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Full-Text Articles in Law

Effectively Curbing The Gst Exemption For Perpetual Trusts, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jun 2012

Effectively Curbing The Gst Exemption For Perpetual Trusts, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

In "Effectively Curbing the GST Exemption for Perpetual Trusts," I criticized the Treasury Department’s proposal for dealing with perpetual trusts. My objection is that Treasury’s approach would leave many trusts and much wealth GST-exempt for much longer than Congress originally intended. For perpetual trusts created before enactment, Treasury’s approach would allow them to continue to be unburdened by a durational limit. For perpetual trusts created after the effective date of enactment, Treasury’s approach would still allow them to qualify for the GST exemption, but would have the exemption expire 90 years after the trust was created.


The Dangers Of Reform: Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, And The Limits Of Law, Jennifer L. Levi, Giovanna Shay Jan 2012

The Dangers Of Reform: Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, And The Limits Of Law, Jennifer L. Levi, Giovanna Shay

Faculty Scholarship

Professors Jennifer Levi and Giovanna Shay review Dean Spade's new book "Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law." They argue that Professor Spade's theoretical approach, which he describes as "critical trans politics," is most useful when employed to analyze issues relating to criminal punishment and mass incarceration, and that it is less appropriate as a critique of the marriage equality movement. Despite some areas of disagreement with Professor Spade, the Authors conclude that the book makes an important contribution.


Inter Arma Enim Non Silent Leges, Philip C. Bobbitt Jan 2012

Inter Arma Enim Non Silent Leges, Philip C. Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

There is good reason to think that law and war have nothing to do with one another, and this has certainly been so for most of the lifetime of mankind. Cicero's famous observation-silent enim leges inter arma – from which I take my title, was not a novel insight when uttered in 52 B.C. and in any case was not said in the context of war, but of a prosecution for murder in the aftermath of the Roman riots of that era between the partisans of the populares and optimates. Clausewitz, however, said much the same thing when he decried …


A Crisis In Federal Habeas Law, Eve Brensike Primus Jan 2012

A Crisis In Federal Habeas Law, Eve Brensike Primus

Reviews

Everyone recognizes that federal habeas doctrine is a mess. Despite repeated calls for reform, federal judges continue to waste countless hours reviewing habeas petitions only to dismiss the vast majority of them on procedural grounds. Broad change is necessary, but to be effective, such change must be animated by an overarching theory that explains when federal courts should exercise habeas jurisdiction. In Habeas for the Twenty-First Century: Uses, Abuses, and the Future of the Great Writ, Professors Nancy King and Joseph Hoffmann offer such a theory. Drawing on history, current practice, and empirical data, King and Hoffmann find unifying themes …


Facebook, The Jobs Act, And Abolishing Ipos, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 2012

Facebook, The Jobs Act, And Abolishing Ipos, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

Initial public offerings (IPOs)-the first sale of private firms' stock to the public-are a bellwether of investor sentiment. Investors must be bullish if they are putting their money into untested start-ups. IPOs are frequently cited in the business press as a key barometer of the health of financial markets. Politicians, too, see a steady flow of IPOs as an indicator that capital is fueling the entrepreneurial initiative that sustains the growth of new businesses. Growing businesses create jobs, so Republicans and Democrats can find common ground on the importance of promoting IPOs. That bipartisan consensus was on display this spring …


The Pragmatic Court: Reinterpreting The Supreme People’S Court Of China, Taisu Zhang Jan 2012

The Pragmatic Court: Reinterpreting The Supreme People’S Court Of China, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the institutional motivations that underlie several major developments in the Supreme People's Court of China's recent policy-making. Since 2007, the SPC has sent off a collection of policy signals that escapes sweeping ideological labeling: it has publically embraced a populist view of legal reform by encouraging the use of mediation in dispute resolution and popular participation in judicial policy-making, while continuing to advocate legal professionalization as a long-term policy objective. It has also eagerly attempted to enhance its own institutional competence by promoting judicial efficiency, simplifying key areas of civil law, and expanding its control over lower …


Our Broken Misdemeanor Justice System: Its Problems And Some Potential Solutions, Eve Brensike Primus Jan 2012

Our Broken Misdemeanor Justice System: Its Problems And Some Potential Solutions, Eve Brensike Primus

Reviews

Although misdemeanors comprise an overwhelming majority of state criminal court cases, little judicial and scholarly attention has been focused on how misdemeanor courts actually operate. In her article, Misdemeanors, Alexandra Natapoff rights this wrong and explains how the low-visibility, highly discretionary decisions made by actors at the misdemeanor level often result in rampant discrimination, incredible inefficiency, and vast miscarriages of justice. Misdemeanors makes a significant contribution to the literature by refocusing attention on the importance of misdemeanor offenses and beginning an important dialogue about what steps should be taken going forward to fix our broken misdemeanor justice system.


