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Lunar Refueling: Legal Issues and Suggested Solutions
Get PDFThe establishment of settlements and economic activities on the Moon is expected to occur in the near future, positioning the Moon as a critical hub for continued exploration of the Solar System. Central to this development is the creation of a lunar refueling industry, which will play a pivotal role in supporting lunar activities and fostering further exploration.
Lunar refueling, which includes extracting local resources like lunar ice water to obtain hydrogen, offers key benefits, such as reducing the need for resupply missions from Earth, lowering launch costs, extending mission capabilities, and enabling launches from the Moon, which are more cost-effective due to the Moon’s lower gravitational pull. While lunar refueling is expected to empower the lunar economy and transform the Moon into a gateway for deep-space missions, facilitating exploration of destinations like Mars and asteroids, it also raises legal and environmental concerns.
This Paper does not address environmental concerns; it focuses instead on some of the legal questions, arising particularly under the Outer Space Treaty (“OST”), discussing potential implications of Articles II, IX, and XII OST on lunar refueling, and arguing the issues are manageable. Further, the Paper examines the possibility of conflicts arising from competition for prime locations and potential interference.
Given the current unlikelihood of negotiating new treaties or amending existing ones, this Paper advocates for the development of industry-sponsored guidelines for the lunar refueling industry to foster common practices, incorporate ethical standards, ensure compliance with the OST, and promote safer operations.
The Paper also advocates for voluntary cooperation among stakeholders, in the form of shared facilities, resource pooling, and network contracts, arguing that these instruments–besides promoting efficiency–can also help foster compliance with the OST, enhance coordination, and mitigate the risk of conflicts. The proposed guidelines and the suggested cooperative and coordinated solutions may also be environmentally beneficial and foster sustainability
No Trade Wars Without Taxation -Who\u27s to Blame, and What Comes Next?
No full textAs tariff policy once again shapes U.S. trade strategy, this article makes a foundational claim: trade wars are, at their core, tax wars. Against the backdrop of escalating economic tensions with the United States’ trade partners, this article argues that tariffs cannot be understood apart from the fiscal architecture that sustains them. What appears to be protectionism often masks deeper structural asymmetries in the U.S. tax system.
The discussion proceeds through three interrelated dimensions: reshoring production, promoting fair trade, and raising revenue. In each, the interaction between tariffs and the tax system reveals deeper distortions. U.S. export mechanisms such as the Domestic International Sales Corporation, Foreign Sales Corporation, and Extraterritorial Income Exclusion were not reactions to European value-added tax border adjustments, as commonly asserted, but instead responses to deficiencies within the U.S. corporate income tax regime.
Furthermore, this article challenges the conventional view of VAT as inherently cross-border trade- neutral. Through theoretical modeling and empirical evidence, it shows that border adjustments can affect trade flows in the presence of rate disparities, weak enforcement, and incomplete currency offset. In a global environment dominated by consumption taxes, the United States\u27 continued reliance on income taxation places its exporters at a structural disadvantage and contributes to escalating cycles of retaliation.
In response, the article proposes a VAT-equivalent reform consisting of full capital expensing, elimination of interest deductions, a zero tax rate on foreign-derived intangible income for exports, and broad-based wage taxation at a baseline rate matching that of capital income and equal to the corporate tax rate. This hybrid structure replicates the economic effects of a subtraction method VAT and could even preserve progressivity through targeted credits, all while averting the economic inefficiencies of tariff escalation.
