Organizations Law Commons^™

Reforming Nonprofit Exemption Requirements, Peter Molk

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

This Article proposes a reform for nonprofit exemption and unrelated business income tax. Current tax law provides unclear guidance and requires exempt organizations to risk their entire exemptions on this guidance, leading them to make the socially inefficient choice to use for-profit subsidiaries to preserve their exemptions. Reforming the tax law will solve this inefficiency while providing exempt nonprofits with the desirable option to undertake efficient nonexempt activities to augment their operating budgets. This reform is particularly timely in light of changes to the healthcare field; reform will enable exempt healthcare organizations to offset rising health costs and decreased reimbursements …

Hybrid Entities: Distributing Profits With A Purpose, Heather Sertial

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

This Note elaborates on the introduction of a new legal structure for organizations known as the “hybrid entity.” A hybrid encompasses aspects of both the for-profit model, to generate revenue; as well as the nonprofit model, to distribute funds to a community in need. The objective of this Note is to offer a structural guide to entrepreneurs who are interested in this new model. This Note first examines the limitations of for-profits that would like to contribute to social goals, as well as the limitations of nonprofits that wish to increase their revenues. This Note then discusses two current statutory …

Money And Meaning: The Moral Economy Of Law Firm Compensation, Milton C. Regan, Lisa H. Rohrer

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article, part of an ongoing qualitative research project on law firm culture, analyzes the role of compensation in the modern law firm. At first blush, the significance of the compensation process may seem obvious: it represents an economy in which the firm distributes material rewards to its partners. From this perspective, disputes and dissatisfaction regarding compensation are simply attempts by partners to improve their financial well-being.

Our research suggests, however, that compensation serves to distribute not just money, but also respect. Compensation thus represents the operation of both a material and a moral economy within a firm. As a …

Scaling The Patent System, Christina Mulligan, Timothy B. Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Nonprofits, Politics, And Privacy, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Journal Articles

The first Part of this Article briefly reviews and contrasts the history and current rules governing disclosure and privacy in the federal tax, federal tax exemption, and federal election law contexts. This review reveals that both the cost-benefit approach and the right-to-privacy approach can be found in this history, but to a greater or lesser extent depending on the context. The second Part explores these two different approaches and the extent to which the existing disclosure rules reflect those approaches. This Part shows that the rules are sometimes but not always based both on the cost-benefit approach to disclosure, in …

Internet Governance: The Role Of Multistakeholder Organizations, Joe Waz, Phil Weiser

Publications

With the increasing international focus on the future of the ITU and its role (or lack thereof) in Internet governance, there is greater attention being paid to the fact that much of the 'governance' of the Internet is in fact carried out by so-called 'multistakeholder ('MSH') organizations.' Over the last two decades, these entities have largely established the norms and standards for the global Internet, but they are little known to the general public and even to most regulators and legislators. Indeed, most governments do not understand the essential role of MSH organizations. Consequently, to develop an effective Internet governance …

Re-Construction Of Private Indicators For Public Purposes, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter studies the history of the first generation of indicators of governmental institutional quality. These (international) indicators include labels such as ‘bureaucratic efficiency’ and ‘rule of law.’ This discussion also addresses the argument that it is the reversal, and not the creation, of indicators designed to justify large-scale development policies by leading multilateral agencies that is problematic. This chapter emphasizes the importance of using alternative data sets and making raw data easily available, in order to challenge the present assumptions instead of merely aiming to validate them and the policy choices with which they are associated with.

The Organization For Economic Cooperation And Development’S Role In International Law, James Salzman

Faculty Scholarship

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has played, and continues to play, an important and largely unrecognized role as a lawmaking body. The OECD occupies a unique space in the international lawmaking field, in large part because it was not established with lawmaking as a priority. In a small number of cases, however, it has played a significant role in crafting the emerging architecture of global governance. Case studies of the hazardous waste trade, the Bribery Convention, and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises are presented to demonstrate a clear pattern. A topic of major concern arises on …

Environmental Crisis And The Paradox Of Organizing, Gregg P. Macey

BYU Law Review

Public organizations, including those involved in contingency planning, have tremendous influence over the ultimate scale and scope of an environmental crisis. Yet our understanding of how organizational behavior can either rein in or exacerbate crises continues to lag behind advances in technology. This Article considers the role of public organizations in the blowout of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. Its theoretical lens is the “paradox of organizing,” a frame that I suggest should be applied to interorganizational responses to low-probability, high-consequence events. The struggle to differentiate tasks and subunits and then piece them together during moments of …

Organizational Apologies: Bp As A Case Study, Erin O'Hara O'Connor

Scholarly Publications

On April 20, 2010, the Macondo oil well ruptured during the final phases of exploratory drilling. Methane gas and other substances spewed from the well onto the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform causing an explosion and fire that killed eleven crewmen and ultimately sank the platform. Over the next three months, the well, located approximately 250 miles southeast of Houston, Texas, spilled as much as 184 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. In the aftermath, the U.S. government banned deepwater drilling for several months while applicable regulations were toughened.

