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The Historical Origins of the Multilateral Tax Convention
Get PDFThis paper will survey the efforts to create a multilateral tax convention (MTC) from the beginnings of the international tax regime to the present day. The paper’s main contribution is to provide a historical analysis of the (failed) efforts to create a MTC from the beginnings of the ITR until the League of Nations (as contained in Part 1 to this paper). Part 2 of the paper serves to provide a brief modern context to the historical analysis from Part 1, covering why the multilateral instrument (MLI) that was included in BEPS 1.0 is not a true MTC, and secondly points to the BEPS 2.0 effort to develop a true MTC. Part 3 will conclude by discussing under what conditions can a true MTC emerge and what it might look like
What Would Surrey Say? The Long Reach of Stanley S. Surrey
Get PDFThis essay examines the extent of Surrey’s influence on developments in tax law after his death. It argues that his ideas clearly impacted the tax reform of 1986, but can even be seen in later enactments like the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and contemporary developments in international taxation. This in turn enables us to get a clearer perspective on what Surrey aimed to achieve and what the goals of these later developments are
Inequitable by Design: The Patent Culture, Law, and Politics Behind COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access
Get PDFCOVID-19 vaccine access has been highly inequitable worldwide, with coverage depending largely on a country’s wealth. By the end of 2021, 64.1% of people living in high-income countries had received at least one dose of the vaccine, compared to only 5.4% of those in low-income countries. Similarly, only high- and upper-middle-income countries had received the most effective vaccines.
The uneven distribution of these lifesaving vaccines is made complex due to the convergence of several factors, but it suggests that the extraordinary expanding and ossifying market and political power of a few vaccine manufacturers founded on intellectual property and complementary policies is a decisive factor in shaping our healthcare systems and securing equitable access to vaccines.
This Article analyzes the power dynamics of vaccine manufacturing and distribution of U.S. pharmaceutical companies in the context of global COVID-19 vaccination. Drawing on the health-justice and law-and-political-economy scholarship of the last decade, this Article demonstrates how a “patent culture” shaped by intellectual property law fundamentally neglects health-equity principles while politicizing healthcare access. These contemporary frameworks suggest that the global COVID-19 vaccine-access problem is the result of avoidable policy choices made by big manufacturers and affluent governments. Despite a long history of inequities in access to healthcare, policy choices—as predicted by Hart’s inverse equity theory—have favored a purposely inequitable-by-design vaccination program driven by the wealth and power of those allowed to control vaccine production and supply globally.
Finally, this Article proposes ways to challenge the normalized and institutionalized patent culture that has commodified access to lifesaving medicines beyond national borders. As it examines national and international legal strategies to address the vaccine-access problem, the Article suggests equity-based principles of public value, transparency, and inclusivity to guide healthcare governance and future reformation of the vaccine-access landscape. An interdisciplinary analysis of the first year of the global vaccine rollout provides an account critical to future policies aiming to address the structural conditions needed to attain equitable health outcomes, even after the pandemic
Using ODR Platforms to Level the Playing Field: Improving Pro Se Litigation through ODR Design
Get PDFIn a few short years, court-connected ODR has shown itself capable of dramatically improving access to justice by reducing or eliminating barriers rooted in the simple fact that courts have traditionally offered dispute resolution services only during certain hours, only in particular physical places, and primarily through traditional face-to-face proceedings. Given the monopoly that courthouses have long had on resolving many legal issues, too many Americans have discovered their rights are simply too difficult or costly to exercise. As court-connected ODR systems spread, offering new types of dispute resolution services everywhere and often at any time, people will soon find themselves with the law and the courts at their fingertips. But robust access to justice requires more than just the raw, low-cost opportunity to resolve disputes. Existing ODR platforms seek to replicate in-person procedures, simplifying and clarifying steps where possible, but litigants without representation still proceed without experience, expertise, guardrails, or the ability to gauge risk or likely outcomes. Injecting ODR with a dose of data science has the potential to address many of these shortfalls. Enhanced ODR is unlikely to render representation obsolete, but it can dramatically reduce the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” and, on some dimensions—where machines outperform humans (e.g., minimizing agency costs)—next generation platforms may be a significant improvement
The Meme Stock Frenzy: Origins and Implications
Get PDFIn 2021, several publicly traded companies, such as GameStop and AMC, became “meme stocks,” experiencing a sharp rise in their stock prices through a dramatic influx of retail investors into their shareholder base. Analyses of the meme stock surge and its implications for corporate governance have focused on the idiosyncratic creation of online communities around particular stocks during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this Article, we argue that the emergence of meme stocks is part of longer-running digital transformations in trading, investing, and governance. On the trading front, the sudden abolition of commissions by major online brokerages in 2019 reduced entry costs for retail investors. Zero-commission trading represents a modification of the payment for order flow (PFOF) system, which is itself a product of technological disruptions in the financial markets in the 1980s. With respect to investing, the emergence of social media communication amplified retail investors’ pre-existing dependence on social networks to make decisions regarding stock market entry and portfolio construction. It also allowed them to coordinate their investing activities and affect the market price while expressing their non-financial interests. Finally, while some startups have attempted to bring the shareholder experience into the digital age and help retail investors participate in governance, these developments have been relatively modest. After tracing the meme stock phenomenon, we sketch a research agenda for law and finance scholars to explore the concrete effects of meme investing on corporate governance outcomes. First, we ask whether retail traders can transform into enthusiastic retail shareholders engaged in corporate governance. Second, we propose a broader metric for “meme-ness”: future scholarship can use modern advances in data science to better identify which companies are vulnerable to meme surges and social media-driven investing unrelated to their financial fundamentals
Disrupting Carceral Logic in Family Policing
Get PDFA Review of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, By Dorothy Roberts
Consent searches and underestimation of compliance: Robustness to type of search, consequences of search, and demographic sample
No full textMost police searches today are authorized by citizens\u27 consent, rather than probable cause or reasonable suspicion. The main constitutional limitation on so-called “consent searches” is the voluntariness test: whether a reasonable person would have felt free to refuse the officer\u27s request to conduct the search. We investigate whether this legal inquiry is subject to a systematic bias whereby uninvolved decision-makers overstate the voluntariness of consent and underestimate the psychological pressure individuals feel to comply. We find evidence for a robust bias extending to requests, tasks, and populations that have not been examined previously. Across three pre-registered experiments, we approached participants (“Experiencers”) with intrusive search requests and measured their behavioral compliance and self-reported feelings of psychological freedom. Another group of participants (“Forecasters”) reported whether they would comply if hypothetically placed in the same situation. Study 1 investigated participants\u27 willingness to allow experimenters access to their unlocked personal smartphones in order to read through the search histories on their web browsers—a private sphere where many individuals feel they have something to hide. Results revealed that whereas 27% of Forecasters reported they would permit such a search, 92% of Experiencers complied when asked. Study 2 replicated this underestimation-of-compliance effect when individuals were asked to permit a search of their purses, backpacks, and other bags—traditional searches not eligible for the heightened legal protection extended to digital devices. Study 3 replicated the gap between Forecasters\u27 projections and Experiencers\u27 behavior in a more representative sample, and found it persists even when participants\u27 predictions are incentivized monetarily
Résumé Review: Breadth and Depth
No full textNobody is born knowing how to craft an effective résumé. But because the document can play a major role in a young lawyer’s career, I often talk with law students and new attorneys about how they might revise the versions they send out to potential employers. I usually frame my advice by telling them about a concept that can give their resumes a helpful organizing structure: being “T-shaped.