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House Oversight Hearing on Tax Avoidance and the IRS
Get PDFProfessor Leandra Lederman testifimony for the House Oversight Hearing on Tax Avoidance and the IRS, October 13, 2020.
Click the Download button to read the text of Professor Lederman\u27s prepared testimony, or view the video of the fulll hearing below.
To view just professor Lederman\u27s testimony, click HER
Judicial Independence and the Budget: A Taxonomy of Judicial Budgeting Mechanisms
Get PDFThis Paper addresses three aspects of judicial budgeting. First, it will identify the four broad families of constitutional provisions that consider the judicial budget. While the majority of procedures and requirements that govern judicial budgeting are found in statues, many nations’ constitutions explicitly address judicial salaries. Other constitutions only broadly address judicial budgeting. Second, we will analyze different approaches to judicial councils. Third, this Paper will address several different approaches to the judicial budgeting process. This includes how the judiciary’s budget is proposed, as well as how it is allocated and managed. Finally, this Paper will touch upon the tension inherent in judicial budgeting in democratic societies. While judicial independence is prioritized by most nations, there is a competing priority of ensuring efficient use of public funds. This tension can create problems as nations work to keep government spending in check, while continuing to honor judicial independence
Zoning For Families
Get PDFIs a group of eight unrelated adults and three children living together and sharing meals, household expenses, and responsibilities—and holding themselves out to the world to have long-term commitments to each other—a family? Not according to most zoning codes—including that of Hartford, Connecticut, where the preceding scenario presented itself a few years ago. Zoning, which is the local regulation of land use, almost always defines family, limiting those who may live in a dwelling unit to those who satisfy the zoning code’s definition. Often times, this definition is drafted in a way that excludes many modern living arrangements and preferences.
This Article begins by exploring how zoning codes define both the family and the “functional family,” namely, a group of individuals living together like the Hartford group described above. The Article then carefully tracks judicial decisions that have rejected restrictive definitions of family and analyzes sociological and anthropological literature demonstrating that definitions excluding functional families are unreasonable as a matter of law. Based on the law as it has developed and demographic trends, my view is that governments must allow, but may regulate, functional families.
The Article concludes with suggestions for local governments to revise their zoning codes to allow for functional families. In making these revisions, communities must weigh the real need to control density, the desire of functional families for privacy, and the urge to manage community character. Local governments who choose to regulate functional families may choose between three models of regulation: the density model, the privacy model, and the character model. Once decision-makers recognize these choices, they may more appropriately consider fellow community members’ increasingly diverse living arrangements and preferences—and better zone for families, whatever their modern form may entail
Reviewing Intergovernmental Institutions in Federal Systems: Opportunity for Cooperation
Get PDFThis Article surveys intergovernmental institutions across federal states. Generally, these institutions offer meaningful cooperation for the different levels of government when addressing state problems. These institutions, however, often lack political authority to bind institutional members or implement authoritative state actions.
This Article proceeds in two general parts. First, this Article taxonomizes intergovernmental institutions across federal systems. Though few intergovernmental institutions are constitutionally mandated bodies, several federal states have enacted legislation to formalize these institutions while others simply utilize informal arrangements. This taxonomy will primarily discuss contemporary institutions within federal systems and focus exclusively on executive institutions. The taxonomy categorizes these institutions into two general categories based on the composition of the bodies: vertical and horizontal. Vertical institutions include members that are accountable to different levels of government while horizontal institutions are comprised of members responsible to the same level of government. Intergovernmental institutions will also be classified as either constitutional bodies, statutory bodies, or the result of formal and informal agreements. Second, this Article offers brief remarks on the effectiveness, transparency, and power of these institutions. Intergovernmental institutions wield nominal political authority, but intergovernmental institutions may nevertheless play an important role in federal states. Though these institutions offer benefits related to intergovernmental relations, intergovernmental institutions suffer from accountability, transparency, and logistical drawbacks
An Alternative Constitutional Implementation Mechanism? A Case Study of Kenya’s Commission for the Implementation of the Constitution.
Get PDFThis Paper analyzes the independent implementation commission of Kenya and its work in facilitating the implementation process of the 2010 Kenyan Constitution, and further evaluates the effectiveness of such implementation mechanism. The case study of the Kenyan Constitution implementation shows that an independent implementation commission established by the constitution can have substantially positive impact over the implementation process. To design a successful commission, it is crucial to ensure its institutional independence, legal and enforcement power, and collaboration with civil society
Cause Lawyering and Compassionate Lawyering in Clinical Legal Education: The Case of Chile
Get PDFIn order to contribute from a situated perspective to a global narrative of access to justice, in the next sections I will trace the origins of compassionate and cause lawyering in the history of Chilean legal aid and training. Part II will explain how legal assistance to the poor was codified as a duty of legal professionals during the Middle Ages, in both canon law and in Castilian legislation. Part III will show that practical legal training, both in Spain and in Chile, began much later as the result of the ambition among prominent members of the legal profession to create institutional spaces that could supplement university education-still devoted until the eighteenth century solely to canon and Roman law-with knowledge of royal legislation as applied by the royal courts. During the nineteenth century, the University of Chile included in its legal curriculum the study of national legislation, and absorbed the function of providing practical legal training to future practitioners through moot courts. When law clinics were created in the late 1960s, they were part of a number of innovations promoted by progressive law school reformers inspired by legal education in the United States. The conservative reaction that took over law schools after the 1973 coup against President Allende, however, rid law schools of disruptive instructors and students: a conjuncture that transformed a depoliticized version of compassionate lawyering into the dominant paradigm of clinical legal education among elite law schools in the capital for decades. Part IV will show that this only changed in the 1990s, when a relatively new elite law school, Universidad Diego Portales (UDP), opened a public interest law clinic as part of a network of Latin American public interest clinics funded by the Ford Foundation. Part V will discuss the contrasting challenges faced by models of clinical legal education inspired by cause lawyering and compassionate lawyering. Part VI will offer a few remarks about the need to promote cause lawyering in Latin America
