UC Law SF Scholarship Repository
Not a member yet
18602 research outputs found
Sort by
Bowling with Bumper Rails: How Firearms Examiners Have Duped the Courts and Generated Low Error Rates Only by Avoiding Challenging Comparisons
Get PDFWhen Debt Gets a Makeover, Taxes Follow
Get PDFThe taxation of debt modifications is a complex and crucial area of tax law, significantly impacting both corporate finance and the broader economy. This article explores the complex legal and economic implications of modifying debt instruments, focusing on the key provisions of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) and covers the foundational principle of “realization,” which governs the recognition of income, gain, or loss when a debt modification is deemed significant under Treasury Regulation § 1.1001-3. The article delves into the tax consequences for both debtors and creditors, highlighting the potential for Cancellation of Debt Income and the challenges of managing gain or loss recognition. The discussion further examines the interplay between debt modifications and other IRC provisions, including the limitations imposed by IRC Section 163(j) on interest deductions and the restrictions under IRC Section 382 following ownership changes. The complexities introduced by the lack of updated guidance under IRC Section 385, which distinguishes debt from equity, are also addressed, underscoring the uncertainty faced by taxpayers in navigating these regulations. In addition to the statutory analysis, the article places the discussion within the broader economic context, considering the impact of rising global debt levels and economic instability. The role of tax policy in either facilitating or hindering debt restructuring efforts is critically assessed, with a focus on the need for clear and adaptable regulatory frameworks. Ultimately, this article argues that the current tax treatment of debt modifications, while necessary for maintaining tax revenue, must be carefully balanced against the economic realities faced by distressed businesses. The article concludes with a call for ongoing legislative and regulatory refinement to ensure that tax law supports both legal certainty and economic resilience
Artificial Authorship on the Big Screen: Regulating Ai in Scriptwriting
Get PDFWhile the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) offers exciting, new creative possibilities for the entertainment industry, it also threatens to replace or undercompensate the humans who have been at the backbone of the industry since its inception. AI’s increasing ability to generate human-quality content raises concerns about job displacement and copyright ownership for scriptwriters. While the recent Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike secured several protections, the unique and rapidly evolving nature of AI requires that further legal safeguards be created. This Note argues for additional regulations to ensure that AI remains a collaborative tool for scriptwriters and not a replacement. The regulation would protect scriptwriters’ creative contributions by potentially limiting studios’ ability to freely train AI with past works. While this Note primarily addresses the challenges scriptwriters face, it also sets the stage for a broader discussion regarding AI and human collaboration in the workforce
Reproducing Inequality: Racial Capitalism and the Cost of Public Education
No full textAmerican democracy is marked by an unwavering deployment of racialized economic modalities of fines, fees, and debt aimed at scaffolding hierarchies of white power and prescribing Black people as commodities, not human beings. Over the last two decades, an expanding praxis in the economic justice field has emerged, opposing and disrupting racialized economic logics within a national anti-fine, fee and cost movement. From scholarly discourse to legal interventions and reforms at city- and county-levels, the movement has sought to target interlocking material and ideological forces that comprise racial capitalist geographies across many criminal and civil systems. Despite this significant work, however, the distinctly racialized dispossessive and extractive economic realities of fines and fees regimes in other public state systems, namely K–12 public education, have escaped interrogation and advocacy. This Article serves to fill that gap at three levels—theoretical, analytic, and prescriptive—presenting an incisive critique of public education absent from the existing legal literature and highlighting explicating existing remedies available to civil rights education attorneys to protect Black students and families. In advancing racial capitalism as its constructive feature, this Article does not simply rely on a theoretical approach. Instead, it employs critical theory and social science methodologies, drawing on an original dataset of firsthand accounts of clients and analyses of more than seven hundred different published and publicly-available individual public school, charter school, cyber charter school, and district handbooks and codes of conduct. The data illuminates how public education functions across key dynamics of racial capitalism—accumulation, dispossession, debt, punishment, and containment. This work thus contributes richly to legal scholarship and legal practice by attending to an undertheorized yet formative area of critical theory, and exposing the operation of racial capitalism through a familiarly racially evasive modality that fundamentally undermines Black students’ access to their education