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Meet the Oligarchs: Business Legitimacy and Taxation at the Top
No full textWe study the causal impact of trust in business elites and trust in government on preferences for taxation at the top. Using new survey data, we find that distrust causes an increase in desired taxes on the top 1 percent. For example, our distrust-in-business-elites treatment leads to an increase in desired taxes on the top 1 percent of 2.4 percentage points (it closes 27 percent of the Democrat-Republican gap in tax preferences) when trust in government is low; a similar result is obtained for our distrust-in-government treatment
Shh---It\u27s a Secret! The Evolution of the Swiss Banking System & International Tax Implications
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Mahanoy v. B.L. & First Amendment “Leeway”
No full textMahanoy Area School District v. B.L.1 promised to resolve an issue that had been vexing the lower courts for decades: When may public schools rely on Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District2 to restrict their students’ “off campus” expressive activities—i.e., when those students are not at school, under school supervision, or otherwise participating in school activities?3 Fourteen long years after it expressly left open this issue in Morse v. Frederick,4 the Court resolved this pressing question with a deeply unsatisfying answer: it depends. Although the Court ruled 8-1 in favor of a student who had posted “fuck cheer” on Snapchat after she did not make the varsity cheerleading team, Mahanoy is no victory for students.
Not only does the Court conclude that schools may use Tinker’s more relaxed constitutional standard to regulate their students’ expression wherever and whenever it might occur, Mahanoy also embraces an ad hoc inquiry as its mode of analysis. The allure of the “special First Amendment leeway”5 Mahanoy affords public schools is that it allows the Court to avoid articulating a clear student speech doctrine, but it leaves schools and judges free to consider any factors they wish to evaluate the constitutional rights of millions of public-school students on a case-by-case basis. The Court offers no guardrails to prevent schools from overextending their authority over student speech aside from essentially warning judges to “be careful.” This dramatic expansion of school authority leaves students uncertain about what remaining speech rights they might have and creates even more instability in an already confusing and arguably incoherent area of the law.6
The Court may have thought its decision in Mahanoy was narrow; it is full of statements suggesting judicial modesty.7 In addition, giving schools First Amendment leeway to regulate student speech may have seemed appealing because it offers flexibility as technology continues to develop.8 Although the case specifically addressed the application of Tinker to off-campus speech, it could be read as collapsing the increasingly complex set of student speech cases into one single inquiry regardless of where the student speech occurs. This approach to First Amendment questions reflects Justice Breyer’s long-standing advocacy for a proportionality approach, where the Court’s traditional free speech doctrines provide helpful “rules of thumb” but are not determinative.9 Importantly, however, Mahanoy is not obviously a proportionality inquiry but instead an ad hoc analysis of a specific set of facts.
This Article contends that the Court’s willingness to embrace an ad hoc inquiry in Mahanoy reflects the underlying fault lines in the Court’s student speech cases and its First Amendment jurisprudence more generally. Although in many ways Mahanoy seems like a simple—and silly—case, it raises complicated questions not only about the proper scope of school authority but also about the rights of minors more generally, the distinction between public (or political) and private speech, protections for harassment and bullying, and the constitutionality of restrictions on lewd or profane speech. An ad hoc approach allows the Court to dodge these questions in the name of the “special circumstances” of public schools.
Part I reviews the facts of the case and the opinions of the Third Circuit and Supreme Court. Part II examines the First Amendment fault lines the Court dodges by embracing an ad hoc inquiry granting schools “First Amendment leeway” to regulate off-campus student speech. These doctrinal fault lines are based both in the Court’s ordinary First Amendment jurisprudence as well as in its student speech cases specifically. Part III argues that the Court afforded schools “leeway” to regulate student speech wherever it might occur to paper over important doctrinal differences. This approach is distinct from a true proportionality inquiry that offers a potentially promising framework for evaluating student speech rights, provided that the Court does not lightly disregard bedrock First Amendment principles or afford unwarranted deference to school authorities
Harry A. Bigelow Portrait
No full textPhotograph courtesy of the University of Chicago Law School. For rights and permissions information for this photo, please contact [email protected]://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/harry_bigelow_images/1003/thumbnail.jp
Edward H. Levi, Formal
No full textEdward H. Levi, Formal 1. University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-03737], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
View information about rights and permissions.https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/edward_levi_images/1001/thumbnail.jp
Edward H. Levi and Harry Kalven
No full textEdward H. Levi (right), dean of the University of Chicago Law School, and Harry Kalven (left), the Harry A. Bigelow Professor of Law.
University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-03777], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
View information about rights and permissions.https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/edward_levi_images/1012/thumbnail.jp
The Law of Restitution for Mistaken Payments: An Economic Analysis
Get PDFThe law of restitution and unjust enrichment has emerged as an important and independent branch of private law globally, but has attracted relatively little economic analysis. The aim of this paper is to develop a general conceptual framework for the economic analysis of the core example of restitution - mistaken payments. We develop a formal model in a parsimonious setting with two buyer-seller pairs, with low (high) transaction costs within (across) pairs. This model generates several novel insights, based on the idea that mistaken payments to strangers impose a “transaction tax” on contracting parties. It sheds new light on distortions generated by the change of position defense, and on the rationale for the discharge for value doctrine (which was implicated in the recent highly controversial Citibank case). We show that full restitution is socially optimal when harm is unilateral, and partial restitution is generally optimal when harm is bilateral. We also propose a hypothetical decoupling regime that would (if it were feasible) lead to more efficient outcomes than would partial restitution. The decoupling regime is intended as a thought experiment that can arguably shed light on some of the foundational debates surrounding the law of restitution