Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute
Digital Commons @ University at Buffalo School of LawNot a member yet
8606 research outputs found
Sort by
The Puzzle of Inciting Suicide
Get PDFIn 2017, a Massachusetts court convicted Michelle Carter of manslaughter for encouraging the suicide of Conrad Roy by text message, but imposed a sentence of only 15 months. The conviction was unprecedented in imposing homicide liability for verbal encouragement of apparently voluntary suicide. Yet if Carter killed, her purpose that Roy die arguably merited liability for murder and a much longer sentence. This Article argues that our ambivalence about whether and how much to punish Carter reflects suicide’s dual character as both a harm to be prevented and a choice to be respected. As such, the Carter case requires us to choose between competing conceptions of criminal law, one utilitarian and one libertarian. A utilitarian criminal law seeks to punish inciting suicide to reduce harm. A libertarian criminal law, on the other hand, justifies voluntary suicide as an exercise of liberty, and incitement of suicide as valuable speech. Utilitarian values are implicit in the foreseeability standards prevailing in the law of causation, but libertarian values are implicit in the reluctance of prosecutors to seek, and legislatures to define, homicide liability for assisting suicide. The prevalence of statutes punishing assisting—but not encouraging—suicide as a nonhomicide offense reflects a compromise between these values. These statutes are best interpreted as imposing accomplice liability for conduct left unpunished for two antithetical reasons: it is justified in so far as the suicide is autonomous and excused in so far as the suicide is involuntary. This explains why aiding suicide is punished, but less severely than homicide. Yet even these statutes would not punish Carter’s conduct of encouragement alone. Her conviction although seemingly required by prevailing causation doctrine, is unprecedented
The Equifax Data Breach: An Opportunity to Improve Consumer Protection and Cybersecurity Efforts in America
Get PDF
Phantom Income and Domestic Support Obligations
Get PDFThe tax code is designed to raise government revenue. Domestic support obligations (DSOs)—namely, child support and spousal support—are designed to ameliorate the financial burdens that arise upon divorce. To determine the amount of domestic support obligations, statutes often refer to commonly used taxation concepts, such as “income.”
Courts determining domestic support obligations have been confronted with the question of how to treat “phantom income”—that is, amounts that are includible as gross income under the federal tax code but that have not resulted in any actual current cash receipt. Individuals obligated to make domestic support payments have argued that phantom income should not be included when calculating or modifying such obligations because the individual’s ability to pay has not materially changed. This Article analyzes the intersection of federal tax law and domestic support obligations concerning phantom income.
This Article considers several solutions—judicial and legislative—to address the phantom income issue in the domestic support context. Notably, this Article evaluates the current judicial decisional framework to examine the potential tax and DSO asymmetries. Finally, this Article advances a legislative proposal for a charging-order type remedy specific to domestic support obligations—one that would resolve the phantom income issue in many situations
Interpenetration of Powers: Channels and Obstacles for Populist Impulses
Get PDFDiscussions of populism often focus on the most visible points of executive power: individual leaders. Yet individual leaders only accomplish things through administrative apparatuses that enable and support their power. Rejecting a political theology that imagines sovereignty as inhering in a single decision-maker, this article turns to political pragmatics focused on the people who populate the government. I draw on interviews with administrators in the government of two successful but quite different democracies. The first is the United States, an old, flagship democratic state. The second is Taiwan, which transitioned from a four-decade military dictatorship to a vibrant democracy in the late twentieth century.
My interviews probe how administrators understand their work and how they describe the conditions for its legitimacy. Many Taiwanese administrators tend to present their regulatory practices as highly dialogic and legitimated through ongoing interactions with multiple outside influences, including the legislature and multiple public sectors. Many American administrators, in contrast, tend to hew to a more rigid notion of separated powers, in which too much interaction with those outside the executive threatens the legitimacy of agency action.
My Taiwanese interviewees\u27 idealized state-involved government branches highly integrated with one another and their surrounding society. I suggest that this insistence on interpenetration as a hallmark of legitimacy presents conceptual obstacles to populist impulses, which seek to cordon-off executive action from outside influence and bypass legislative power and public influence. In contrast, the ideal of separated, antagonistic powers that underlies my American interviewees\u27 descriptions of their work presents potentially hospitable channels for the flow of such populist desires
Revisiting the Open Access Citation Advantage for Legal Scholarship
Get PDFCitation studies in law have shown a significant citation advantage for open access legal scholarship. A recent cross-disciplinary study, however, gave opposite results. This article shows how methodology, including the definition of open access and the source of the citation data, can affect the results of open access citation studies