Bridging international tax law, trade regulation, and public finance, this article calls for a fundamental rethinking of the tax-trade relationship. It contends that the prevailing focus on VAT as a source of unfairness misdiagnoses the underlying problem. True trade reform requires tax reform, and only by addressing these systemic shortcomings can the United States construct a more equitable, sustainable, and competitive position in the global economy
\u3cem\u3eTrump v. United States\u3c/em\u3e and the Half-Originalist Presidency
No full textThe Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. United States has been criticized for its ahistorical approach to presidential immunity. This Essay offers the first account of the historical mismatch between the Trump Court’s decision to immunize presidential removal power and Founding era conceptions of the presidency. Unlike the presumptive immunity that the Court recognized for most other official presidential acts, the immunity afforded for presidential removal power is absolute. The Court ruled that the President’s “unrestricted power of removal” can never be regulated by Congress or considered as evidence of wrongdoing, even when the President threatens removal to effectuate blatantly unlawful ends. The Court’s approach creates a far more powerful presidency than was ever recognized by the Founding generation. The text of Article II authorizes the President “to execute” the law—not violate it—and it requires Presidents to “take care” that the law be faithfully executed. The Court’s decision to immunize removal also conflicts with Founding era understandings and early laws in which Congress restricted the President’s removal power
Fall 2025 - Demo Days: Spellbook
No full textDEMO DAYS: Spellbook - Thursday, September 25 @ 12pm
Over 3,600 law firms and in-house teams are saving hours on contract review and drafting with Spellbook AI. Discover how practicing lawyers are using this powerful tool to draft faster, work smarter, and transform their legal workflow. Be a step ahead of your fellow associates and join us for a live demo, free trial of Spellbook AI, and Domino\u27s pizza!
Resources covered: Spellbook
Host: Justin Toronyi | Enterprise Account Executivehttps://repository.law.umich.edu/legaltechseries/1013/thumbnail.jp
The Modern-Day Discovery Doctrine: Reforming Property Law\u27s Productive Use Doctrine for the Age of Climate Change
No full textWhen European settlers first colonized the Americas, claiming Native land as their own, they largely believed their actions to be justified. To Europeans, property rights over land emanated from putting one\u27s labor into that land, improving it by removing it from a state of nature. Absent such \u27\u27productive use, land had not been claimed and was therefore ripe for the taking. Yet while Native Americans had labored significantly and fundamentally shaped the land around them, European settlers deemed the Americas to be in a state of nature. Such attitudes towards Native American labor and property rights reveal a strikingly limited conception of \u27\u27productivity : one encompassing activities that dominate and develop wilderness, but not those that preserve it. European settlers viewed exploited land as generating economic value, but deemed uncultivated nature essentially worthless.
Over the course of the nineteenth-century, the view that undeveloped nature lacked value and that only a specific type of productivity should result in property rights motivated the development of a property law system that heavily favors those who develop, rather than conserve, preserve, or restore their privately-owned wildlands. And while today our desire for land development has been tempered by a compelling interest in wilderness preservation, a limited, nineteenth century conception of productive use remains entrenched in modern American property law. Doctrines like nuisance, waste, and adverse possession continue to award stronger property rights to those who engage in environmentally destructive practices, incentivizing wilderness destruction. In the face of climate change, this poses a problem; undeveloped landscapes like forests and grasslands are potent carbon sinks, whose capacity to offset carbon emissions is of enormous value to society. That value is threatened by a doctrine that disincentivizes the preservation of America\u27s remaining privately-owned wilderness.
In this Note, I explore how reimagining this aspect of property law could better protect the environment. While much of the harm caused by the productive use doctrine\u27s bias towards wilderness development is irreparable, we can and should reduce future harm. Doing so will not require the productive use doctrine to be eliminated in its entirety; rather, our definition of \u27\u27productivity should be updated to reflect society\u27s interest in preserving what privately-owned wilderness remains. This could be done, in part, by incorporating the value of carbon sequestration into the balancing tests courts apply when hearing property law disputes, compelling courts to weigh the value of a proposed development against the value generated by a piece of land\u27s carbon sequestration capacity. Doing so could help counterbalance property law\u27s current bias in favor of environmental destruction, creating an incentive to protect privately-owned natural lands and combat the climate crisis
Boden Lecture: Taxation of Autonomous Artificial Intelligence
No full textThis Article proposes that tax can be a useful supplement to other measures to regulate Autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AAI) and limit its potential harmful effects. This proposal differs from command-and-control regulation of AAI along the lines of European Union legislation that may unduly limit the development of AAI. It also differs from existing proposals to tax AAI to generate revenue to help workers displaced by AAI programs, or to tax the data used by AAI The proposal is based on granting AAI programs like ChatGPT separate legal personhood, like corporate personhood, while incentivizing or requiring their corporate owner to place them in a separate corporate shell. The tax rate on AAI\u27s income is adjusted based on harmfulness indices based on an objective assessment, thereby creating an incentive for its corporate owner to reduce the harm. Developing a new tax on AAI excludes it from the limits imposed by the existing international tax regime on taxing multinationals, which are inappropriate for a tax on a person that does not have a physical location except on servers that can be located anywhere. Instead, the tax should be levied by the jurisdictions in which AAI users are located
AI and Tribal Court Practice
No full textAmerican Indian tribal court practice resides at the intersection of two difficult legal problems. First, because tribal justice systems are usually very young and dynamic, awareness and analysis of tribal law is underdeveloped. Second, because tribal nations are not governed by state or federal law, tribal law is culturally unique. Tribal court practitioners often find that even routine legal matters will involve questions of first impression in the jurisdiction. All of this is to say tribal court jurisprudence is intensely jurisgenerative.
