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Taxation as Insurance
Get PDFA central yet often overlooked aspect of an income tax is that it acts as insurance against the risk of low income. Because a person’s payments to government are a function of income, he can be assured that in a time of low income, his tax payments will decrease and transfers will increase, while the standard benefits of governments continue to flow. Because everyone, no matter how successful, faces some risk of lost income, that assurance provides us an insurance benefit, even if our income never actually drops
The Puzzle of PDVSA Bond Prices
Get PDFMarket reports in the summer of 2016 suggest that Venezuela is on the brink of default on upwards of $65 billion in debt. That debt comprises of bonds issued directly by the sovereign and those issued by the state-owned oil company PDVSA. Based on the bond contracts and other legal factors, it is not clear which of these two categories of bonds would fare better in the event of a restructuring. However, market observers are convinced — and we agree — that legal and contractual differences would likely impact the payouts on the bonds if Venezuela defaults. Using a comparison of recent weekly yields for roughly similar PDVSA and pure sovereign bonds, we attempt to gain some insights into the value investors assign to the legal differences between these two categories of bonds
Brief of Evidence Law Scholars as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioner Paul L. Behrens’ Petition for Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc
Get PDFThe panel here held that the government’s expert in a criminal trial can present hearsay for its truth without satisfying the requirements of Rule 703 or the prerequisites to admissibility under any hearsay exception. Amici believe that misreads the Federal Rules of Evidence, undermines the general prohibition on hearsay, and circumvents defendants’ cross-examination rights
Treasury Should Exclude Income From Discharge of Student Loans
Get PDFThere are several ways that a student loan borrower can have a federal student loan discharged. In some cases, that cancellation of student debt creates taxable income, but in others it does not. This Article argues that taxing cancellation of student debt undermines the purposes of loan discharge and income-driven repayment programs like IBR and PAYE. This Article further argues that, if Congress does not act to provide a clear exclusion, Treasury has sufficient statutory and common law authority to exclude that income, and that it should do so
What If Fiduciary Obligations Are Like Contractual Ones?
Get PDFThis essay, to appear in Contract, Status, and Fiduciary Law (Miller & Gold, 2016), explores three ways fiduciary obligations might be like contractual ones: in the methods lawmakers use or should use to determine the content of the obligation; in the private voluntary acts that generate the obligation; and in the fact that the obligation is a default that parties have the power to alter. The thesis is that to the extent that these similarities exist, they are not especially revealing. Theorists who emphasize the similarities commonly treat contract law as a private power-conferring rule, then analogize the law of fiduciary obligations to it. In fact, the law of contract is more complex and serves a broader range of purposes than just giving private parties the ability to undertake legal obligations when they choose. Contract obligations are sometimes imposed for reasons other than party choice, and contract defaults and altering rules can be designed to serve other social purposes. A more nuanced understanding of the functions and design of contract law suggests that structural similarities between fiduciary obligations and contractual ones tell us less about the fiduciary obligations than we might have hoped. The explanation of why that is so, however, reveals important features both of contract law and of the law of fiduciary obligations
After Snowden: Regulating Technology-Aided Surveillance in the Digital Age
Get PDFImagine a state that compels its citizens to inform it at all times of where they are, who they are with, what they are doing, who they are talking to, how they spend their time and money, and even what they are interested in. None of us would want to live there. Human rights groups would condemn the state for denying the most basic elements of human dignity and freedom. Student groups would call for boycotts to show solidarity. We would pity the offending state\u27s citizens for their inability to enjoy the rights and privileges we know to be essential to a liberal democracy.
The reality, of course, is that this is our state-with one minor wrinkle. The United States does not directly compel us to share all of the above intimate information with it. Instead, it relies on private sector companies to collect it all, and then it takes it from them at will. We consent to share all of this private information with the companies that connect us to the intensely hyperlinked world in which we now live through our smart phones, tablets, and personal computers. Our cell phones constantly apprise the phone company of where we are, as well as with whom we are talking or texting. When we send emails, we share the addressing information, subject line, and content with the internet service provider. When we search the web or read something online, we reveal our interests to the company that runs the search engine. When we purchase anything with a credit card, we pass on that information to the credit card company. In short, we share virtually everything about our lives--much of it intensely personal-with some private company. It is recorded in an easily collected, stored, and analyzed digital form. We do so consensually, at least in theory, because we could choose to live without using the forms of communication that dominate modem existence. But to do so would require cutting oneself off from most of the world as well. That is a high price for privacy
A Brook with Legal Rights: The Rights of Nature in Court
Get PDFOver two decades ago, Professor Christopher Stone asked what turned out to be a question of enduring interest: should trees have standing? His question was recently answered in the affirmative by a creek in Pennsylvania, which successfully intervened in a lawsuit between an energy company and a local township to prevent the lifting of a ban against drilling oil and gas wastewater wells. Using that intervention, this Article examines whether such an initiative might succeed on a broader scale. The Article parses the structure, language, and punctuation of Article III, as well as various theories of nonhuman personhood to see if, like corporations, the Constitution might be sufficiently capacious to allow nature direct access to Article III courts. Finding toeholds in these theories, the Article identifies some institutional and practical problems with allowing nature to appear directly in court. The Article suggests possible answers to these problems, such as limiting the type of cases brought by nature to those that involve important and/or irreplaceable resources threatened by government inaction and requiring that nature must be represented by lawyers who have sufficient expertise, commitment, and resources to prosecute her interests. While success is not guaranteed, nor can it ever be, the author hopes that others, like the lawyers representing Little Mahoning Creek, will petition for judicial relief in nature‘s name. Given the rigidity and hostility of the current Court‘s standing jurisprudence, the intransigence of Congress, and the over-crowded agenda of the Executive Branch, this may be the only way to protect our disappearing natural resources
Inmate Legal Information Requests Analysis: Empirical Data to Inform Library Purchases in Correctional Institutions
No full textThe introduction of legal content to Google Scholar made United States case law and law journal articles accessible to an unprecedented extent. With case law freely available and accurate bibliographic information for articles, could Google Scholar be accurate and complete enough for correctional institutions to forgo purchasing either print publications or fee-based services for these materials? This article empirically assesses whether Google Scholar can reliably answer the questions of inmates in a correctional facility, the Baltimore City Detention Center. As a comparison, the same questions are tested in Westlaw Correctional, a subscription database marketed to correctional institutions
Adverse Childhood Experiences in the New Mexico Juvenile Justice Population
Get PDFFaculty from the University of New Mexico (UNM) School of Law and the UNM School of Medicine, and New Mexico’s Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD) initiated a joint project to look at the prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) nationally and in New Mexico. The study was intended to better establish the association between early childhood trauma and delinquency, as well as to explore the role that law and medicine can play in ensuring better health and juvenile justice outcomes for children who have experienced ACEs