Law and Society Commons^™

Tax Filing Experiences And Withholding Preferences Of Low- And Moderate-Income Households Preliminary Evidence From A New Survey, Michael S. Barr, Jane Dokko

Other Publications

The United States Federal income tax code has an enormous potential to shape the economic and financial decisions of taxpaying households. Tax rates, compliance laws, and the withholding system create incentives, as do the methods by which the Treasury collects tax receipts and disburses tax refunds. The role of third party service providers in this incentive structure is less well understood, even though tax preparation firms play important roles in our tax system. Nationally, more than half of taxpayers use paid preparers to submit their tax returns. Low- and moderate-income (LMI) households are among those who use the paid tax …

Standefer V. State: The Creation Of The Criminal Defendant's Diminished Right To A Trial By A Fair And Impartial Jury., Esperanza Guzman

St. Mary's Law Journal

In Texas, the right of an accused to have an impartial jury is firmly grounded in the voir dire process, the definitive goal of which is to empanel a fair and impartial jury. The right to a fair and impartial jury is bolstered by the voir dire examination. There have been large discrepancies over the types of questions which can be asked during the voir dire process. The court’s attempt to simplify the process of differentiating between proper and improper voir dire questions has “muddied the issue” for court participants and has resulted in the deprivation of a criminal defendant’s …

2003 Texas House Bill 4: Unanimous Exemplary Damage Awards And Texas Civil Jury Instructions., Patricia F. Miller

St. Mary's Law Journal

Lawmakers and other supporters of tort reform generally describe enacted tort reform legislation as having a positive effect on consumers. But tort reform can create new hurdles for plaintiffs seeking damage awards in civil litigation. The Texas Legislature’s 2003 House Bill 4 (H.B. 4) amendment to the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code (Code) represents the most recent example of major tort reform in Texas. It has yet to be seen whether H.B. 4 will meet promised expectations. What is clear is H.B. 4 will adversely affect Texas plaintiffs seeking exemplary (punitive) damages from a jury. The H.B. 4 amendment …

Getting The Sand Out Of The Eyes Of The Law: The Need For A Clear Rule For Sand Suppliers In Texas After Humble Sand & (And) Gravel, Inc. V. Gomez., Victor E. Schwartz, Mark A. Behrens, Andrew W. Crouse

St. Mary's Law Journal

Health risks associated with the inhalation of silica dust have been known for a very long time. In the United States, the American Foundrymen’s Society has distributed literature addressing silica exposure hazards to its members for over 100 years. For years, litigation against industrial sand manufacturers concerning silica exposure was stable, though recently there has been a marked increase in the number lawsuits. While the number of suits continues to climb, the government reports silica-related deaths have declined dramatically. It appears plaintiffs’ attorneys are manufacturing silica claims using the same lawsuit-generating devices developed during the asbestos context. Tort law recognizes …

Public Attitudes About The Culpability And Punishment Of Young Offenders, Elizabeth S. Scott, N. Dickon Reppucci, Jill Antonishak, Jennifer T. Degennaro

Faculty Scholarship

Conventional wisdom holds that the public supports harsh punishment of juvenile offenders, and politicians often argue that the public demands tough policies. But public opinion is usually gauged through simplistic polls, often conducted in the wake of highly publicized violent crimes by juveniles. This study seeks to probe public opinion about the culpability of young offenders as compared to adult counterparts through more nuanced and comprehensive measures in a neutral setting (i.e. not in response to a high profile crime or during a political campaign when the media focuses on the issue). The opinions of 788 community adults were individually …

Social Contagion Of Violence, Jeffrey Fagan, Deanna L. Wilkinson, Garth Davies

Faculty Scholarship

Since 1968, violence and other crimes in New York City have followed a pattern of recurring epidemics. There have been three consecutive and contiguous cycles characterized by sharp increases in homicides and assaults to an elevated rate followed by equally steep declines to levels near the previous starting point. The most recent epidemic, from 1985-96, had the sharpest rise and steepest decline of the three epidemics. Popular explanations of the current epidemic fail to account for both the rise and fall of the decline, or for the repetitive pattern of these epidemics. In this article, we use public health data …

Jackson V. Birmingham Board Of Education: Title Ix's Implied Private Right Of Action For Retaliation, Elizabeth Mccuskey

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court has penned countless words about the sound of statutory silence.' On March 29, 2005, the Court once again grappled with the meaning of silence in a statute, splitting along familiar 5-4 lines in Jackson v. Birmingham Board of Education.² When the dust cleared, a male coach of a high school girls' basketball team, who was fired in retaliation for protecting his players' Title IX³ rights, possessed a private right of action arising from the statute itself.⁴ Although the Court has retreated from its high-water mark of implying private rights of action,⁵ in …

Infant Safe Haven Laws: Legislating In The Culture Of Life, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

