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THE WORST CHOICE FOR SCHOOL CHOICE: TUITION TAX CREDITS ARE A BAD IDEA AND DIRECT FUNDING IS WISER
Get PDF School choice is on the rise, and states use various mechanisms to implement it. One prevalent mechanism is also a uniquely problematic one: the tax credit. Tax credits are deficient at equitably distributing a benefit like school choice; they are costly, and they invite fraud. Instead of using tax credits, states opting for school choice programs should use direct funding. Direct funding will more efficiently achieve the goals of school choice because it can be regulated like any other government benefit, even if it ends up subsidizing religious private schools.
Tax credits’ prevalence is not inexplicable, of course. It is based on a prior legal understanding that states were constitutionally restricted from directly funding religious schools. Historically, states that wanted to include religious private schools in their school choice programs therefore felt pushed to use tax credits as their only constitutionally viable option. However, the landscape has changed. The Supreme Court held in 2022 that direct funding of religious private schools is not only constitutionally permissible, but it is required if a state funds non-religious private schools and provides no neutral basis for excluding religious ones. The initial reason for tax credits’ popularity therefore no longer exists; both tax credits and direct funding alike are constitutionally acceptable. It is time, therefore, to revisit the merits of tax credits and ask whether, knowing what we know now, it is worth disposing of them in favor of direct funding. This Article answers that question with a resounding yes. Tax credits carry significant disadvantages—specifically, inequitable distribution and difficulties in regulation—that direct funding does not. Now that the law is clear, states choosing to sponsor school choice should discontinue their use of tax credits in favor of direct funding
Green Bond Reporting: John Patrick Hunt
Get PDFAre green bonds really “green”? A number of legal scholars have addressed various aspects of this critical question. However, none has focused on issuers’ post-issuance assertions about what they spend the bond proceeds on and on the way those assertions are, or are not, verified.
This paper is the first empirical study in legal scholarship of post-issuance reporting on the use of green-bond proceeds. Using a dataset from the Bloomberg service that covers all 155 dollar-denominated corporate green bonds from US corporate issuers in the period from mid-2019 to mid-2022, supplemented by a Web review of reporting, the paper reports that almost 10% of green bonds appear to have no post-issuance reporting and that around one third of the bonds lack reporting that is attested by a third party. Project-level attestation, the most detailed type, exists for around 30% of attested bonds and 20% of all US corporate green bonds.
Much of the commentary on green-bond verification focuses on assessments by pre-issuance reviewers, building on an analogy to credit rating agencies. But an important difference between green-bond verification and credit rating is that investors are likely to find it difficult to determine whether an issuer used bond proceeds for green purposes, while they will typically know if the bond is paying them on time or not. Thus, credible post-issuance reporting is especially important in the green-bond context. Moreover, this study finds that pre- and post-issuance reporting quality have been negatively correlated in some respects. Thus, advocates of green-bond market reform should concentrate more on improving post-issuance reporting than they have to date.
Specifically, the International Capital Markets Association should consider amending its green-bond standards to require attestation of post-issuance reporting and withdrawal of pre-issuance “greenness” opinions if issuers do not report as required on use of proceeds
Unlearning the Aesthetics of Malicious Joy
No full textBodies that are gendered and sexualized through the male gaze appear frequently in the study of classical Arabic poetry, but learned reading practices predetermine how these descriptions are interpreted. These reading practices, which students learn to this day, are connected to a reception tradition that emerged to suit the logics and investments of premodern Arabic anthologies. A critical intervention, this article begins by comparing the presentation of saliva metaphors in erotic poetry to other bodily and relational unmentioneds through a discussion of taste, tradition, and training. In the second half of the article, the reception of a famous teaching text by Bashshār b. Burd (d. 783) is juxtaposed with the pedagogically invested criticism of the Egyptian critic Mohamed al-Nowaihi (d. 1980), who confronted the poem on ethical and presentist terms
The Problem of the Global Middle Ages : A View from the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
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Fairness & Privacy in an Age of Generative AI
Get PDFGenerative AI technologies have made tremendous strides recently and have captured the public’s imagination with their ability to mimic what was previously thought to be a fundamentally human capability: creativity. While such technologies hold great promise to augment human creativity and automate tedious processes, they also carry risks that stem from their development process. In particular, the reliance of foundation models on vast amounts of typically uncurated, often web-scraped training data has led to concerns around fairness and privacy. Algorithmic fairness in this context encompasses concerns around potential biases that can be learned by models due to skews in their training data and then reflected in their generated outputs. For example, without intervention, image generation models are more likely to generate images of lighter skin tone male individuals for professional occupations and images of darker skin tone female individuals for working class occupations. This further raises questions around whether there should be legal protections from such pernicious stereotypical representations. Privacy is also a concern as generative AI models can ingest large amounts of personal and biometric information in the training process, including face and body biometrics for image generation and voice biometrics for speech generation. This Essay will discuss the types of fairness and privacy concerns that generative AI raises and the existing landscape of legal protections under anti-discrimination law and privacy law to address these concerns. This Essay argues that the proliferation of generative AI raises challenging and novel questions around (i) what protections should be offered around the training data used to develop such systems and (ii) whether representational harms should be protected against in an age of AI-generated content
Defanging Diversity
Get PDFThey don’t want to realize that there is not one step, morally or actually, between Birmingham and Los Angeles.
- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro (2017)
This article explores the jurisprudential underpinnings of the so-called “diversity rationale” that until recently had been considered a powerful vehicle for fostering racial diversity on elite college campuses. As the national debate around diversity, equity, and inclusion measures—both their legitimacy and practice—will only intensify in the current sociopolitical climate, this writing attempts to provide a chronology of how the nation’s High Court has shaped the contours of that discourse, arguing that the Court’s juridical trepidation in this area of the law led to an unworkable framework that was doomed from inception. This article further examines the rapidly changing norms of race and identity—including the inherent tensions and complexities that such concepts engender before concluding with a recommendation for how to achieve the supposed aims of the affirmative action regime in American society
THE TRAGEDY OF FELIX FRANKFURTER: FROM CIVIL LIBERTIES AND CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST TO REACTIONARY JUSTICE
Get PDFThis article reconsiders the life and record of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter was smart, hardworking, and talented, serving as a great activist lawyer and important law professor in his early career. When nominated to the court, there were high hopes he would follow Holmes and Brandeis in leading a progressive Court that would protect civil liberties and minority rights. However, it was not to be. On the Court Frankfurter became increasingly conservative and ultimately reactionary. In his opinions, he upheld persecution and discrimination of religious and racial minorities, occasionally hindered racial justice and civil liberties efforts, and opposed due process in criminal trials and fairness in elections. Arrogant and dismissive, he constantly fought with his brethren, alienating almost all of them. In the end Frankfurter was far too often on the wrong side of history, liberty and the law, and even legal ethics. The tragedy of Frankfurter is that he abandoned the constitutional rights and protections that he supported from his graduation from law school until he donned his robes. He could have been a great justice. Sadly, he was not