neglect of unaccompanied children, subsequent legal analysis …

Preschool For All: Plyler V. Doe In The Context Of Early Childhood Education, Shiva Kooragayala

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

In its 1982 opinion in Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court held that a state could not deny undocumented children living within its borders a public and free K-12 education. This Note argues that Plyler’s protections extend to publicly-funded early childhood education programs that serve children between the ages of three and five. Due to the broad support of researchers, educators, and the general public, early childhood education programs funded by local, state, and the federal governments have become an integral part of a comprehensive public education today. While these early childhood education programs are nominally open to all students …

Reconstituting We The People: Frederick Douglass And Jürgen Habermas In Conversation, Paul Gowder

Northwestern University Law Review

This Article draws on Black American intellectual history to offer an approach to fundamental questions of constitutional theory from the standpoint of the politically excluded.

Democratic constitutional theory is vexed by a series of well-known challenges rooted in the inability to justify law without democracy (“the countermajoritarian difficulty”) and the inability to justify any particular composition of the popular demos without law (“the problem of constituent power”). Under conditions of genuine egalitarian political inclusion, a constitutional conception of popular sovereignty derived primarily from the civic republican constitutional patriotism associated with Jürgen Habermas and others can resolve these challenges by providing …

This Isn't Lochner, It's The First Amendment: Reorienting The Right To Contract And Commercial Speech, William French

Northwestern University Law Review

The commercial speech doctrine has long weathered accusations that it is simply an attempt to reinvigorate the laissez-faire protections provided by Lochner v. New York. The modern interpretation of Lochner is generally condemnatory, arguing that its “right to contract” is a symbol of the Supreme Court’s unprincipled decision to impose its own economic preferences upon the nation. Even though Lochnerism itself has been dead for nearly 100 years, some scholars believe that the First Amendment’s commercial speech doctrine is on its way to replicating the defenses provided by the right to contract. The argument goes that because speech pervades …

Accredited Investors: A Need For Increased Protection In Private Offerings, Christopher R. Zimmerman

Northwestern University Law Review

On June 19, 2019, the SEC released a report examining, in part, the adequacy of the accredited investor definition contained within Regulation D of the Securities Act of 1933 and soliciting public comment on potential changes to that definition. This Note argues that the current accredited investor definition, which determines who may invest in a private offering, does not adequately protect retail investors. Implemented in 1982 with fixed wealth requirements to qualify, the accredited investor definition has never been significantly revised, despite four decades of inflation that dramatically increased the percentage of households who meet the qualifications of an “accredited …

The Statutory Interpretation Muddle, Richard H. Fallon, Jr.

Northwestern University Law Review

Debates about statutory interpretation typically proceed on the assumption that statutes have linguistic meanings that we can identify in the same way that we identify the meaning of utterances in ordinary conversation. But that premise is false. We identify the meaning of conversational utterances largely based on inferences about what the speaker intended to communicate. With legislatures, as now is widely recognized, there is no unitary speaker with the sort of communicative intentions that speakers in ordinary conversation possess. One might expect this recognition to trigger abandonment of the model of conversational interpretation as a framework for interpreting statutes. Instead, …

Algorithmic Advertising Discrimination, Joseph Blass

Northwestern University Law Review

The ability of social media companies to precisely target advertisements to individual users based on those users’ characteristics is changing how job opportunities are advertised. Companies like Facebook use machine learning to place their ads, and machine learning systems present risks of discrimination, which current legal doctrines are not designed to deal with. This Note will explain why it is difficult to ensure such systems do not learn discriminatory functions and why it is hard to discern what they have learned as long as they appear to be performing well on their assigned task. This Note then shows how litigation …

Rethinking Police Rulemaking, Maria Ponomarenko

Northwestern University Law Review

For more than sixty years, prominent policing scholars have argued that the way to address the many problems of policing is to treat police departments like all other agencies of government—and to require that they set policy through something like notice-and-comment rulemaking. This paper argues that despite its intuitive appeal, rulemaking is not a particularly apt solution to policing’s various ills. Although policing scholars have been right to look to administrative law for ideas on how to govern policing, they have been focused on the wrong set of administrative tools. Instead of looking to the public to regulate the police …

From Language To Law: Interpretation And Construction In Early American Judicial Practice, Hillary Chutter-Ames