This Article analyzes the politics, implementation, and influence of Infant Safe Haven laws. These laws, enacted across the states in the early 2000s in response to much-publicized discoveries of dead and abandoned infants, provide for the legal abandonment of newborns. They offer new mothers immunity and anonymity in exchange for leaving their babies at designated Safe Havens. Yet despite widespread enactment, the laws have had relatively little impact on the phenomenon of infant abandonment. This Article explains why this is so, focusing particularly on a disconnect between the legislative scheme and the characteristics of neonaticidal mothers that makes the use …

The Problem Of Authority: Revisiting The Service Conception, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The problem I have in mind is the problem of the possible justification of subjecting one's will to that of another, and of the normative standing of demands to do so. The account of authority that I offered, many years ago, under the title of the service conception of authority, addressed this issue, and assumed that all other problems regarding authority are subsumed under it. Many found the account implausible. It is thin, relying on very few ideas. It may well appear to be too thin, and to depart too far from many of the ideas that have gained currency …

The Adventure(S) Of Blackness In Western Culture: An Epistolary Exchange On Old And New Identity Wars, Adrienne D. Davis, Robert S. Chang

Scholarship@WashULaw

Through a series of letters, Professors Robert Chang and Adrienne Davis examine the politics of positionality in law and literary criticism. They use the scholarly debates and conversations around critical race theory and feminist legal theory as a starting point to formulate some thoughts about Critical Race Feminism ("CRF") and its future. The authors use the epistolary form as a literary device to allow them to collaborate on this project while maintaining their own voices. Thus, the letters are not dated. The letters pay particular attention to various border crossings: male attempts to engage in feminist literary criticism, white attempts …

The New Biopolitics: Autonomy, Demography, And Nationhood, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

In India and China, a population gap has opened between young men and women. There are now about 100 million more men than women in those countries and a few of their neighbors. Many of the "missing women" either were never born because of sex-selective abortion or died in childhood because families devote more medical and other resources to boys. "Missing women" mean men who will never marry. Socially unintegrated young men are associated with a variety of social pathologies; most importantly, they are the prime recruitment targets of nationalist and fundamentalist political groups. Conservative and reactionaries have always argued …

History, Human Nature, And Property Regimes: Filling In The Civilizing Argument, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Comment on Carol Rose's 2005 Childress Lecture

The Wto Agreement On Government Procurement And The Uncitral Model Procurement Law: A View From Outside The Region, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

Two of the most significant efforts to bring municipal procurement institutions up to international standards are the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) and the UNCITRAL Model Law on Procurement of Goods, Construction and Services. Though the Model Law has had limited adoptions, it enjoys global influence as a source of norms and practices for good public procurement. The GPA, also reflective of international standards, seems to be on the rise, as more WTO members elect to become GPA contracting parties. This article explores two aspects of these instruments. First, the article explores how the Model Law promotes efficient public …

Clark's Treatise On Corporate Law: Filling Manning's Empty Towers, Ronald J. Gilson, Reinier Kraakman

Faculty Scholarship

Almost 45 years ago, in an elegantly depressive account of the then current state of corporate law scholarship, Bayless Manning announced the death of corporation law "as a field of intellectual effort." Manning left us with an affecting image of a once grand field long past its prime, rigid with formalism and empty of content:

When American law ceased to take the "corporation" seriously, the entire body of law that had been built upon that intellectual construct slowly perforated and rotted away. We have nothing left but our great empty corporate statutes towering skyscrapers of rusted girders, internally welded together …

Capital Punishment And Capital Murder: Market Share And The Deterrent Effects Of The Death Penalty, Jeffrey Fagan, Franklin Zimring, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

The modem debate on deterrence and capital punishment, now in its fourth decade, was launched by two closely timed events. The first was the 1976 United States Supreme Court decision in Gregg v. Georgia, which restored capital punishment after its brief constitutional ban following Furman v. Georgia in 1972. In 1975, Professor Isaac Ehrlich published an influential article saying that during the 1950s and 1960s, each execution averted eight murders. Although Ehrlich's article was a highly technical study prepared for an audience of economists, its influence went well beyond the economics profession. Ehrlich's work was cited favorably in Gregg …

What Do We Owe Each Other In The Global Economic Order?: Constructivist And Contractualist Accounts, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

No legal system deserving of continued support can exist without an adequate theory of justice. A world trade constitution cannot credibly exist without a clear notion of justice upon which to base a consensus. This paper examines two accounts of fairness found in moral philosophy, those of John Rawls and Tim Scanlon. The Rawlsian theory of justice is well-known to legal scholars. Scanlon's contractualist account may be less well-known. The aim of the paper is to start the discussion as to how fairness theories can be used to develop the tools for examining international economic policies and institutions. After elaborating …