The Moral Complexity Of Cause Lawyers Within The State, David Luban Jan 2012

The Moral Complexity Of Cause Lawyers Within The State, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Douglas NeJaime's Cause Lawyers Inside the State is a significant contribution to our understanding of cause lawyers. Most basically, NeJaime calls attention to a remarkably neglected topic: cause lawyers who work in the state rather than in public interest firms, law school clinics, or other non-governmental organizations (NGOs). His analysis undermines a narrative that students of cause lawyering too often presuppose: that to be a cause lawyer means standing outside the state, and usually in opposition to it. Almost by definition, a "cause" exists because the dominant institutions of society have failed to represent the interests and ideas of some …


Refugees And Asylum, James C. Hathaway Jan 2012

Refugees And Asylum, James C. Hathaway

Book Chapters

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European governments enacted a series of immigration laws under which international migration was constrained in order to maximise advantage for States. These new, largely selfinterested laws clashed with the enormity of a series of major population displacements within Europe, including the flight of more than a million Russians between 1917 and 1922, and the exodus during the early 1920s of hundreds of thousands of Armenians from Turkey. The social crisis brought on by the de facto immigration of so many refugees - present without authorisation in countries where they enjoyed no protection …


Enforcement Without Foundation? Insider Trading And China's Administrative Law Crisis, Nicholas C. Howson Jan 2012

Enforcement Without Foundation? Insider Trading And China's Administrative Law Crisis, Nicholas C. Howson

Articles

China's securities regulator enforces insider trading prohibitions pursuant to non-legal and non-regulatory internal "guidance." Reported agency decisions indicate that enforcement against insider trading is often possible only pursuant to this guidance, as the behavior identified is far outside of the scope of insider trading liability provided for in statute or regulation. I argue that the agency guidance is itself unlawful and unenforceable, because: (i) the guidance is not the regulatory norm required by the statutory delegation of power; and (ii) the guidance is ultra vires because (a) it addresses something substantively different from what is authorized under the statutory delegation, …


What's In The Third And Final Volume Of The New Restatement Of Property That Estate Planners Should Know About, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 2012

What's In The Third And Final Volume Of The New Restatement Of Property That Estate Planners Should Know About, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

Professor John Langbein and I have just concluded a twenty-year project for the American Law Institute to restate the law of donative transfers. The official title of our three-volume Restatement is the Restatement (Third) of Property: Wills and Other Donative Transfers.1 We refer to it herein simply as the Property Restatement. The third and final volume of the work was published in the last days of 2011. Professor Langbein spoke about certain of the initiatives in the two earlier volumes, which set forth the principles governing the law of wills, intestacy, interpretation of instruments, and the nonprobate system. The concluding …


How The Gun-Free School Zones Act Saved The Individual Mandate, Richard A. Primus Jan 2012

How The Gun-Free School Zones Act Saved The Individual Mandate, Richard A. Primus

Articles

For all the drama surrounding the Commerce Clause challenge to the in-dividual mandate provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”), the doctrinal question presented is simple. Under existing doctrine, the provision is as valid as can be. To be sure, the Supreme Court could alter existing doctrine, and many interesting things could be written about the dynamics that sometimes prompt judges to strike out in new directions under the pressures of cases like this one. But it is not my intention to pursue that possibility here. My own suspicion, for what it is worth, is that the …


Why I Do Law Reform, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 2012

Why I Do Law Reform, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

In this Article, Professor Waggoner, newly retired, provides a retrospective on his career in law reform. He was inspired to write the Article by a number of articles by law professors explaining why they write. He contrasts law-reform work with law-review writing, pointing out that the work product of a law-reform reporter is directed to duly constituted law-making authorities. He notes that before getting into the law-reform business, he had authored or co-authored law review articles that advocated reform, but he also notes that those articles did not move the law a whit. The articles did, however, lead to his …


Too Libor, Too Late: Time To Move To A Market Rate, Michael S. Barr Jan 2012

Too Libor, Too Late: Time To Move To A Market Rate, Michael S. Barr

Articles

Barclays has been fined, the British have issued their report, and now the market is anxious for everything to go on as usual with the London Interbank Offer Rate (“LIBOR”). I think that would be a serious mistake. The U.S. and British investigations into rate-fixing by Barclays revealed a widespread culture of pervasive, deceitful conduct in the setting of the most important private sector benchmark for over $300 trillion in derivative contracts and $10 trillion in adjustable-rate loans. It is highly unlikely that Barclays was the only major bank engaging in this conduct, and public investigations and private lawsuits against …