The well’s majority owner was BP PLC, formerly known …

Share Transfer Restrictions In Close Corporations As Mechanisms For Intelligible Corporate Outcomes, Stephen J. Leacock

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Global Panopticon - The Changing Role Of International Organizations In The Information Age, Jennifer Shkabatur

Michigan Journal of International Law

The outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2002-2003 and Swine Flu (H1N1) in 2009 captured a great deal of global attention. The swift spread of these diseases wreaked havoc, generated public hysteria, disrupted global trade and travel, and inflicted severe economic losses to countries, corporations, and individuals. Although affected states were required to report to the World Health Organization (WHO) events that may have constituted a public health emergency, many failed to do so. The WHO and the rest of the international community were therefore desperate for accurate, up-to-date information as to the nature of the pandemics, their …

Toward A Trips Truce, Patricia L. Judd

Michigan Journal of International Law

The World Trade Organization's (WTO's) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS or Agreement), now over fifteen years old, regulates a marketplace characterized by extraordinary dynamism, influenced by the constant forces of globalization and technological evolution. Attempts to regulate this market raise natural, persistent questions concerning the Agreement's ability to serve its respective constituencies and adapt to change. The Agreement operates in the midst of an age-old dynamic pitting developing and developed countries against one another, especially when it comes to domestic enforcement against piracy and counterfeiting-a dynamic in which TRIPS has been criticized as a one-sided instrument. …

Palestine Is A State: A Horse With Black And White Stripes Is A Zebra, John Quigley

Michigan Journal of International Law

The article Israel, Palestine, and the ICC by Daniel Benoliel and Ronen Perry, published in Volume 32 of the Michigan Journal of International Law, makes a case against a possible assertion of jurisdiction by the International Criminal Court over war crimes that may have been committed by persons on either side of the 2008-2009 war in Gaza. Benoliel and Perry argue that the International Criminal Court is powerless to investigate or to prosecute such war crimes, despite the strong possibility that such crimes were committed. Concern over such possible crimes has been widely expressed at the international level, including a …

Infusing Due Process And The Principle Of Legality Into Contempt Proceedings Before The International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia Ad The International Criminal Tribunal For Rwanda, Gwendolyn Stamper

Michigan Law Review

Contempt proceedings before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda suffer from two procedural defects: the hearings run afoul of the principle of legality and fail to afford calibrated procedural protection for accused contemnors. First, this Note contends that these two tribunals properly rely on their inherent powers to codify procedural rules for contempt proceedings. However the tribunals' inherent power to prosecute contempt does not allow the courts to punish contemptuous conduct that has not been explicitly proscribed. Such a prosecution contravenes the principle of legality, which provides that criminal responsibility may …

Special Court For Sierra Leone: Achieving Justice?, Charles Chernor Jalloh

Michigan Journal of International Law

The creation of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL or the Court) in early 2002 generated high expectations within the international community. The SCSL was generally deemed to herald a new model or benchmark for the assessment of future ad hoc international criminal courts. As the Court completes the trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor in The Hague-its last-nine years later, this Article offers an early and broad assessment of whether it has fulfilled its promise. More specifically, this Article examines whether the SCSL has achieved, or more accurately-because its trials are still ongoing-whether it is achieving justice. …

Liberal Legal Norms Meet Collective Criminality, John D. Ciorciari

Michigan Law Review

International criminal law ("ICL") tends to focus on the same question asked by the Cambodian survivor above: who was ultimately most responsible? Focusing on the culpability of senior leaders has powerful appeal. It resonates with a natural human tendency to personify misdeeds and identify a primary locus for moral blame. It also serves political ends by putting a face on mass crimes, decapitating the old regime, and leaving room for reconciliation at lower levels. But what happens when smoking guns do not point clearly toward high-ranking officials? And how can the law address the fact that most atrocities are committed …

Mar. 2, 2011, Tnc Comments On Ifc Performance Standard 6-Version 2, Ifc

IFC E&S Performance Standards

No abstract provided.

Questioning The Peremptory Status Of The Prohibition Of The Use Of Force, James A. Green

Michigan Journal of International Law

It is incontrovertible that the prohibition of the unilateral use of force is a fundamental aspect of the United Nations (U.N.) era system for governing the relations between states. Given this fact, the prohibition, as set out most crucially in Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter, is often seen as the archetypal example of a jus cogens norm (a "peremptory norm" of general international law). Certainly, an overwhelming majority of scholars view the prohibition as having a peremptory character. Similarly, the International Law Commission (ILC) has taken this view and it is arguable that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) …

Jan. 10, 2011, Ifc, Review-Update Policy And Performance Standards, Ifc

IFC E&S Performance Standards

No abstract provided.