Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Keep Charitable Oversight In The Irs, Philip Hackney

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Critics are increasingly calling for Congress to remove charity regulation from the IRS. The critics are wrong. Congress should maintain charity regulation in the IRS. What is at stake is balancing power between the state, charity as civil society, and the economic order. In a well-balanced democracy, civil society maintains its independence from the state and the economic order. Removing charitable jurisdiction from the IRS would blind the IRS to dollars placed in charitable solution increasing tax and political shelters and wealthy dominance of charities as civil society. A new agency without understanding of, or jurisdiction over, tax cannot act …

A More Capacious Concept Of Church, Philip Hackney, Samuel D. Brunson

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United States tax law provides churches with extra benefits and robust protection from IRS enforcement actions. Churches and religious organizations are automatically exempt from the income tax without needing to apply to be so recognized and without needing to file a tax return. Beyond that, churches are protected from audit by stringent procedures. There are good reasons to consider providing a distance between church and state, including the state tax authority. In many instances, Congress granted churches preferential tax treatment to try to avoid excess entanglement between church and state, though that preferential treatment often just shifts the locus of …

Book Review: Christophe Jaffrelot, 2021. Modi’S India: Hindu Nationalism And The Rise Of Ethnic Democracy. Translated By Cynthia Schoch, Aniket Nandan

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Book review: Christophe Jaffrelot, 2021. Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy. Translated by Cynthia Schoch

Dark Money Darker? Irs Shutters Collection Of Donor Data, Philip Hackney

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The IRS ended a long-time practice of requiring most nonprofits to disclose substantial donor names and addresses on the nonprofit annual tax return. It is largely seen as a battle over campaign finance rather than tax enforcement. Two of the nonprofits involved, social welfare organizations and business leagues, are referred to as “dark money” organizations because they allow individuals to influence elections while maintaining donor anonymity. Many in the campaign finance community are concerned that this change means wealthy donors can avoid campaign finance laws and have no reason to fear being discovered. In this Article, I focus on whether …

The Vulnerable Sovereign, Ronald A. Brand

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The connection between sovereignty and law is fundamental for both domestic (internal sovereignty) and the international (external sovereignty) purposes. As the dominant forms of government have evolved over time, so has the way in which we think about sovereignty. Consideration of the historical evolution of the concept of sovereignty offers insight into how we think of sovereignty today. A term that was born to represent the relationship between the governor and the governed has become a term that is used to represent the relationships between and among states in the global legal order. This article traces the history of the …

Yes, It's Equality, But It's Not What It Used To Be, Edward Brennan

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No abstract provided.

The Western Way: Democracy And The Media Assistance Model, Daire Higgins

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International media assistance took off during a time where the ideological extremes of USA vs. USSR were set to disappear. Following the Cold War, international relations focused on democracy building, and nurturing independent media was embraced as a key part of this strategy. Fukayama called it the ‘End of History’, the fact that all other ideologies had fallen and Western style democracy was set to become the one common ideology. The US and UK led the way in media assistance, with their liberal ideas of a free press, bolstered by free market capitalism. America was the superpower, and forged the …

Journalism Education And Children's Rights: New Approaches To Media Development In Cee/Cis Countries, Michael Foley, Noirin Hayes, Brian O'Neill

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This article gives the background to a project entitled Children's Rights and Journalism Practice, which was carried out for UNICEF in university journalism faculties in CEE/CIS countries

By focusing on journalism in the context of the academy and raising awareness of children’s rights from a journalistic perspective, the project seeks to provide a relatively safe space for critical engagement with journalistic ethics and values. Children are targets of, or are implicated in, nearly all aspects of public policy, yet are largely invisible in news-media coverage, and rarely have their voices heard in matters affecting them. By using the UNCRC as …

Executions At Guantanamo Bay Would Mock Us Democracy, Tom Clonan

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This week’s announcement by the Pentagon to seek the death penalty in the case of six prisoners at Guantanamo Bay – charged with involvement in the 9/11 attacks – represents yet another step in a long-term planning process for executions at Camp Delta at the US Naval station in Cuba. US Army Regulation 190-55 has for some time allowed for military executions by lethal injection. Until recently however, precedent within US martial law has identified Fort Leavenworth in Kansas as the location for military executions – a location which in theory, would place the condemned prisoner within the jurisdiction of …

Minority Rights, Minority Wrongs, Elena Baylis

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Many of the new democracies established in the last twenty years are severely ethnically divided, with numerous minority groups, languages, and religions. As part of the process of democratization, there has also been an explosion of “national human rights institutions,” that is, independent government agencies whose purpose is to promote enforcement of human rights. But despite the significance of minority concerns to the stability and success of these new democracies, and despite the relevance of minority rights to the mandates of national human rights institutions, a surprisingly limited number of national human rights institutions have directed programs and resources to …

A New Model Of Radical Democracy, Ellen Hazelkorn

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No abstract provided.

External Sovereignty And International Law, Ronald A. Brand

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This essay addresses the need to redefine current notions of sovereignty. It returns to earlier concepts of subjects joining to receive the benefits of peace and security provided by the sovereign. It diverges from most contemporary commentary by avoiding what has become traditional second-tier social contract analysis. In place of a social contract of states, this redefinition of sovereignty recognizes that international law in the twentieth century has developed direct links between the individual and international law. The trend toward democracy as an international law norm further supports discarding notions of a two-tiered social contract relationship between the individual and …