Because tribal law is often unsettled or indeterminate, the costs of discovering and applying this law are occasionally high. Most tribal law involves tribal constitutional or statutory interpretation or the application of federal and state court precedents, which is not terribly costly to perform. But applying tribal customary or traditional law, also known as tribal common law, can be much more difficult. Today, legal practice is knee-deep in reliance on artificial intelligence (AI). More practitioners are using AI to conduct legal research and even to draft pleadings. Assuming a practitioner reasonably utilizes AI generators, the use of AI can be beneficial. One assumes that the larger the corpus oflaw ( statutes, cases, regulations, etc.), the greater value AI can provide in cutting out the relevant legal wheat from the irrelevant legal chaff.
This Article offers preliminary thoughts on how tribal court practitioners can use AI to research and apply tribal law using a common legal issue-tribal sovereign immunity. This Article analyzes written research memoranda and pleadings generated by AL As a result, this Article concludes there is great potential for the use of AI in tribal court practice, but there are definite and indefinite pitfalls
Should Tax-Free Triangular Mergers be Eliminated?
No full textThe tax advantages of reverse triangular mergers under section 368(a)(2)(E) are well known. They enable the acquiring corporation (P) to use up to 60 percent cash consideration to acquire the stock of target (T) through a merger with a controlled subsidiary (S), with T surviving. This amount of boot is higher than what is allowed under a B or C reorganization. Because it is a triangular merger, it avoids exposing the assets of P to the liabilities of T (unlike a direct merger), and because it is equivalent to a stock acquisition, it avoids having to transfer assets, which is more cumbersome (unlike a forward triangular merger or a C reorganization). There are limits (T must own substantially all its assets after the transaction, and P must use voting stock to acquire control “in the transaction”), but these are usually manageable
Proposed Cloud Services Sourcing Rule: The Right Direction
No full textThis past January, in conjunction with the issuance of a final regulation (T.D. 10022) that treats income from defined cloud transactions as income from services, Treasury and the IRS released a proposed regulation (REG-107420-24) on the sourcing of that income. In 2019 a Treasury official had asked the tax community for feedback on whether specific cloud transaction sourcing rules were needed, and the preamble to a 2019 proposed regulation asked for comments on “administrable rules for sourcing income from cloud transactions in a manner consistent with sections 861 through 865.” The feedback was “split almost evenly with regard to whether specific sourcing rules are needed in this area, with a narrow majority expressing support for such guidance,” the preamble to the 2025 proposed regulation explains
Let\u27s Break Some Rules: Immodest Proposals for Evidence Reform
No full textIn 1975, when the American Bar Association launched LITIGATION, its editors dedicated the entirety of one of the journal\u27s first issues to evidence. Authors included distinguished practitioners, respected judges, and academic giants like Margaret A. Berger, Irving Younger, and Jim McElhaney. Subjects varied, but the articles shared a common sensibility: The recently adopted Federal Rules of Evidence were a good thing