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QUALIFIED OPPORTUNITY FUNDS: PRIVATE EQUITY EXEMPTIONS FROM PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY
Get PDFThe historic Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), passed and signed into law in 2017, included a pilot program of a new kind of tax advantage: the Qualified Opportunity Zone. The obscure provision has since spawned novel investment vehicles, called Qualified Opportunity Funds, through which qualified individuals and entities participate in what are often significant tax advantages, including deferral of capital gains for up to ten years. Because Qualified Opportunity Funds have come into existence so recently, regulation has been slow to catch up to the ways in which this tax program is rapidly attracting capital from private equity, investment banks, and even real estate crowdfunding platforms. While the program purports to improve underdeveloped areas of the United States, in practice the dearth of guidelines directing these investments perpetuates a black hole of information surrounding the risk and reporting of the investments, and also invokes securities laws as merely a minimum threshold, rather than meaningfully regulating how and with whom the funds can invest. This Note suggests that greater mandated disclosure requirements, and an extension of the tax incentives to investments only in particular kinds of projects—those that actually advance the goals envisioned by the TCJA provision—would improve the program’s efficacy and protect investors across the spectrum
NOT SO FAIR USE: THE SHORTCOMINGS OF CURRENT COPYRIGHT LAW IN MUSIC SAMPLING
Get PDFThe current enforcement method of the fair use doctrine is not suitable to handle the ever-evolving music industry. The fair use doctrine allows a copyright protected work to be used without getting it approved by the original owner of the work. This is seen often in music sampling. Music sampling is extremely prevalent in today’s music industry; however, federal court is currently the only arena that sampling disputes can be resolved in. This has led to inconsistencies across circuits, unfairness, and exacerbated the backlog of the federal court docket. While many have pointed out both the inefficiency and unfairness of the current enforcement method of the fair use doctrine, the legislature has refused to make any changes to The Copyright Act since 1976. This Note considers how the fair use doctrine can keep up with the increase in music sampling, without having to amend the Copyright Act. Instead of federal court being the only arena for copyright disputes, an independent agency, modeled after current federal agencies, should conduct fair and impartial investigations into copyright infringement
LOOKING FOR A SILVER LINING: HOW THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC FORCED NEW YORK TO RECKON WITH ITS AFFORDABLE HOUSING CRISIS
Get PDFSince the Great Depression, the United States government has failed to find an adequate remedy to a nationwide housing shortage amongst low- and moderate-income individuals and families. The COVID-19 public health crisis has exacerbated this ongoing, nation-wide housing crisis, and has highlighted the racial inequities present in our housing market. Furthermore, it has pushed New York State’s residential housing market into a uniquely precarious position. Dramatic legislation is required at the state level to address the housing crisis caused by the massive growth in income-insecure and housing-insecure individuals that resulted from the pandemic, as well as the widespread departure of high-earning individuals out of the city. Despite the recent federal and state-wide moratoriums on evictions, further action is needed at the state level to address pernicious, exclusionary practices creating these housing shortages. By following the leads of other jurisdictions attempting to remedy their own housing crises, New York State should preempt local government restrictions on new developments, and further incentivize property owners to convert their housing into affordable units. Given the number of vacant market-rate units in New York City as well as the ongoing suburban housing boom, the real estate market is particularly ripe for New York State to remedy longstanding inequities and injustices
FOREWORD: The Free Speech Record of the Roberts Court
Get PDFOn April 9, 2021, scholars gathered at Brooklyn Law School to consider the free speech themes highlighted by a catalogue of the Roberts Court’s free speech jurisprudence. The speakers provided incisive and timely insight on these themes—insight that is reflected in the catalogue and accompanying papers published in this symposium issue of the Brooklyn Law Review. This introduction provides an overview of this symposium issue and the questions presented by each article and essay
The Good, the Bad, and the Historically Anti-Semitic: An Analytical Comparison of Anti-Hate Laws in Germany and the United States
Get PDFConfronted every day with drastically increasing accounts of hate crimes and hate speech, nations’ legislators have routinely tried and subsequently failed to implement effective legislation capable of curbing the hatred epidemic currently sweeping the globe. This failure is due in large part to the lack of a universal stance on hate crime regulation and criminalization. Two countries in particular, the United States and Germany, embody two diametrically opposing approaches taken by nations in the present-day war on hate speech. This Note explores the dramatic dichotomy between the legislative framework surrounding the regulation of hate speech in these two countries. This Note then contrasts the incontrovertible First Amendment implications for the U.S., against Germany’s absolute legal commitment to the preservation of human dignity following WWII, ultimately finding that neither has successfully advanced a solution to the ongoing global war on hate speech. By touching upon each country’s relevant history and the myriad failed attempts to enact laws with sufficient protection, this Note seeks to show how neither extreme is has been victorious in combatting hate crimes within its borders. This Note concludes by proposing a multi-factor approach, with nods to education, historical relevance, and narrowly tailored laws, in order to finally achieve adequate protection against hate crimes without infringing on individual rights
Hypothesis Testing Ordinary Meaning
Get PDFCorpus linguistic tools promise to make determinations of the ordinary meaning (OM) of a word or phrase in a statute more objective, replicable, and transparent. However, significant questions remain as to how corpora may best be employed in the process of determining OM. In this paper, we argue that objectivity, replicability, and transparency are bolstered when legal practitioners take a hypothesis testing approach to determining ordinary meaning. In this approach, the corpus (a large collection of authentic texts) is treated as a sample of data which the practitioner may use to draw inductive inferences about the meaning of the term in question for the population to which the statute applies. This article presents a rationale for viewing OM determinations in this way and a conceptual overview of hypothesis testing as it is employed in the wider scientific community, as well as a step-by-step demonstration of hypothesis testing applied to an OM determination