Northwestern University Law Review

This Note surveys evidence concerning how early American Supreme Court Justices approached interpretation and construction based on an analysis of Supreme Court opinions from 1795 to 1805. An evaluation of this evidence indicates two main trends. First, the Justices engaged in interpretation and construction as a single process, alternating between textual and normative reasoning to determine the intent of the Framers or of Congress. In some cases, textual reasoning seemed determinative; in others, normative reasoning was decisive. This finding illustrates some tension between the idea of limiting judicial discretion in construction and applying methods of interpretation and construction that would …

Forgotten Limits On The Power To Amend State Constitutions, Jonathan L. Marshfield

Northwestern University Law Review

There seem to be no limits on what can pass through state constitutional amendment procedures. State amendments have targeted vulnerable minorities, deeply entrenched specific fiscal strategies, and profoundly restructured institutions. The malleability of state constitutions is significant because in many states there are legitimate fears that special interests dominate amendment politics, and that fundamental change is occurring with minimal opportunities for constructive deliberation or inclusive participation. The state doctrine of “referendum sovereignty” is a key condition fueling this dynamic. The doctrine holds that there are no substantive limits on any state amendment processes so long as amendments comply with federal …

The Character Of Law: A Normative Critique Of Social-Emotional Learning Laws, Meredith R. Aska Mcbride

Northwestern University Law Review

This Note examines a widespread but barely acknowledged phenomenon within education law: the recent enactment, in all fifty states, of statutes and standards regarding students’ social and emotional learning within public schools. Despite significant empirical evidence that curricular and disciplinary interventions targeting students’ social and emotional skills are effective at building these skills and, in turn, enhancing students’ academic and long-term outcomes, this Note argues that social and emotional learning should not be legislated. Drawing on James Scott’s seminal critique of processes of state rationalization and Jal Mehta’s application of this critique to education policy, this Note shows that the …

Alienating Citizens, Amanda Frost

Northwestern University Law Review

Denaturalization is back. In 1967, the Supreme Court declared that denaturalization for any reason other than fraud or mistake in the naturalization process is unconstitutional, forcing the government to abandon its aggressive denaturalization campaigns. For the last half century, the government denaturalized no more than a handful of people every year. Over the past year, however, the Trump Administration has revived denaturalization. The Administration has targeted 700,000 naturalized American citizens for investigation and has hired dozens of lawyers and staff members to work in a newly created office devoted to investigating and prosecuting denaturalization cases.

Using information gathered from responses …

Alienating Citizens, Amanda Frost

NULR Online

Denaturalization is back. In 1967, the Supreme Court declared that denaturalization for any reason other than fraud or mistake in the naturalization process is unconstitutional, forcing the government to abandon its aggressive denaturalization campaigns. For the last half century, the government denaturalized no more than a handful of people every year. Over the past year, however, the Trump Administration has revived denaturalization. The Administration has targeted 700,000 naturalized American citizens for investigation and has hired dozens of lawyers and staff members to work in a newly created office devoted to investigating and prosecuting denaturalization cases.

Using information gathered from responses …

The Myth Of The Ever-Watchful Eye: The Inadequacy Of Child Neglect Statutes In Illinois And Other States, Kira Luciano

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Traditional Public Utility Law And The Demise Of A Merchant Transmission Developer, Meredith Hurley

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Shelby County And Local Governments: A Case Study Of Local Texas Governments Diluting Minority Votes, Sydnee Fielkow

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Unrequited Innocence In U.S. Capital Cases: Unintended Consequences Of The Fourth Kind, Rob Warden, John Seasly

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Legal Rights, Real-World Consequences: The Ethics Of Know Your Rights Efforts And Towards Improved Community Legal Education, Brandi M. Lupo

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

No abstract provided.

Deliberation And Decision-Making Process In The Inter-American Court Of Human Rights: Do Individual Opinions Matter?, Ranieri L. Resende

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

The work is focused on the adjudicatory nature of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and investigates its model of deliberation, considering three basic schemes: per curiam, seriatim and hybrid. In order to identify an institutional pattern, the importance of individual opinions is analyzed through the quantitative performance of each category of judge (ad hoc and regular), as well as each type of adjudicative activity (judgments and advisory opinions). The quantitative data is also useful to better understand the explicit assimilation of separate opinions to the core reasoning of future cases. As a result, it has been possible to identify …