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How a Central Bank Digital Currency Could Help Curb Tax Evasion and Other Financial Crimes
Get PDFCentral Bank Digital Currencies are digital currencies issued by the central bank government of a sovereign nation. It is a unique form of payment currently used by just a few countries that has the potential of transforming the US’s current financial landscape. According to the International Monetary Fund, more than 100 countries are currently developing their own central bank digital currencies. The U.S. Federal Reserve solicited comments for what a U.S. CBDC should have. The Biden Administration demonstrated executive support for creating a U.S. CBDC. Several scholars have also recommended design features of a CBDC. This article seeks to examine the potential tax benefits a U.S. CBDC could have on the economy. Tax evasion costs the U.S. $1 trillion. Curbing individual tax evasion can help save millions of dollars in tax revenue. My research will show that designing a U.S. CBDC with certain reporting and withholding functions could help limit the use of fiat currency for tax evasion purposes. And it could further enhance our tax withholding and collection procedure. This will lead to a society where there are less tax cheats and reduced financial crimes. My proposal will show Congress how we can go from the idea of a US CBDC to its reality
Dobbs, State Policies, and Minors’ Interests in an Open Future
Get PDFThe United States Supreme Court discarded five decades of established federal constitutional doctrine with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Following Dobbs, legislators in some states rushed to restrict the decisions of pregnant persons. Litigation, executive actions, and voter initiatives, including attempts to amend state constitutions, quickly followed. At the time of this writing, access to abortion is severely restricted in large swaths of the country. Increasing numbers of pregnant persons have sought out-of-state services through telehealth or cross-border travel. Some states have created new forms of criminal or civil liability in an effort to prevent its residents from accessing these services, while other states have adopted laws to shield persons who seek, or assist those seeking, abortion within their borders.
This Article examines some of the impacts these dramatic changes in the legal landscape are having, or are likely to have, on minors who wish to terminate their pregnancies. Even before Dobbs, it was not easy for minors to access safe and legal abortion. Access has become exponentially more challenging in the past several years.
Decades of health and social science research demonstrate that teen pregnancy, childbearing, and parenthood dramatically alter the lifelong opportunities available to the young parents and their offspring, risking their physical and mental health, their educational options, and their socioeconomic status. These events heighten the likelihood of future involvement of these families with the child welfare and criminal justice systems, and their needs for public assistance.
Relying in part on philosopher Joel Feinberg’s concept of a child’s right to an open future, this Article asserts that state policies that do not provide minors with the option to terminate a pregnancy, or that create insurmountable obstacles to exercising that choice, constitute the types of “crucial and irrevocable decisions,” made “irreversibly” by others, that dramatically foreclose more favorable potential life trajectories for minors and their offspring. As such, these policies are inconsistent with the parens patriae and police power interests that justify empowering adults to govern the lives of minors.
This Article considers legal frameworks governing health care decisionmaking for children’s health, with particular attention to decisions by minors to terminate their pregnancies. It analyzes the pre-Dobbs regulations of minors’ access to abortion, reviewing constitutional doctrine, legal scholarship, and state policies. It examines the post-Dobbs legal landscape affecting abortion access, such as complete bans, gestational limits, targeted regulation of abortion providers, exceedingly narrow exceptions, burdens on out-of-state travel, penalties on persons who provide aid or assistance to persons seeking abortions, and restrictions on telehealth services and medication abortion. It then focuses on abortion restrictions specifically affecting minors’ access, such as laws governing parental consent and notification, and statutory attempts to block or deter assistance to minors.
