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Playing the Long Game: The Role of International Courts and Tribunals in the Russo-Ukrainian War
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Shading Sunshine: The Proliferation of Exemptions to State Open Records Laws
Get PDFState and local open records laws play a vital role in our democracy. They shed light on the darkest places, exposing corruption and holding the powerful accountable. Yet lawmakers are continually chipping away at the public’s right to know by limiting the information available under open records laws. Exemptions have been passed to bolster special interests, in response to investigative journalism, and to shield lawmakers. This Note examines the proliferation of exemptions and proposes a three-pronged solution that combines statutory improvements from federal FOIA and Florida’s open records law with a call for greater public engagement on the importance of access to information
Too Much SALT: Rejecting the Pass-Through Entity Tax as a SALT Deduction Cap Workaround
Get PDFHistorically, U.S. taxpayers have been able to deduct their state and local taxes from their federal taxable income. This changed with the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which introduced a $10,000 cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction. States have reacted by turning to various methods to mitigate the negative tax consequences of the cap for their residents, including workarounds that use the charitable contribution deduction or a payroll tax as a means to allow full deductibility of state and local taxes.
With the IRS striking down the charitable contribution workaround, and the payroll tax workaround being difficult to implement, the latest development has been a pass-through entity workaround. Generally, the pass-through entity workaround allows pass-through entities to pay their income tax at the entity level. The owners of the entity then report their pro rata share of the entity\u27s income on their individual state tax return. Finally, the state provides each owner with a tax credit equal to that amount of taxes. The tax benefit for the owners is that the tax paid at the entity level is deductible a business expense, meaning it is not subject to the SALT cap. Thus, the owners are able to deduct the full amount of state and local taxes that they pay.
The Internal Revenue Service issued Notice 2020-75 on Nov. 9, 2020, which suggested that forthcoming regulations would permit the pass-through entity workaround. But it has now been over two years since this Notice was issued under the Trump administration, and there have been no developments on this front under the Biden administration.
This Note argues that the Internal Revenue Service should instead issue regulations denying the validity of state legislation allowing for the pass-through entity workaround. In doing so, this Note examines the legislative history of the SALT deduction, compares the pass-through entity workaround to the charitable contribution and payroll tax workarounds, and analyzes public policy arguments for and against the workaround. Ultimately, it concludes that the workaround raises public policy and substance-over-form concerns and that the Treasury Department and IRS should issue regulations disallowing it
Cannabis Drug Development and the Controlled Substances Act
Get PDFCannabis is a federally illegal drug in the United States, yet thirty-seven states and four territories have now enacted laws allowing the production, distribution, and consumption of cannabis for medical use. An estimated 5.5 million individuals in medical-use states are qualified to purchase cannabis to treat and mitigate symptoms for conditions ranging from cancer to post-traumatic stress disorder to chronic pain. But, only three cannabis drugs have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The current state of federal illegality creates a problem of supply and demand—consumer demand for cannabis is high, but the number of approved drug products and indications for use remains extremely low. Federal agencies maintain that they support cannabis drug development, but current regulations add hefty requirements to the already complex and costly drug approval process.
This Note provides an overview of the current regulatory approval process for cannabis drugs and identifies specific barriers to research and development, specifically restrictions on the supply of cannabis for research and the current demand for cannabis drugs. As the FDA has a responsibility to protect the public health by ensuring drug safety and efficacy, it should prioritize its study of cannabis products, given that the plant and many of its chemical compounds likely have significant therapeutic potential
Solving the Valuation Challenge: The ULTRA Method for Taxing Extreme Wealth
Get PDFRecent reporting based on leaked tax returns of the ultrarich confirms what experts have long suspected: for the wealthiest Americans, paying taxes is mostly optional. Some of the country’s richest have reported annual taxable incomes that would be modest for a schoolteacher, even as the share of wealth held by the top .1 percent is at its highest in nearly a century.
Experts have long understood that one problem sits at the roots of many of the tax system’s failures to reach the very rich: valuation. Because it is difficult to appraise complex or unique assets, modern tax systems instead wait until an asset is sold to impose tax. In combination with a U.S. rule that wipes away income tax on inherited profits, and a highly porous estate tax system, this “realization” approach has deeply undermined U.S. efforts to tax extreme wealth.
This Article proposes a new approach: governments should take payments from the wealthy in the form of notional equity interests, which we call unliquidated tax reserve accounts (“ULTRAs”). Simply put, the ULTRA is economically equivalent to a government claim on a portion of the stock of a business, but because it is “notional,” it does not provide the tax authority with any governance rights or minority shareholder protections. Because the ULTRA represents a set share of an asset, whatever that asset’s worth, it does not require valuation.
We explain how the ULTRA proposal builds on existing components already in use by wealth and income taxes around the globe, as well as on prior academic proposals. By combining select features from predecessors, the ULTRA addresses many of the shortcomings those tools face individually. For example, unlike the “retrospective” systems proposed by the economists Alan Auerbach and David Bradford, the ULTRA method ensures that taxpayers who expect to outperform the market with their investments will still have no incentive to delay paying tax.
We then set out a variety of ways in which ULTRAs can be used to close the loopholes that wealthy taxpayers use to minimize their tax burdens. Most obviously, our proposal helps to make an annual tax on extreme wealth viable, and we detail how the ULTRA features in our proposal, developed more comprehensively elsewhere, for a state-level wealth tax. ULTRAs can also be used to reform the income tax system, most ambitiously as in the recent Billionaires Income Tax reform proposals for eliminating the realization approach for the very rich. We also show that valuation is at the core of many other common tax dodges, and we detail ways that ULTRAs can be used to curtail them
Firearms Law and Scholarship Beyond Bullets and Bodies
Get PDFAcademic work is increasingly important to court rulings on the Second Amendment and firearms law more generally. This article highlights two recent trends in social science research that supplement the traditional focus on guns and physical harm. The first strand of research focuses on the changing ways that gun owners connect with firearms, with personal security, status, identity, and cultural markers being key reasons people offer for possessing firearms. The second strand focuses on broadening our understanding of the impact of guns on the public sphere beyond just physical safety. This research surfaces the ways that guns can create fear, intimidation, and social trauma; deter civic participation and the exercise of constitutional rights; and further entrench racial inequality