After presenting initial observations and data on the impacts on minors of post-Dobbs restrictions, this Article concludes that these restrictions are having, or are likely to have, a disproportionately harsh impact on minors due to their physical and psychological vulnerability, their dependencies on adults, their limited information and resources, and the risks and adverse consequences of teen pregnancy, childbearing, and parenthood. It concludes that young persons’ ability to terminate unwanted pregnancies safely and legally is essential to offering them a future with opportunities for good health, basic education, and financial self-sufficiency and to avoiding a range of adverse consequences that may persist for generations
Personal Jurisdiction and Federalism
No full textPersonal jurisdiction has long professed to safeguard interstate federalism through the principle that good fences make good neighbors. Although this goal sits uncomfortably with the idea of personal jurisdiction as an individual right under the Due Process Clause, recent decisions from the Supreme Court have reinvigorated the federalism aspect of personal jurisdiction, offering a new opportunity to appraise its value and efficacy. This Article does so and concludes that personal jurisdiction fails to protect interstate federalism. States and private parties, it turns out, have too much authorization to expand state-court personal jurisdiction beyond state borders using the doctrine of consent and to constrict state-court personal jurisdiction within state borders using state law. The resulting distortion of interstate federalism has implications for vertical federalism, too, by creating anomalies in the parallelism between federal-court and state-court personal jurisdiction. I therefore urge the elimination of interstate federalism from personal-jurisdiction doctrine. Doing so not only will refocus personal jurisdiction on its core attention to the relationship between the defendant and the forum but also will shift the responsibility of policing interstate federalism to more apt doctrines of horizontal federalism and court access, such as the Dormant Commerce Clause and the First Amendment\u27s Petition Clause. These recalibrations would produce a simpler, more workable personal-jurisdiction doctrine, for the benefit of courts and parties alike
Transcultural Courts
No full textAlthough countries commonly divide their judicial systems along geographic and subject-matter divisions, the idea of creating specialized courts based on culture has not taken root. Instead, courts are generally transcultural. Functionally, the lack of culture-specific courts is surprising because cultural diversity within a population often creates legally significant distinctions. Focusing primarily on the U.S. judicial system, but incorporating attributes of other judicial systems where appropriate, this paper offers three explanations for why courts tend to eschew cultural specializations in favor of transculturality. It also hazards some opportunities for experimenting with cultural specializations in discrete areas of the law that most warrant them
“As Judged by Themselves”: Freedom, Transformative Experiences, Law, and Testimony
No full textOne way to evaluate various legal interventions in people’s lives is to ask whether they make choosers better off by their own lights, or “as judged by themselves.” This criterion can be understood to borrow from the liberal political tradition insofar as it makes the judgments of choosers authoritative. If lawyers, judges, and policymakers give ultimate authority to choosers, this might be taken as respecting choosers’ own judgments and promoting their welfare (insofar as people are uniquely situated to know whether choices make them better off). But for certain decisions, the “as judged by themselves” criterion is indeterminate. In these situations, which involve life-changing, transformative experiences, the criterion does not offer a unique solution; people might be happy with their choices either way. It is possible that welfarist criteria will resolve the indeterminacy, despite serious questions about incommensurability
Artificial Intelligence & Defamation Law: An Excuse to Do Away with the Infamously Controversial Section 230?
No full textWith the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) in various aspects of our lives, it is not surprising that it has become a subject of legal disputes and controversy. In 2023, an individual filed the first defamation lawsuit against AI company, OpenAI, for its ChatGPT service, leaving many to speculate how the court will proceed. This Note assesses the viability of defamation actions against generative AI platforms and their broader effect on defamation law. Particularly, this Note considers how courts may characterize these platforms and how specific characterizations could further the controversy over an already polarizing and hotly debated piece of legislation—Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“CDA”). Suppose courts remain consistent with prior broad interpretations of Section 230 and grant generative AI platforms “internet provider” status. This would protect AI platforms from liability for outputs that spread false, misleading, or dangerous information to users. Consequently, harmed plaintiffs would be left without any recourse or recovery options against the companies and programs behind the AI algorithms. The potential for a continuation of such expansive judicial interpretations should prompt Congress to revisit the legislation that has granted internet providers sweeping protection for decades. This Note argues that Congress should use the contentions associated with AI and defamation to clarify the contours of the current Section 230 legal framework and adjust it to fit the range of technological advancements that have developed since its enactment. Specifically, Congress should not simply leave it up to individual courts to decipher the statute’s reach on their own. Instead, Congress should act now to eradicate or radically restructure this controversial and outdated legislation before it seeps into areas of technology beyond its purpose. Thus, generative artificial intelligence programs emphasize the antiquity and inflexibility of Section 230 in today’s technological society, giving AI the potential to ignite congressional removal or reform of one of the most influential internet laws today